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Why managers hate remote work

It’s true – most managers hate remote work. 

Yes, they trust their employees.

Yes, they want a culture of flexibility & openness.

Yes, they believe that results matter more than hours logged.

But no – they still hate remote work.

Why?

It’s not that managers don’t like the theory of remote work.

Who doesn’t want to believe that everyone is more productive in their pajamas, banging away at home in an asynchronous manner, only being interrupted from their deep work by their Amazon delivery person? 

It’s just that it’s not a world most managers live in today. 

Most managers are not trying to solve the problem – ‘how I can get John to work more efficiently’.

They’re trying to solve the problem – ‘how I can get John, Kevin, and Sara to all collaborate together to immediately solve this urgent customer issue’.

Remote work makes this more difficult. 

Particularly if the company isn’t a remote-first culture and has always relied on ‘in-person collaboration’. Most Fortune 500 companies are this way today – and many have recently spent MILLIONS to redesign their offices to the ‘open office’ concept to promote more impromptu collaboration.

So what should these managers that were forced to quickly go remote work do?

One easy solution is for managers to set up a virtual office like Sococo.

A virtual office is basically a pseudomorphic depiction of their physical office. It looks just like their physical office – but it’s online instead. Simple as that – no more, no less.

The manager can set up the virtual floor to have individual offices, cubes, meeting rooms, kitchen areas – or whatever else they want to recreate in the space.

The most important part for managers, however, is that their entire team is there and available.

When each team member starts work in the morning – they are automatically placed into their office. The manager can ‘see’ her team, go have impromptu chats, see the various team members collaborating, call a meeting with everyone, etc, etc. 

Just like a physical office – simply online instead.

Sometimes – just simplifying and getting the team back to par is a decent first step…

If you have any questions – please feel free to contact me at @andytryba.

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3 min video to show how virtual worlds will contribute to remote work

Remote work evangelists have a tendency to believe that the word ‘office’ is a four letter word. This is short-sided and ultimately harmful in making remote work mainstream.

Don’t get me wrong – remote work has a ton of advantages that I love (infinite talent, global, async deep work, etc) – but it also has a bunch of disadvantages. These current disadvantages – such as employees not feeling ‘connected’ to their team, lack of impromptu collaboration, feeling of isolation and manager’s lack of trust are items we should address head-on and find ways to fix.

Fortunately – technology is on our side and the emergence of ‘virtual worlds’ will help overcome many of these current issues.

Virtual worlds? You mean like Second Life?

Well – sorta…

These multi-player games create connection and enable folks – that are thousands of miles apart – to ‘feel’ like they are on the same team and working together.

In a work setting – we definitely want that same type of connection and collaboration (less the tanks and ammo perhaps). There is a big difference between communication and connection (as I write about in this article) – and these virtual worlds can help make these connections reality.

Now – I’m not saying you should run your company off of Fortnite – but there are a lot of great virtual office programs. We use a program called Sococo (and loved it so much we bought the company).

Here is a quick 3 minute video of how we use a virtual world to bring together our remote teams.

If anyone is also currently using remote worlds to run your company – love to hear your experiences! You can reach me on Twitter – @andytryba

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Book notes: Trillion Dollar Coach – Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell

The ‘cult’ of remote work evangelists believe that the lessons of ‘classic’ Silicon Valley companies are outdated and don’t apply to us. When it comes to mentoring and coaching – we couldn’t be more wrong.

Bill Campbell was a legendary mentor to Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jonathan Rosenberg, Sundar Pichai, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Sheryl Sandberg and countless other important innovators of modern tech. If his advise was good enough for them – they’re definitely good enough for us…

Now – obviously in a remote world – mentoring and coaching are delivered via a different medium – but the approach largely stays the same. Many of us have a tendency to neglect the elements that Campbell did so effortlessly – but in reality – we need to be finding ways to increase the frequency of coaching delivered to our remote teams instead.

The isolation of remote team members require even more touch than in-person to maintain morale and alignment.

There are clearly some disadvantages in coaching remote – such as the difficulty to read body language and the development of trust. But many of the ‘Campbell-isms’ can be applied equally well remote – such as his methods of coaching directly, meetings, feedback and morale.

Remote also gives us several advantages – such as the frequency you can ‘see’ (via video) your team members, ability to provide feedback faster via async communications and the ability to make changes faster.

Here are some super raw notes

  • Campbell coached Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Sundar Pichai at Google, Steve Jobs at Apple, Brad Smith at Intuit, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, John Donahoe at eBay, Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, Dick Costolo at Twitter, and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook
  • Campbell-isms:
    • Mentor gives advice – coaches get their hands dirty
    • Best coaches make good teams great
    • Title makes you a manager – your people make you a leader. 
    • You have to become a great manager before becoming a great leader 
    • Great coaches lay awake at night thinking about how to make their people/team better
    • Bill believed that what peers think of you is more important than managers think of you. 
    • 5 min favors go a long way – be generous
    • Love the founders – CEOs come and go but there will be only 1 founder 
    • If you’ve been blessed – be a blessing
  • Hiring:
    • 4 key characteristics to look for in hires – smart, integrity, work hard, grit 
    • When interviewing candidates – asking ‘how’ they achieved X is an important question. Will tell you if the candidate is hands on, doer, team builder, etc 
    • Big turnoff was if candidate was no longer learning – not asking enough questions 
    • Coachabilty is key to all successful players – look for this key trait in interviews, on the job, etc.
    • Keep note of how long they take before giving up. Also how they celebrate others’ success when peers succeed. 
    • Pay attention to people that show up and work hard everyday. Not everyone should be quarterback. 
    • Smarts and hearts 
  • Meetings:
    • Managers – be the last person to speak. Your job is to break ties and make decisions 
    • Start staff meetings w personal discussion. Get to know people and share stories – helps bring honesty and have more candor discussions in making decisions. Small talk is important – interest in people’s lives. 
    • In meetings – see the entire field – not just the person talking. Look around the room to see who’s committed and who is not. Then talk to them outside of the discussion to get them aligned.
    • 1:1s – personal, performance on goals, peer feedback, how to measure yourself amongst best in world
  • Rule of 2:
    • Pick the best 2 people in the org that know about subject to make the decision recommendation. He was big on ‘pairing’ people up to develop relationships but also bring the right subject matter experts together.
    • Team dynamics is often overlooked as important to success. Pair people up on projects. Helps build trust. 
  • Firing:
    • Letting people go is a failure of management – not the people being let go.
    • Important to let people leave with their heads held high – treat them well and with respect 
    • Send out note with their accomplishments as they depart 
    • Be clear early in conversation and provide details. Firings shouldn’t be a surprise. 
    • Treating departing people well is important to the moral of those staying. Many of who you lay off have closer relationships to continuing team members than you. Treat them with the appropriate level of respect. But company has to move forward – so don’t apologize too long. 
    • When you fire someone – you regret it for a day – then say you should have done it a long time before. 
  • Trust: 
    • Team must have a willingness to be vulnerable 
    • Trust enables you to have more direct conversations 
    • Phycological safety is the biggest factor in best, successful teams. Trust is key to that. 
  • Feedback:
    • Be candid and aggressive with negative feedback – you can do this if safety and trust is there. Candor plus caring.
    • Deliver negative feedback in private
    • Bill never had an elephant in the room – it was always directly on the table.  Trust was there to be able to talk about anything.
  • Morale:
    • Be a person that gives energy and not takes it away
    • When things are going bad – morale in the team is bad – and you can’t fix things when morale is bad. Need to build up team first to make changes. 
    • Work to revitalize the team then get to the problem. Teams can’t solve problems if they are a problem also.

Great lessons for all leaders – remote or otherwise… Read the book.

If anyone has additional notes from the book or ideas on remote company coaching in general – love to hear them! You can reach me on Twitter – @andytryba

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Book Notes: What you do is who you are (Horowitz)

I have to admit that I wasn’t always a big ‘culture’ guy. The word always sounded like a fluffy HR term that didn’t really mean much. Now with a bit more grey hair and a few thousand people spread across the globe – I realize that I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Particularly in the remote team environment – developing culture is much much harder. You have all the variables that work against you – not seeing each other very often, language barriers, various countries, various cultural norms, different holidays, various religions, etc etc etc. If you’re not ABSOLUTELY intentional in defining your company culture – your outcome is literally a random number generator.

Ben Horowitz signing away…

This book by Ben Horowitz hit home for me. The book is written from a perspective of a CEO/Founder (unlike other books in this category written by HR). I could respect it – and I could hear his pains along the way as he learned what really mattered.

One line I loved was ‘Culture is the decisions your people make when you’re not there’. CEOs/Founders forget that, at scale, most of the decisions made in your company are without you there. And how you ensure those decisions are aligned is where culture comes in.

My 3 takeaways from this book

  1. Be intentional about defining your culture – but ensure you also consider how it can be weaponized (Uber example)
  2. The definition of culture is really ‘what does it take to succeed in your company’ – and don’t ask execs or managers to define it
  3. Your culture needs to be who you really are – don’t try to make some pretty descriptions of what you think a company should be. It’s all about what you wakeup and do everyday – that’s your culture and what you’re company culture will be.

Ben’s Checklist

  • Cultural design – aligns w both personality and strategy. Be sure to think how it can be weaponized. 
  • Day 1 orientation – people learn more about what it takes to succeed in org that day than any other. 
  • Shocking rules – so surprising that people ask why it’s here – will reinforce key cultural elements 
  • Outside leadership – sometimes the culture you need is best brought in from an outside pro with a culture you want 
  • Object lesson – public display of importance 
  • Make ethics explicit – don’t leave unsaid 
  • Cultural to make deep meaning – what do they really mean
  • Walk the talk – refrain from choosing what you don’t practice yourself 
  • Make decisions that emphasize priorities 

Here are some super raw notes

  • Culture is the decisions your people make when you’re not there
  • Saying in the military – If you see something below standard and you don’t say anything – then you set a new standard
  • Culture changes over time as market and company changes 
  • Andy Grove – You don’t take the ball and run w it – you deflate it, put it in your pocket, grab another ball and run into the end zone, then inflate the other ball and score 12 points. (Innovative thinking outside the box)
  • Innovative ideas fail more often to succeed. And they are controversial and hard to gain momentum. So cultures typically kill those ideas as ‘dumb’ – particularly in large companies with many layers to kill it. 
  • Virtues are what you do, values are what you believe 
  • Who are we?  ‘Who you are’ is not what you list on the wall – it’s what you do. 
  • Make ethics explicit 
  • Michael Dell famously stated (when Apple was down to 3% MSS) – that he would shut it down and give money back to shareholders. (Before Jobs came back).  Back then – every PC maker was horizontal and the belief was that innovation on supply chain was the future (like Dell)
  • Amazon – frugal culture ‘do more with less’ (door desks, etc). Also written culture – not PPT (only written docs for meetings)
  • Facebook – Move fast and break things (but replaced w Move fast w stable infrastructure)
  • Yahoo – Work hours must be in office (no working from home). 
  • Uber:
    • TK actually designed Uber’s culture carefully – and it worked exactly as designed – but had design flaws
    • Values: Celebrate cities, Meritocracy and toe stepping, Principled confrontation, Winning – champions mindset, Let builders build, Make big bold bets, Always be hustling, Customer obsession, Make magic, Be an owner not a renter, Be yourself, Optimistic leadership, Best idea wins
    • Elevated 1 mindset above all – competitiveness. Do whatever it takes to win. 
    • No evidence that Travis ordered all the unethical actions – but the culture to win at all costs took over. 
    • Culture, like code, can have bugs 
    • And if ethics are the bugs – then many bad things happen
  • Samurai culture
    • I will never fall behind others in the way of the warrior, always ready to serve my lord, honor my parents, serve compassionately in the benefit of others
    • Extent of ones courage (or cowardice) cannot be measured in ordinary times – all is revealed when something happens
    • Awareness of mortality was a big driver – and die at any moment. Ready for death and accept worst outcome. Enables you to be fully live. 
    • 8 virtues:  justice, courage, honor, loyalty, benevolence, politeness, self control, voracity/sincerity 
      • Honor:  immortal part of themselves. Individual name matters throughout time 
      • Politeness:  Most profound way to express love and respect for  others (still works this way in Japan)
    • ‘Samurai word is harder than steel’
  • Bill Campbell – you’re doing it for your team, don’t let them down
  • How to know if your culture is working – ask yourself what it takes for the employees to succeed and get ahead. Don’t ask exec team or managers – you’ll get back what you want to hear. 
  • Design the culture. And be you 
  • Disagree w Drucker quote – strategy and culture work together 
  • Growth question in interview – what’s one thing you could have done better in your current job?
  • Wartime vs Peacetime CEOs – typically people that like to work for one type doesn’t like working for the other
  • Trust – tell the truth even if people don’t want to hear it (state facts clearly, what was cause, what is meaning and end result of action)
  • Kimchi problems – the more you bury them the hotter they get
  • Be okay with bad news – embrace it publicly and encourage it to be aired 
  • People don’t leave companies – they leave managers. Take genuine interest. 

In a remote world – we have to work that much harder to develop a unified company culture. Don’t neglect defining it – and don’t neglect reinforcing it on a daily basis…

If anyone has additional notes from the book or ideas on remote company culture in general – love to hear them! You can reach me on Twitter – @andytryba