Navigating Remote Work for Business Owners

Wiktor Żołnowski: Welcome to Pragmatic Talks, a podcast and video series where we discuss startups, contemporary digital product development, modern technologies, and product management. This episode is brought to you by Pragmatic Coders in collaboration with Agile by Example, one of the largest Agile conferences in Europe. We believe that everyone should have equal access to knowledge about product development and entrepreneurship and also that everyone should have the opportunity to apply it in pursuit of making our world a better place. Through this series, we aim to create an impact on the future world. In today’s episode, we are joined by Lisette Sutherland, an expert in remote work, an author, fellow podcaster, and director of Collaboration Superpowers, a company that helps people work together from anywhere. I’ve been following Lisette for over 10 years already, tracking her lessons learned and research results about remote work. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people started their interest in remote work, but Lisette was already a remote work expert years before it became popular. Today, we will discuss the pros and cons of remote work and explore the potential of a remote-first approach to improving productivity. Then, we will cover tips and tricks for effective online collaboration, recruiting people to a remote environment, building strong remote relationships, and remote leadership. Lastly, we’ll touch on the future of remote work. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Lisette Sutherland. Welcome to the next episode of Pragmatic Talks. Today, we are at the Agile by Example conference in Warsaw, and our guest is Lisette Sutherland. Welcome, Lisette.

Lisette Sutherland: Thank you.

Wiktor Żołnowski: It’s great to meet you here. I hope that you’ve already enjoyed the conference. Before we start talking about remote work, which is our main topic for today’s discussion, tell us who is Lisette and what is your story. Let’s talk about you.

Lisette Sutherland: I’ll try to keep it in the context of remote work, but what I would say is, 20 years ago, I started working for somebody who wanted to end aging. And so, he thought that he could get longevity scientists from all over the world to come together, collaborate, and solve the problem of aging so that he didn’t have to die. And so, when I heard his story, my mind was a little bit blown, and I just started going down the path of remote working at that time. Before that, I’ll say I was a hydrologist, and I worked on hazardous waste sites and helped clean up hundreds of hazardous waste sites in California. But I made the switch when I realized that the office was not the place for me. Since then, I’ve just been going down the road out of pure interest of who’s working remotely, how do they do it, and it’s led me to here today.

The journey to remote work

Wiktor Żołnowski: I remember we met for the first time somewhere around 2015 or 2016 when I was struggling with remote work or with hiring people remotely at Pragmatic Coders, at our company. I remember that I found out somehow about your advertising for your workshop, “Work Together Anywhere.” And I signed up for that, and that was pretty funny because it occurred that I was the only one who actually attended it, and it was one of the very first workshops that you were actually testing.

Lisette Sutherland: Totally, totally.

Wiktor Żołnowski: And we had a brilliant one-on-one conversation and consultation on how to work fully and learned so much during that time, and for sure we’ll come back to the lessons that I learned today. But in terms of remote work, so you already told us how did it start, but why did it start? So why did you decide that working from the office is not something for you?

Lisette Sutherland: So I didn’t find out exactly why until years later, but I knew I had this weird allergic reaction in the very beginning to the office, and I didn’t understand it. And then I took the Reiss Motivation Profile from Pia Maria, who is big on motivation and agile HR, and I took the Reiss Motivation Profile. In that profile, I discovered that one of my primary motivators is beauty. It didn’t occur to me that that could even be a motivator, but I am motivated by beautiful things. And so one of the things that got me out of the office was because it was so ugly. It was gray walls and cubicles, and I was having an allergic reaction to how ugly everything was. And I remember in my office, I kept trying to make it beautiful with flowers and plants and posters, but I mean, there’s only so much you can do in a cubicle to make it nice. So I originally went remote mostly because I wanted to have my own environment. I had a home in which the walls were painted magenta, and I had beautiful curtains and lots of plants. And so really, my initial escape from the office was to just have more beautiful surroundings. Since then, I’ve also discovered more about myself and that I’m really sensitive to noise and I get easily overwhelmed when there’s a lot going on around me. And so I find it extremely difficult to concentrate in that kind of office environment. And so for me, it’s just better to have my own environment in order to be productive. If I go into an office, you’ll see me with the noise-cancelling headsets on. I’m kind of in my own box because I really have a hard time with all the noise.

Wiktor Żołnowski: That actually shows the impact of the beauty of the environment, that the work, the beauty of the offices that we work in, how important it could be for many people like you. Some people, I mean, I don’t know how many people have the same motivation, but yeah, indeed, some people do. Don’t you think it’s also a motivation of expressing yourself in some way? You said that you painted your walls in magenta or whatever.

Lisette Sutherland: Yeah, maybe. It could be that. It was especially for me, I’m really creative in that way. Like, I’ve never had white walls in any house or apartment I’ve ever lived in; I’ve always painted them some color. So maybe it is more of an expression of sort of creativity, but I’m not exactly sure what’s behind it. I just loved more beautiful places than what was available at the office, and I didn’t find it a productive place to be. I remember trying to have office hours so that people would only ask me questions during that time because I had people coming by my cubicle every 15 or 20 minutes. You could not get anything done in that case. As soon as you got into flow, you were out again with somebody coming by, so it was just a difficult environment for me. Other people thrive in an environment like that, so it really is individual.

The post-pandemic return to the office

Wiktor Żołnowski: So the keynote talk that you’re going to give tomorrow is titled, “If You Go Back to the Office, Don’t Go Backwards in Time.” What do you mean by that? Can you give us an introduction?

Lisette Sutherland: Well, what I would say is, the pandemic changed the world of work fundamentally, and regardless of whether you like the office or you don’t like the office, if we go back, we can’t go back to the way it was. The world of work has fundamentally changed. Nobody’s going back to the office to the same environment that they left three years ago when the pandemic started. With all the mandates now to go back to the office, I really just wanted to have a title for the talk that was saying, “Don’t go back to the way it was,” because it no longer exists, and at the same time, people don’t want to go back to the way it was. So I really like the analogy, “The toothpaste is out of the tube,” as we say in the US, or “The train has left the station”–it can’t go back, and people don’t want it to go back. So I titled my talk that because I thought a lot of people, a lot of managers, wanted it to be like it used to be. It seemed easier, but I think we’ve forgotten how difficult the office was even at that time. So if we go back to the office, we can’t go back to the way it was. We have to change with the times.

Wiktor Żołnowski: How do we change it? What needs to be changed? How should the future of working, like hybrid or remote work or office work, look in the next few years?

Lisette Sutherland: There’s a phrase that I really like; it says, “It’s not a workplace, it’s a place to work.” So to me, the future of work is flexible. And I say that because nobody cares about remote or hybrid work. Everybody cares about freedom. What I think everybody wants is the freedom to decide when and where they’re most productive and when and where their team is most productive. We are experts of our own productivity, and we know what we need and we know what our teams need. And so I think that the future of work is that people can decide for themselves. We don’t need to be mandated to a particular place anymore. We can work everywhere.

Managing meetings and information overload

Wiktor Żołnowski: You mentioned that when you used to work from the office, something that was interrupting and disturbing you was a lot of people coming to you and interrupting your work and asking you questions, etc. But from what I hear right now from many people who are working remotely is that they’re complaining about the amount of meetings that they have and the time that they spend in meetings. And this is something that I see like a common column. I even remember when the pandemic started, my calendar started looking like a mess; it was fully booked. Sometimes I had two meetings at the same time, etc., every single day for eight hours or more. Meetings, meetings, meetings. So how do we work on that? How do we avoid it? And how do we work remotely without so many meetings?

Lisette Sutherland: That was one of the symptoms when we went remote: all of a sudden, everything turned into a meeting. And I mean, we are all zoomed out. Everybody is totally zoomed out. So when you have a schedule full of meetings like that–I mean, some people, like coaches that need to be talking with people all day, I can understand that you would be on calls all day with people. But to me, it’s a symptom of us doing something wrong. One of the original cures for this comes from Cal Newport’s book, *A World Without Email*, where he talks about the “hyperactive hive mind,” which is a way of collaborating that is made possible by email and instant messaging, but it’s not necessarily the best way to do it. So I’d say if you’re having too many meetings or if you feel like you’re getting information overload from all of the messages coming in, one of the things we need to do is tame that hyperactive hive mind by changing how we work. And so we really need to look at how work flows across an organization. An easy example of this is a team that I was working with a while back. They had five people on their team, so it was a small team with a large number of projects, and they were constantly meeting about the status of this product, what’s going on with this, constantly meeting. And so instead, what they did is they created a dashboard, and they used Trello. Any tool is fine, but they used Trello, and they put all their projects on a dashboard and then kept them updated in real time. So now, if anybody needed to know what was happening, they just go to the dashboard. There’s no need to call a meeting. There’s no need to send an email. We can just go look at the dashboard. So I think that one of the keys to this way of working is changing how the work flows in order to tame that hyperactive behavior and just being more intentional about how we use our time. Working in person is a different medium than working online. That’s what we know. And so when we work in this remote-first way, we all have to change to this new medium of work, and part of that change is redoing how the work flows. And hopefully, if you’re doing it well, the number of meetings should go way down. And one of the things Matt Mullenweg said is, “Meetings should be rare and excellent,” and I think that that’s also a key. Right now, there are so many bad meetings, and the place that people can start is your recurring meetings. Start with those. Do they really need to be every week, or can they be done differently somehow? Or really looking at what can be done asynchronously. If you’re going to just show up and watch a presentation by somebody, it doesn’t make any sense. We record the presentation, send it out to people before the meeting starts, and then use your valuable time for discussions and decision-making. But those kinds of things, like these all-hands meetings where we just sit and watch the CEO talk for 30 minutes and then ask questions–just send it out on video and then have a Q&A session.

Wiktor Żołnowski: I think more people would like that than sitting there and watching the CEO. So it’s a matter of intentionally doing things differently. Recently, we decided that we will tune our town hall meetings, like a company-wide discussion, only to a Q&A session without any presentation, as you said. Like this information can be sent before, or there is a presentation that is sent to people, and there is only a Q&A session during the meeting. Brilliant. We’re experimenting with it as well because, as you said, those meetings are a waste of time. Okay, so you already mentioned a few things, but what do you think about some tools that are supporting remote work, for example, push-to-talk communicators? So people are all working mostly together, like in the same room but not in the same room. When they push a button, they could speak to each other, everyone. Like Star Trek. “Bridge, report.”

Lisette Sutherland: Oops, we set… yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that stuff.

Wiktor Żołnowski: So, for me, I love all tools. I’m a total tool junkie and have been for as long as I’ve known about tools. It’s never about the tool, but it’s all about the behavior that the tool enables. So I’m a big fan of all these tools, I think, but only if they help. Some tools get in the way. And one of the big dangers, one of the things we saw during the pandemic, is that productivity was not the issue; it was burnout. And so with these push-to-talk tools and all of these tools where we’re always on and always connected, I’d say great, and we need to make sure that we agree as a team on how we’re going to use those tools so that we create a sustainable way of working. What we found is when people can work anywhere, anytime, we tend to work all the places, all the time. Work and life just bleed together, and burnout is a real issue for people. So I would say tools are great, but agree as a team on how to use them.

Creating healthy remote work habits

Wiktor Żołnowski: So don’t you think that working remotely sometimes is actually harmful for people because they are… when people are not taught how to separate their personal space, personal life, from working space? I remember from the beginning of the pandemic especially, people would start working from their kitchen or use an ironing board as their standing desk and try to work that way. Actually, I was looking at it, and it was sad that they were doing this to themselves because that would be harmful to them sooner or later. So how do we teach people what is important when working remotely? How do we teach them to do this in a safe way?

Lisette Sutherland: Indeed, it is really hard because one, you have to really know yourself, and if I think back to when I was in my 20s, you think you know yourself, but you actually don’t. You don’t really know what you need, and it takes a little bit of experimentation. So, one, it’s important for people to experiment, and two, it is really important for leaders and organizations to role-model the behavior that they want to see. I think that’s really important. Mentoring is really important, getting training. When I recently interviewed Paul Richards, who was an astronaut in 1996, he said that astronauts train for every situation so that when they get into space, it’s like they’ve done it a hundred times before. And so I really think, especially for younger people who are just coming into the workforce, training is the best thing that we can do. So providing training to really understand what you need in order to be productive. Besides training, there are some other fun techniques. Like, one thing that became really popular during the pandemic was personal user manuals. So it starts as an introspective exercise for what do I need in order to be productive, and what should other people know about collaborating with me that’s important? Like if you were going to collaborate with me, I’d send you my manual, and in there would say, “These are my languages that I speak, these are my normal working hours or my preferred working hours, I prefer to communicate via email, I hate the phone, love video calls, hate the phone.” But those are good things to know about working with me, and I think starting with a personal user manual, if you’re not going to be able to get training, starting with a personal user manual to really understand why you like the way of working that you do is a great place to start. That’s an easy one to do for people. But I think training is the… not just because I run a training company, but because when I was talking with Paul Richards, he was saying astronauts train for that two-second delay so that when they get into space, it’s not weird. It’s just a normal way of speaking with each other. And I think that that training goes a long way.

Wiktor Żołnowski: So do you think there are some common habits or routines that people can implement in their life that would work for almost everyone that you can recommend to just maybe not fix all the problems, but improve their quality of their work-life balance and productivity?

Lisette Sutherland: It is so personal. I know Tim Ferriss has the books out, *Tools of Titans* and there’s the other one I can’t remember now. What I learned from that, and also I listened to the audiobook of that, was every single person had their own style. So I can’t give a one-size-fits-all approach to productivity. But one of the things that works for most people is one, separating your workspace from your personal space. That is really important, and there are many ways to do that. So I used to live, when you first took that workshop, I lived in a one-bedroom apartment, and behind me was my bed. Not the best thing for video, of course, but also it was just one bedroom; there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t separate my work from my personal space. So I got a room divider, and in the morning, I would put the room divider up. And one, it served so that people didn’t have to see my bed behind me, not the most professional background, but two, it served as, “Now this is a workspace.” And somehow it worked. It was a mental shift of putting that up, and then when I took it down at night, I would take it down. And then the other thing that seems to work for people is having some sort of a commute. Going for a walk in the morning before you start, so don’t roll out of bed and just hop on your computer. Like, go outside and get some sunlight and some fresh air. And then in the evening, don’t just shut the computer down and go on to YouTube or do whatever you need. Again, exactly, open it again, but this time for fun. But like going out and doing more movement, and so I’m a big fan of movement. I just really believe that the more people move, the better. Those tips are general enough that everybody can do that, but the way people work, I mean, if you’re a morning person or a night owl, all of that comes into play, and there really is no one-size-fits-all, which is why it’s so difficult.

Wiktor Żołnowski: You know, that way, you will take out the most common argument for people who are pro-remote work: that they don’t have to commute to work, so they save a lot of time.

Lisette Sutherland: It’s true you don’t have to commute, but an involuntary commute is not the best, and sitting in traffic is no fun. But going out for a walk or something or just getting out, just standing in your garden and getting some fresh air and some sunlight, even that is better.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Since I started working professionally a long time ago, I always had this habit to, if not walking to the office or walking back from the office home, then I was always trying to walk a few bus stops until I would get into a bus or get off the bus early, or do some work before I went to the office or after I came from the office. So yeah, I’m also a person of moving. And when the pandemic started and the lockdown started, you were prohibited from even going for a walk. I was like, “Oh my God, I don’t know how I will.” It was awful.

Lisette Sutherland: It was awful. I totally started gaining weight during the pandemic.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Me too. Oh man, it was awful.

Lisette Sutherland: And so what I did, interestingly, I got a virtual personal trainer, and he gave me… I still use him to this day. I’ve lost six kilos since the pandemic started, but he sends me workouts via an app. He monitors whether I do it with my iWatch, and he can see how I’ve worked out. And then, just knowing that this random guy in Ohio is watching me to make sure I’m working out makes sure that I never miss a workout. So, you know, there are all kinds of things that people can do to get more movement in the day, but I recommend it.

Wiktor Żołnowski: I really like this idea of separating, even if you have one bedroom, separating the space with some screen or something behind you. I think I feel it’s like it would be much better than the blurred background that people are using in the video conference tools right now. Now I just realized that separating yourself physically is actually not only a physical barrier but also a psychological barrier between your living space and working space. And just turning on the blur or some background in your Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, whatever you use, is actually only covering it but not really helping.

Lisette Sutherland: But it’s not covering it for you because you still see it. It’s your mental process that you’re trying to… yeah, it’s psychological.

Wiktor Żołnowski: I think it’s a brilliant advice for many people to even try to improvise with it and try how it would work for them.

Lisette Sutherland: You know, another one that people use is to separate your devices. So like my laptop is for work only, and then when I go and I do fun, like YouTube or Netflix, it’s always on my phone or my iPad, and the two never mix. Even that helps separate it out.

Overcoming remote work challenges

Wiktor Żołnowski: There are many challenges from the organizational perspective. This is probably the main reason why many companies nowadays are deciding to come back to the office and are trying to also address it. So one of such challenges that, for example, I see in our company, but I also talk to other C-level people in the industry, and they also see it, is knowledge sharing. So before the pandemic, when people were coming to the office, all of this, even chitchat next to the coffee machine… Right now, people are considering like, “Oh, when I will go to the office, I will spend most of the time in the kitchen.” At the end of the day, it occurs that those discussions in the kitchen were often around the products that we’re working on; it was part of the knowledge sharing. Also, the communication was easier because we didn’t have to set up a meeting, we didn’t have to… the face-to-face communication was more efficient than just using my arms and head if you have turned on your camera, because not everyone is still doing this. This is something… okay, I understand some situations where you don’t want to or you cannot, but in most of the cases, you should use your camera.

Lisette Sutherland: Yeah, people are multitasking 90% of the time.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Yeah, that’s true. That’s another… that’s another one. But how to address this knowledge sharing in the organization and this information exchange?

Lisette Sutherland: So one of the things that happens when we go more to a flexible-first environment is that we inherently become more of a documentation culture. Things, because we don’t have the physical walls in order to have the culture, things become more documented. And so one of the things in knowledge sharing is that our knowledge sharing also has to be more documented. Now, WordPress is sort of the gold standard for how they operate in this way because they do everything, almost everything, asynchronously using their P2 platform. And so all of their decisions in the organization have been documented in this platform. And so they basically have every decision that’s ever been made; they can go back and look at why was that decision made because it’s all in that document. And when I think about the knowledge that’s lost in organizations when somebody leaves the company and their inbox goes with them, you’re losing all of that institutional knowledge that they had. With like with WordPress, if they want to go back and look at why is this thing blue, they can go back and see like, “Oh, we decided that it would be blue for these and these reasons.” And so a lot of organizations, they go around in circles and reinvent the wheel over and over again because that knowledge has not been documented anywhere. If you’re going to go flexible-first, you have to really start getting into documentation in a useful way, which brings up a whole information management challenge, but it’s just a different challenge. I mean, in the office, you’ve got a certain amount of challenges; flexible-first, you also have that.

Wiktor Żołnowski: I believe it’s pretty universal, both for remote working and in-office working. If you have good documentation, an efficient way to document stuff, then you are more productive at the office as well. So that is not changing if you are working remotely. Okay, so that’s the one thing. But what about the education of people, like training people, etc.? What I’ve noticed since the pandemic started and people started working remotely, for example, in IT is that there are not so many job offers for junior developers. Actually, during the pandemic, I’ve seen maybe a few on the market, when before, it was like every second company used to hire junior developers, train them on a lower salary, and then increase their salary, train them to become regular/senior developers, architects, whatever, in a couple of years. But during the pandemic, it stopped. Like companies stopped training people because it turned out to be very hard to do that remotely, or it’s very inefficient to do that remotely. So maybe you have some good tips on how to train people–not just onboarding, but a long process that usually takes a year or two years from junior to regular developer?

Lisette Sutherland: That is a real challenge. There is nothing that can sometimes replace the in-person kind of leading and mentoring somebody over the years. But especially with software development, there are so many different opportunities that I see, like, for instance, pair programming. That would be a great way to mentor and to teach people, is just pairing up, but it just takes more time. But how did we do it in the office before?

Wiktor Żołnowski: Well, I see a few differences. Like in the office, it was really easy to even… I, as a senior developer, I can see that someone who is a junior is struggling with something. I can visually see it. So I can ask, “Okay, do you need help?” Yes, that was usual. It was pretty easy to notice on people’s faces they were struggling with some problem. Maybe if you have a constant camera turned on and you see every team member, maybe you can do this, but usually, you don’t want to work like that.

Lisette Sutherland: Definitely.

Wiktor Żołnowski: So it wouldn’t work. So this is one thing. The second thing was also, people were having these relations with each other. Like people built these relations, so it was much easier for junior people to actually ask for help when they needed it, or even sometimes catch someone over coffee when they see that that person is not busy right now and ask about the problem that they had. And it was much easier to do in this physical environment. So those are the things that used to work in the past, but maybe there are some things that can work right now?

Lisette Sutherland: Yeah, I mean, the thing that comes most to mind for me is, I don’t know how to solve all the challenges that we’re facing, but one of the things that comes to mind now is working out loud and making our work visible to each other in new ways. And I got the idea 10 years ago from John Stepper, who wrote the book *Working Out Loud*, because he was working at a bank, and he was the only one in his department that had his job function. And when the bank started downsizing, he was in danger of getting fired because nobody knew what he was doing. And so I feel like in these situations, there’s got to be more ways that junior developers can work out loud so that people can see what’s going on. And working out loud can be something like having your team status accurate as to what you’re doing or the daily standups. That’s a great way of working out loud or using tools and these kinds of things. But there’s got to be another way to help people when they’re feeling challenged like this. And that doesn’t mean that we have to be sitting side by side. That can’t be the only way. With junior developers, there’s more in-person time that we need to plan with them, and then later, they can work more out loud. That might, you know… So I don’t think “all remote” is the answer. There’s got to be a better way than just mandating everybody back into the office. We just need to be more creative on that and experiment with new ways of doing things. Because they want the help too, so it’s up to both. One, they’ve got to reach out more, and the other people have to reach out more. But I won’t lie, it’s a challenge. I mean, if I think back, I’m very grateful that in my 20s I was in the office because yeah, you learned a lot. I got mentored a lot. You know, so it’s a tough one.

Building a strong remote culture

Wiktor Żołnowski: So coming back to that, yes, it’s much easier to train people in the office, but it’s also easier to pass on the culture of the company when they are in the office. So maybe you have some advice on how to do this remotely, how to build a culture remotely?

Lisette Sutherland: Oh, so Chase Warrington from Doist has this great quote where he says, “Company culture is not about how you socialize together; it’s about how you work together.” And so I think if you’re really working on… like, in person, the company culture is sort of embodied by the office. That is sort of the culture visually. Online, we have to do culture a little bit differently. And so I really think that the culture comes from the team really understanding its purpose and its values, which sounds really cliché. But purpose is like we’re all going in the same direction, and our values determine how we behave. So we can have a culture of transparency, or we can have a culture of corruption just based on the values of the people on the team. And so I think it’s really important that teams have those discussions about, “Is our value transparency? How do we live that?” Jurgen Appelo in Management 3.0 had a really interesting practice called “Value Story.” When I was working for Management 3.0, we actually did that, and the way that we did that is we had a Slack channel at the time, and anytime there was a decision that we had to make that we weren’t sure which direction to go, you would always be told, “Well, think back to what are the company values and how would you make that decision based on what the values are of the company.” And when you made that decision, you had to put it in the Slack group. It would reinforce people’s behavior based on the values of the company.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Public channel, a public channel for everybody.

Lisette Sutherland: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so you would just share your story. Like for example, one woman, her husband, the company that he was working for wanted to give him a raise, but they wanted to do it under the table so that they didn’t have to pay taxes for him. For his personal values, this was not appropriate, and so he turned the raise down because he didn’t… or the bonus or whatever it was, he turned it down. And so she posted that in the channel, just saying, “His value was honesty and transparency,” so it was sort of an example for the rest of us. I still remember that story to this day because I thought, “I don’t know how I would behave in that situation. I would hope to turn down the money, but now that he’s done it, I would totally want to follow in his footsteps,” so it makes it easier for me to make the right decision. So I think there’s all kinds of things like that that our culture doesn’t just come from hanging out together; it’s really about how we work together. And so teams can create team agreements, really be clear on what your values are, what is the purpose. It goes a long way.

Wiktor Żołnowski: So, any other advice on teamwork and how to build a team remotely? Because you already mentioned team agreements, this kind of sharing stories, etc. So there are plenty of tools, but maybe you have some other advice? Because again, people are usually more effective when they are working remotely because there’s no disruption, other things–some people, at least. But teams are not always more effective when working remotely. Sometimes there is no team, just a group of people who are very effective on their personal level but not so effective on the team level. And so the sum of the effectiveness is much lower than if they were to work from the office.

Lisette Sutherland: Indeed. In this situation, it’s funny, I would say bring people together regularly. There’s nothing like hanging out over a big pile of nachos and a couple of beers. You’re just not going to get that same feeling until virtual reality becomes more real. We’re not going to get that same sort of interaction online. The friendships and the bonding can happen online, but it takes a long time. In fact, I could tell the story. I had a virtual co-working colleague. I probably started working with her the same time that you were taking the workshop. We started working together, and we worked together for nine years and had never met. And she became one of my best friends. I mean, I knew everything about her. I went through all of her dating life. I was there for all the boyfriends over the nine years that we worked together. I knew everything about her apartment, and then in January of 2020, I actually went to San Francisco and met her for the first time, and it was awesome. And I went into her apartment, knew where everything was because I’d been on video. Like, I’d been in her bathroom because we’d become closer; she’d put on her makeup and stuff while we were talking and just checking up, or I’d be there when she was cooking breakfast. So I knew where everything in the apartment was. And then when I saw it in 3D, it was just an extension of what we had already built.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Exactly. And, “She is way shorter than I expected.”

Lisette Sutherland: Yeah, that’s…

Wiktor Żołnowski: I was also surprised when the pandemic ended and we started coming back to the office for the retreats and whatever. I was like, “Oh my God, this guy is so tall, this one is short.” It’s so weird because we’re all the same size online.

Lisette Sutherland: So, for team building and things like that, I do think that we should get together every once in a while. I have to say, that depends on the team. When I worked for Management 3.0, twice a year was enough, and for other teams, maybe it’s once a week. I think you mentioned you have everybody come into the office on Wednesdays.

Wiktor Żołnowski: My girlfriend has this rule in her team. We as Pragmatic have the rule that everyone needs to be in the office for two days, and in the best-case scenario, that will be the same two days for the entire team in the month, and it will be like one after another day. So like Monday, Tuesday, or something like this. Two days in a row, so for example, some people who are not from our town, from Kraków, they can arrive and stay for a night, so they could hang out in the evening or something like this.

Lisette Sutherland: That’s a great idea. I love that. And so the budgets for these little outings that happen, I think those are… I think that’s a much more creative way of doing it than maybe even having an office. I know WordPress gets together regularly, but they also have certain teams or certain departments that get together on their own. Famously, the book *The Year Without Pants* was written by one of the WordPress folks, and I think they got together in Greece for a month, and they just spent the month in Greece working together. I think those are awesome options. So I’m not saying “all remote” is the best, but I do think that giving people the choice opens up a lot of issues, but it sure is a better quality of life for everybody.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, building relations between people, bringing them more often to the office or bringing them more often somewhere for the retreats so they will meet each other, that’s one option. What about building people’s relationship with the company so they would feel that they are part of the company? It’s also not easy.

Lisette Sutherland: No, that’s really not easy, and I think that’s definitely easier done in person, feeling connected to the company. I mean, you have to have a reason that you feel loyal and connected to the company. So in that case, I think that that’s really on leadership. Leadership, culture, goals, mission, 100%, 100%. And also, it’s really important to understand why people come to work to begin with. I mean, for some people, it’s all about solving challenging problems. You’d want to get up and dive into this puzzle. That sounds like a nightmare to me. I would hate to solve challenging problems every day. That does not motivate me. For me, it’s more about who I work with rather than what I’m working on. And for some people, it’s just a job. You’re never going to motivate them with a pizza party or a quiz night. It’s just a job, so what they want is stability and a good paycheck. That is what motivates them. My friend Abe is the same way; he doesn’t care at all about the company that he works for. He cares about his pension. He’ll remain loyal to the company as long as he’s getting his goals. So I really think that for companies, it’s important to understand what your people need in order to feel connected to the team because it’s different for everybody, and then you build the environment for that set of people.

Wiktor Żołnowski: And the companies could choose what’s important for them and what type of people they want to attract. And there’s employer branding and then recruitment that they will eliminate, for example, if they don’t want to increase the salary every four or five months because they’re following the market. They could choose to be a strong brand with some mission that people could believe in, or something.

Lisette Sutherland: Totally. I mean, GitLab has their entire company culture written in their handbook, and it’s public and available to anybody on the internet. So anybody that applies to GitLab already knows exactly what they’re getting into because they know the company culture. It is completely transparent, and so the company is attracting what they want. And so I think a lot of companies should follow suit in that way.

Dealing with dishonesty and lack of accountability

Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, we are talking about the challenges of remote work. So the last question about challenges. Unfortunately, more and more often, I hear about companies that are struggling with people who are working a few jobs at a time. If they are doing that transparently, for me, it’s okay. Like we have this agreement that you are a freelancer, you’re an expert that they want to hire for a few hours or to do some particular task. When it’s not time-related but job-related, that’s perfectly okay, and I used to work that way. I used to work with people that way. That’s totally okay that they or I have been working for many clients. But there are people who are claiming that they are working full-time for some company, and at the same time, they are working for two or three other companies and taking three or four salaries. And because of remote work, it’s of course much easier. But I also heard the stories from the past, a few years before the pandemic, that there were some people who managed to do this: working remotely for two companies and working on-site for some company and still do this. So it’s not only remote work, but with remote, it became much easier for people, and unfortunately, many people tried to do it that way and simply earn more money at the cost of their employers.

Lisette Sutherland: Indeed. There are always going to be a few bad apples. And I think the best thing that companies can do is create as much transparency into the processes as possible. And when you find these bad apples, they need to be dealt with appropriately. To me, it’s just dishonest. It’s just dishonest. I mean, I understand why people do it. Yeah, it’s easier to hide the shenanigans online, so companies creating a culture of transparency, I think that helps. And there are always going to be bad apples, and I think that to deal with those, there has to be accountability. And so I think in one of… you know, in the office, it’s much easier to see the shenanigans, but I remember going, when I was in the office, there were people playing solitaire and video games, and there was a ping pong table. Like we were all… you know, so there’s also people that are sort of blowing off work at the office as well. It’s just easier to catch them. But building a culture of transparency… there’s no easy answer for that, but I think there should really be accountability for people’s actions, and that is something that’s lacking in a lot of offices. There’s a great framework that I learned about called “tight-loose-tight,” and it really goes along with the Agile methodology, whichever one. Because the tight is you give people clear expectations for what they’re supposed to work on. The loose is you let them, give them the autonomy to do the work in the way that they see fit. And the tight is you have to come back again and review and see what was done. Keep them accountable for the work that they’ve agreed to do. And a lot of times, there’s a lot of “tight-loose-loose” behaviors in organizations. And even I was subject to that. During the pandemic, one of my colleagues finally asked me during a retrospective, “I need you to review the work that you’ve given me,” because I would give her work, she would do it, and I trusted that she would get it done, and it always got done. But what she wanted was more accountability, just for somebody to acknowledge that she had completed the tasks that were given to her. So I think some people will like it, and the ones that are full of shenanigans won’t.

Wiktor Żołnowski: I think that’s a very good fit, especially for Scrum. Like in Scrum, we have planning where we agree, maybe not commit to something, but we agree what the goal is. And then we have at the end of the sprint, a Sprint Review, where the people who were giving the job, paying money for it, are reviewing what was done and providing the feedback. So people are kept, one way or another, accountable for the job they perform. And during the sprint, they have the freedom to do this in a way that they like, even on the level of how they will achieve the goal. And do you think with those kinds of feedback loops that people could do two to three jobs? I think that many companies struggle with actually doing proper Scrum, so that might be the reason. Like for example, in our case, it’s very rare that we catch someone that they have more, that they’re working for someone else, not only for us, and not telling us that. Actually, I believe that no one is doing this because we are doing Scrum, and we are doing Scrum very much by the book, so as you said, that provides transparency. So it’s pretty easy to be noticed by everyone in the team that someone is not performing as others or is not committed to do the work as others. So usually, the team itself is cleaning up from such a bad apple. One way or another, they are telling that, “Okay, there is something wrong with this person and we are not as effective as we should be because of the person who is maybe not…”

Lisette Sutherland: I love that. I love that. And I really think that that loop, that accountability part, is really missing in a lot of places.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, in Scrum, it’s not accountability, it’s more about responsibility, but at the end of the day, people feel accountable. That is the feeling. So you don’t want to be the one person on the team that’s not delivering when everybody else is delivering. I mean, it feels bad. Sometimes these kind of situations are cleaning up on their own, like people are deciding, “Okay, I won’t be able to do three jobs, so I resign from this one because that is the hardest to cover the other one.” But we are to provide advice for everyone, so maybe one of the pieces of advice would be to actually use Scrum and do it properly, so you will provide more transparency for your organization.

The benefits of building a remote-first organization

Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, so let’s talk about some benefits of working remotely. Benefits from the company perspective. What do you think is the most important benefit from the company’s perspective, from the company owner’s perspective? We are working, for example, with startups at Pragmatic Coders, so how would you sell remote work to a startup founder?

Lisette Sutherland: Well, one of the things that we know that’s been proven is that diversity is a superpower. And so I think one of the biggest benefits for companies is that you can hire a much more diverse group of people to come and work on a problem, and you’re getting perspectives and different confirmation biases, so you’re going to get many more perspectives to work on a problem than just having everybody from the same city, the same background, and the same cultural background. It also creates a lot of problems because we have to learn about each other’s cultures, of course, but the diversity really is a superpower. So I think that that’s one of the biggest benefits. You can hire from anywhere, and you can hire all kinds of people. And there are all kinds of people in the job market now that have gotten a lot of benefit from the pandemic. There are disabled workers, there are military spouses; there are all kinds of people that are back into the workforce because they’re location-independent. I think that is really the biggest superpower that companies have.

Wiktor Żołnowski: What would be the most important things if you were to advise someone, and I know that you sometimes do it, if you were to advise someone who wants to build a remote-first organization from scratch, what would be the best advice you would give to such a person?

Lisette Sutherland: If I were building a remote company from scratch, which I’ve done, but it’s taken a really long time… I didn’t mean to build a company; I’m an accidental entrepreneur. What I would start with, one, you’ve got to get the right people on the bus. That comes from the Jim Collins book *Good to Great*. Man, you’ve got to get the right people on the bus. So, one, your hiring process should be super important, and it’s tough; hiring is always tough. Two, create a team agreement. I still to this day, I’ve been talking about team agreements for more than 10 years now. It probably was in the workshop that you took. I can’t remember, but I’ve been talking about team agreements for 10 years now, and still in my workshops, 80-85% of the participants have never had a team agreement or don’t have any agreement on working together. I think that an agreement is key. And then I would really do training on that. I would train people how to work asynchronously. I would train people how to do good documentation. I would train people for how to be on video online. I mean, all these little things that we were teaching actually became quite important during the pandemic, like lighting or just being able to see each other. All of those things were small things, but it does increase the overall engagement of the company. And I would say one of the things I would change about what I did is I would get people together occasionally and get together in person. When I worked for Management 3.0, the first four years that I worked for the company, we didn’t organize retreats because of me, because I thought, “If anybody can work remote-first, it should be us,” and I’m going to lead the way. And then we met in Lisbon. We decided, “Okay, let’s meet,” after four years. We thought, “Okay.” So we met and we rented an Airbnb in Lisbon, and it was one of the best weeks that I’ve had with a group of people. We had so much fun. We were out at night dancing in the streets of Lisbon, playing games. We were all in the same Airbnb together. It was an amazing time. So I would definitely plan more team retreats.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Getting the right people on the bus, Jim Collins. I totally agree. We are very focused at Pragmatic. And there is another episode of Pragmatic Talks about recruitment and how we do recruitment as well. But the question is actually, so remote working is a skill. So partially it’s a skill, partially it depends on the personal values of the person or character of the person or some other things as well. But it’s a skill that people can be taught how to do this. But how do you assess if a person is the right person to work remotely? So, during the interview or recruitment process, how do you assess the remote work skill?

Lisette Sutherland: So one of my favorite techniques is using multimedia interviews. So I would interview people on video and see what they’re like on video. I would interview them via email. I would use WhatsApp or whatever the communication tools you use in the company, like maybe you’re using Teams. So I would say, “Okay, let’s communicate via Teams,” and so what I would try to assess is their communication style, like what are their response times, how clear is their written communication, how they behave in this asynchronous environment, and how do they treat other people. That’s one of the things. I mean, when you’re interviewing in person, one of the things that Facebook always said was part of the interview is they had people picked up at the airport to take them in, and then they judged how they treated the cab driver on the way there. Those kind of things, that, I thought, was key. So I would try to do things like that in a remote environment, but don’t just video interview people; do it multimedia because you want to see how they behave on your tools and how do they treat other people.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, so it’s interesting. So we invite them to a Slack channel, for example, and what? Ask some questions? Ask some questions, but not at a given time, or just tell them that we’ll contact you, let’s say, tomorrow, and we’ll have some questions over Slack?

Lisette Sutherland: So, with an interview process, people… you’ve got to schedule the times, but I might say like, “Okay, tomorrow at 11, let’s have a chat, but we’ll do it via Slack, or we’ll do it via WhatsApp.” So we’ll be there. Let’s get together. We’re going to just have a conversation back and forth and then ask a few questions, maybe ask them to go find something. But I would use the multimedia approach because on video, people are one way, and on instant messaging, they’re… it’s a different medium. So I would just test out all of those mediums to see if they’re a good fit. And then I would have them do the Management 3.0 Moving Motivators, just really understand what motivates them. It’s such a simple tool that goes so far, to just understand…

Wiktor Żołnowski: It’s a side topic, but totally. But when I do this with a team that is already working at the company, I was doing this and then I ask people to actually move the motivator up, the card up, if they feel that the company supports that value for them, or move it down if they think that the company is demotivating that value. You see, when you have Moving Motivators, 10 of them or something, and here are the less important, here are the most important for a person. And when the most important are down, you see that okay, that person doesn’t fit our culture. Or you see that, okay, we need to work on that because we want to keep this person because she or he fits our culture, but we are not providing the things that are important for a person. So brilliant. This is something that I love in this exercise as well. It just takes minutes.

Lisette Sutherland: Yeah, it’s amazing how powerful it is. I actually had an experience with Moving Motivators about five or six years ago, or maybe longer. Time is weird now after the pandemic. It’s like fast and slow. I had an experience when I was working in an office in the Netherlands, and I was the only woman and the only American in an office of Dutch men. And so I was really… and I’m an enthusiastic person by nature. And so I was really trying to keep it down, not be too enthusiastic, not be too American. And at one point, we did Moving Motivators, or I can’t remember why it came up. I think I had it on my desk because I was going to a Management 3.0 conference or something. I did this game with one of my colleagues, and I remember thinking, he had kind of been trying to be friends, but I wasn’t sure. I was really trying to keep it professional, but it turned out that “relatedness” was his most important motivator, and for him, it was really important who he worked with. It was important to be friends. And as soon as I realized that, it broke the barrier completely, and we’re friends to this day because of that one five-minute game on my desk. It’s amazing how it works.

Looking ahead: The future of remote work

Wiktor Żołnowski: That’s really brilliant. I’m very grateful to Jurgen that he wrote it out so simply. It’s so simple, you almost want to be like, “It’s too simple.” Coming to an end of this discussion, what do you think about artificial intelligence and its impact on the future of remote work, especially about the pressure of AI?

Lisette Sutherland: Yeah, I mean, I’m using it myself. I’ve got ChatGPT, I’m using it on images on Canva; I’m experimenting all over the place. Amazing tool. I mean, it’s a tool like anything else, and it has the potential… I mean, the disinformation potential alone is really scary. I mean, I think even just this morning, it was Tom Hanks that came out in the news that there was a video of him promoting something, and it was all done via AI, and it wasn’t him, and he didn’t want to promote the product. I mean, it’s a tool like anything else, and it’s just something we’re going to have to have an agreement in our companies about what is proper use of the tool and what is improper use of the tool. Because you want to use it to the benefit, and it also has the potential of really causing a serious disinformation problem, so I don’t know how to solve it yet. I mean, I’m very excited about it. I think what the potentials are is awesome. I don’t have to think about the dumb stuff anymore. That’s the thing I like about it, is like ChatGPT, it’s just like, “Hey, listen, I’ve got to write this style of email. Start it for me,” because a blank page is… I don’t know, you start writing things out. But I use all the tools. And then on top of that, I’ve got Grammarly. So I think I’m both excited and scared at the same time, and I don’t know how it’s going to affect remote work, that’s for sure.

Wiktor Żołnowski: So aside from artificial intelligence, what do you think the future of work, the future of remote work, should look like? You already mentioned 15 things about coming back to the office, doing it in a different way. But if you could imagine how it should look, if you could provide advice to people or provide the direction for people who are looking to design or redesign the work environment, regardless if it’s physical or remote, what would it be?

Lisette Sutherland: I really do believe the future of remote work is total flexibility, total location and time independence. I think that’s nirvana. So right now, we’re all… 9-to-5 was sort of the old way. The new way is now we can work anywhere, but we’re all still kind of working 9-to-5, and I think the new way is going to be total location, total time independence. And companies will have to decide for themselves what is the configuration that they’re going to want. So it’s freedom for the individual and freedom for companies to decide how remote they want to be. And some companies don’t want to be remote. I think it’s totally fine, but you should prepare yourself with remote-first processes in case something happens. In the past, I used examples like bad weather or sick children or a pandemic. I would never have used a pandemic. Like, I’m a dramatic person already as it is. My husband calls me “poetic.” I’m poetic and dramatic at the same time, so I would never have used the pandemic. But here we are, and we saw that the remote-first companies had a seamless process to go online during the pandemic and didn’t lose any time or any business. And other companies really struggled to make it work. So for any company, it’s in your best interest to become remote-first, regardless of if you work remote or not.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Actually, I recall that the workshop that we had back in 2015 or something, I took a few lessons from there, and I passed it to the teams, and people started working that way that we discussed that time. And some people are still working with us since 2015, and wow. When the pandemic started, that was the only team that was already working remotely, like for four days a week or something like this. They agreed that they would work. They were extremely efficient, comparing to any other team that we had in the company. They were really good at working, not only working remotely. So when the pandemic started, we just gave them the wheel and said, “Okay, now please set up the rules, teach everyone how to work remotely because you are a good example of how to do this.” And I feel that was partially thanks to your training back then in 2015 that I had. I took that lesson and came to the team, and those people actually started working that way later on. Like they used Discord, they had this team agreement, other things that they used for remote work as well.

Lisette Sutherland: Yeah, I mean, we saw that all over the place. The remote-first companies, they sort of kept the economies afloat during the pandemic. I didn’t want to say, “I told you so,” but it was really a good example of, you guys, this sort of showed… Of course, over time, during the pandemic, productivity started to decrease, and so we saw that, but I think that’s more a matter of teams reorganizing themselves to work in a different way.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Not everyone caught up, and not everyone succeeded with remote work. And I believe that there will be companies that will come back to the office fully and will stop doing remote work. Stop thinking about investing into it. But there will be many companies that will at least work hybrid, or they will at least prepare for the next black swan that could happen and some event that will force them to work remotely, because that already happened.

Lisette Sutherland: Well, they’re saying now that new companies created since the pandemic are creating themselves in a more remote-friendly way. And I think that the newer, more modern companies are going to just start that way. It’s like kids right now, these days. My neighbor kid, for instance, he’s six years old, and he’s really into Minecraft, and he learned English by playing this Minecraft game. We’re in the Netherlands, so he speaks Dutch, so he speaks perfect English. Amazing, from this video game. But what struck me about it was he’s already learning how to collaborate and work with people from all over the world. He’s never even met these people, and yet they’re going on adventures together. I think that by the time he gets into the workforce, it’s going to be second nature. It’s going to be weird to go into an office.

Wiktor Żołnowski: I wonder, that’s the need for the educational system as well to change, start teaching people how to work remotely. I don’t know how it looks in the Netherlands, but in Poland, I never heard about lessons on how to work remotely. I know that kids were learning, remote learning, taking part in the lessons remotely for two years almost during the pandemic, but nobody ever told them how to do this. Nobody ever told the teachers how to do the lessons remotely, or there were some tries, but actually, that wasn’t really good and successful. So there are no… I believe that there should be classes on how to work remotely, how to communicate remotely, or how to teach remotely.

Lisette Sutherland: Right, like that would have been a great thing to train teachers on that during the pandemic because a lot of them were struggling along with the rest of us. But indeed, I do think that the future of education is also going there. I know before the pandemic, I was actually at a university in Sweden that had gone hybrid. They were in the north of Sweden. I think Östersund was it. It was in the north of Sweden, and they couldn’t get enough students in their university already, but they had a really good program that people wanted to be a part of, and so they opened it up for hybrid learning and they started experimenting with, “How do we get hybrid people into the classroom?” I think that they were probably very happy during the pandemic that they had put all of those things in place, and I think that those kind of things also teach students, “This is the new normal.” We’re never going back to the way it was. Some people will go back to the office, and some people won’t, but it’s never going to be like it was before, and nor should it be. But my husband works in a startup hub in the Netherlands, and one of the things that I also saw, some companies came back to fully on-site work, and some companies did all kinds of variations from there. And I think that’s perfectly fine if your company wants to work on-site. I think it’s a perfectly good way of working, but be prepared for the next black swan event. There’s always a bad commute, there’s always bad weather, there’s always sick children.

Wiktor Żołnowski: In the past, there was a cost, some cost, of working remotely, like adding all of these tools on top or teaching people, training. Like, there is a lot of work that needs to be done if you want to be successful remotely as an organization. But nowadays, it’s actually the default way of working, and there is no other option, so it’s better to focus on the benefits and try to prepare for things that may come, and also prepare for the market, because the job market, or the employee market, is also about the fact that people are looking for remote work first, and then only if they cannot find anything, some people, at least, choose working on-site only if they have to. But of course, there are also plenty of people, and more and more people, actually, are coming back to the office on their own because they are searching for the jobs that are mainly in the office because they miss it.

Lisette Sutherland: I mean, I’m reminded of this almost every day because my husband hates working from home. Hates it. Hates it with all capital letters.

Wiktor Żołnowski: You’re a really good couple.

Lisette Sutherland: We butt heads on this, but he loves the office. And right now, he’s looking for new work, and he’s specifically looking for a team that works together in the office, and he’s finding it incredibly difficult to find. So I’m like… but I can imagine any company would want somebody that really wants to be in the office.

Wiktor Żołnowski: But if you want to move to Kraków, then maybe…

Lisette Sutherland: I’m not opposed to that, that’s for sure.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, so thank you very much for the discussion. I’m pretty sure that you shared a lot of good advice about how to work remotely, and I’m pretty sure that people who will watch it or listen to it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, they will find it really useful. So thank you very much. It was a great pleasure to meet you after these few years, and I’m waiting for your keynote tomorrow at the Agile by Example conference.

Lisette Sutherland: Thanks.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Thanks for preparing me so well for the keynote. Now I can take all the questions. Perfect.

Lisette Sutherland: So that will be great. And thank you to all of you for watching us and listening to us, and don’t forget to subscribe to Pragmatic Talks on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Thank you.

Pragmatic Talks is delivered to you by Pragmatic Coders, the first-choice software development partners for startup founders. Be sure to catch all new episodes. Subscribe to our YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcast channels. And if you are thinking about building your own startup or struggling with product development, contact us and find out what we can do together.