The Agility of Remote Work: A Fresh Take with Shane Spraggs

Ready for a fresh perspective on remote work? We welcome Shane Spraggs, CEO of Virtira and seasoned expert in managing remote teams, to shed light on this rapidly evolving landscape. Shane shares his wisdom from a 15-year journey leading a completely remote company, unpacking the nuances of working remotely in an Agile environment.

Join us as we traverse Shane's unique hiring approach that bridges rural Canadians with enterprise firms in the United States. Understand how this strategy uncovers untapped talent, and discover the significance of setting boundaries and maintaining open lines of communication in a remote setting. Explore how Shane's company has navigated the pandemic, adapting their remote practices to the shifting landscape.

But we're not stopping there! We dive headfirst into the challenges of remote work and the solutions Shane and his team have devised over the years. We'll break down the Agile manifesto's lack of remote considerations and discuss the crucial rules of remote work. You won't want to miss our take on remote scrum management, communication strategies, and the role of virtual face-to-face interactions. Buckle up for an enlightening journey into the world of remote work!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:21

Welcome to the podcast that challenges you from the inside. Welcome, be More and Discover the Agile Within. And now here's your host, greg Miller.

Speaker 2: 0:35

Okay, we're back again. So we are in November. It's fall here in the US and the leaves are changing colors, and I got a good chance to take my trip to Virginia. Mark's been. Mark took a trip to Atlanta, right, mark, to see your Falcons play recently.

Speaker 3: 0:56

I did Believe it or not, greg. Those that are in the southeast probably know, but those that don't. There's actually a large granite mountain just maybe 15 miles outside of Atlanta, on the outskirts of Atlanta, called Stone Mountain, and my wife and I hiked up that and it gets really really pretty steep. Once you get up to the top there's actually handrails because it's so steep. One interesting fact so we're starting to show our age, because we were huffing and puffing going up, hiking up this mountain and there was some really fit dudes that were going and I guess it's a thing. They were actually running up, running down the mountain until they lapped us. They ran up, went to the top, came back down. We were still going up and they lapped us up again.

Speaker 2: 1:42

Yeah, yeah, I know we're getting there right. I know I mean at this mountain in Virginia, there too, and my wife, she works on her feet, so she's in way better shape than I am. I have a desk job, so I'm like, yep, yeah. So our guest today lives in Canada, on the west coast, and he was talking to us about a hike he took into the Rockies, which sounds wonderful. I need to get there someday. So our guest here today is the CEO of Vertira, which is a productivity performance company. He is also the author of a book called the Power of Remote and he's an agile enthusiast. Lucky for him, he's on an agile podcast. His name is Shane Spriggs. Thank you, shane, for coming to the show today.

Speaker 4: 2:32

Thanks, guys, it's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 2: 2:35

So, if you can't tell by the title of Shane's book, we're going to talk about remote work and how it relates to us in an agile world. Shane has an interesting take on that. So, shane, let's start with you. First of all, you're telling us your company is fully remote, right?

Speaker 4: 2:51

Yeah, we've been remote for 15 years. We've been in before. It was cool, as they say. We have people all across Canada. We tend to hire people in rural areas, so our specialty is to find people who may be in a rural community because they couldn't find work somewhere else or because they're helping an infirm parent or they follow to partner with a better job. And these people have fantastic skill sets and so, through the power of the internet, we're able to connect them with large enterprise firms in the States. So we do a lot of work with enterprise companies and we provide them with project management, help them with sales support so a lot of sales being done like projects and just really helping people get things done faster and letting people who know what they're doing, like the sales people, letting them get back to their customers faster and focusing on the strategy of the sale instead of the administration of it Right, so that's interesting what you said there.

Speaker 2: 3:55

So maybe you said it and I missed it, but so you target people in rural areas. I got that. How do you hone in on that? Or is there a place they go and I live in a rural area and you find them, or how do you do that?

Speaker 4: 4:09

Well, it's also very much a challenge. We use go on Facebook and find local communities on Facebook. We post jobs there. We obviously use Indeed and LinkedIn and they can find us through that and these days you post a job on LinkedIn, you get a thousand dollars an hour.

Speaker 4: 4:30

It's easy for us to really filter out the people. It's the first sort of. We have seven stages of qualification not stages but levels of qualification with the communities being top and then a large center like Toronto being the last person we'll hire, and so that helps us with the filtering process.

Speaker 2: 4:54

Okay, interesting, yeah, and that's for people that are in not near big cities and looking for jobs, so that's awesome yeah.

Speaker 4: 5:01

And it helps with the remote dream. I mean, that's the. A lot of people want to work remotely to have the blend of their lifestyle Right, and so it's done. And the other thing we look for is we know from experience that people who have outside interests that you're talking earlier about your hiking, and people who are part of sports teams, they're part of charity groups, maybe religious church groups, whatever you know they they tend to do better remotely because they have something to go to after after a while yeah, exactly so.

Speaker 2: 5:34

you've been fully remote for 15 years. Pandemic obviously never touched you, probably, right, didn't really impact you.

Speaker 4: 5:41

Well, that's it actually did. In some ways, we, despite being full remote, we we get together occasionally, and so we, for the first time, weren't able to get together in person in in the summer of 2020. And I took a. I took a trip out to the East Coast, where most of our team is, and did a little bit of a car tour, driving around and say hi to people and and meet them one-on-one. But we, we we recognize that there are some things that are just better in person. You know, getting together for a good strategy session with a whiteboard and sticking out.

Speaker 4: 6:16

It's hard to replace that online. You can do is just just take some, some effort and the right people. But there, you know it's, there's some good things about being together as well as you know some good things about being remote. So try to try to combine the both and get together as often as we can. It's a bit tough. It's a large country. It's just like right, so I'm, I'm a solid days travel from, from the East Coast and and three hours, three and a half sorry, four hours time zone difference. So it's, it's a yeah, it's, it's a journey to get out to see the rest of the team.

Speaker 3: 6:53

It is so, shane, talking about remote work, do you set any guidelines for For your people regarding remote work, and, if so, what might those be?

Speaker 4: 7:06

That's a great question. Yeah, so the first starters, you know, we, we have a pretty solid approach to Making sure that they know what our boundaries are. We it's on the responsibilities on us to make sure that we take care of them. And we start with simply as simple as hours of work. So we have people All across Canada, four different time zones. We've established that meetings can only be Only be held between 8 am Pacific and 5 pm Atlantic. So that gives us a narrow window and that way people know right, we also, we don't prevent people from we don't say you can't email somebody after hours or message them after hours, but we Enforce that you, you're not obligated to reply to it.

Speaker 4: 7:55

I also take them considerations. Well, I as a, as a CEO, I know that sometimes I send a message and Holds more weight than sometimes it probably should, and so I'm just I'm just trying to get my stuff done and send a message out. You know, you know three o'clock my time and someone is getting that at. You know supper time, their time and like, oh, they got to message the CEO. I gotta get back, you know, and we're just trying to reinforce no, don't, don't worry about that. So I do try to delay send when I know it's not, when it's not important, and, and just to take that into consideration, I've seen a lot of tools these days helping that out as well. I noticed that Microsoft Outlook has now has some pretty good delay send features that you can set up your hours of work. So that's the first thing and just having those, those boundaries, and for me, I, I, I people need connection, people need to be, have someone to talk to at least once a week. So I encourage our managers to meet with their team members on a on a weekly basis. But of course it's a depends on the nature of the, of the of the work. If they, you know, if they they're, if they're working full-time on one of the work, one of the projects, we are with the client, they with a client, they may not need to meet with us on our side, on the operations team on our good basis, but our operations folks should probably Meet with us on a week, on a weekly basis. So we clearly have a meeting with your manager monthly, have a meeting of your team quarterly, have a meeting with the company and that's established some just in framework there for communication, and then we over, communicate whenever we can, because it's easy to miss things. And you know we hold a regular all hands every quarter, mm-hmm, I'm doing regular monthly newsletters. So yeah, there's.

Speaker 4: 9:44

And then you know the it really comes down to assigning, not really signing. We're working with the team members to know, to just to help them understand that the, the work, the tasks that they have to do. And and this falls into, you know, very much the autonomy concept, where people will be more productive if, if they've have a say in what work they're doing. And my philosophy is not about when you say it, you know, point a to point B. It's not about telling them what point B is, it's about letting them decide how to get there. Right. So, as a manager, your job is a figure out what point B is, say, hey, we need to get here, let's work together and decide what that looks like. And then, as a manager, your job is to make sure that you know what they decide to do fits within a. You know they're not gonna. You know give them some guidelines and it fits in the guardrails of the task and the work, right so Forgive me, maybe humor me for just a minute.

Speaker 3: 10:41

Any guidelines or roles around camera use? Oh?

Speaker 4: 10:45

Yeah, good one, yeah, so this has actually been a huge debate for us and we have We've done two separate Surveys, slash actually more like research Efforts, and that we, we, we, we, we surveyed over a thousand people in 2021 and we surveyed another Probably more than that in 2023 recently, just to follow up on that, and Initially, when we first, when the pandemic first hit, we heard a lot about the zoom, burnout and Whether or not you should have your camera on, and the assumption was that at the time, that that cameras caused burnout because you are sitting there staring at a screen all day, and and and that, and and.

Speaker 4: 11:35

Moreover, there's people, some people who, who aren't comfortable Looking at themselves on camera, or you know, and certainly there's some groups who take longer and then they feel they have to be more prepared for, for being on camera, and so for us, our cameras are optional, and and then what we found In 2023 was that, yes, cameras are still a bit of an issue that most people had, you know, just say most. That's rather wrong. More people had become familiar with them over the last few years. But what the real issue is, meeting burnout, it's because of the way remote work works you can schedule your entire day back to back to back. We're just, we're just talking with us.

Speaker 4: 12:22

You know there would you if you're in the office, even if you have a back to back, meaning you're getting up and you're walking to the next room? Yeah, right, and.

Speaker 4: 12:29

Stretch your legs, and that time is is important for a number of reasons, not least, not least, remembering what it was you just talked about. So what happens is, if you I get this all out frequently I'll have my morning, you know, locked up and one, one meeting after next, and Suddenly you, you can't remember what you talked about three hours ago, I know. So that goes to one of our first rules of remote work, which is nobody's paying attention and Everyone is distracted. I so, if you and that that gets into One of the, we'll jump it ahead here, but to you know. So, going back to your question about cameras, what I tend to do, I believe cameras have value on smaller Calls. If you are having a, if everyone in the call is engaged in the conversation, then it's worth worthwhile. If you're hosting the call where there's a presentation or one person's talking, one after, the next.

Speaker 4: 13:34

You're traditional, you know what we do is we do the first few minutes on camera, we do a bit of small talk, we do an icebreaker and then we get back to we say, hey, time to turn your cameras off if you want to. Everyone turns them off and we get. We get to the business at hand. But so it's sort of a it's a yes and no answer.

Speaker 4: 13:54

In certain situations, cameras are great, great for building, you know, relatedness and, you know, build relationships with people. But they, in the long haul, it's pretty tough and you would probably experience this yourself. They're most people experience us. Staring at a screen for even 10 minutes is tough and if you're in a room, you're looking around, you're, you're looking at your desk, you're you're fidgeting your, you know your eyes aren't focused on it. And I just feel sorry for those individuals and you see this on the news all the time people, the newscasters who are, who are staring at someone on a, you know, on a telecast, and they're, you know right, talking to a guest. They have to sit there and stare at the camera straight, for you know yeah.

Speaker 4: 14:34

You know and I, it's just, it's exhausting and it just wears you down and and so that's one of the one of the key things, just to give people the permission to go off camera and and don't excuse, you know. So, anyway, I'm I'm rambling a bit, but no, it's like I'm thinking as you're saying stuff.

Speaker 2: 14:56

It's kind of like a I think of as a trust thing. Right, you know, the executives in your position oftentimes are like everybody's got a other camera zone so that you know, I know, or Managers know that you're working right. You're not, yeah, goofing off or whatever that type thing. It's like big brother is watching you. It feels like that sometimes.

Speaker 4: 15:15

Well, I think it's the same reason why they had the you know large open space office buildings back in. You know the Googleplex and the you know Apple saucer, you know the, the Apple spaceship. They, they had this thing. That was all built on this concept of Productivity and cooperation, and the people you're gonna work with are right there next to you. But really, what happened was everyone put their headphones on and yeah, and we're distracted all day right with constant, you know people tapping on their shoulders. And that was all built on the. You know the auspices that this was something. It was going to make you more productive, but really, people just wanted to see you, that you were at the, at the office, at your desk.

Speaker 3: 15:56

It's quite ironic and quite humorous that, even though we have those sessions and we had those, like you say, you have an open office setting. If you had like a department meeting, quite a number of people would opt to not go into. This was my experience, this is just me but quite a few people would opt not to go to the actual meeting room and just join from there, from their desk, like you say, with headphones on. So you've got like ten people all sitting side by side Talking to each other. You know it's kind of like we used to give give our kids a hard time about you just sitting right next to each Other texting each other. Why don't you just go talk, talk.

Speaker 2: 16:33

Yeah, it happens, it happens. Yeah, yeah, you're all in the same meeting and you're on the phone.

Speaker 4: 16:39

Yeah, yes, I might be office at all right, yeah, I know, I know yeah, I worked with Disney about ten years ago and you know, visiting the Burbank office. They recently opened up a new, a new large office there and they they went full in no rooms whatsoever and this meant that every lay level of Employee, including their senior executives, had no office. And I'm like I want my senior VP to have an office. I don't want to go talk to him in front of everyone in the middle.

Speaker 4: 17:11

I don't want to hear what he has to say or she has to say. You know, and it ended up these individuals would work, decided. Just after a few months of this, they, they, they took, they camped out in a, in a, in one of the meeting rooms that became their room.

Speaker 3: 17:26

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 17:29

Life finds a way right meeting room. It does.

Speaker 3: 17:31

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 17:32

Well, I mean to your point. There's just certain things that people at your level, on that level Conversations they have to be able to have in private. That it's just the way it is right. Yeah, absolutely yeah. So I get that. One thing you mentioned off-air was you were talking about and it's very interesting. So the Agra manifesto does say that the best way of communication is face-to-face. Yeah, and the idea of the co-location, which is very true, yeah, and the pandemic disrupted that. So you'd said you talk about that in your book. The power of remote, let's talk about that a little bit.

Speaker 4: 18:12

Yeah, it's just a simple observation and people forever have overlooked this fact that both the PMP or the Pembok and the waterfall approach to doing project management and agile were. But we became prominent before this whole World of remote work. I mean, there was people working in distributed teams Back in the early 2000s, but now everyone's remote and you just said you know people are dialing in from their desks to a meeting that's in the office. And Agile was just, it wasn't built from the you know, it wasn't built to handle remote or distributed team, and so, at least from again, my, my opinion is that all these other frameworks that have grown from it, that have made things more complicated for large teams, you know specifically safe, you know scaled edge, our framework, it's all there to try to paper over this issue of communication, and so I alluded to earlier, we have three rules of remote work and these this is what we. We teach our new recruits this when they first joined, and this is you know I said, for rule one was no one's paying attention If you're gonna, if you're on a call that you're not on, you know, even if you are on the screen, there's a million different distractions, everything from you know your your Strava app to your email right, and people just aren't paying attention, and then people won't do what they said they will do you.

Speaker 4: 19:47

So people tend to make promises and meetings because it's nice to say that I can do that or I want to do that, rather than I will do that. And there's actually a name for it. It's called the intention action gap, where people there's a disconnect between what people's intentions are and their actual behaviors. So this often happens when people want to do something, but they just don't follow through, and so it's very common with things like lifestyle changes I want to lose weight, but I don't. I want to eat healthy, but I don't want to quit smoking, but I work.

Speaker 4: 20:22

People fail to complete tasks because of procrastination, distractions, changes and priorities and, like we just talked about, chains of meetings where you can't remember what happened three hours ago. And our third rule is people lack the skills to get things done. Now, what I mean by this is it's not that you, that systems administrator or sort of the backend database guy, the build engineer, it's not that they don't have skills for that, that's fine, they can do that work, but it's the other skills that they are allacking, and I'll just say a few of these right, able to manage their time, able to communicate properly with others, handle shifting priorities, using technology efficiently and taking advantage of their professional networks. And these things, when you're in the office, can be managed on a case by case basis. Someone has a having problems loading a piece of software the leanover and someone says you just need to do this and this at home.

Speaker 4: 21:23

They lose time right, and so, if you take all those into consideration, I'm going to get back to the agile thing in a minute here, what we've identified is that there needs to be a layer that deals with distributed work first, before you deal with the other issues around. What you know, the symptoms of not being able to communicate, and we have a very simple. It breaks down like this you need to keep track of action items and you need to follow up on it, and so we have a. We have a very simple methodology. We call days of the week. You can imagine why we call that. We have specific tasks you do every day of the week and we typically have somebody assigned to this role.

Speaker 4: 22:04

In an agile team, it's perfect for the scrum master and a larger agile team, you might have somebody additional on the team just to do this, just to make sure that things are well communicated. And it's about capturing all the things people say in meetings, because when you think about when you do it, when you're working on a story and two people are talking about what needs to be done in that sprint for that story, they need to remember everything they talked about in order to be effective and efficient and those need to be captured. And so on Monday we have a list of all these action items that we've collected. We remind the entire team hey, here's the actions of the week. And again, these are separate from stories. The stories let the stories be their stories. These are action items that are going to support that or other team activities. And then on Tuesdays and Wednesdays you have someone who just monitors them and follows up with people. On Thursday you identify any of these that are at risk and on Friday you publicly shame anybody who doesn't have theirs done.

Speaker 4: 23:14

And again, it's about accountability. It's about making this you said you'd do this and then having a tool. We used to use Smartsheets quite a bit just to capture all these items. We just recently moved to MS Planner. It's a really simple little tool and I'm sure this will work really well with the JIRA as well and other agile tools. But just something just keep track of these one-off things. You said you'd do this by this point. And again, it's all these small things that create these little cracks in the fabric of the productivity of the team. But if you have someone to follow up on and someone goes oh, I forgot, I had to do that.

Speaker 4: 23:51

It takes me 10 minutes Right, I got it done. That unlocks somebody that moves things forward, and it's amazing certainly for a larger team if you just hire somebody to do that work how much more effective you are with everybody else Right. And so that's one of the things we also teach our team members when they first join, and it's one of the things that makes us very successful and productive with the companies we work with.

Speaker 3: 24:19

So, shane, how do you balance that with trying to get teams to be self-managing and self-organizing if you've got a separate, identified individual who's responsible for the upkeep of these action items?

Speaker 4: 24:39

Yeah, just look at it as a scrum master. So on a smaller team, the scrum master will just hold people accountable to the work they said they would do. It's not like we're telling them what they're going to do. They still have the autonomy aspect to it. They are the ones who are saying this is what I will do. We're just going to hold you accountable to it, because the facts are that most people forget the stuff throughout the course of the week and as these missed I'm talking small tasks pile up. Then it starts to reduce the productivity of the team.

Speaker 3: 25:16

So asking this in not an adversarial way, just I'm just facilitating conversation. What happens when the scrum master goes on vacation?

Speaker 4: 25:26

or has to be out. Same thing happens with anyone else with the stories for the sprint. The scrum master hands the baton off to somebody else for that period of time, and it's not like it's endings being done in secret. It's a public board. If you're using Trello, you might have a different color for what actually I am. You might have a story that has a series of just check boxes underneath it or a list of follow-up actions, and it really is just saying, hey, you said you'd get this done and keeping track of those things so that the people don't forget. And it's no more difficult than that and, from a scrum master standpoint, they do go on vacation. They just hand the baton off.

Speaker 4: 26:14

Hopefully, they've done a good job with capturing all these action items in the first place, and what we find is that when we used to use smart sheets, there was a form you could type in a few words and it would be put into the smart sheet automatically. Now, with Planner, we will just do it themselves, and so if you give people some control over it, people tend to use that as their shared notes tool as well, so that they put their own action items in to remind themselves of things. It's in a healthy team, it's self-sufficient. It's simply the recognizing that there are smaller responsibilities that don't get captured, that need to be followed up on in distributed teams, that, in order for you to make sure you're overall productive, that when you're in the office it's less of an issue. And the other thing you know other on this is that recognizing that. We're just going back to meetings as well.

Speaker 4: 27:17

Meetings are different as well. On remote teams, if you have a your typical scrum sorry a story mapping session or back a lot of refinement meeting where you have, you know, traditionally you'll have the whole team and sometimes you'll have people who just sit there and absorb the information the whole time. Those people aren't going to pay attention during that session either. So there's a need to overly over communicate the results of these conversations so that everyone understands what came out of it, and or do more upfront planning on meetings so that people can come prepared. So, yeah, it's really about recognizing these faults, these areas where people fail to perform remotely, and that is because of distractions and their intention action gap.

Speaker 3: 28:14

So I've got a hot take for you, Shane. Maybe get a little bit controversial and see what you're doing. This isn't something that I read, this is just. This is a markism, maybe a metzism, if you, if you will. So the Agile Manifesto does have. In one of their 12 principles, they do say that the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. That's right Now, technically speaking. You know we can take this too far, but it doesn't say anything about being co-located. It doesn't say anything about physically being in the same room.

Speaker 3: 28:56

So this was done this was created like this was created in what 2000, 2001?. So we didn't have these same tools that we have today. So what would a remote meeting have looked like? You would have had the Polycom sitting in the middle of a conference room and then you had other people remote and everybody's staring at the at the Polycom and everybody's talking. You don't get any visual feedback at all. So that was the landscape that the Agile Manifesto was trying to change, right yeah?

Speaker 4: 29:32

Well, and back to my, you know just going bring up Disney again. We had a studio here in Canada that I was part of and we had this idea of we were one team with the LA folks, and so because of this, we are in this massive project that we had a scrum team in Kelowna, we had scrum team in Burbank and and we had stand-up every day and our team would dial into the polycom and Stand around and listen right to this other team Do their stand-up and I got to tell you If I caught 5% of what they were talking exactly it was a lucky day, right.

Speaker 4: 30:15

So already that was a problem back then and that wasn't because of of You're working from home, zoom, remote work, that was just distributed teams not being well organized and not taking into into considerations the limitations of remote work or distributed work.

Speaker 3: 30:36

I've even seen the, the. I've even seen a team where the polycom was disconnected from the power and let's say you were sitting in a circle and you actually physically passed the polycom from person to person. Yeah, the people on the other end could could hear them, because the sound quality was so bad. But so my hot take is that If the manifesto is telling us that the most effective and efficient method of conveying information is face-to-face conversation, I Am a huge proponent. So I'm a cameras on guy. Yeah right, if I'm meeting, my cameras on. If I'm meeting with a dozen people, 11 people have their cameras off. Guess what, I'm gonna have my camera on it. Just, it doesn't bother me and I get that some people are different, but but you gain so much information just by being able to See someone's face and see their mannerisms. I can tell when people are paying attention and when they're not.

Speaker 3: 31:38

Mm-hmm you know it's very easy to see. You can see someone's eye movement. You can see them typing on the keyboard. It's very easy to see if they're dialed in, if they're upset with something that was said. If you don't have your camera on, you just sit in silence and you're like, hey, what does everybody think about that? If you're like seething, you're probably gonna be like now's not the time for me to say anything, I'm just gonna be quiet. You don't get that, um, and so it's something. It's a struggle that I have Because, quite frankly, the teams that I work with currently they are largely a cameras off group.

Speaker 3: 32:17

So that's a struggle for me and like, if I'm going into a physical office, I'm not gonna put a mask on, I'm not gonna put a wall in front of me so that no one can see me. Yeah, you're gonna be sitting across from, from other people, and so, anyway, that for me, that's what I. When I see that the manifestos, you know, embracing face-to-face conversation. If we're remote, I just think that's the least you can do is turn your camera home so that you can you can pick up on those other non visual key or non verbal cues.

Speaker 4: 32:55

Yeah, and, as I said, camera, camera issues have gotten better over the last couple years, people getting used to them, right. There is still a number of people who who have, you know they're introverted, they have problems seeing themselves as they talk. And there's apps these you know the, for example, webex, no longer shows your your, your camera view unless you move your mouse, and other other Tools are taking that as well. The issue is on a case-by-case basis. That's fine, but when you pack these meetings across one after another, it really comes into many fatigue and in staring at your, your screen for that many hours becomes more and more of an issue. Is it also yeah for a lot of people? Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3: 33:43

So I think so I'm a former developer and Goodness knows I would steer my screen writing code. I'm being a, I'm being a little bit facetious here, but yeah, I would stare at my screen writing code for hours. Bring me the, bring me the, you know, bring me caffeine. Just pump me up and I'll, I'll be good.

Speaker 4: 34:05

Yeah, well, there's a famous internet video of a police interrogation where where a Serial killer sits still for hours at a time, and that's that's called out as being odd. Yeah, we expect people to do that throughout the entire day screen right so the what I was, what I For me.

Speaker 4: 34:32

There's different kinds of meetings and I, if everyone's involved in the conversation, if you're actively talking to somebody, there's nothing beats visual cues. I'm for me on that, on that page With you on that one. You know that we have to be able to see what they're looking at, what there's, how they're put the face. Are they smiling, are they, are they laughing or they, you know, are they upset? You can tell that what's from a picture, right?

Speaker 4: 34:57

If it's one of these meetings where it's the Monday morning management meeting and everyone's gonna go around do their update, yeah, you should not only rethink that in the first place. Like, is that, is that doing what you think it's doing, or is it, you know? And Do people have to sit there and stare while someone else is giving an update? Right, and so that's the other end of the spectrum. For an agile, typical agile team, if you are in doing one of these planning meetings that is very creative and requires everyone to interact, absolutely, I think it's. But then again, I would also suggest that before you get into that, you have a team contract of how cameras are used on your team so everyone understands, when they're going into it, what's expected of them? And then again I would even look at updating and changing how you handle some of those meetings. Maybe backlog refinement doesn't require everyone, maybe it just requires that people are going to talk. That's a really good point.

Speaker 3: 36:08

Yeah, what's the purpose of the meeting and is it valid? So that's another whole other topic is that, when you're scheduling meetings, who really should be there?

Speaker 4: 36:23

Well, another good example. I had a chat with someone from Amazon recently. I'm sure you know Jeff Bezos' famous idea of, before the meeting starts, everyone's going to read all the notes in front of everybody. Right, and that was how they used to do it.

Speaker 4: 36:38

You get in a room, everyone delivered. You have to be really prepared for the meeting, you have to deliver the information and you sit there and read it all because he felt that no one was going to read it beforehand and everyone was going to come and wing it. I think he's right in a lot of cases. Well, he translated that into the digital world and they have a different meeting platform. They don't use Zoom or MS Teams or WebEx. They use their own proprietary system and it requires that you get the first I forget what it was a certain number of minutes, six minutes per page to read the documents that are submitted before the meeting even starts. Now I'm sure scholars will debate whether that's a useful approach, but it's different. But it goes to show again that people are having, you know, people are having some real realities around the effectiveness of meetings, especially the meetings that are done over Zoom.

Speaker 2: 37:40

Yeah, that's a great one. So, shane, we're almost out of time here, so this has been a great conversation.

Speaker 4: 37:48

I feel like we could talk for hours.

Speaker 2: 37:49

I know.

Speaker 3: 37:50

I know.

Speaker 2: 37:50

It's like this. So for the listeners out there, what again your book is? The Power of Remote. We're talking with Shane Sprague, so what would you want to leave with our listeners about talking about remote working in Agile environment?

Speaker 4: 38:11

I think it's that one epiphany that Agile wasn't made to be done distributed. It was made to be done in the room, with people looking face to face and, you know, holding on the sticky notes and pointing on a whiteboard. So think differently about how you're doing it distributed. Think differently and if you want a process that you know a company that's been in business for many, many years has been using successfully, give me a call and I'll talk your hair off about Agile.

Speaker 2: 38:43

Yeah.

Speaker 4: 38:45

You got a lot.

Speaker 2: 38:49

And the stuff we talked about here is a lot of this in your book.

Speaker 4: 38:51

Yeah Well, days of the Week is definitely outlined there. I mean, it's a simple concept. It's called Days of the Week because it's something to do on every single day of the week and it's one of these simple and it's elegant kind of systems. It's easy to do poorly and you know experts do it very well. If you do, there's a little minutiae to it that is worth reading. But you know the long and short of it is that sometimes you have to have a separate person to take notes and hold people accountable because of the deficiencies of remote work, and that's okay.

Speaker 3: 39:32

Is the book, is it available on Amazon or how can people fund it.

Speaker 4: 39:35

It's most definitely available on Amazon. It was published through via Forbes this year and we have a number of articles we've published through Forbes, so just have one. Came out last week which is actually on this topic. I should have shared the link with you. I should have shared the link with you, but it's, you know, it's.

Speaker 3: 39:54

You can put it in the show notes, Greg.

Speaker 2: 39:56

Yeah, go ahead and send it. You can send it to me. It's Greg Miller at theodrawithincom, or just on LinkedIn, or through Matchmaker FM. Whichever you want to do, whichever way you want to Get it to me some way, I'll put it in the show notes for folks. That'd be great. Yeah, so, shane, yeah, how can folks get ahold of you real quick if they want to get in touch with you?

Speaker 4: 40:16

Well, our website is vertiracom V-I-R-T-I-R-Acom, and my email address is Shane at vertiracom, keeping it simple. So shane at virdircom, happy to field any thoughts.

Speaker 2: 40:34

Yeah, again, it's Shane Sprags, s-p-r-a-g-g-s. The book is the Power of Remote. It just came out this year, right February. Yeah, february 8th. Congratulations, thanks, everybody go. Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 4: 40:48

Feel free to look me up on LinkedIn as well.

Speaker 2: 40:51

Okay, yeah, so this has been a great conversation about remote work, very topical. So if you want to get ahold of us I mentioned my email, greg Miller, at theodrawithincom. Mark and I are also on LinkedIn. We also do have a LinkedIn page, theodrawithin. You can reach us there X, which was Twitter, as you know, and Instagram. We look forward to hearing from you. This has been Mark and Greg, with TheodraWithin and Shane. We'll talk to you next time.