The Handbook: The Operations Podcast

Julia Vastrik: How to strengthen company culture in the WFH era

• Harv Nagra • Season 1 • Episode 10

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We’re in the age of remote and hybrid working, and our physical distance from one another is having a huge impact on company culture. 

Previously, grabbing lunch or a drink after work was easy. But now, even small talk needs to be consciously brought into our scheduled Slack calls to avoid things becoming too transactional. 

This new way of working can lead to serious challenges like feeling disconnected from colleagues and the company mission, lacking motivation, and experiencing loneliness. 

So what’s the way forward?

In this episode, we speak with Julia Vastrik, an agile coach and team facilitator, about how we can strengthen company culture in a remote/hybrid workplace.

Julia offers loads of great advice, which we’ve summarized for easy reference:


Building Trust and Relationships

We’re a much more effective team when we like the people we work with. 

  • Get to know people through small talk
  • Use ice breakers, team rituals
  • Virtual lunches, coffees
  • Encourage silliness for personalities to shine
  • Learning together e.g. book clubs, communities around certain topics like AI
  • For big meetings, use breakout rooms
  • Organize face-to-face activities - both for work and fun


Communication

A lot of information is lost in written communication. 

  • Use a good balance of synchronous and asynchronous communication
  • Have explicit agreements on communication and how to run meetings
  • With written communication, the giver needs to be overly friendly (emojis, kind greetings), the receiver overly accepting that they may perceive the tone wrong
  • Use audio and video to prevent misinterpretation


Productivity and Collaboration

  • Set clear goals for teams and individuals
  • Create working agreements e.g. working hours, punctuality, documentation, ways of working, etc
  • Co-create - brainstorm solutions and make decisions together to boost a feeling of belonging


Continuous Improvement

Little changes sum up to bigger improvements over time. 

  • Retrospectives, post-mortems & team discussions
  • Experiment
  • We’re never in an ideal state - there’s always room for improvement


Psychological Safety

Feeling safe to be not perfect, to make mistakes, to be a human.

  • Mistakes happen and they are a learning opportunity
  • Have leaders model this behavior


Other Resources:

The book Julia recommends to read is called The Culture Map, by Erin Meyer.

The virtual ‘body doubling’ clubs Harv mentioned are flow.club and flown.com.


Follow Julia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-vastrik/

Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/


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Harv:

Hi all, welcome back to the podcast. We're in the age of remote and hybrid working. There's a joke that every time you step out of your flat in London, you end up spending 50 pounds. That is a bit of an exaggeration. But the commute, the coffee, and the lunch all do add up. Not to mention the time savings. But there is a downside to this as well. I don't know about your workplace, but at my past agency, I certainly felt that the dynamic, friendly, fun culture we had created changed following the COVID lockdowns. Even with a hybrid model, a part of that magic was lost, and we struggled to overcome that. Where it was easy to have a laugh or a moan, grab lunch together, or get a beer after work to burn off some of the stress, that's harder to arrange if not impossible to do at home and now over the past few months I've been in my first fully remote job. That's come with its own challenges; sometimes feeling lonely, sometimes feeling like interactions end up being very transactional. And as an adult, it's been my experience that the closest friendships I've made have been through work. Not only has that made work more enjoyable for me over my career, but I've made some lifelong friendships. So, in the age of hybrid and remote working, one of my questions and anxieties has been, what does this mean for the future of company culture? Do our careers become just jobs? Don't all our conversations just become transactional if everything is through a Slack message or a scheduled Zoom call? Isn't it a sad future when we don't get to know our co workers and build a personal connection, and friendships that motivate us and give us something to look forward to each day? And imagine these young people coming up that might only ever work in remote jobs. How different will their worldview be? So what is the way forward? Is this just a reality of this stark future we face? Is everyone just going to be quiet quitting at home for the rest of time? Or is there a way through where we can strengthen those connections, build camaraderie, care about our mission, and have fun along the way, even with dispersed teams? As Ops leaders, I do think it's our responsibility to create that cohesive, warm, and collaborative culture. So that's the topic of today's discussion. Our guest today is Julia Vastrik. Julia is an agile coach who has over 20 years experience in IT and engineering and over 10 years experience in agile coaching and team facilitation experience. She currently works as an agile coach and also runs her own consultancy as a team coach and trainer where she provides training, coaching and facilitation services. She has won the Estonian trainer of the year award and spoken at several conferences, sharing her expertise in developing high performing teams. Now you might be thinking, I'm not an engineer or a developer. How is an agile coach going to help me or my agency? Trust me on this. And in fact, I would recommend you go get a pen so you can write down some of the great ideas Julia is going to present today. I'm a big fan of Julia's content on LinkedIn. It's very visual and it really resonates with me. I think there's a lot we can learn from her and after listening to this discussion, I hope you'll agree. And you'll have some practical ideas to bring back to your workplace on how you can give your company culture a tune up. Let's get into it. Julia, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here today. Our topic is company culture in the age of remote and hybrid working. We were forced to embrace remote working a few years ago, and then many of us have stayed that way, or at least shifted to hybrid working. And a lot of the conversation about getting back to the office focuses on out of touch bosses that are forcing people back five days a week and people not wanting to do that. Hybrid is probably a very good compromise, but I can't be the only one that's thinking company culture and relationships are suffering as a result of this new way of working. At least I don't think so. What do you think are some of the challenges that remote working introduces?

Julia:

Yes, indeed, when we work together with physical space, many interaction happen naturally, those casual conversations, jokes and stuff like this, we go to lunches together; it's difficult to replicate so easily in remote environment. It's possible, but it requires very intentional effort, so it won't happen by itself.

Harv:

So, you know, before, when we were talking, you mentioned something about proximity bias. Can you tell us what that is as well and how that's relevant?

Julia:

Yes. Proximity bias is quite a big thing in the remote and especially hybrid working environments. Proximity bias is our tendency to favor those who are physically close to us. We like them more, we spend more time with them, we think that they are maybe more professional, maybe they're more diligent, maybe they are contributing more. It's very important for managers to be aware of this and to mitigate this bias. If everybody is remote it's easier to make everybody equal, but if part of the team on site and somebody is far away, then there are a lot of challenges.

Harv:

Yeah, I think it ends up being that people have different experiences depending on where they're based. You're absolutely right. So, you know, when we think about the areas that we should pay attention to about company culture, can you maybe take us through what those key areas are. First, let's just maybe list them and then we can get into a discussion about some of those specifics.

Julia:

First, building trust and relationships, not only work related trust and relationships, but different types of trust. Also to think about miscommunication and miscommunication to avoid conflict. Then we also need to think about productivity and collaboration. One of the most important things for every team, is the culture of continuous improvements. It's especially important for remote cultures to experiment. And also fostering of psychological safety. It goes together with trust, but a little bit different also. So those areas are very important.

Harv:

Let's get into each of those areas in a bit more detail. So the first was building trust and relationships and the sense of belonging. Let's start with that.

Julia:

Trust and relationships, I put it first because I believe it's the most important thing in any team and especially in remote or hybrid environments because it's easy to overlook this. We are a much better team when we like people we work with. And to like people, we need to know more, know more as professionals but also as person. And in some cultures people are not so open to talk about themselves and this is quite challenging to be with team members who are quite closed. But what we can do is to start doing this first; to reveal a little bit of our personality together with our professionalism. It's also It can be like cognitive trust, like I trust you as a professional. I know that you are trustworthy, how you are doing your work, but also trust on personal level. I trust you as a person. I know who you are. I know your interests and that I can rely that you are doing the best for the team. This is very important, this type of trust. And quite often at work we pay most attention to cognitive trust. Like you are good professional, check, that's it. And that's why we need to pay more attention to this soft type of trust. The trust which come from heart and it might be touchy feely but it's kind of very important for us. And this doesn't mean that I need to tell everything about myself. There are some things that I'm willing to tell, for example, my hobbies or stuff like this. Some people are more open, some people less open. And it's okay. And also it's very important to not reveal some kind of private information. Private information is your own. If you share this, you might put people in awkward situation because, first, they don't want to know anything like this about you. And second, they might feel that they now need to reveal their secrets as well. No, yeah. But it's also depends on people, like what is private for you might be not so private for me.

Harv:

Understood. That's really interesting, Julia. So can you maybe give us some examples of building trust in relationships? So we can feel inspired and maybe start introducing that at our workplaces.

Julia:

It starts with very small things like just everyday interactions with people. So when we start our meetings, we can have some small talk and not just go straight to the point. And we might need to have some intentional exercises, like icebreakers in the beginning of the meetings. It's really good practice. Not every meeting, but maybe bi weekly meetings, spend five minutes to answer some questions. Something like, what is your favorite food? Who you wanted to become when you were a child and stuff like this to maybe if the team relations are already deeper, you can go to deeper topics. Also you can do some special team building events using some exercises. For example, my favorite one is market of skills. Where people present their professional skills. Everybody create their poster, where they present themselves. And then they talk about themselves, and then others give feedback, and it's all very revealing information about people. In the beginning, when I give this exercise, people are like, I need to create this. And for this, we are using virtual, virtual online boards, or physical boards, if in a physical space, but during the exercise, people get much more excited, and the atmosphere is totally different. But this is like special event, but you can integrate it time to time. And silliness is Silliness is very important. Having silliness, not only to concentrate on serious stuff like efficiency, efficiency, efficiency, but if we have some channels in our tools where we talk about anything...

Harv:

what was on TV last night? The latest episode of like, house of the Dragon or something like that.

Julia:

Yeah these things and sometimes we think that it's something that we don't need to do because it doesn't have anything to do with our work, but I get to know you better as a person. And for me, it's much easier to work, to ask some questions. And especially in hybrid working or remote working, it's more difficult to ask somebody for help because you think I'm disturbing this person, but the better relations we have together, the easier for me to, to ask you for something. I know that you are a good person. it's not a problem for you to answer me when you have this time. So you see those small things, they have a big impact, but they need some intentional effort and some planning. So if team is not very big then we might have this relaxed atmosphere naturally, but for b ig teams it might be more difficult and especially if you're just starting this journey of building trust and relationship, people will be just sitting like this, like very straight and not talking. And of course, cameras needs to be on. This is awful that still sometimes on some teams, cameras are not switched on.

Harv:

It's a good policy.

Julia:

Yeah. It's sometimes, of course there are some situation. If you did not have time to eat, you use this time to eat, but it's more like exceptional state. We are talking to people not to the black square on our screen.

Harv:

Mm. Really good examples there. Is there anything else you wanted to cover there? or should we move on?

Julia:

There are a lot of things we can have some kind of communities, book clubs, learning together. These things help a lot and it's half work half not work, if, for example, we would like to learn some topic together. For example, AI, and we create this community. We will create this important feeling that we are part of the team. We have this goal together. And another thing, it's also very important to work together to earn trust to each other as professionals. So we are not doing our tasks separately, but we are working on achieving something together. So not only having fun together, but also working together. This is something that is very important in remote working. In remote, sometimes we think it's better we are in our house doing our stuff, and then we make those status reports meetings. But it's better to find possibilities to work together. What is important with all this said, time to time we need to have those face to face activities to see people for work and for fun.

Harv:

That's a good point. Whether, you can do that monthly or quarterly or every six months or, once a year, if you're a fully remote company, whatever. But I think the point is trying to get people together as well. So there's that kind of closer relationship, lots of really, really good ideas. And I can see why you put building trust and relationships at the top of your list. The second area you mentioned was communication or miscommunication. So why don't we get into that? Why, why is that important? And then we'll get into some of the examples that we can introduce.

Julia:

So written communication is very different from how we are talking. So we lose so much information there. And that's why it's really easy to misinterpret. So if it's some kind of just work related information, it's okay, but sometimes we might feel that somebody may be hostile to us, or maybe not happy with what we've done. So this here is very important to be more friendly than you would usually be. So be over friendly, to put those maybe emojis or polite words or something like this. If you can use video use video

Harv:

mm Hmm,

Julia:

it's better just to have some clip or video and sent, than to write this big text where people might misinterpret.

Harv:

mm

Julia:

And also to avoid this miscommunication from other side. You need to know that something might have been lost in this written communication. So always assume good intentions. And then if you are not sure, just ask again

Harv:

hmm, mm

Julia:

Benefit of doubt here is very important because

Harv:

good point.

Julia:

most of those things are just our misinterpretations of what is happening.

Harv:

mm hmm.

Julia:

this is work from both sides. One side needs to be overly friendly. Other side need to be overly accepting

Harv:

Yeah.

Julia:

in their opinion.

Harv:

Okay. Super interesting. And yeah, I definitely recognize this as well. You know, when people are talking, you can hear the tone in their voice. You can see their eye contact. You can see a smile and things like that. And that's completely gone if you don't make the effort in text communications, if you don't say the friendly greeting or the emoji. And just get straight into business. It can just come across as a bit blunt. So you mentioned some examples already. Is there anything else that comes to mind we can introduce to make sure that we're building positive communication?

Julia:

Again, it's very good idea to use the meetings as an opportunity to connect to each other. So again, not only make them transactional, but to have a good laugh and to show your personality more, to start meeting well, to finish meeting well, So meetings are very important to build this trust.

Harv:

Mm hmm. Since we don't have the benefit when we're working remotely of having our colleagues with us to have that warmth and connection and interaction, using some of that meeting time, and it doesn't have to be long, but to just share some warmth and friendliness and catch up and things like that is really important to not make it feel so transactional. The other thing that you said that really kind of resonated with me was the use of a video message to communicate instead of writing a long paragraph. And I, I do that sometimes and tools like Slack make that really easy to record a little voice note or a video message that you can send and saving yourself typing a paragraph of text, and like you're saying, the benefit of that is also communicating some of the, the, the tone of voice and the warmth and, a bit of friendliness as well. So let's get into the next area, productivity and collaboration. Why is that relevant to company culture? And then we'll get into some of the examples.

Julia:

Okay, so a company, we exist first of all to achieve some goals. And this is very important for us to, to be informed by this big goal. So as a team, we need to have clear team priorities; why we exist as a team and this is how we work together. So it's very important to have working agreements. How we work as a team, code of conduct, how we work together, what's our, for example, our working hours, how we are sharing our information, what kind of ratio of synchronous, asynchronous communications we have. So team culture is not only having this fun together, but it's also to do work together. And for this we need to have explicit agreements. And what I see most of the teams, they don't have any working agreements. And this is also something that is done during retrospectives or team meetings, brainstorming meetings, where we decide how we work as a team. And this is not something written in stone, we experiment with this, and then we might add, remove, change those working agreements. The more the team develops, the more it changes also.

Harv:

A lot of the way we work, we end up creating these patterns, whether it's this weekly team meeting or, or things like that. But what you're saying is that it's useful to have this documented as well so that everyone can reference it and it becomes not just knowledge floating in people's head, but it's a codified practice and it just helps get everybody on the same page.

Julia:

And overall, it should not be something very long. The longer, the more chances that people will not remember. So

Harv:

Okay.

Julia:

three rules, it's cool. If it's five rules, it's also good.

Harv:

Yeah. Hmm.

Julia:

for example, documentation, it also might be part of working agreements. What kind of documentation we have, where we keep this, what is necessary. And how we collaborate, what kind of tools we are using. It might be also part of this.

Harv:

Okay. Yeah. Super interesting. You know, ops people, they have to be responsible often for creating the agency handbook So That's a great place to start collating this information so that new starters can reference it and your existing team has a place to go look at that best practice as well for the agency. So we're going to move on to the fourth area you highlighted in company culture. It's continuous improvement. So, tell us about that.

Julia:

So continuous improvement is that we are never at ideal state. We always can be better. And those incremental changes, little by little, they sum up in great improvements and the teams regularly set time aside, just sit together and think how they work as a team, what they can improve. And there is no best practices because best practice is something that suits the best for your team at this exact period of time. In one year, your best practice will be different, so it's always this fluid state. And so this, this is what we are doing to become better all the time.

Harv:

Super interesting. And I think the point of continuous improvement will and should really resonate with our audience of Ops leaders because that's what ops is all about continually improving the way you're working for better results in your business. So Julia, something you mentioned was retrospectives. As You know,, I'm, I'm quite familiar with postmortems for projects, but I think retrospectives are slightly different. They're not necessarily linked to projects. Can you tell us a bit about that? So we understand what that means and how we can bring it in.

Julia:

Retrospective, they are kind of like postmortems, but they are not necessary connected to some big initiatives or projects they can be done on a regular basis. And this is one of the practice of agile teams; they do retrospective on this regular basis, some of them maybe even weekly but most common cadence is bi weekly or monthly. So they Look at their way of working and think what works well for them. And then to think on the things that might be, to look at the things that might be not so ideal, which might be changed or removed or stopped, or maybe new experiments might be done. And also we never know what will work for us. Everything that we decide there, it's still kind of experiment. And then during the next retrospectives, we look at this, okay, we tried this, did it work or not? And then we might continue with this or try something different.

Harv:

Super interesting, and I think I can see the value of, you know, scheduling those in your calendar. So there's a regular cadence of them to encourage you to have those conversations to see what's worked well and what you need to change. So yeah, definitely book those in your calendars with your teams. Thank you for that. Okay. So we're going to move into our last area of company culture, which is psychological safety. So tell us about that.

Julia:

Psychological safety is about feeling safe to be not perfect, maybe. To make mistakes. To be a human, basically. Many of us are afraid to show who we are at work because we need to be perfect, always right, never ask for help, stuff like this. And psychological safety is creating the environment where people will not be afraid to speak up, they know that they will not be punished for this. If they don't know how to do things, it will be safe to admit this and ask for help than just to try to cope themselves and maybe have some big mishaps. And here the role of leaders is very important to promote this environment where people feel safe to be not perfect. So leaders need to help people admit their mistakes by admitting their own mistakes. So if leader says that okay, I was wrong or I made mistake then for others it will be easier to do the same. Or for example asking questions when I don't know something I don't keep silent. You probably have seen those situations when somebody talking about something and everybody is like nodding and then somebody asks, but what are you talking about, I don't understand, and then everybody else says yes, I did not understand either. And this is like. Okay, some brave person was able to admit this. But of course, if you are admitting your mistakes, and then you get punished for this, you will never admit your mistake again, yeah?

Harv:

Super interesting. Well, first of all, I really appreciate that you, brought this up as one of your key areas of company culture, because I maybe thought I knew what psychological safety was, but it was probably a very skewed, idea of that concept based on things that I've seen on social media whereas the way you've described it, makes so much more sense and it sounds like a really, it sounds fantastic. So yeah, I really understand that much better. Thank you for that. So what advice would you give to ops leaders who want to make sure that everyone on their team feels involved, valued and connected and want to create a really positive company culture? Maybe that's kind of a bit of a recap or just combining the best of your advice, so people can go away and try to apply some of this stuff.

Julia:

The first step would be engaging in listening and small talk on regular basis, which is creating for people the feeling that they are important. It also reduces anxiety for people. When you're remote, you feel that maybe something is happening. And if your leader's routinely talking to you, involving in some small talk in written form or during those online meetings, it creates this feeling that you are important, you are respected, you matter. They're interested in you and you create these feelings of belonging. So this is very small thing but if leader is always busy focused on efficiency, then for others, it will be the signal that others need to behave the same.

Harv:

And, you know, in my opinion, sometimes, you have to do the smaller, easier things first. Like, if you try to do the grand efforts, I think there's a missed opportunity because you can start very small and simple and that is kind of the warmth you bring in the small conversations. If you're not doing that, the grand things might end up feeling superficial and artificial and you're trying to model best practice rather than actually having warmth between people. Mm-Hmm.

Julia:

and be like really natural in this. So not just some how are you and then not listening to answer but really listening. interacting in the conversation, seeing the person behind the screen or this written form. So this is like very small step, but this needs to be integrated everywhere. Then maybe, create those, interactions when everybody can, collaborate, in creating solutions together, brainstorming. So those decisions are not made only by people who are on site, but involving remote people. Ensuring that those who participate on meetings remotely, they have the same opportunities than everybody else. So when at least one person is remote, it's better to have fully remote meeting. Then everybody has their screens, they are part of this video call and creating this experience equal for everybody. And again, those regular check ins, one on ones, having those just to understand what is happening. This is very important part of leadership. Also all this silliness stuff. It might be not so much for leaders to be involved there, but this, it sends very clear message how things in the company are done. And if you would like to have this great company culture, then besides those serious topics, our goals, our targets. We spend a lot of time together, it's great for company culture to have those interactions.

Harv:

Very, very good points. One other thing that I wanted to speak to you about Julia is cultural norms in international companies, we're very used to working remotely, but also having colleagues, you know, across the world and there's different expectations in different parts of the world about what is normal. How do you find something that works for everyone?

Julia:

This is very interesting Harv, because our cultural differences shape us, our cultural norms shape us much more than we think, and our cultural differences might be very big. And so I would really recommend to read the book of Erin Meyer, The Culture Map. She talks about eight scales where we might be very different. For example how we relate to leadership, either hierarchical or egalitarian. How we perceive time; for some people it's very important to be on time for some cultures, it's totally okay to be quite late. How we are decision making as a team or top down. And also this trust for some cultures trust is really like this head based cognitive trust; you are doing tasks and that's it and for others it would be relationship based. And so we might have very different norms in our culture. And when we put together as a team, it creates a conflict. So I would think that first step is just acknowledge that we are different. It's really good to have some kind of cultural awareness workshop. You can use different material to talk about this. Like for me, it's important to have small talk. And for me, it's not important. For me, it's important to be on time for me, is not important. I think that decision making should be done this way, I don't think. We see our differences. The next step is just to create common agreements. And here again, working agreements is very important. Where we explicitly decide how, for example, we made decisions in this type of setup where we are very different. So this is where we need to first talk and then agree.

Harv:

Super, super interesting. Thank you for that. Um, I don't know if it's a bit of a tangent, but it's related to working from home. There are times where you can feel, at least I sometimes feel that there's a bit of loneliness, but when you're working on something difficult, you can also get quite anxious. And sometimes having people around can be helpful, but you know, if you're in a full remote role that can be difficult. I've recently come across this concept of body doubling. So body doubling is the idea that you are on a video call and you don't have to be collaborating with that person or speaking to them, but simply just having your camera on whether it's a coworker or a friend or a complete stranger. And there's websites such as flow. club, there's flown. com and there's loads of them out there that let you log in and then you just join a virtual meeting room with other people that are studying or working and getting their stuff done and simply having their presence there and seeing other people working not only motivates you to keep going, but it fills that feeling of being alone and just having to do stuff on your own. I've found this really interesting and I found it really helpful as well. So that's something, if you are remote that, you know, you could look into.

Julia:

Yeah, the

Harv:

So

Julia:

is that I think it should not be made mandatory

Harv:

I absolutely agree. And that's not what I'm implying at all. We'll put some links in the episode notes if anyone's interested in looking into it more. Also, we'll put a link in the episode notes about the Culture Map, which is the book you mentioned by Erin Meyer about cross cultural differences, which you said had a big impact on you. So, Julia, lots of really interesting ideas that you've shared here. If anyone's looking for more information or, you know, learn more about your workshops or the stuff that you're sharing, where can they find you? What's your website and, where can they find you on LinkedIn?

Julia:

You can find me, I have a website juliavastrik. com and also I am present in LinkedIn. So keep in touch.

Harv:

Excellent. And Julia is J U L I A V A S T R I K dot com. And I would strongly encourage you to check out Julia's website and follow her on LinkedIn. Like I said, she's a regular contributor on LinkedIn and always has really smart advice for people that are looking just to improve collaboration and team function. So do check that out. Julia, it's really nice to speak to someone that really gets this stuff. So I've really enjoyed that.

Julia:

Thank you, Harv. It was very interesting for me to have this talk.

Harv:

Excellent. Thank you so much. Hi all. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Julia. Company culture is such an important area for us to consider as it has such a huge impact on employee experience, motivation, and overall happiness. We all want to work somewhere where we feel respected, where we can do the work that we're great at and appreciated for, and where we can build great friendships. Like Julia was saying, it's the little things that can add up to make a big difference. There was a lot there to sink your teeth into. So what we're going to do is copy some of the key points under each of these categories Julia had highlighted and put them in the episode notes for this podcast so you can go back and reference them and see which ones you want to bring into your workplace. That's it for now. As always, please share this podcast with your friends and colleagues and share your feedback or suggestions with me as well. You can DM me on LinkedIn. I'm Harv Nagra. I'd love to hear your suggestions on upcoming episode topics as well. I look forward to having you back in the next episode. See you soon.

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