Ep 64 Teamwork: Best practices for remote work

In this episode of The Crazy One, Stephen Gates dives into the challenges of thriving in a global, remote work environment. As teams collaborate across different time zones and cultures, relying on outdated approaches can hinder success. Stephen breaks down the most common issues with remote work, debunks popular misconceptions, and shares the essential mindsets, tools, and behaviors you need to excel in today’s digital workplace. Tune in to elevate your remote collaboration skills and drive results in a complex, global landscape.

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Stephen Gates : 0:00

What's going on everybody, and welcome into the 64th episode of The Crazy One podcast. As always, I'm your host, Stephen Gates. And this is the show where we talk about creativity, leadership, design, and everything else that helps to empower creative people. Now, be sure to subscribe to the show. So you sure you get the latest episodes whenever those come out. Because if you know anything about me, I don't do this on a super regular cadence. But whenever I do, I want to make sure that you know that the show is there so you can listen to it. And whenever you're there, you're on your favorite podcast platform, take just a minute and leave a review for the show so that people know if it's any good or not. Now today, we're going to talk about one of those subjects. I've been getting a ton of emails about a ton of questions about and so I thought, you know what, it probably makes a lot of sense to do a show about it. And what we're going to look at today is work but we're going to look at the new way that a lot of us are needing to work and because as creatives technology has affected a lot of the things about the way that we work, it's affected a lot of the leadership models it's affected a lot of companies but Interestingly, it seems to only have affected that work, when we're all in the same office for most people, not everybody, but most. And the thing is, is that increasingly, we've got to work with other people we've got to create with other people in other locations, either because our companies are just getting bigger, they're getting more global. And we don't always have the luxury of having everybody in one spot. Or because work is starting to become more distributed. You're starting to see companies that are a little bit more distributed, starting to see people in other locations, because this is something that technology has allowed, you can work incredibly effectively. And because of that, fewer people are interested in relocating. More people want to stay where it is that they want to be. And so that makes it a real hiring challenge for how do I get the best talent into my studio, but it also challenges a lot of old held assumptions about also why do you have to work that way. But all this is going on, all this is swirling around. And so as a result, I've been getting a lot of questions about things like, what are the best practices for working with or for leading those sort of distributed teams? How do you work with teams that are in multiple locations? Or even How do you do? And is it even possible to be effective doing remote work? Now, over the course of my career, I've had a lot of experience with this over cross multiple different companies. I've worked in a lot of different models where I've had leading multiple studios that are in different locations that mine that yes, maybe I had the home base, but there were other teams that I had to go out and lead in other places I've had, yeah, that one core team around me, but again, as we talked about that model of trying to reach out and find the best talent, well, maybe they always weren't in the same city as us. So maybe they're an individual Freelancer and we wanted to work with them and we didn't really care where it was that they worked with. And I'll tell you what, something else I thought I had a pretty good idea about how to do this. And then I started working for a division and honestly pretty much all that went out the window. It's a it's a fact that I think maybe not a lot of people know or they don't necessarily realize but in Division is a completely distributed company, which means that all 600 plus of us are working remote either from our houses or from a we work and it's become this sort of like, interesting war shot test whenever I talk to people, because I'll ask them like, Yeah, well, where's envision based, and a bunch will say San Francisco, a bunch will say New York, you get your smatterings of like Austin, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, like all these different places. And the funny part is they're all right. But this new model, I think one is incredibly progressive, but it's Let me see remote working, working with remote teams in a completely new way. And candidly, a far more effective way. So in this episode, we're going to take a look at the most common problems with remote work. What are the things that people are really writing the asking and saying, This is what they're struggling with? What are the most common misperceptions about distributed teams and remote work and then What are the different mindset, the different tools, the different behaviors that you're going to need to be successful in this kind of new and emerging world. But let's start with the most common problems, because there are a number of them, but they tend to center around a few themes, right? And I've seen this firsthand, like, Look, having worked with teams in multiple locations and done remote work, there are just common problems that you're going to run into. And you know what the biggest one you're going to see is that executing the idea works. But creativity and collaboration doesn't. And I'll give you a preview of coming attractions. The reason that why are we going to have these problems is because what we're trying to do and what people most often mistakenly do, is that what they're doing is that they're taking the same old approach that they've always had the approach that Okay, we're all in the same office. And they're trying to just simply apply that model those tools those behaviors to this new model. distributed way of working? Well, no shut, that's not gonna work. Because again, you need to evolve and you need to do things differently. This is why you're able to execute. This is why you're able to once you've got the idea, you can get people to execute against it because there's a plan. But it's the creativity part. It's a collaboration part that people really struggle with. Another big one that you see a lot, there isn't enough communication. There's not enough communication between the different locations between the different teams or the different people. And here again, the reason why is because we're all so used to, we're also accustomed to face to face. And that that is literally our mindset is that's the only thing that we care for is that if you're in the same location, oh, you're there, I can talk to you. Oh, but if you're not, well, then that's just sort of like out of sight out of mind, right like that saying came about for a reason. And this is why we need some different tools and some different behaviors. But either Whenever you are trying to collaborate even whenever you are trying to sort of bring these different teams together, the other problem that you find is that you have these sort of improvised collaboration tools or methods. nobody's really taking the time to think it through, nobody's taking the time to invest in tools that's actually going to allow this to happen. So you have this incredibly fractured, disconnected, Frankenstein sort of process. And as often say, with anything, whether it's Frankenstein work or Frankenstein process, yes, Frankenstein was alive, which is great. And so in some way, it was functional, but nobody wanted to date him or go hang out with them. As a matter of fact, whenever they saw him, they usually came around with torches and pitchforks. And so Frankenstein processes and ideas tend to get fairly similar reactions, where Yes, they're functional. Yes, they're living but whenever you try to use them for any amount of time that people that do it tend to get out the port the pitchforks and torches because it's just doesn't work. But I hit on this before, right is that the biggest problem with all of this? Is that leadership, the people that are in this process, think that if you're at work, then you're working right? I can see you, you must be working. But if I can't see you, then you must not be doing anything. It's just incredibly weird thing. And I've seen this with some leadership who really would push back or get resistant to like, even if you're gonna like every Friday, take a half a day and work from home that somehow Why can't see you. So you must not be working. All of these are based and like I said, this sort of antiquated leadership construct because you know what, and I've talked about this before, you know, the secret sauces for Apple and Google and Facebook and all these companies that we want to fetishize. Well, they start by hiring smart people, hopefully most of us are all of us are doing that. But then they do one thing that's sort of different, a little bit crazy, a little bit nutty. What it is that they do is that then they actually do trust those people to do their jobs, and to know that they don't have to see them to know that they're doing their jobs. And that is a very, very different mindset. And so it really leads into that next part about what are the common misperceptions? Right. And I think even that, you know, kind of leadership, I've got to see you to know that you're working. Because that's the thing is, on the flip side, there's misconceptions about work, and remote teams and remote work really also cause a ton of the problems. So yes, we've got the very common practical ones about we don't have good tools, we don't have good communication. But the misperceptions can be just as dangerous. And a lot of it really is this idea that like great work can only be done in person at the same location. I would argue against that because look, I'll be candid, I had my concerns, my doubts coming into envision, be able to say, look, am I going to be able to do creative work? Am I going to be able to do you know, the sort of things Am I still going to be able to work with a team and collaborate and do all those sorts of things do Yes, but the answer is that it's only been three months, but I can already see where I was wrong. My head was wrong. I thought about this and approach this the wrong way. And that I've needed to change. And I think that that sort of learning that kind of enlightenment is what we all need to go through. Because you start to do these other misconceptions, like, Oh, I'm not gonna be able get ahold of people whenever I need them for something. Well, the reality is, if you think about it, that's true in person, somebody in a meeting, they're on a phone, they're doing something else. You can't always get ahold of people right away whenever you're in person. And then there's another one, like I said, that people are only working, if you can see them. And this is I think this is a sad and frustrating byproduct of just where we're at with a lot of leadership. I think it's, it's a byproduct of the time that yes, like as creatives we have the ability to affect business in ways we haven't seen since the Industrial Revolution. But there is this thing that we keep slamming into of this Old Guard way of thinking these old guard structures and processes that are getting in the way and are causing this frustration. And I think this these are great examples of those. Because as creatives we know that our best ideas don't come between nine and five on a regular basis, this isn't, you know, I don't know why it's not a vending machine, there's not a drive thru window in my office, like creativity just doesn't work like that. It comes at weird times, moments of inspiration can strike in all sorts of different places, and you never know what that's gonna be. But most leadership and most companies again, since they fundamentally don't understand and struggle with understanding what creativity is at all, this is one of those intersection points where we struggle. So those are the problems those are the misconceptions. Those are the things that we're going to need to find different solutions for we need to find different mindsets, different tools, different behaviors, to do that. But you know what, this also isn't throwing the baby out with the bathwater. This is the fact that this is still work. We are still people, we are creative, we share the common creative condition. So there are a bunch of things are gonna stay the same. And I think this is where I can see some teams overcorrect. Where they want to do is rethink everything, we're gonna, like, we're gonna be new, we're going to be awesome, we're going to be totally different. We're going to rethink everything. Well, here again, let's not over correct, because while there are problems in there are misconceptions. There are some things that need to stay the same. And it's really four big ones that are gonna need to stay the same. The first one is to have clear leadership and responsibilities. I don't care if you're in front of me or someplace else, you probably need to do a much better job and a much stronger job of setting those clear leadership and responsibilities because the one thing that is going to change is that you're not going to be able to read your people as often read them as easily because know the casual interactions are the things that you start to lose. I don't read somebody's body language. Whenever They walk into the office in the morning, I don't have the ability to be able to see you know that they're eating by themselves at lunch every day. And that is a problem. But what that means is that we just simply need to come up with new ways of doing things to be able to overcome that. But as a leader, I've got to be even more clear, I've got to be even stronger. I've even got to make sure that there's more responsibility for everybody because of that, as you always should, but you do. You need to focus on culture. Because here again, whenever you're distributed culture becomes incredibly important. Whenever you're working with people who aren't where you are, culture becomes incredibly important. And so the some of the things that we need to do are the things that you should have been doing before and I've talked again, in other episodes about you need to be building these tent poles, you need to be building these things that everyone can rally around and culture is always a big one. Culture really meaning what do we believe in? What are the things that are important to us? How do we define our ourselves, how do we define the standards and the norms that we're going to establish that we're going to hold ourselves in our work to. Because what that does is it creates a common source of, I don't know what focus, it creates a common destiny for the team. But then what it also does though, is it leaves enough space for each group, team, individual, whatever that is, to bring it to life in their own individual way. Because that is here again, the one difference is that it could even be cultural. I worked with teams that are in North America, but then I've also worked with ones that are in Europe or in Asia, or South America or Australia or other places like that. And there are cultural differences, where again, we can all believe the same thing, but maybe we need to bring it to life a little bit differently. You need to have clear responsibility and accountability here again, this is the what I want you to do, what's the outcome that I expect and what's going to happen if that doesn't happen. That's true of anybody in any setting any location that you need to be clear on about those sorts of things. And then the last part of it is you need to have a clear process, I will continue to say that I know as creatives This is the least sexy thing in the world want to focus on process, the who wants to focus on process. But process is the basis of so much of success. Because what it does, it sets a standard, it sets an expectation, and it defines what you need to be successful. It's not going to change just because you're working with people in different places, you still need to define those things. You still need to be able to understand what it is you need, and make sure that you get them so that your work isn't a happenstance. So the core parts of it whenever you think about this, we're talking about leadership. We're talking about culture, we're talking about responsibility, accountability, we're talking about process. That's the core of any team. And here again, that's not my thing that most people overthink this or they overcorrect because of the core remains the same. Then what needs to change is your mindset. what needs to change are your tools and that what needs to change? Be your behaviors, because that's the thing is you need to get your head right about how you're gonna approach this, you need to get your tools, right. So you actually have the ability to work with these other people in need to get your behaviors, right. So that those sorts of things work and to do a few of those things differently. But let's start with mindset. Because as always, I'm a big believer that if you want to bring about change, you need to change the way that people think not just the way they behave. And too often that's the problem is that we're like, oh, we're working with people in other locations, we're just gonna behave a little bit differently. But then the underlying thinking remains the same. And the underlying thinking is that older mindset, the underlying thinking is what leads to those problems, around collaboration around communication around improvise tools, because we want to say, Oh, yes, we're going to be different. But when the rubber meets the road, we're actually not to work with remote teams effectively. You can't just use the same old thinking, the biggest thing that you're going to need to change around your mindset is you need to change your leadership style. You need to change your team approach your work mentality, and even in your hiring personas. And because your leadership style is going to need to evolve, to make time to build relationships. And the reason why that is, is because there is a real tendency whenever I'm talking to people who are in other locations, to just simply say hi, and then go right into work. So I don't have a reference point to them. As a person, I'll even see this happen sometimes on some teams whenever you actually are even in the same location. But you need to take the time to build relationships, you need to make sure that you're getting to know these people as people that you are investing in them. I know that that's advice that I've given for even when you're in the same location, but it becomes even more important whenever that person is not around me every day. So consciously leave five or 10 minutes at the beginning of a call at the end of a call to just say how was your weekend? What book are you reading? What do you up to? How's your wife doing? How are the kids? How's the dog? It may sound inane. But it really is the basis of how do you build a relationship? How do you invest in people, and it becomes incredibly important. But as an extension of that, whenever you have those conversations, the other big leadership thing that I've really kind of come to understand is that you have to empower vulnerability. And the reason why I say that is that you have to make sure that you're constructing spaces conversations, and even setting the expectation that people can and will be vulnerable. Because the problem is, whenever people are in other places, whenever they are working in another studio, whenever they're working at home, people can very easily suffer in silence. I've seen this happen with other studios that I've worked with where all of a sudden, you know, whenever you get on the phone with them, it's like, Hey, what's going on? Oh, everything's great. We're great, right? Because that's the standard answer. That's the answer that everybody wants to give. It's the safe one. It's the easy one. But whenever you press on it whenever you ask them. People, you try to do a little bit of research, you try to look past a little bit more, maybe an entire studio is incredibly frustrated, they just don't want to tell the boss, maybe an individual is incredibly frustrated, and they don't know how to raise that issue. Maybe their boss isn't the one leaning in to be able to look at that. This goes back to a study that I've cited before. And the Harvard Business Review, or Harvard did a study looking at honesty in the workplace. And what they discovered was that eight out of 10 people are actually uncomfortable, if not uncomfortable, actually do not want to or are unable to or do not feel comfortable telling the truth. Think about that for a second. You're working with a studio of 10 people that it's in a location different from where you're at 80% of those people are not telling you the full truth of what's going on in that Studio 80% how, as a leader in the world, are you going to be successful with that sort of honesty rate? So I think this is why for me a big one when we talk about empowering vulnerability is so We are asking those questions and that you are leading by example. So that you can have sessions you can have times and you can say, look, this is what it is that I'm struggling with. These are the things that I'm going through. Are you going through things like that? What's going on here, so that you can try to open up that dialogue, you can make it a muscle, you can make it something that you can do all the time, so that you're sure that those people are sharing with you. And they're not just suffering in silence. And it really, really makes a big difference. It connects people together. And I think that's here, again, why you need a different team approach. Because the other thing that could happen in your team approaches that even if people are being honest. The other thing that you might run into from a mindset standpoint is that they might be as weird as this sounds too polite. This is something my team is working on right now. A lot of insanely talented people a lot of in really good, really, really smart some of the best people I've ever worked with. But then the problem is is that you respect the other people. So much that you don't call them on their bullshit, you don't call them on problems, you're just too nice. Instead of saying, look, it really irritated me, whenever you did this, instead of saying, you know, look, you said you were gonna do this and you didn't do it. We're polite, and the space makes that easy. The distance makes that really easy to do. And I think that, you know, so from a team approach, these are those sorts of things. These are the mentalities we need to get into. And because a lot of it isn't his mindset is that you're going to also have to hire a little bit differently. You need to look at and hire for culture more you need to look at and hire these people self starters more, because that's the thing is that you know, in if I'm being honest, whenever I've hired studios, who I know are going to be my home base, the mentality is a little bit different. I'm a little bit more willing to train them up. I'm a little bit more willing to take risks because I know I'm going to see them every day. But whenever you hire for remote studios, the leadership I need to put in those needs to be stronger. The leadership I'm going to put in those places needs to be geared different They need to be more. They need to have more emotional intelligence than the average person probably does. Because I'm going to need them to be able to see what's actually going on and communicate that back. They need to be not only the eyes, but then they need to be the heart of those teams. And I think that's the problem is that so often we just simply use a one off hiring persona of saying, okay, we're going to hire the same person with the same makeup for everywhere. But that's the thing is that, yes, we want everybody to be equal, yes, we want those different studios to all be the same. But the reality is, is what they're going to be the same as they're gonna be in the same in the types of work that they do. They're gonna be the same in the types of deadlines that they get. But the ones that aren't at that home studio with leadership are different. And that's just simply a fact of it. Sometimes, that's hard for the leadership of the home office to understand sometimes it's hard for the people in those remote offices to understand it's not done out of bias. It's not done out of malice. It's just simply done out of the reality of distance, that when you aren't physically with people, sometimes things change. So this is why you need to Look at how do you hire differently? How do you actually do those things and look, and I've said it before, test those people, give them an evaluation, make sure that they really can do what it is that they say, from a talent perspective, from a culture perspective, look and lean into this stuff. Because what you don't want to do is to hire somebody who you are not going to be able to be around every day. And then all of a sudden, you discover that they were a great talker, but where the rubber meets the road, it just wasn't something that they're going to be able to produce on. But then as we move on, it's about the tools. Because again, I think that is day in day out. It's the thing that we're in front of, it's the thing that we use the most. And I think in many cases, this is the biggest thing that you need to be successful, is a whole different set of tools. And this, these tools are possible because of technology. The days of like whatever it was faxing or doing the you know, it's just we have high speed data connections, we have the ability to do video, we have the ability to do collaborative platforms. And that's so much of the key Write is that these tools need to be cloud based, and collaborative. And they need to be that way for every stage of your workflow. And they need to work in the same way that people are used to working. Because this is where most creatives are getting tripped up, right, because what we're doing is, instead of getting creative collaboration tools, we get Google Docs or we get Dropbox, which are fine. But for the majority of what we do, the majority of what we do that is important, those aren't going to work. What we need to do is to be able to find other ways we need to find things that are visual, we need to find things that really promote this sort of interaction. But here's the thing is that this means we're going to have to get over those old ways of working, we need to get over the fact that like all of our files need to be on our computer, and we're going to need to get over this idea of a single point of control. I own the file. That's not the way real collaboration should work. And for me, this is why I think this whole topic, I'm hoping I'm thinking is going to be really good for us as an industry, because so much of it in for us in so many ways is about possession, possession of ideas, possession of assets, possession of all these sorts of things whenever where we need to be, is so much more collaborative, it's changing the eye into week. And I think as you start to get more distributed teams, it forces this into being. And so I think I'm hoping that this trend is going to be good for us once we can get over ourselves. So there's a couple tools that I'm going to recommend a couple of things that I take a look into, but also understand where do they fit in the process? Right. And I think that one of the things I tell you to do is that if you're struggling with this, there's a great book that I got. And it's a great book as a starting point. It's called remote office not required. It's by Jason Fried, who is the founder of 37 signals, and it's just a really good book about the basics and mentalities and misperceptions. A lot of the stuff that I've been talking about here and a lot more is in his book and I think it's a really good starting point if you're going to do this and a really good starting point to understand the tools. Now, a lot of them are the ones where you start at, you probably have the Google Docs, the Dropbox, paper, like these sort of similar cloud documents, sweet sort of things. And these are great, it could be Evernote, it could be anything like that. And you're still gonna need that. But understand that those are more of the administrative more of the infrastructure, more of sort of those base sort of tools. But what we usually don't have in place are the ones that allow much more creative collaboration. Now, many of us we maybe we, you know, you do have some of the the video conferencing platforms, right. It could be zoom, it could be FaceTime could be Oracle, any of these sorts of different ones. And I think those are really good. And the thing that I'm going to tell you is that what you need to do is to over prioritize using those tools. Because you know, again, if I'm working with people in other places, a phone call and email, even a slack is not the same as actually talking to somebody and This was a huge, huge mistake that I made in the past whenever I was communicating with studios in Asia or things like that, because it was just so easy to let the timeframe be an excuse, right? It's like, Oh, well, they're, you know, 12 hours away from us. And it's just a little bit too hard. I'll send me an email. It's just easier. Again, if creativity is about collaboration, it's about ideation. It's about a lot of those sort of things that hear again, those sort of just written emails just don't work on and it's so funny to me, like, even after three months, I envision doing a phone call with somebody to me is just so wildly antiquated when somebody's like, oh, let's do a conference call. I'm like, why? Like what I mean, I literally I think I've used I've maybe I've had three phone calls all with people who are outside of envision, but most of the time, I'm like, No, no, like, you know, here's my zoom information, here's my FaceTime or whatever it is, right? Like I want to be able to talk to people. I want to see what the look on their faces. I want to have that sort of interaction. And I think that that's a big place where we fall down we just we take the easier road Been a long standing theme in this show. But right but it's it's it's this idea of the fact that like, Look, if the best way that I know to collaborate if the best way that I'm creative is to talk to people then keep doing it look him in the eye. But here's where a lot of the times we get into like the improvise tools because a lot of times even if teams are doing video calls between each other then there's a brainstorm crap, what do we do? is one studio sketching is one person the scribe? How do we do this, then you end up with like this big whiteboard that somebody writes do not erase on or you take a photo and you send that around but then somebody has to recreate that and how do I share it with the person that wasn't in the meeting and do those sort of things and I think this is where again, we start to get into the area where we need much, much better sort of tools. The probably the interestingly enough, the one tool that I've used the most that before I joined in views envision I did not use at all ever once. I'll admit that openly is there's one called freehand. And freehand is an online interactive whiteboard. Like I have had dozens of people in a freehand. And what is so amazing about it is this massive whiteboard where everyone gets their own marker. You can go in and type things, you can draw things, you can collaborate, you can see the cursors in the pens of all the other people and so that as I'm having this discussion, we start to talk about something, I can start to sketch something out. And then somebody had that other idea, and they can come in and move it around or duplicate it, they can do their own sketch next to it. And then all of a sudden, it feels like you're both standing next to each other at the same whiteboard. Even though we could be hundreds of miles apart hours of time zones of difference. But again, it recreates a recapture is that ability to be just fluidly and easily creative with people. And I love it even more because what two weeks ago, we released free hand for our iOS and Android apps. So now I can do free hands Whenever I'm sitting anywhere, and I can do in my Apple Pencil, and so here again, I can go in, I can start to be able to sketch these things up and have a meeting with everybody. If I want to do it before I start a meeting, I can sit and sketch this stuff up, then when we come into the meeting, I've already got stuff up on the whiteboard we can start to work with. So again, it can be ideas for plans for org charts for any of these sorts of things. But it's this tool that has fundamentally changed the way that I work. Because it never occurred to me that I was using these improvised tools. It never occurred to me. And I don't know why that I needed to evolve because I think that here again, and even I am victim of and look, most of these shows come out of my struggles. I didn't realize that this is a very key place where I needed to evolve. But then there are other tools that we have that I think are also underappreciated. There's another one from envision standpoint called boards. And this is a great starting place as a mood board. And it can start as a mood board. You can go in you can put assets, you can organize different ideas, but then over time as the project evolves, it can then actually go Go from that all the way to this sort of like living documentation where what started as just images and raw thoughts as the project is now done. I can now put Photoshop files up there, I can put sketch files on there, I can put studio files up there, I can put videos, I can put all these different things, it can become a documentation of the project, it can become, you know, the artifact that you hand out then becomes like a style guide. There's tons and tons of different ways that you can work with it that I think are really, really effective. But I think that that's what a lot of it is, you know, for me, I've given up and I don't use Evernote, I don't really use Google Docs a ton because for me, you know, and I've talked about this before I there's a company I love called Milla note and I use them because it's basically like digital sticky notes. But what they do is that they allow me to work in a much better way because for Google Docs or Evernote for a lot of those sorts of things. My brain doesn't work in a vertical verbal linear format. I need to be able to write things down I need to be able to move them around. I need to be able to have these thoughts in the same way that you would use sticky notes. That's why you This tool that I think, look, a lot of it for me is go out and explore these tools, try them out, use them in your process, understand that there are these key moments in ideation and working together in, you know, sharing files and doing a lot of these sorts of things that become incredibly important. It's why, you know, prototyping and this sort of build to think mentality is so key for us. Because we need to collaborate, we need to be able to share things around, we need to be able to get people to understand what the concept is, because that's the problem. The way we keep screwing ourselves up is that all that we're doing is we're only prototyping before we launch something, we prototype the physical space before we're actually going to roll it out. We prototype the app right before you know, do user testing two weeks before launches. We need to be doing this stuff differently. We need to be more collaborative, we need to be able to get things into working forms more cheaply, more quickly, and for this stuff to really be effective. But this is where we've got to go out and rethink these tools. We've got to look at this sort of stuff and figure out how to Do this different and better. But a lot of this, again, is going to require different behaviors, this leadership style, these new tools, you know, they're going to culminate in some new behaviors for everybody. And I think that these are sort of like the cheat sheet of, you know, make sure that you are doing these things. Whenever you look at yourself, go in this process, make sure you're doing this stuff. One is over communicate, it works in person, it works even better with remote teams, because again, it's so easy to let the excuses creep in the time change the distance, the fact that you know, there's 20 people working with me and oh, there's that one person who's someplace else. But again, put the shoe on the other foot, make sure that you are communicating over communicating to be able to do that. Whenever you do it Have patience. The expectations should be exactly the same for somebody who's in another location as it is for again, if you're in the same location, that's what I've always found so bizarre is that somehow, if I'm in the same location, somebody is in a meeting, I'll wait an hour. Two hours, half a day whole day like, again, depending on what the meeting is for that person to come out. I'm not gonna be badgering them, pestering them texting them, like why, but it's weird. Whenever we text somebody, we slack somebody, we send them an email we do whatever it is, then somehow they're like, on the clock. It's like, Okay, well, you know, I slacked you, why didn't you write me right back. But we have a very different mindset and a very different behavior in person. So maybe let's pull that patience and things like that over with us. I think that as part of that over communication, it is prioritizing, talking to people face to face, way less emails, even less Slack, more of those sort of things of, again, if I know that that's what I need is crave to be most effective, that I'm prioritizing that behavior. Again, I'm not you know, yeah, sometimes it's easier to just say, oh, here's a three sentence email to go do it. But then again, is it really faster? Because if the person misunderstands it if you send them that direction, and they don't really get it, did we save time Over, if we were to jump on a video call opened up for free hands, you know, sketched out, whatever it was we wanted to work on, because that's the way that you're going to work with the designer who's in your studio. Now. That's the respect that you're gonna pay them now. Why wouldn't you do that with somebody else? Who was someplace else it again, like I said, these are the things that we need to think through because they just aren't lining up and making sense. But here again, we also need to look at like, do you need to do other things like establishing core working hours for all the time zones? Do you want to say, Okay, look, no matter where you are in the world, there is this window, maybe it's a really big window, maybe it's really small window, maybe it's eight hours, maybe it's two, but we're gonna make sure that we are all, you know, going to have this sort of core working hours and that if we're doing all hands if we're doing important meetings, that those meetings fall into that core space, because yeah, that's the challenge is if you've got somebody in California and you have somebody else in Europe, that's maybe a two or three hour window, I'm going to ask somebody to get up a little bit early and probably ask somebody to stay up a little bit late. But this is going to be the reality of it. And that again, everyone's gonna have to make a little bit of action. so that everyone can get a much bigger game. But here again, the selfishness the ability to say, Well, I, well, we, I don't want to stay late, I don't want to get up a little bit early. Okay, as again, as a leader, this is where you need to suck it up and understand that your role and your responsibility is bigger than I, it's we. And so to that end, this is the sort of stuff we need to do. But the other thing that you need to do is to make sure whenever those people are remote, especially if they're individuals that they are is also clear and times, because the other thing you're going to find is that whenever you aren't in an office, whenever you aren't around that team, it becomes really easy to let the work bleed over. This is something I'm having again to learn now. Because it used to be I would show up in an office a particular time because there was a social expectation of when I needed to be there. And then there's a certain time when it became acceptable to leave or boys everyone else was leaving you were simply reminded to go do that. This is even about weird things about eating like whenever you're working by yourself. It becomes really easy to forget to eat as weird as that sounds, but on multiple occasions, it's like four o'clock I'm in a meeting can understand why I feel like shit don't have much energy and actually have a huge headache and then realize that I've been working since eight in the morning and totally forgot to eat. But, you know, so for me again, it's reacting to the problem. So now from 1230 to one every day, I have a meeting that says go get food. And but that's the problem is that then I have a start time and I've got a stop time. And I try to really hold on to that. Because if not, it's really easy to just kind of burn yourself out because you just want to keep going and going and going, especially if you love what you do. But all of this comes down to the word that I use before. If you want to be effective, yes, you need different tools. Yes, you need different behaviors. Yes, you need a different mindset. And a lot of these here, again, are going to be customized are going to be specialized on your particular team, their particular makeup, what they're good at what they need to improve on. But the only way any of it is going to work is that there has to be trust. Because I think that's why I think you see the rise in remote work and distributed companies and startups. And, you know, I think that that's the heart of why so many of these new business models are starting up because the old companies, the old models, lack trust. At the end of the day, too many companies will punish you for caring about the work, they punish you for caring about people, what they want to reward you for, is caring about politics and rationalizing mediocrity. Because there's no trust, there's more comfort than anything else. But you need to think about that. How do you trust your people? And if you don't, is it justified? Or is it based off of an old mindset and old way of doing things? That shouldn't really be there? Because again, I think that's something that I've come to realize having now gone into this new model is that most of the time whenever I would kind of like bemoan or say that, oh, you know, those other studios, they needed to work differently. Now what the problem was, is that I needed to, I needed to get over myself I needed to invest more I needed to try to find new ways of working. I'm doing a lot of stuff that I've talked about here, because that was the thing, it was just easier for me to say, Oh, it's it's them. It's not me. This is the plague of our generation, I think, is that it's just we all want somebody else to blame. But I think that's the thing is that in this case, it's not always them. In many cases, it's us. And I think that's the hard part about getting this sort of model down working with remote teams and getting that to be successful is you've got to trust people, you have to believe in them, you have to know that they're going to do the right thing when given the chance. When too many times too many other companies, what we believe is that people can't be trusted, they're gonna try and cut every corner they can. And I think whenever you believe that, that's the employee that tends to show up. Because people are a reflection of leadership. People are a reflection of the attitude of leadership, and if that's the attitude you give them, then that's the employee you get. But hopefully this helped. If it did great if it didn't look, you I still want this to be a conversation. So Reach out to me on social media you can follow me on any of those channels send me questions. I will write people back all the time. I mean, I highly recommend like LinkedIn is usually the best Facebook is the best. Instagram sometimes there are weeks ago by and I don't see it somebody put a question in there. But reach out and ask me if there's particular things you want to know this didn't answer. Let me know. I think that you know, as always, you can find all the information about this podcast related articles, the show notes, I'll put links into all what all those tools are. So you can find those head over to podcast Stephen Gates, calm look up Episode 64. All that's going to be sitting and waiting for you. If you liked the show, go to your favorite podcast platform, leave a review let people know what do you think about it. And like I said, make sure you subscribe while you're there so you don't miss any of the episodes. And as always, everyone down and legal wants me to remind you that all of us here my own, they don't represent any of my current or former employers. These are just my own personal views. And lastly, I say it every time because I mean it every time but thank you for your time. I know that time is incredibly precious commodity and I'm always incredibly amazed that anybody ever He wants to spend it listening to me. So hopefully this helps. Hopefully you can be able to find some better talent some other locations and do some better work with them. And all the while while you're doing it. Stay crazy