Ensuring Alignment in this New World of Remote Working - Martyn Storey, Director Customer Success at Puppet

Martyn Story,  Senior Director Customer Success at Puppet joins the Get Amplified crew to talk about best practices in this new world of constant remote working. 

Martyn shares how he and the Puppet team are using OKRs in place of KPIs to ensure the team have clarity of what is expected of them and feel empowered to be innovative.

This episode is a little different as it also features some best practices from David Parry Jones and Stuart Fenton with regards to this years remote working. (Please note their comments were recorded in September when things were a little different, but are still very relevant)

The OKR software Vicky refers to:
https://weekdone.com/ 

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Transcript

Sam 0:10

Welcome to Get Amplified from the Amplified Group, the podcast for tech industry leaders and aspiring leaders focusing on transforming talented individuals into extraordinary teams. I say this every time, of course. We're virtual as usual. I'm at home in Bucks. Vicky's over in Deepest, Darkest Oxfordshire, not so far away. Sia's a little further away in the Netherlands. Sia, do you want to lead us in? Tell us what we're covering in today's episode, please.

Sia 0:34

I will indeed, Sam. Thank you. So today we're going to be talking about best practices when working remotely. And the person we have with us today is Martin Storey, who is the Director of Customer Success at Puppet. And Martin's got some fantastic experience in this area, particularly in the last, unfortunately, the last nine to ten months. So I'm really looking forward to hearing some of his experiences there.

Sam 1:01

Brilliant. And Charles, just to change it up a little bit, we're going to supplement this episode with a couple of snippets of wisdom from our previous guests, right?

Sia 1:09

Absolutely, we are. So we've got a few uh pearls of wisdom that we've been really storing up and collecting. Uh DPJ and Stuart Fenton in previous podcasts had some really great insights into this and how a leader can work with a team remotely. So we've saved them up for our listeners and uh we're going to add it in to this topic as well. So yeah.

Sam 1:33

Fantastic. Like a like a greatest hits compilation.

Sia 1:36

A little mashup for you, yes.

Sam 1:37

Brilliant. All mashup, very modern, very on trend. So, Martin, do you want to maybe start by giving us a little bit of a potted career history of where you've where you've got up to so far and how you got to where you are today?

Speaker 6 1:51

Absolutely, Sam. Well, first of all, I want to say thank you to all three of you for inviting me to do this. Really looking forward to this chat. It's been a bit of an interesting mix, actually. So I originally was a geologist before I went into IT back in the um the late 80s, did a degree in geology, love everything about the earth, um, and was a hydrogeologist for a short period of time. But I've always been a techie, always been a techie at heart, always played with tech. I remember my first VIC 20 my dad gave me when I was a young lad, and um decided to make a bit of a switch uh while I could while I was young, when I was about 20, 21, 22, um, and went into working for a couple of companies, working in IT. I've been very much focused on the infrastructure side of the world. Those of you as old as me on the call will remember Novell Networks, will remember Windows NT351, we'll remember Citrus.

Sam 2:48

I had a Novell qualification way, way, way back in the day. Covering what I was, but or what it was for.

Speaker 6 2:53

But yeah, a great OS, amazing file system, but you know, the world of Microsoft took them over and away you went basically. So always been an infrastructure kind of guy, and then went into pre-sales around 95, 96 for a small reseller uh in the Microsoft arena and the Citrix arena. And I've always been a bit of a salesperson at heart. I think I'm gonna chip off the old block of my dad. I've lived in pubs all my life. My dad's a bit of a you know, one of these guys, he has a bit of a chinwag with people, and I've kind of been the that much kind of outgoing person. I think it's really important as a pre-sales person, but I've always been a techie, so I love to evangelize. And you know, I went through, got loads of qualifications in I was an MCSE, a Cisco CCIE, and went through all that process and um joined a couple of resellers, spent a bit of time in the Unix arena, Sun Solaris and HPUX, worked for a large reseller called Morse. So I was in the partner world for quite a long time, and then finally sort of branched into Vendorland in 2005 and joined VMware. Um yes, I've heard of them. Absolutely, just a small company now. I mean, it was amazing. Um, amazing when I started, there was in Fremley, there was something like I don't know, um, 10-15 people in there. I was I was one of um three SEs. I I covered probably the best patch in the UK, which is central London, City of London. It was was was mad. Literally jumping on a tube every day, five meetings a day. It was really cool.

Sam 4:28

This was this was ESX era VMware, right? V the early vSphere stuff.

Speaker 6 4:33

Absolutely, ESX2.

Sam 4:36

Yeah, it was it was just magic, and yeah, why wouldn't you have gone down that route? It was fantastic.

Speaker 6 4:42

I know I remember going into early meetings, Sam, and showing vMotion for the first time, and we're just like, What sorcery is this? Everybody says that, but it's but it was so cool. I used to wear that uh that badge and that you know the VMware badge of pride, and people it was it was great days, lovely company, still is an amazing company, and look at the size of it now.

Sam 5:06

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think you know, we've all all four of us have been through VMware in some way, shape, or form, and I think we've had a lot a lot of love for the company.

Speaker 6 5:16

Yeah, no, absolutely. So, yeah, 10 years at VMware. I moved over to management after three, two, three years of P of uh SE SE World, ran the channel pre-sales team for UK, then ran the uh the tier what we call the tier one pre-sales team for the UK, which also covered global accounts as well. So, more solution architecture type pre-sales, yeah. And as the product set started to broaden out, exactly, into cloud private cloud solutions with obviously, as was in the early days, VCAC, which is obviously now VROP, VRAM, VR, VRO. So, and obviously the EUC technologies as well. You know, as an SE, you have to be a generalist, right? So, um yeah, really great times, love the company, but it's time for a change, decided to go into the cybersecurity industry, um, and joined Intel Security, which is the part of Intel that bought McCaffee. So spent two years understanding and spending some time in cyber, which is really cool, actually. You know, all the bad actors out there and understanding it's so different to VMware, right? Um, and obviously they've now branched into security quite heavily with Carbon Black, right? So um, and then after that, decided to get my back into my roots of infrastructure, decided to get back into my roots of um of that world. And I started joined Puppet. Um, I joined Puppet uh to run the EMIA um pre-sales and PS team, so running both sides of the of the coin, right? From selling it and not selling it and tripping it over the fence. I was responsible for both. Yeah, it's great to cover an EMIA role, right? So as you're broadening your your yourself in terms of you know working with different cultures and things like that. So did really good. Learned a lot about Puppet when I was at VMware, you know, we was talked about a bit. Yeah. And it's and now working for the company, it's infrastructure as code, right? It's the infrastructure person of the old, being more like a developer, acting more like a developer, and obviously it's automation. So yeah, that's a real real quick potted history of my time. Brilliant.

Sam 7:25

Thank you. So, Vicky, do you want to jump in and tell us a little bit about today's topic and why we've chosen it, why we're covering it?

Vic 7:33

Yes, thanks, Sam. Why we have Martin on the on the podcast today is because very early on in my days at VMware, I had the pleasure of working with Martin, and he is such a collaborative team player. When I think of Martin, I just think about someone who just does the right thing, always does the right thing. And so when when the pandemic first hit, seeing on LinkedIn way before anybody else was doing it, Martin had uh highlighted that he was doing a uh a pub quiz with his team, um, and it really took off after that. But Martin was was really out the doors early with it. And so when this topic came up about best practices, because the world of remote working now has definitely changed. And even with the vaccine, I don't think we'll ever going to go back to office work as we were before. We've been working with some companies through um the last few months, and it's become really apparent that remote working has different challenges and brings different challenges, and silos form much more easily, and it's very, very important to keep organisations tight and aligned, and the communication is such a critical part of that. And I know Martin's got some great best practices that he's going to share from Puppet. So, really looking forward to uh to hearing more about what he's doing.

Sam 9:05

Brilliant. I'm looking forward to hearing all about that as well. Um, so Martin, do you want to start maybe give us a bit of background, a bit more background on Puppet?

Speaker 6 9:12

Yeah, absolutely. Um, well, first of all, to talk about the culture of Puppet. It's such a great company. Um, it's born out of uh Portland over in Oregon. Um, was originally set up by and founded by a guy called Luke Cannes over in the Portland area. Luke is an old school sysadmin. He doesn't want to, he doesn't want to be installing stuff manually and configuring things. It's because there's got to be a better way to do this. He went around, worked as a contractor all around lots of all sorts of companies. Set me up these networks, set me up these systems. So he decided to automate a lot of the stuff that he did because he thought it was just a waste of his time. He started the company up in 2005, he created the puppet uh language, and effectively a lot of companies refer to us as a DevOps company at the end of the day. Um, there's there is there's definitely some truth in that, but there's also truth with regards to you know maintaining and and automating operations, because that's the challenge is getting systems up and running quickly and that are consistent that don't change because things change quite a lot in data centers. You know, you try it's hard to keep track of stuff, not only because you've got to keep things up to date, patch them, keep them consistent, you know, keep away those bad actors, all that stuff I learned at Intel Security. Um, it's a hard job. And when you're dealing with thousands and thousands of systems all differently configured, um, with all their application stacks all on top of each other, it's a hard job, and it's it's a soul destroying job for quite a few admins out there. So if we can help them take away that pain and take away those soul-crushing jobs, we call it, and being into more innovative and bringing in automation, and automation is key in today, especially in the days of COVID, when everything's remote and you've got to try and make things maintainable and and uh and consistent, hope it really helps in that world. So effectively, we wrote the first um view to creating infrastructure as code. Everything that you install can configure on something that is maintainable in some way, can be turned into code. Every operating system, every switch that you turn on, every command that you do, you can find facts about that system and you can configure them in the way that you want to to keep them the way that that company wants them in the right way. So, yeah, at a very high level, we're an automation company. Um, we've branched out into lots of other areas. Our main key product is Puppet Enterprise. We're born out of an open source company, Puppet Open Source, it's in version seven now. Um, Puppet Enterprise is an evolution of that, which the first version that came out in 2011. So first commercial product in 2011, uh, and we're now up to, well, effectively version seven in the enterprise, but we call it 2019, it's a slightly different naming convention. Um, but lots of other products have spawned off from that that enable Puppet Enterprise to be taken on board in a particular way. A recent launch we did was Puppet Comply, because compliance is key for security, and Puppet makes things the way that they should be, and we help to keep them compliant. So, yeah, that's kind of a really high-level view of what's all that makes sense.

Sam 12:33

So it's an interesting, interesting company. Seems like the um you joined at the right sort of time, and the the organization came to the fore at the right sort of time as people were starting to move in the direction of merging, bringing ops and devs closer together, and the the the security angle is really interesting. I think that was our major interest in in playing with with Puppet from a soft cat standpoint was you're right, enabling people to keep it simple, right once deploy many kind of stuff, make sure it's it's it's all up to the same standards every time. That's the that's the key, isn't it?

Speaker 6 13:13

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, and just just to close out on the dev side, systems are changing so rapidly. Developers want to make change to systems to be able to build in new features, and that's in in direct conflict with ops. Ops don't want to do that, ops want to keep static, and developers don't. So they need to work together in order to make it real and make them sustainable. So, yeah, DevOps, absolutely.

Sam 13:42

Yeah, now you know, now that you know, software development, I suppose, even more so at the minute, the whole digitization or digitalization stuff has accelerated over the last nine months or so. That stuff is probably more important today than even than it was nine months ago.

Speaker 6 13:58

Absolutely. The opportunity that that situation is, yeah, definitely.

Sam 14:03

So, as I suppose that leads us into the dreaded COVID pandemic conversation. Um, what we what were your priorities with your remote team when when this stuff first yeah, it's it's interesting.

Speaker 6 14:15

Yeah, just great question. And when Vicky sort of teed teed this point up, and she said that she saw the uh thing on LinkedIn. Um, you know what? I remember the the my last tube journey down into London because I was in London every day of the week. I love going in. Our London office is beautiful, it's gorgeous down in Allgate. Um, and it's great to be with everybody and be close to everybody, and you've got the banter in the office, especially the sales. It's important for me to listen into what the salespeople are talking about and listen to what my team are talking about and the PS team. Um, and when that's all suddenly gone, when you're like, you know, no more jumping on the tube and getting into London, whether that's a good thing or not, jumping on in sort of sardines on the bloody tube. Um, you know, I woke up the day that we gave we gave the announcement globally that would shut all offices. And that's our offices in Portland, London, Belfast, Singapore, Sydney. Um, and I woke up and I thought, Jesus, got to do something about this, got to keep the team together. We've got a solid team, we've got to we've got to keep communicating, we've got to keep innovating, otherwise, we're gonna be stuck in these chicken coops for God knows how long. And obviously that was way back in March, right? So we're still stuck in our bloody chicken coops. But um, you know, I had to think outside the box. So first day I was thinking, right, okay, let me have a little thing about this. We've got to keep catching up. We are on Monday Monday meetings as a team, uh, and that's fine to do that on a Zoom. Um, but we need to have like the social side of it because it's one side of the coin sort of professional working and getting the job done. The other side of the coin is sort of being together as a team and being trustful with everybody, getting to know everybody, having a good laugh, you know. So I decided to work with one of my SEs um to do this pub quiz. So uh we still do it, we don't do it every single Friday now. We did it, we sort of overdid it to be honest, in the first few months because kind of all right, there's only so many it was a bit of a novelty, wasn't it? You know, it was yeah, it was good fun, and then but we still meet for a beer on a Friday. Not everybody turns up, most people do. We have now we have a chin wag. Every now and then we do have the odd um we do have the odd quiz. Um, and you know, quite a few other teams around the globe have actually using the same platform we hire, just like a SaaS platform we use for quizzes, really cool. Um, and we just have a laugh and keep together. So that was my first initial thing, but there's lots of other things that you've got to start thinking about in terms of um in this pandemic, how can we still maintain innovation and make people think they've got purpose in the job, let alone the Friday pub quiz, right? And doing things differently that we can have impact with. So one of the things I got I I did was um we had to start driving a hands-on lab workshop program that all the SEs could get involved in creating. So we generated and created something really quickly with the with the marketing team. Now we've got a global rolled-out workshop, hands-on lab workshop plus webinar program, which is now globally done in the US and in EMIA. We kicked it off in EMIA. Um, and marketing love it because they want to reach out to more customers and it gets the SEs more. So, again, other innovation you've got to think about to keep the team really engaged and and and this is outside from the day job, from being a pre-sale systems engineer. The other thing we had to do is rapidly remove our PS team from doing on-site work to complete off-site work, and that was a challenge in itself, communicating that to customers. However, it worked really well in the end, you know, we can do everything remotely, connecting to systems or so isn't it funny how companies have adapted and would just adapt and get on with it, really? Exactly, that's human nature, right? You've just got to have a positive attitude and crack on with it, really. So yeah, so yeah, exactly.

Sam 18:21

That makes sense. Yeah. So, how important is building alignment?

Speaker 6 18:26

Alignment is so important, especially even more so with the COVID environment, because again, people got to be fully aligned to where the company's going. I mean, the company's gone through a lot of change. We had leadership brought in, a leadership change from CI CEO downwards. Uh Yvonne Vassenir is CEO. I know Yvonne from my days at VMware. She worked with Carl Eschenbach quite closely in the old early days of VMware. Um, and she joined sort of a couple of years ago now. Really impactful, um, and she made some changes through the organisation. My boss, Beth Shea, um, absolutely love working with her. She is so important for me in my career, but also for the whole of the organisation. One of the things that she's instilled in the whole of the organization is to work as a global team. We are that, we are that size company that we can do that. So, for example, the best practices that I may do in the international region. So, obviously, uh, my role changed from EMIA to run EMIA and APAC. Um, and there's some great best practices happening over in in AIPAC. I bring that to her, and there's some great best practices over happening over in the US. So, alignment at a leadership level is absolutely key. So, Beth fosters that, and the trust in the team, in the senior leadership team for customer success is really solid. We really, you know, get on so well. I can't wait till I can jump on a plane and meet them again and go and have a beer with them and have a laugh, you know. So that side of the coin, the other side of the coin is ensuring that the alignment down from the leadership level is globally structured and everybody's on the same page so that we're all in it together, we're all pulling together to drive it. So I spoke to Vicky about um about OKRs, um, you know, uh objective key results. You know, a lot of people talk about KPIs. This is one thing that I remember from many days. Yeah, yeah.

Sam 20:28

So one wanted to drill into this, it's quite it's quite interesting because everybody everybody does KPIs, right? That's just standard across business. So this is something slightly different.

Speaker 6 20:39

It is something slightly different. Um, and OKRs for us a puppet, we we maintain and change our OKRs on a half by half basis. We've just recently defined them a couple of months ago for the second half. It was so key for everybody to get agreement as to what we're going to focus on. And the difference between OKRs and KPIs is quite significant in my view. And it everyone's got a different view on this, so this is my view on it. I think OKRs are much more um digestible and simplistic to understand. Rather than having a ream of KPIs, could be 20 KPIs. I remember seeing a list of 20 KPIs when we used to do KPIs at Puppet and do KPIs at VMware actually. OKRs, we've you you summarise it in a different way. Uh, and the word key results, results, it's in the name, right? Um, and monitoring and managing those results. So what we have at Puppet is we have three main objectives. I won't go into detail on them, but effectively it's around hitting the number, product, and performance in teams. That's effectively it from three from three levels. Um, there's devils in the detail in each of those those three, but the focus is around those three. Three key metrics. There's a key exec sponsor against each um each objective. There's specific KRs underneath them, so key results. So they're the things that you monitor the metrics around. And what you're trying to do is move the needle in the quarter.

Sam 22:15

Those things then roll up into the overall result that you're aiming at, right?

Speaker 6 22:19

Correct, correct. So it's effectively there's a dashboard that we have on Confluence that everybody's got visibility of and that they can see how we're doing in each one of these KRs.

Sam 22:30

I like that. It makes sense because sometimes you you know you look at KPIs and you wonder if they really roll up to the overall business objective. Or you wonder, or you wonder if there's something that's put in just so your manager's got something to talk about or something to bonus you on or not bonus you on, as the case may be.

Vic 22:48

I'm so pleased that we're talking about this subject because I just think it's so important. I um was only having a conversation with a with a client this morning just on this topic. And one of the differences I see between KPIs and OKRs, and and um Martin, what you've just described, I I completely agree with. I think everything you've just said makes complete sense. But KPIs also for me are it's like business as usual, these are the things that we're generally tracking, whereas OKRs to me are about these are the the things that we are going to bring in that's going to make a change and that's gonna move the needle.

Speaker 3 23:27

Yeah.

Vic 23:27

So I so I see that as a difference. And actually, when um I came across OKRs at VMware, but not because somebody else had introduced them, it was in um my last role I got asked to build out a much larger organization than I than I was used to um leading, and I had managers of managers, and I really wanted to to get a uh make sure that we were all on the same page and and to be able to know how people were feeling further down the the track. And um and the other the other driver here was actually that we used to do a weekly report, and it used to be a weekly report in Word that actually came from the Citrix Times because the people the person that set up um VMware in Mir came from Citrix and we used to do this weekly report, and it used to take ages to do, and then it would be filed away and never looked at again. And that to me felt like yeah, remember them well, filling them out.

Speaker 6 24:27

I remember them asking my team to do them when I was a VMware, and I'd have a whole list of every week. Yeah, it just gets put into a file share somewhere, no one really acts on it.

Vic 24:37

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it was how do we there must be a new way of doing that, and we came across a system called Week Done, and it was week done actually that introduced the concept of OKRs um to me and to and to the team, and so that would be cascading the goals, but also their weekly report or their week done, it would just be a tiny snippet, but then they would tag what they'd done to the key objectives, right? And so you could see you'd got that alignment, people knew what they were being expected to do, and you could also track progress against it as well. So week done was a really cool system. I think it's really really taken off. So that this was like three or four years ago now, so it was quite a while ago.

Speaker 6 25:22

That's really cool. Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to add to add to that point about you know, people are tracking their um activities against, you know, specific key results. And that this is back to your point, Sam, about everybody's got awareness about you know, from exec down to senior leadership down to the field, because then it was down to me and the rest of the leadership team to ensure the organization understood what the OKRs are. And my my discussion with my team is if you are doing anything that's aligned to an OKR, don't even talk to me about it, just crack on with it.

Sam 25:57

If it doesn't, if yeah, it enables people. Well, it gives you that alignment that we talked about earlier, and it also massively empowers people because if they can defend what they do is isn't quite the right phrase, but to maybe justify what they do in the context of aiming for striving for those OKRs, then yeah, that can that can only be a good thing, and you know, they might get it wrong and they might have made a judgment that this will help, and maybe they just need nudging in the right direction, but at least you know they're doing it with the best intentions.

Speaker 6 26:29

Correct.

Sam 26:29

And that you know, that's quite important, actually.

Sia 26:32

Yeah, and I think there's another point I wanted to make as well about that, is the fact that if you if you're very, very clear on what those OKRs are, it gives you permission in a way to say no to the other stuff that you're that that's been thrown at you. You know, it's just not on on the list of priorities that we have agreed. So therefore, I've got permission to say no, and you don't have to go to your manager then to say can I do this or can't I? It's just no, it's not on my priorities. So uh I I think that's what I use them in my team for is to give them permission, empower them. We've agreed these are your performance indicators, so that's what you should be doing.

Speaker 6 27:14

100% spot on. Couldn't put it by myself, Sharon. As effectively, you know, you know, it's about empowering people and just focus and moving that needle because the the world is moving so quickly, and we'll we'll change them again if need be.

Sam 27:30

Have you needed to change them more regularly? You know, you mentioned a sort of a six-month check-in. With the world changing more quickly and everything being in something of a state of flux. Have you needed to go back and review them at three-month increments instead of six months increments? Or I mean, I I guess ideally you wouldn't because you you know you want people to have a chunk of time to go after a big goal, yeah, rather than quick keep flipping your direction.

Speaker 6 27:56

Not yet, not yet. I think this for this current round of OKRs that we've done is the best way that we've approached it, actually. Because we we did have a go in the previous one, and you learn as you go on as an organization how you find refine it each time, yeah. This way that again, this is uh from me, Von and Beth. Beth was Beth, my boss, has been leading a leadership program, and basically, um we've taken about a month to two months to go through it as a group, as a whole leadership team, to disseminate it and agree with because the words are important, the words that you use and how you disseminate them down to your field. And we've we had to fine-tune some of the words so that we make we're in agreement on it. Makes sense, and then you you go to the field with it, and everybody, everybody in the field will resoundingly kind of this is brilliant, this is spot on. Everybody's talking OKRs in my conversations with them, it's become part of the DNA. So we've definitely done something right, and obviously, we'll improve the next set of OKRs that we change. We may change them in um FY21, uh FY22 for us, actually.

Sam 29:02

We yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you find it's an evolution rather than a wholesale change? Yeah, you nudge it forward with each iteration.

Speaker 6 29:10

Correct.

Vic 29:11

You can't, you can't, you know, you know, you've got to you've got to take it, you know, just like what you learn as a manager, but you can't I get I guess there'll be times when there's a step change in the business, but yeah, that that would be the exception rather than one of the other things that you said yesterday, in order for you to give your feedback into the the leadership team, you'd also done an awful lot of listening to the people in the field as well. So you were representing them back in. So I think that also really ties into the fact that they were they were brought into them back to start with, and that um Sam really relates back to what we talked about with Pippa, doesn't it, at Tesco of making sure that everybody was on board because everybody felt like they'd they'd been heard, they might not have been directly in the conversation. Does that make sense, Martin?

Sam 30:02

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's that building a consensus because people have had the opportunity to get their their point of view across, even if the business doesn't go in their direction, the fact that they've been consulted means that they get on board, right?

Speaker 6 30:19

Yeah, no, absolutely. They they they were consulted. There was there was debate around each of the OKRs between the team, but they were decided on by the exec team and the leadership team, senior leadership team. That we're not going to change them, we weren't going to change them drastically in any way, shape, or form because we were consulted with them along the way. There's people who I speak to, they're my right-hand men and women in the organization saying, Look, we're working on these OKRs, right? I want to give you some visibility of these things, and then I can feed that back in to every which is what Vicky's on about, is I was consulting them along the way. And then by the time it came for you can't consult with everybody, right? You know, there's only so many people you can consult with. Um, by the time we came to launch, it was literally it was painless. It really was. It just was smooth.

unknown 31:11

Yeah.

Sam 31:11

That's brilliant. Uh have you got uh any sort of specific concrete examples of how this has had an impact on the organization?

Speaker 6 31:19

Yeah, I think um one of the one of the big ones we've had recently um is in the in the product OKR, um we've had some we had a sticky situation with a customer recently. Um and this is a really good example of everybody coming together as a team because they fully understand the OKRs and they fully understand the the purpose of why they're there. And um, you know, the customer is we're very like every organization says this, customer-centric, right? You know, and of course it's so true, but this particular scenario we had a challenge with a customer, very sticky situation, and um in this scenario we uh had to rally around as a team and get the right people on this particular challenge that we're dealing with with the customer, which had an effect potentially on a deal that we were aiming to close in November, and all came together as a team. I I built a team, it was a combination of people in the US, people in in AMIO, and people in APAC. The customer was in APAC, it's one of my customers. Um, and it was amazing how everyone rallied together and the communication lines to the customer. The customer could see we really cared and bothered about what they wanted. Um, and within two to three weeks, we had a really sticky situation, all sorted out. And I swear, if we were all in a pub, we'd have been buying everybody shots and having a good old laugh with each other because it was the euphoria of seeing the customer go from you know quite tense over to being, we love what you're doing. It was just so great. Um, and it was a combination of working with product engineering, customer success, really great teamwork as is an example of that.

Sam 33:11

Brilliant, thank you. And this is this is globally across the whole organization, right? Not just this isn't just a Martin Story initiative.

Speaker 6 33:20

No, this is this is a glob, this is a global initiative. This comes back to the point um was saying earlier about Beth. Beth is so so key to ensure that we work together as a group across the board, and we're of that, as I say, we're at that size where we can do that, and it's that's one of the beauties why I love working at Puppet is it's just got that the ability for you to pick up the phone no matter what level you are, get together and pull together as a team. Um, and and it it the same would happen. I mean, I've been helping some stuff in the US, customers in the US, because there's people in my team that are perfect to help out people in the US. It's not about theaters, it's not about EMIA, APAC, and the US, not about that at all. It's about us all pulling together and and helping each other out, and it works really, really well. Yeah. That's brilliant.

Vic 34:12

Well, you know, it's a power team, isn't it?

Sam 34:14

Well, it is it is a power team, and you know, that's what you want. You want everybody pulling in the same direction. Um, you know, that was the great thing about SoftCat for me, was we had a lot of that, you know, it was a it wasn't a big organization, even when it became a big organization, if you know what I mean. You could still rock up at the chief exec's desk and say, Yeah, I think we should be going this way, or I think we should be going that way, or have you thought about this, that, or the other? And that stuff was massively encouraged. And it feels like you've got a similar sort of thing.

Speaker 6 34:46

Absolutely.

Sam 34:46

And that's really important because the people at the top, you know, we were blessed with Martin and Colin. You know, they they obviously really knew what they were doing, but they don't always see absolutely everything on the ground all the time, so they you absolutely rely on that feedback and that open conversation, don't you?

Speaker 6 35:07

Totally. Open honesty and transparency is one of our major taglines in Puppet, and it's fostered all the way through. Yeah, and it's it's leadership to instill that and and ensure that um that the team are aware of that, and it is open on this. And and we we've got really, really strong, we don't we have very low attrition in the company because I I believe in that open honest and transparency.

Speaker 3 35:35

That makes sense, yeah.

Sam 35:37

So previously on Get Amplified, we've talked a lot about the well-being of employees and and in particular mental health. Now, you know, it seems to me like you've done a lot of work on that within your group. It do you feel a responsibility for the mental health of your team? And is that something that's endemic within Puppet, or again, is that just a Martin Story initiative?

Speaker 6 36:03

No, it's a it's a global initiative we have um with the COVID committee. Um, a Puppet um is very um strong and made up of many people around the globe. Um, and there's a dedicated Slack channel that we have um around COVID, but specifically around you know the fact that we're all remote and we're in this new world now, and mental health is something that we all need to be conscious about. I personally went on a mental health course through Puppet just before lockdown, actually. It's really interesting stuff. Three-day course, very useful. So I'm mentally meant mental health. Um I've got the badge now and all that kind of stuff. Um yeah, absolutely. Um, but you know, it's it's important that we keep in contact with everybody because we you just don't know what the lives are that people have got the other side of the planet. I've got people in in Sydney and Singapore, and I trust in my uh leadership team in Sydney to reach out to as many people as possible. It's important even as at my level to do skip level one-to-ones, right? So that I sort of reach out regularly. Skip skip level, yes. Oh, skip skip a level, yeah, one level down the manager because there's some reports who don't report to me but report through a manager, um, and just sort of check in. But it's also important um to also reach out to people who are not in your own organization, I think, as well, and just have a have a chinwag with people just generally, you know. So I often reach out to some salespeople, we've got a few young salespeople, right? Um, I reach out to people in engineering uh and support and other areas of the organization, not specifically, but I've got relationships with, and just check in with them, you know. The odd Slack message and say, Hey mate, do you want to have a chat? We also do this thing in Puppet called donut. It's all done by it's have a coffee and a donut, right? So basically it's automated through our Slack system, and you just get paired up with someone randomly. And I was having a chat with this engineer in Portland the other day. What a great guy! He's into all the stuff that he's into gaming. I love my gaming. Probably see behind me.

Sam 38:18

I can see the steering wheel behind you, yeah.

Speaker 6 38:20

Yeah, I enjoy I enjoy that sort of stuff because you know, when you're in these times and you're all sort of locked in your house, you've got to have some other outlet. So yeah, I had this conversation with this guy, and you know, it's really nice just to sort of meet just new people, but it's important to keep in contact regularly. That is what it's all about.

Speaker 4 38:40

And I'm trying to break this down within Twilio now into more granular bits so we can start, you know, giving employees some light at the end of the tunnel because I think people are really, really struggling, and it is affecting their mental health regardless of where they started. You know, if you're already fragile from a mental health perspective, this could be the thing that is knocking people over the edge and it's horrifying to think about.

Vic 39:02

Yeah, I had a conversation this morning with with an organization that I'm working with, and they said just that it's like the novelty is worn off now. We need to find a way to come together. If we can't, how how do we make this work now? We've got to face that, we've got to think about doing things differently. And this is an awesome team. They're so strong, but they're really feeling the strains of it. So goodness knows how organizations are feeling that aren't in a good place.

Speaker 4 39:29

But we've got people we hired in uh March who've never had anybody from Tullian, virtually we're we're actually buddying them up. We just we just thought about this buddy them up with people who are local to them and have some significant things that they do, so you know, in today's environment, at least they can work, they can meet socially, put a face-to-name, and and get some connection. And that's by the way, just segueing a little bit into the we'll all never go back to the office and we'll all be remote working. I don't think we will, and I think people need that kind of grounding in the culture that only a physical environment can give them. That doesn't mean they have to be in the office every day. I've never been a fan of presentedism, but I am a fan of building culture, and I think it's exponentially harder if people haven't experienced the physical and cultural aspects of coming together in an office. And that's controversial, but that's certainly. I'd absolutely agree with that.

Sam 40:28

You know, it might mean that in instead of being in the office four days a week, you're only in the office two days one week and three days the next, or something. But but being there and getting that physical connection, it's also about those accidental conversations that you have, um, yeah, that you just don't get in a point-to-point or even a team-based video chat. It it it doesn't work like that, I don't think.

Sia 40:50

I think also you have to consider that everybody is different, like we know, you know, from the work that we do, that everybody has a different approach, and some people are really struggling right now being isolated. Other people might be fine with working at home all the time, but you have to figure that out in your team. You know, I I've I have friends, one of the guys he he works in support, and he said, I never want to go back to the office ever. I'm quite happy being at home, doing my own thing, and yet other friends of mine are saying, I'm going crazy here, I can't stand it. And so I love the buddying up thing. I've heard that before, actually. It's a really good idea just to find out who lives fairly local to you and just have a physical get-together. The other thing that I'm seeing at the moment as well, which I think is a bad trend, is that it's kind of like we're going into this new normal where it's just Zoom calls back to back, there are no spaces in between your meetings, everything's back to back, and we've stopped doing the fun bit. So instead of picking up the phone saying, How are you? Are you okay with all of this? Oh, let's have a um, I don't know, a pub quiz on a Friday together and doing all the things that they were doing in COVID, that seems to be stopping, and it's just work, work, work. I don't know whether you're seeing that as well, DPJ, or or you feel that.

Speaker 4 42:16

I think it's such an interesting point. So, yes, I am, and I think particularly in in well, maybe not actually, I was gonna say in larger meetings, but I think what I've managed to get into a habit of doing is at some point in the meeting, ideally the beginning, is going, how are you doing? And inevitably they go, Yeah, I'm okay. Sometimes they tell me straight away, which is great, but then you ask the second question, it's like how you really doing, you know, how's it really? I really want to know, not not just a superfluous kind of question at the beginning. And I think having those conversations um regularly um makes it just it's often for people because they just they want a bit of empathy, they they also, I mean, not when I'm running team cores of my leadership team, I think me showing vulnerability around this as well that I'm struggling with it, I think is powerful too because it's more it's weirdly acceptable if people above you have the same problem. I don't get it's it's all to be a hierarchy, but just showing vulnerability, showing that you care, showing you genuinely want to know how people are getting on, and then also championing them back around some of the things we maybe can do to collectively make their lives easier. And I'm right in the middle of that. And um, my next call, in fact, is you know, with with HQ around how we can, I guess, bridge between today and fully opening an office with smaller kind of gives along the way that, as I say, you know, make people more hopeful that there's a brighter path to the future.

Sam 43:48

Let's hope so. Let's hope so.

Vic 43:50

We did a a recording earlier in the week, DPJ, with Stuart Fenton.

Speaker 3 43:54

Yeah, yeah.

Vic 43:54

The the reason we got in touch with him is because he'd done a hashtag no guilt. Inside his organization, which was it's okay to go for a walk. Don't feel bad about it if you've missed this call. You need to do that. And I think probably what you were just talking about, and I love the idea of buddying up, and you know, going for a socially distanced walk and being able to do that and making time for it in the daytime in the winter is going to be more critical, isn't it?

Speaker 2 44:23

We as an organization going through the COVID crisis recognized that we needed to do things differently. And our pulse survey was interestingly, we have this shared uh team site where everyone can say anything to everybody. And at first, you know, you get all sorts of kind of here's a picture of my dog, and we all did it, and here's me working at home. And then then it sort of dies down and becomes you know, like almost very little information. What we found is if you ask questions, you learn a lot through that process. And so, in a in a somewhat active fashion, we do this thing where we ask people in our organization what you know what are the challenges. We learned through COVID that people were working harder, yeah, more intensely and more hours than they were when you considered the commute and coming to the office and all that kind of stuff, even though on the commute we're all doing our emails on the train and all that kind of stuff. Um, you know, I think I think that we found people working and they were intense. And teams, which and and Zoom that we're on today, you know, these are brilliant tools, but the problem is they're very easy. And so, you know, I I you know, as the moment a thought occurs to me, I can then contact Sam and tell him my thought. And um, there was this famous book by Bill Gates, Business at the Speed of Thought. But it was all about this instantaneous feedback loops and all this. And in reality, is you know, Bill Gates goes into a room for six hours a day to read books. I mean, he's not taking, he's not being interrupted every 23 seconds by an employee with a question. And what happens is you create there's this culture of suddenly, oh, I, you know, I can see so-and-so's online, or maybe I haven't even checked, but I'm just gonna send them an instant message. And we we really said to people, like, you you shouldn't feel guilty about being away from your desk. And we had these things where you know, people were saying, 'Go, I've I missed a I'm really sorry I missed your instant message. I was getting a cup of tea. Well, don't feel guilty about getting a cup of tea, or walking the dog, or taking an out taking an hour's lunch break.' Or, as a lot of people who are homeschooling, you know, in this at that time were were were strongly. We said, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So we had to we created a hashtag. Yeah. It was our second, the first hashtag we created was called um looking for sunshine. When COVID hit, we said, right, we're gonna go and find the good news and the good clients and the good opportunities. We called it looking for sunshine really helped us, and we we continued to grow. Then we realized this intensity, the the feedback we created. This no guilt, no, no, if you're not on Teams, that's okay. If you if you miss a call, that's absolutely fine. If you're gonna be out walking the dog or doing some homeschooling, it's fine. If you can't work from nine until five because of homeschooling, and you can only do you know 11 and and and until six, or maybe you can only do eleven until five, it's okay. In these unusual times, we will have to adapt ourselves, and and you should not feel guilty. So we create this no guilt thing, and and it was enormously powerful. And then you know, we layered that on with the the third one, which was me time, and we make Thursday Wednesday afternoons, every Wednesday afternoon. It's Stuart time. No, it's it's yeah, they all have to listen to me. Yeah, they have to look at a picture of me and salute their glorious leader, a little shrine in their home. No, so we said we said uh you know, uh we said to people, look, you know, uh let's not have any internal meetings on a Wednesday afternoon, and let's have no, you can't buzz people on teams on a Wednesday afternoon. It is now me time, and it's for you to focus on the things you need to get done for the job or clients or something, but there's no you know, rat ta-tat of the teams pinging around, and that was really important to us, and you know, that's that's been successful, not quite as successful as the no guilt thing, but it's been successful. Um, you know, I'm I'm one of the people who struggles with that insofar as you know, I'm I'm I'm always wired in. But a lot of the people have said I need my me time, and they actually market in their calendars and they take teams out of office. Oh best practice, um, but they'll talk to their clients in that period of time. They're able to, but it stops that kind of incessant. I mean, I I want to use the term Twitter in the truest sense of that, you know, of of yeah, that is character that you you get. And I I think that you know, when they said look, you know, that there's a view that there's the death of email coming, that's you know, a lot of people abuse email for epoxy little messages that could go over an incident messenger. But now instant messenger has become this thing where I don't people don't write stuff down. So we we big big proponents of create a to-do list and sort it by the person that you want to talk to. So as I think, oh, I just need to talk to Sam about this, I don't instantly get on Teams and talk about it. I write a list. Now people can use their book, I use Microsoft To Do, other people can use Apple reminders. I really don't care. But what they do is they organize their thoughts. So when they do call Sam, Sam, I need to talk to you about these five things. When are you available for us to have a meaningful moment and discuss these, you know, these five things? And that has that has been really important to us.

Sam 49:29

So the instant message becomes the vehicle for setting up the conversation rather than I I need these things answered now.

Speaker 2 49:35

Yeah, and I and and you know, and there's always going to be an element of chatter. What you're trying to do is dial it down, really.

Sam 49:42

Yeah, no, that makes sense. That makes sense. And do you think this will carry on, you know, post-pandemic when the world gets better? You know, what will be the balance between actually getting it together, getting in an office and working from home?

Speaker 6 49:57

Yeah.

Sam 49:57

Will we go back to where we were before or not?

Speaker 6 50:00

I don't think it's going. I think maybe in a few years, who knows? Crystal ball, I'd I hope so, to be honest, because I loved I'd love the world as it was before, you know, and we're trying to make the most of it is at the moment. But yeah, you know, I think you know, we're we've we've open we've we've opened up the our offices over over in the um other side of the world because they've managed to manage coronavirus a lot better than we have. But um I don't know where ours are gonna open, but I think we'll bring back some social side in some way, yeah. But it's gonna be an element of this trying to keep it together on Zoom, Zoom gloom. I don't I don't I don't purport to the Zoom gloom thing to be honest, it's just is what it is, just crack on, yeah, yeah, be innovative and keep in contact and look after each other. That is the main thing because mental health is is there. We all see yeah, it's really important, but we'll get back to it.

Sam 51:00

Yeah, let's hope so. So, while we're still in in COVID mode, you best give us your three key takeaways on supporting a remote team.

Speaker 6 51:08

Yeah, three key takeaways. I've I'll I peppered it through the conversation, but number one, um, ensure that you're regularly reaching out to your own team and also people outside your team. Think about that's number one, uh regular reach out, um whichever methods you use. Um, number two, think about innovation because people who innovate are people who really feel that they've got they're providing worth to themselves and the company. Um, the place is moving so quickly, there's so much opportunity to think outside the box. So give people the room to innovate freely within the OKRs, as to what was said before, and provide something that makes that that move the needle. That's kind of number two. Uh, and number three, I think um, I could do four, five, six, but I'm trying to think which is the best one to leave with the uh with a third. Um take some time out for yourself away from all the meetings and don't take life too seriously when it comes to work because everyone's because you're remote and you're thinking oh my boss didn't know what I'm doing because I'm remote, I'm kind of I'm not providing the value, blah blah blah. You are if you're doing all the the previous two things we talked about, but the it's take some time out, ensure you don't burn yourself out. I mean, I I'm the fact my my girls, one of my girls is at university, she's doing remote. I see her more. I have lunch with her now. I never had lunch with her before. I've got a dog I can play with. Take that time out and be a bit human, move away, move away from the screen for your mental health. Um, and that's kind of the third one.

Sam 52:55

That makes a lot of sense, a bit of self-care.

Speaker 3 52:57

Yeah.

Sam 52:59

Yeah, because then you, you know, if you take care of yourself, you can be a much better support for your team and those around you. That makes sense. Right. Talking of maybe trying to be a hero, Shah. It's over to you, it's hero time.

Sia 53:12

Yeah, it's hero time. I just wanted to comment actually very quickly on what Martin said there. I was talking to one of our advisors today on um email, Odette uh Newham. And he he's the enterprise uh cloud architect for an organization, and he said that he's worked it out that on average he spends between four and five hours a day on Zoom for the last six months. So that's such great advice you just gave them, Martin. Take some time out for your mental health, but also for the fact that you're going to be a better team player if you feel better yourself, right? So it's such great advice. So you're a little bit of my hero today. So hero time, here we go. Um, so hero time is something that we uh have always at the end of our podcast, a little bit of fun just to get into your psyche, find out uh maybe who's your hero or somebody that you admire. Uh it could be now, it could be in the past. Um, but also it's just because we've based it on the brand of the Amplified Group. Uh, we call him Hero. He wears a cape, and uh it's about making our clients the hero. So we always uh add this little section in. So with that, over to you.

Speaker 6 54:29

Wow, I didn't even think about this one. I did see it on uh the pre-stuff, but I didn't really think so much about this. There's so many bloody people.

Sia 54:36

It's probably better thing, I think.

Speaker 6 54:38

Yeah, so many people who I admire in the world and I get inspiration from, um, both historically um and obviously in today's day and age. And I've got, you know, I don't want to be cheesy and say my wife's my hero, but she's amazing, she does some really great stuff. You know, she keeps us all together and keeps the family solid. She's she's an amazing lady. My uh current hero, as you can see there, Sam, with my steering wheel. I'm big into cars, I'm big into racing, both physically and virtually. My current hero is Lewis Hamilton. What a sportsman, you know. Unbelievable. I mean, he's number one now, right? Um, he's just achieved so much. So the day that he won the current world championship, Martin Brundle interviewed him as literally as he came out of the car and he was panting. Obviously, he just finished a race and he won it, right? And he won the championship to equal Schumacher's record. For those of you who watched Formula One that weekend, that particular one, Mercedes, who normally do well in in qualifying, normally end up qualifying first and second and win the race first and second. This particular weekend they ended up qualifying, I think it was 6th and 9th. So they had trouble this weekend. And he and he said this we knew it was a difficult weekend, we were massively disappointed with our qualificate qualifying position. We knew that we were on the back foot and we did the best we could, and that's important what it says there. He said, We learnt a lot and we did it as a team. There was no blame game. Um, we just hashed it out, we just hashed it out, and we continue to try and improve our communication so we can make moves forwards, and we don't always get things perfect. So, even though they are the best team, and he he was just so you know, he was appreciative of the team, he was appreciative that there were challenges. It's never perfect, but we did, we came together as a team. Oh, it was just it was just amazing.

Sia 56:41

Yeah, we've just done a workshop actually with a team, and um, we're talking about learning cultures, and I did a story about Formula One in there. I do think that it's really important that you you also you debrief on your good things, but you also debrief on your bad things and you learn from that. And and the fact that he said that and didn't put blame is is um is great. So thank you very much for that. Thank you. And I'll hand over to Sam to close us off.

Sam 57:07

Brilliant. Thank you very much. That's really interesting. So, yeah, really enjoyed that. Thank you, Martin. That was fascinating, as expected. Really good stuff. I hope our listeners enjoyed the snippets from uh DPJ and from Stuart as well that made their way into the remote working conversation. And it just remains for me to say thanks again for listening to Get Amplified from the Amplified Group. Your comments and subscriptions always gratefully received. And we'll see you next time.