Remote working is being embraced by an ever growing number of employers. But are remote workers experiencing the same quality of communication and opportunity as their office-based colleagues? In many cases, the answer is a resounding no.
So what can be done to improve the situation? My guest this week is Wiktor Schmidt, CEO of Netguru. Netguru has adopted a “remote first” working policy that many other companies could learn from.
In the interview we discuss:
- Overcoming the challenges of recruiting digital professionals
- The importance of casual communication within a business
- How to ensure remote workers get the same communication experience as their office-based colleagues
- Using a unique culture to recruit and retain talent
Wiktor also shares his thoughts on digital transformation and the vital importance of an agile mindset.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Greenhouse Software. In June, Greenhouse are running Greenhouse Open 2019 in New York, a forum for recruiting and business professionals to come together to dive deeper into the transformative impact of great hiring. This year they’re celebrating the talent makers, the people who have figured out how great hiring drives business growth. The panels, case study sessions and interactive workshops will open new perspectives and hands on experience on the most important talent topics. To learn more about Greenhouse Open and To register, visit greenhouseopen.com and enter the code futurepod for 25% off your ticket. That’s greenhouseopen.com and the 25% off code is futurepod all in capital letters.
Matt Alder [00:01:10]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 180 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Remote working is being embraced by an ever growing number of employers. But are remote workers experiencing the same quality of communication and opportunity as their office based colleagues? In many cases the answer to this is a resounding no. So what can be done to improve the situation? My guest this week is Wiktor Schmidt, CEO of NetGuru. NetGuru have adopted a remote first working policy which many employers could learn from. Enjoy the interview.
Matt Alder [00:01:55]:
Hi Wiktor and welcome to the podcast.
Wiktor Schmidt [00:01:55]:
Hi Matt, how are you?
Matt Alder [00:01:56]:
Very good. A pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Wiktor Schmidt [00:02:02]:
Sure, yeah. Hi, Wiktor Schmidt, I’m with Net Guru. We are a software consultancy. We help startups and we help corporates build digital products. So it’s a company we co founded, myself, my co founder, 11 years, close to 11 years ago now and it’s been quite a journey. We now it’s close to 600 people on board and continuing to grow.
Matt Alder [00:02:30]:
So can you tell us a little bit about the company’s growth? What’s been the sort of driving factor behind that in terms of sort of taking on more people?
Wiktor Schmidt [00:02:39]:
Sure, yes. I mean so our business is a service business. So basically what we offer to our clients is the skills and the time of our team. So we have a good number of engineers, designers, project managers, and what we really sell is their expertise and time. So for us to be able to grow as a business, to grow our revenues, unfortunately, in a way, fortunately as well, the only way to do that is by growing the team. So it’s not a product business, it’s not something where we can see the hockey stick growth of, of certain startups. But it’s something where we have to be kind of growing with the team size. So for us to be able to grow the business, we need to be growing the team in a very similar phase. So this was something that happens because of the demands of the market. So we’ve been seeing a lot of demand for services, and this was the only way for us to be able to meet this demand is to build and grow the team. And this was the. The reasons for the growth. And we’ve seen this. Actually, the interesting part is that the bigger the organization gets, usually the growth kind of slows down at some stage. And for us, we’ve seen over those 10 years almost constant 100% growth year over year. I’m sure it’s going to slow down a little bit, but so far it’s been quite a ride in terms of the growth.
Matt Alder [00:04:18]:
So obviously recruiting highly skilled digital professionals is a. Is a challenge for many organizations all over the world. How have you overcome that challenge and sort of successfully scaled up the people in the business?
Wiktor Schmidt [00:04:33]:
So I think one of the advantages of companies that are in this space of consulting and working with other organizations and organizations and helping them in certain areas, like for us, it’s building digital products, building software, the whole digital transformation space, is that a lot of people are attracted to being able to work on a lot of different types of projects in a very short time frame. So if you’re joining more of a product company, or you’re joining a company that’s more of a product space, you’re usually expected to be working on this particular project for a longer time frame. And there’s in a lot of companies, there’s very limited possibilities of going somewhere else or switching kind of a context. And in our space, what we can do, also what we can offer our team members, is this opportunity to really work on a lot of different projects, a lot of different challenges in a relatively short time frame, so they can grow much faster than they might be able to in some other organizations. So what we spend a lot of time on is how can we create this opportunity for people and how can we make sure that the job market really kind of knows how this works and how can we build our brand, kind of employer brand, around this idea of really interesting place to work with a lot of different challenges where you can grow very, very quickly.
Matt Alder [00:06:12]:
Now you describe yourself as a remote first business. Could you explain what that means?
Wiktor Schmidt [00:06:19]:
Sure, yeah. So I think a lot of people talk about being remote friendly, being able to kind of remote being okay with people working Remotely. And I think it’s a very tricky. It’s a very tricky thing. It’s really hard to be able to build an organization that’s. That’s remote friendly or that’s kind of okay to be remote in this organization. Because a lot of cultures, a lot of setup for a lot of large organizations is naturally becoming this culture of people kind of talking to each other in the kind of a proverbial by the water cooler. So there’s a lot of informal conversations that are happening because somebody’s physically present in a room, because somebody is physically present in the office. And I think that’s. Obviously it’s helpful. That’s just something that a lot of productivity comes from those conversations. But the fact that they happen and they’re not being then transferred somehow or documented or put into this kind of more virtual online space excludes people who are not in the office. So it kind of excludes people who are remote. So even though you can make all the tools that you use, everything that you have, in theory, allows people to work remotely, the culture within the organization kind of excludes those people from some of the very important conversations. So what we always wanted to build is an organization where it’s remote first. So we don’t really. We don’t really care in some way where people are present, where they are physically present, because we know that all the tools and all the setup, the whole process and the whole communication process especially, is being built in a way that if somebody’s remote, it works. If somebody is in the office, it’s something that happens, but it doesn’t improve in a way, the. The process of communication. Just to give an example, if we have a meeting, we have a meeting at a certain link. So there’s a hangout or Zoom or whatever tool we’re using. We know that everybody’s going to be present at this virtual location. If they happen to be in the same room, that’s fine. You can even obviously skip pulling up the virtual meeting. But if not, that’s where we meet. We meet in this virtual space.
Matt Alder [00:08:54]:
And.
Wiktor Schmidt [00:08:54]:
And if somebody’s in a different office, if somebody is remotely, that’s how we kind of communicate. And that’s the kind of the default thing that people have when we want to meet.
Matt Alder [00:09:07]:
For example, and you mentioned employer brand, and you sort of mentioned the importance of your culture. And obviously, you know, the way you’re describing remote first. There is one sort of differentiator. How else is your sort of culture special? How do you retain people, attract the best People and do that sort of across multiple, multiple locations.
Wiktor Schmidt [00:09:31]:
Well, I think with those things, it’s really hard to pinpoint kind of a one specific or like a few specific things that make culture unique. I think every organization has a, you know, certainly a unique culture. What we wanted to build from the very beginning is really a place where we would like to work ourselves. And the culture of being remote is definitely one of those things that we always wanted to have for us, for ourselves, as a place to work, where we can have this opportunity to work from anywhere we are right now. It can be in the office, but doesn’t have to be. A lot of the times we talk about partnership as well. So we try as much as possible, we try to make all the relationships we have with our clients, with our employees, with our vendors, whoever is the stakeholder. We try to make it kind of a partner relation. And I think on top of it, there’s a lot of those little things. We try to build a culture that’s based on values, so kind of common values where we kind of agree together what’s important to us and then we stick to it. So we make a lot of decisions that are based on our values. We try to treat those not only as display or this kind of list of nice looking sentences that we can put on our website, or we can put our motivational posters across the office, but we use it as a tool to make certain decisions. So I think all those little things that come together kind of create this unique culture. And then what we try to make sure is that we really stick to those things. And all across the board, we are committed to those values, to the culture, and we try to kind of build it as a joint effort to stick to it. Basically.
Matt Alder [00:11:31]:
Digital transformation is an absolute sort of key topic for pretty much every business on the planet at the moment. What would your advice be to, you know, sort of major organizations who are looking to build digital teams or build digital capabilities in terms of, you know, the type of people they might be hiring or the way that they might think about doing that?
Wiktor Schmidt [00:11:54]:
Yeah. So I think, you know, the biggest challenge with digital transformation, it’s kind of a buzzword in a way, but I think when I think about this, I think a lot about change. So we have certain tools that are changing the workplace, changing the way we work together, and those tools are also changing. So there’s a change and there’s also the change in terms of the pace in which those changes are coming. So I think the constant evolution of everything that’s Happening in the workplace is basically the biggest challenge for leaders and organizations. So I think it’s very important then when making decisions in terms of hiring or just leadership paths for people in the organization is really think about how can you promote or how can you hire and promote people who are very agile, in a way they work. So I don’t think that we should be specifically looking at people’s skills in certain digital areas or specific tools that they’re able to use, but really look at the mindset and the mindset of being agile. The mindset of being open or encouraging change or all the stuff that happens with digital transformation is really about how can we continue to change and reinvent ourselves and how can we find people who are comfortable with it. So it’s a little bit less about the tools, about the specific kind of tactics, much more about the mindset of agile mindset or change mindset, basically.
Matt Alder [00:13:45]:
So, final question. What’s next for your business? Obviously, you’ve grown a lot over the last 10 years. What are you looking forward to in the future?
Wiktor Schmidt [00:13:56]:
Right. So, yeah, obviously the 10 years is this kind of a interesting point in time to be making some summaries and looking back at what we’ve been able to do over the 10 years, and also a very good opportunity to look into the future and think about our plan for the next 10 years. And what we’ve done is really looked at the future and the markets that we’re in. I think it’s a very, very interesting market. It’s a growing market. It’s a market that it’s already huge and has a huge demand for services that we can offer and our competitors offer as well. And what we want to do over the next 10 years is really grow this organization to something that’s kind of a global leader in this space of digital transformation. So right now we have a sizable team already, but I think it’s quite far from being able to say that we are able to cover the whole spectrum of services that we can offer to our clients. So we see this first 10 years of a time where we build some foundation, but we still feel like we’re just getting started in how we can grow this business. So definitely a lot of opportunities in front of us to grow this feather. But we really want to keep this DNA of working with at least stage startups, working with corporates, but in this kind of innovation space, working with internal innovators. So we’re not looking at going into different spaces, but really to double down on this opportunity that we’re in right now.
Matt Alder [00:15:37]:
Wiktor, thank you very much for talking to me.
Wiktor Schmidt [00:15:39]:
Thanks Matt. I really appreciate the invite.
Matt Alder [00:15:42]:
My thanks to Wiktor Schmidt. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about Working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
