With everything that has happened in the last few weeks (just to timestamp this I’m recording on March 31st, 2020) there is understandably already a massive amount of content being released and discussion going on about remote working. I wanted to add some value rather than some noise to all of this, so I’ve invited back one of my former guests to give us a CEO’s perspective on remote working.
Wiktor Schmidt is Executive Chairman & Co-founder of Netguru, a company that has always had a remote-first operating model for its employees. Wiktor has a tremendous amount of experience leading remote teams and has some valuable insights to share.
In the interview, we discuss:
- What is a remote-first organization?
- The difference between choosing to work from home and being forced to work from home and the implications for leadership
- Maintaining culture remotely
- The vital importance of trust
- Keeping a remote team motivated and productive
- Digital leadership
- Future equality of opportunity for remote workers
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:01]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 253 of the Recruiting Future podcast. With everything that’s happened in the last few weeks, just to timestamp this I’m recording on March 31, 2020, there is understandably already a massive amount of content being released and discussion going on about remote working. I wanted to add some value rather than some noise to all of this, so I’ve invited back one of my former guests to give us a CEO’s perspective on remote working. Wiktor Schmidt is CEO of NetGuru, a company that’s always had a remote first operating model for its employees. We talk about the difference between choosing to work from home and being forced to work from home and the implications of that for leadership. We also cover motivation, culture, equality of opportunity, and the likely future for remote working. Hi Wiktor and welcome back to the podcast.
Wiktor Schmidt [00:02:03]:
Hi Matt. Hi. Good to, good to see. Good to hear you again, I guess.
Matt Alder [00:02:08]:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, great to have you back on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Wiktor Schmidt [00:02:14]:
Sure. So I’m Wiktor Schmidt. I’m the co founder and one of the co founders of NetGuru. We are are a software consulting and development company. We have a team of 600 people now. 650 people now. And we work with startups and corporates and we help them build digital products. So it’s a service business and we build software.
Matt Alder [00:02:39]:
Fantastic stuff. So I first spoke to you about a year ago and we were talking about the fact that Netguru is a remote first organization and with everything that’s currently coming on, it just seemed very appropriate to get you back on the show and talk a little bit about your considerable experience running a company with remote workers. Before we kind of get into that, what sort of changed in the last year? How have things developed at Net Guru since we, since we last spoke?
Wiktor Schmidt [00:03:03]:
Well, I think, you know, with, with everything that’s Happening. I think you have to also kind of divide this time frame into like, you know, the year that was, you know, after, after we, we spoke and then the rest of three weeks. And I think, you know, the first part of it, we, we were able to grow, I would say quite substantially. Continued on a growth path. No real changes in terms of how we worked Remote first we have a bunch of folks who were in the office, but we also have people who decided to work from home and this kind of, it scales with our growth very easily. And we were very, very happy with how it was all held together. Obviously onboarded some new interesting clients. So pretty much business as usual. And then obviously the last two, three weeks were very, very different. But in some ways obviously this, and that’s I guess why we’re speaking today. We were probably very well prepared and yes, you can never be prepared, but you know, in comparison to some other businesses, I think we’re, we’re quite lucky that we, we had this kind of remote mindset from almost the very beginning.
Matt Alder [00:04:33]:
Again for people who didn’t listen to the show that we did last year, let, let’s just kind of start with the, the sort of basics. So, so what is a Remote first organization? I, I suppose in the context of before the pandemic situation.
Wiktor Schmidt [00:04:45]:
Yeah, so, so the way we, we always understood remote first was that our kind of def. Working with in teams and whenever we’re doing business wise we always expected people to be available online. So whenever there was a meeting we would have this meeting on Zoom hangouts. Whatever tool you’re using, that’s where the kind of meeting place is. And then if somebody happens to be in the same office or they happen to be the same room, they would obviously join the meeting together from this room. But we don’t have this expectation of people, people being somewhere physically. So we designed the whole company in a way that allows almost everybody to be wherever they want it at any given moment.
Matt Alder [00:05:35]:
Obviously there’s a huge amount of content and discussion around remote working at the moment. And I think one of the most interesting things for me are the people who are pointing out that actually there’s a big difference between choosing to work from home and being forced to work from home. What advice would you give to the leaders out there who are, who are finding that pretty much their whole workforce are being forced to work from home? What advice would you give to leaders that can help their people cope with this sort of dramatic and very sudden change?
Wiktor Schmidt [00:06:08]:
Well, look, one thing I would like to say for sure Is that I think everybody who is now listening to this podcast or, you know, us kind of speaking today, I think we are in this. I mean, everybody has been affected by this, but I think we are in this hugely privileged situation to have this opportunity to be so. To be working from home and to be working remotely. I think there’s a number and a huge number of folks, including doctors and nurses and people in this kind of essential supply chain, and people who are basically doing things that just physically cannot be done remotely. And I think we are talking about the struggles, and we’ve all probably seen all the memes going around about the struggles of working from home, but I think this is really in some way, almost like a first world problem, in a way that I think we really have to have this perspective that we are hugely privileged that we are able to do most of the stuff that we do from home. And I think in this context, the thing that really struck me in the last two, three weeks was that how quickly and how just pretty much the whole world and a lot of people who traditionally were just really against and they did not have this mindset were forced and then able to do so many of those things that they felt impossible to do remotes. To actually do that remote. And I have a few examples from my personal life. Things like just signing some small contracts or setting up some things that were just really. Everybody always wanted to do it in person. Now, obviously, nobody wants to do it in person. And we figure out a way with homeschooling, with education, that’s happening in a lot of countries now online. I think it’s. If there is a thing that, especially at this moment in time where we say there are some advantages and then there are some silver linings in this, is that how quickly those things can change. But then again, obviously, like you said, a lot of people who do struggle with it, and I think there are some strategies and tactics that you can take. But for me personally, this is something that was super easy for us because of the culture and the mindset. And I think whenever we. Before this crisis, whenever we’re talking about how to transition the company into being more remote, we always said, hey, you have to start with the culture. You have to start with figuring out what kind of mindset do you have as a leader and what kind of mindset do people have on your team, and how can you change and evolve this mindset, usually like, you know, slowly and gradually into something that will allow you to be very, very productive in this kind of remote environment? Obviously, now it’s quite hard to do it, you know, in an evolutionary manner. We all had to go through a revolution right now. So it’s rough and before slowly getting used to it. But I think they have to be. Yeah, just basically we have no choice.
Matt Alder [00:09:43]:
I suppose, digging deeper into that, into that culture thing. You know, you talked about that you created a culture that kind of really. That really worked remotely. How, you know, thinking that this is going to go on for some time, we’ll talk about the future a little bit or the likely future a little bit later. How can people maintain their culture remotely or build a different culture remotely? What would your advice be?
Wiktor Schmidt [00:10:08]:
So I think one thing that I would definitely point out as this kind of foundation of being able to work remotely in a way that’s kind of productive and that’s not causing, I guess, stress to all parties involved, is that I think in. And this really works even if you’re not working remotely. But I think this remote work adds additional layer of complexity. If you don’t have this. It’s trust. And I’ve been talking about trust kind of a lot, I think. But the component of really trusting your team to do their job and to do their work in a way that’s the best possible way they can do that without having a constant control. This is the key to being able to work remotely in a productive way. And I think it’s also the key to being the most productive and the best possible team, even outside of this concept of being remote. But this is even more crucial when we don’t have this direct supervision and direct control of whatever people are doing when they’re at home in front of their computers. And I think I’ve seen a few of those stories where with this transition, with this rapid transition, people are. One of the first thing that comes to mind for some leaders is like, okay, so how can I now have this piece of software that will then help me figure out what are people doing at any single moment in time when they’re working from home? And that’s, I think, you know, it’s. Obviously, it’s pretty. I think, you know, it’s quite easy to say that that’s probably not the right approach. But the underlying reason for that, obviously, is the lack of trust. So I would say, if you are looking to, if there is something you have to catch up on, if you haven’t been paying too much attention, is trusting your people. So now you really have to step up your game in this and figure out how you can make sure that do you work as a team without having to be, you know, directly supervising everybody at given moments? I think this would be like the key message I would have.
Matt Alder [00:12:37]:
Absolutely. That makes perfect sense. And I suppose again, leading, leading on from that. What about motivation? I suppose we can sort of talk about, you know, your experience of doing this in the past. How do you keep a remote team or remote workforce motivated and productive.
Wiktor Schmidt [00:12:53]:
Sure. So I think, you know all the. For me, always when I talk about this kind of digital leadership, if you will, how do you basically lead the teams and lead the companies and businesses in this sometimes hybrid environment and sometimes purely remote environments? I always say that it’s the same strategies. So if you look at all the management books that have been written over the last leadership books that over the last years and you look at the strategies that people are talking about, they’re the same. But what’s changed is the tactics and the tools. So people say, hey, you should be probably doing. Some of the tools that people were using in the pre remote only kind of environment are like daily standups and having some kind of a weekly catch up and one on one with your team. So all those things you can do, sometimes you can also do them even more productively remotely. But a lot of people in the past would struggle to do that because of the. Just kind of, especially like 10 years ago, I think some of the tools that we had available to do video conferencing or to do proper real time communication were just not as good as they are today. So today we have all the tools to be able to do pretty much everything that we should be able to do sitting in the same room, but do it over again. Zoom or hangouts. So we would do daily stand ups, we would do things like kind of a weekly catch up course or weekly one on ones and then kind of a layer on top of it. Something that I think is pretty strange. I guess in the beginning and I think it again like three, four weeks ago, if we said, and we’ve done this before as well, but if we were talking about this some time ago, people said this is super weird, this is weird. Now I think everybody’s like, I think I should try this. It’s how can you also move some of those informal and social interactions in this kind of a virtual and remote space? So you see those stories coming out about people just scheduling their dinners and their drinks with their friends over Zoom Call and it sounds bizarre, but I think it’s just the new reality in some ways. But what we’ve done in the past in a smaller scale, and we now done on a much larger scale, it’s pretty much to do the same thing for this kind of a social, business, social occasions, which is like, for example, people who are eating lunch together at certain moments in time as a team in front of their video calls. So those are the things that you can kind of put in there that it’s obviously not the same, but it’s something that you can help bring in some sanity into the situation and create this human connection and not become this remote caveman. I think, again, a lot of us have seen those memes about the remote work where people are going into this kind of a caveman mode without shaving, without doing anything, just because they’re staying at home. So to be able to counter this risk, I think there’s a lot of ideas. And then this is really something where you have to be creative. We have somebody from our team who is doing every morning, she sets up a kind of webinar session for stretching. So she will do a stretching session at 8am anybody from the team can join on a call, and she’ll just basically run a small fitness stretching session for whoever wants to join. So that’s one of those things that I think creates this additional layer of kind of human connection and sanity. And one more thing I would add that I think is super interesting change and also I think brings in this kind of a human part of what you’re doing that was traditionally very much hidden in this kind of remote environment. So whoever was on the video call, you always tried to be as professional as possible. And I think we still all want to do that, but we just realized that with a lot of people having their kids at home, it just becomes impossible. And we see so many of our internal and also our client calls where we basically have kids, you know, running in and just joining the call randomly or screaming from the other room or doing something that I think in the past would cause a lot of embarrassment. And again, I think this is the famous CNN video with the kids running in on the guy who was on the call with life on live tv, which was like a huge weird and a famous thing in the past. Now it’s basically like an everyday situation for most people working from home. And on the one hand, it’s kind of a strange thing, but I think it’s also a good thing because it kind of again, brings in this humanity back into this kind of a techno world of remote work.
Matt Alder [00:18:48]:
Absolutely. And I’m kind of at the stage where I’M thinking I’ll just make my 4 year old the co host of this podcast because so many interruptions. The final question, as I said, it’s, you know, it’s very, it’s impossible to sort of predict the future. But one of the things that we talked about on the podcast last time was equality of opportunity between remote workers and office workers. As this situation plays out and presumably people go back to offices and you know, maybe there will be an increase in remote working. Do you think we’ll finally see that equality of opportunity between remote workers and people who are working together in a physical space?
Wiktor Schmidt [00:19:26]:
Yeah, I think it is hard to predict. I think it’s that you will definitely see at least a part of this, what we see today to survive after the crisis. So I think a lot of people who are completely against this will now say, hey, okay, well actually maybe we should consider it more. And then people who are, you know, somewhere on the fence, they’ll say, yeah, this is, this is totally working, like we should totally do that. So I think there is going to be like a movement into this right direction. I think with a lot of things I’ve seen, you know, even not on the, on the kind of remote spectrum, but also like on the part of basically a digital world. So, you know, a lot of companies who thought that they now, they still have like 10 years to really do this slow and evolutionary transition into digital now they think, oh, actually we need to digitalize much, much faster. So I think this could be similar with remote work. So like people who are, okay, well it’s probably the future but like let’s, let’s kind of, let’s not rush it. We’ll, we’ll get there. When we get there now they will realize, well, I think that the window of opportunity and the change pace is going to be much faster. So this is one thing I would say, but I think something that’s, I would say much more important from, from the kind of a HR perspective is that, and this is something somebody said to me or I read it somewhere and it really stayed with me and I feel like this is something that’s gonna definitely happen is that whenever there’s a, in the recruitment process, you have a conversation with a candidate and you get to this moment where you say, hey, do you have any questions for us? Like what’s, what do you want to know about the company? What do you want to know about the organization? And I think one of the big questions for a lot of people is going to be how did you handle this crisis? What kind of steps did you take and how did you treat your employees? How did you treat your people in this time of crisis? And I think a lot of people will gonna make their decisions on whenever to join the organization or not with this in mind. So I think this is one of the things that I really think about a lot when we think about how are we going to deal with this crisis is that we have to have this lens as that this is really a time of like a time of really like something where you have to make good decisions and it’s not going to be easy decisions. And it’s really hard right now to say what’s the right decision. But it’s an important one for sure.
Matt Alder [00:22:11]:
Wiktor, thank you very much for talking to me.
Wiktor Schmidt [00:22:13]:
Thanks Matt. Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:22:15]:
My thanks to Wiktor. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for Recruiting Future. If you’re a Spotify or Pandora user, you can also listen to the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.recruitingfuture.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 time and I hope you’ll join me.
