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The benefits of remote work for employers has been seen as a way to keep business afloat during Covid for many companies and in a post-pandemic world many are saying “the party’s over.” Time to get back to the office and they’ve gotten push-back from employees for it.
But today’s guest, Barbie Brewer, says the rush to return to the office can be short-sighted. Forward-thinking companies are recognizing and reaping the benefits of remote work arrangements.
Discover what they are and how your organization can capitalize on them too.
What You’ll Discover About the Benefits of Remote Work:
- The two most powerful advantages of remote work for employers.
- The logistical benefits of remote work for employers.
- The advantage of investing in people instead of rent and facilities.
- How mastering the art of asynchronous collaboration increases the benefits.
- The collaboration myth of being in the same office.
- And much MORE.
Guest: Barbie Brewer
Barbie Brewer, author of Live and Let Lead began her career in Silicon Valley during the dot.com boom of the ’90s and is now an industry-leading expert in developing critical areas of modern business performance and culture, including remote and hybrid workforces.
As Chief Culture Officer at GitLab Inc., Brewer contributed to the all-remote SAS company’s growth from 150 employees to over 1,000 in more than 60 countries.
She was Vice President of Talent for Netflix when the streaming service expanded from 20 million subscribers to over 150 million.
Related Resources:
If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other Human Resources episodes.
Contact Barbie and connect with her on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
Check out her website and her book: Live and Let Lead: Leadership Lessons for the Future of Work
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How Smart Businesses Reap the Benefits of Remote Work with Barbie Brewer
The benefits of remote work for employers has always been seen as a way to keep business afloat during COVID and in a post-pandemic world, a lot of companies are saying, “Okay, party’s over time to get back to the office,” and they’ve gotten pushback from employees for it.
But today’s guest says the rush to return to the office can actually be short sighted. Forward thinking companies are actually recognizing and reaping the benefits of remote work arrangements. And when we come back, we’ll find out what they are and how your organization can capitalize on them too.
This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner helping you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.
Welcome to Business Confidential Now, the podcast for smart executives, managers and entrepreneurs looking to improve business performance and their bottom line. I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner and today I have a very interesting guest for you. She’s Barbie Brewer, the author of Live and Let Lead: Leadership Lessons for the Future of Work.
Barbie began her career in Silicon Valley during the.com boom of the 90s and is now an industry leading expert in developing critical areas of modern business performance and culture, including remote and hybrid workforces. Her journey includes positions at IBM, GitLab and Netflix, where she helped develop a work culture that was recognized nationally as transformative.
I am looking forward to learning more about all of this, as I’m sure you are.
So welcome to Business Confidential Now, Barbie.
Hi. It’s great to be here.
It’s great to have you. You know, a lot of people understand the benefits of remote work arrangements for employees, but I’m curious about the benefits of those types of arrangements for employers. In your experience developing both remote and hybrid workplaces, what are the benefits to employers? Why should they give this some serious thought?
Yeah, that’s a great question because I think that many companies right now are grappling with what do we do, where do we go. And depending on what we choose, what practices do we set up? So, I think that really the benefit to employers, one, is a unlimited access to the absolute best talent in the world and that can really help you improve diversity.
And I don’t mean diversity just in terms of what we look like, but in terms of neurodiversity, physical diversity, different thought processes. The reality is, is that even if you’re just talking about America, if you’re, you know, kind of doing that, I’m just looking at America viewpoint, the zip codes that we’re all from highly influence our perspective on the world products and things.
So, by hiring people where they live instead of where they’re moving to, you can tap into a lot of that. In addition, when it comes to, you know, functional diversity in terms of neurodiversity as well as physical diversity, it also enables you to tap into talent that it’s harder for them to come into the office.
I left Netflix primarily because I was diagnosed with a pretty aggressive sarcoma and based off of that, I couldn’t handle the two hour commute each way anymore. I was on chemo for a year and then eventually had a great successful surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering.
But in between those times I still wanted to work and GitLab gave me that opportunity to do so. So, had GitLab said, “You have to come to the office,” I never would have been able to be there first Chief People Officer. And they were a great company. They’re public now. They were very successful and they have no office building whatsoever.
When I joined, they were at about 200 employees in about 40 countries. By the time I left, they were close to a thousand employees and over 60 countries. Now, that amount of geographic diversity is not best for every company because what we probably will go into is how to make remote work work well as well. So, you have the diversity of talent. You have the increased talent pool, which are two factors that make it great for employers.
The other thing that you have is the ability to grow and expand without having to worry about the cost of rent and the expansion of the office. I remember when I was at Netflix, we built brand new buildings and until we did, we had a very hard time hiring because we didn’t have a place to put everybody. When you hire remotely, if you have an increase in need for employees, you don’t have to wait until your facilities department can get you more space.
You can hire them now and sometimes more affordably, Now, I’m not someone who wants to take advantage of lower income areas by paying less. But the reality is, you know, if you pay everyone exactly the same, you’re really not paying everyone the same because cost of living does vary.
So, another benefit to employers can be cost savings in hiring lower income areas. But I like to set a minimum bar that you don’t go under based off of San Francisco area, so that you’re not exploiting lower income areas. But the reality is, is that the cost savings you can get in investing in people instead of in rent and facility costs are pretty significant.
Now every company is different. So, when I say that I’m speaking much more to your software businesses more than I am your hardware businesses, obviously. I still think that certain industries are better off having people in person, like educating elementary school students. I think there’s a lot of value for them to being in the classroom together. But when it comes to SaaS companies, I think that they have an opportunity more than some other companies to really penetrate this global market for talent.
So, you have diversity, you have greater talent pools, you have redirecting costs towards rent and facility costs to talent costs, which can be very significant.
The diversity aspect, as we all know, isn’t just about showing better diversity numbers, but it’s about how diversity of thought and experience actually improves your company’s product revenues. There’s enough research around that that I don’t need to quote that. And then the other benefit that I think it really does have to employers and this is hybrid as well as all remote, but you really get the opportunity to get to know people better.
And I know that sounds odd because you think you would get to know someone better when they’re sitting next to you in your office place. But the reality is, is that companies that are building based in office based, you do have your water cooler conversations, you do have your lunchroom conversations. And we look back at that with fondness. And during the pandemic, a lot of people missed that.
We missed it more than we would have during a normal timeframe, largely because our social avenues were removed from us in our day to day life outside of work. I could no longer go to the gym. I could no longer meet my friends for a pedicure. I could no longer go to a local restaurant and dine with my friends who lived in the locality. So, it was a hard hit during the pandemic to not be able to go to work, but also not be able to enjoy your social functions.
And not to mention that I’ve got two teenagers at home now, so trying to work while there’s two teenagers at home, also on Zoom all day and also asking mom for help all day, was certainly more of a stressor than it is today where my kids are going to school, but I’m still working remotely. Right? So, it’s a different environment there.
But the reality is, is that you actually have fewer – as people work remotely, you have fewer issues with employee relations cases being brought against your company as well. And I know that’s very tactical, but the reality is, is that there are fewer offenses typically when you’re working remotely than when you’re all going out for a drink after work and then things get said that maybe should not be said.
But if you were going out with your friends after work, that didn’t work for your company, you would be under less scrutiny. So, social in the workplace is important, but the social avenues that your employees have outside of the workplace are also very important, and working remotely gives them a chance to fulfill their social needs outside of work instead of fulfilling all their social needs within work. That can actually start to complicate the workplace.
Well, that’s certainly is a lot of advantages. What I’m curious about, since you have experience in both the remote and hybrid workplaces, is how would you recommend an employer, maybe a smaller company or even a startup, evaluate the tradeoffs between remote and a hybrid workplace when it comes to reaping the benefits that you’ve just talked about.
So, the tradeoffs, there’s more the further distributed your companies are. So, most of the tradeoffs involved in having a remote workforce include things like learning how to asynchronously collaborate, learning how to get good with online technology, things like that. You can be a remote workforce but still say everybody’s going to be within a three hour time difference of each other, right? And in that case, you don’t have to build a strong of an asynchronous collaboration muscle.
Right now, I work for a company called Safe Security and they’re great company, great culture. I love it here. We have employees everywhere from India to the UK, to Australia, to the US. So, we’ve got a lot of different time zones that we have to interact with. So, whether or not we’re hybrid or remote, we’re full in office, we still have to learn how to build that asynchronous communication muscle.
So, that’s one of the tradeoffs is fewer meetings, more writing, more reading because that’s really what it gets down to when it comes to asynchronous collaboration. Now, if you’re a Silicon Valley startup and you want to be based in the Bay Area where you perceive all the best talent to be and notice I say perceive all the best talent to be, then your tradeoffs are going to be paying more for talent than you would need to if you diversified where people sat.
But you don’t have to trade off on learning the asynchronous muscle, right? Now, there’s other values to working asynchronously besides the time zone differentiation. When you think about the past of the water cooler conversations, the hallway conversations, etcetera, that in itself can be pretty exclusionary.
So, I know that at companies I’ve been at, when you do open a new building because you’ve expanded, there’s a lot of arguments about where everyone’s going to sit. Because if I’m not on the same floor with this team, then I won’t be productive. And there is research that shows that if you have to walk more than 100ft to get to someone, you’re going to send an email or a Slack message or an instant message of some sort instead of walking to see them anyway.
So, some of those hallway conversations and water cooler conversations weren’t actually healthy for the organization. They didn’t actually drive collaboration with the right people. It drove collaboration with the people who sit near you. It drove collaboration with the people who have to be in the same hallway as you at the same time.
But it didn’t necessarily force you to think, “Okay, I’m walking in the hallway and I see Roberta here in the hallway with me, but really, I need to have Jasmine here too.” Instead, you would just have the conversation with Roberta and leave out Jasmine. So, in remote work, you can actually very easily bring everyone together all at once in the same place.
And yes, that same place might be on technology, whether it be Zoom or Meet or Microsoft Teams or you name it, it’s out there, but you’re no longer victim to location bias. And in office building settings, you’d be surprised at the location.
Bias isn’t just what city you’re in, it’s what building and floor you’re on too.
And so it equals out the playing field. If you consider equal access to everyone, no matter where they’re sitting. And when you write things down, you can tend to be more thoughtful about those things and more deliberate about what you’re actually writing versus what you just speak.
If you had given me a list of questions to answer and I had to write them down, I’d be synonyms through spell checker and Grammarly’s and making sure I said everything perfect which, you know, on this – on this podcast, I’m probably not because I’m just talking right? In addition, you enable more collaboration from your introverts.
So, when you get into a conference room and you have a meeting and you’ve got a bunch of people talking, what I’ve seen at numerous companies and numerous environments that if you’re not comfortable interrupting someone else, it’s going to be really hard to ever actually speak. But when you write things down and you allow people to comment on what is written.
So, I’ve not used every technology, but if we used Google Docs as Google Suite as an example, I can comment in there and ask questions and state opinions and people can respond and I don’t have to interrupt anyone to do it.
I don’t have to have English as my first language to feel comfortable contributing because I have time to process what’s been written, process my thoughts and process what I’m going to write, and even have something to help grammar and spell check me as I write it so it can make me feel more comfortable contributing and less uncomfortable with having to interrupt someone in order to get my opinion stated or my question asked.
So, there is value and some companies are doing this already. They have a memo culture where it’s write your memo, people can comment, people can ask questions. That becomes even more important when you’re geographically diverse, whether that be hybrid, remote or everyone’s in an office, they’re just spread out. So getting good at that muscle is important.
But if you’re talking about flexible workplaces, it becomes even more important in terms of the remote and hybrid work. But I think that it’s a valuable lesson for companies to learn that communicating in that way is actually quite valuable. Now, it’s hard. I won’t pretend for one second it’s not hard to build that muscle of writing things down. And what’s even harder than writing it down is building the discipline to read what other people have written and to comment on it and to participate in that.
It’s very easy to just say, “Hey, it’d be easier if we just scheduled a meeting” and there are times where that’s appropriate, right?
But there’s also times where writing it down first can really accelerate the conversation when you do meet because we come to that meeting with a shared and common foundational understanding about what we’re talking about, and then we can get straight into the debate and straighten the discussion and we can skip the inform and go to the inspire, motivate debate, decide. So, it can accelerate some of those decision making discussions if you do in that manner.
Well, it’s interesting. And I want to come back to something that you mentioned earlier about the nature of the work because, I mean, I have read about critics of the remote work saying that some jobs are better in office. And two examples that come to mind are newsroom. Newsrooms and those professions that rely more on osmosis and being around other people, you know, journalism where people are learning by overhearing, you know, other reporters and how they’re dealing with things.
Another example would be like writing for a TV show. There’s a certain spontaneity that happens when people are in a writer’s room and bouncing ideas off of each other, you know, putting it in a memo and then commenting that some of that electricity is going to be gone. Because again, you’re missing all of the verbal cues. It’s a written word. It doesn’t have the body language. It doesn’t have the tone.
Something gets lost in the process. So, what do you think about those types of professions? And there may be some others, but a newsroom and you know, a writer’s room for TV shows or a movie, they come to mind.
Yeah, No, I think that’s real and I think it’s valid. And I think that you have to deliberately think about how do I do things different to mitigate the risk of what I lose there. Right? So, for example, when I’ve worked with very remote based companies, I do open office hours where I open up a Zoom link. I have nothing scheduled. I send it out to the whole company and an hour or two each day anyone can quote, walk by my desk and hop on to that Zoom and have a conversation with me.
Now, when it comes to creativity, ideation, brainstorming, type activities, you can certainly do some of that via technology. You can whiteboard, you can be on a call together and be writing and ideating and speaking out. You don’t have to go to the same room to do that. How are there is – I’ve never worked for a company that I felt like it’s not important to get together.
Sometimes at Safe Security, we try to make sure that we get everyone together once a month. Now, it doesn’t matter which location you go to or necessarily who you’re meeting with, but once a month, let’s all just kind of co-locate where we’re working together in our office. We actually bring people into the office three times a week because we actually have a pretty united department function there that is in engineering.
That’s all in India. So, they ideate and they express together too. I think each company and each team really should be given some freedom to say this is what works best for us. And if we’re still learning to build those muscles, then maybe there’s a transition that we need to go to. I think during the pandemic, we all tried to survive the new way of working. We didn’t really try to figure out how to thrive in it.
So, I’ll go back to when we went from horse and carriage to cars, right? And you had people redesigning the horse whip when really they needed to be thinking about this new mode of transportation. So, I think when it comes to hybrid and remote work, there’s a few companies out there that are still trying to redesign the horse whip versus saying, “Here’s a new method of transporting our ideas” and there is a new way of doing it now and it can be quite beneficial.
And it’s funny, I people talk a lot about how to build trust. You need to be able to share a beverage together and sit across the table from each other and that building trust builds stronger relationships. I don’t disagree with that. I think that’s true. And I know when I went to GitLab, we were all remote and there was no kind of we get together a certain framework except for once every nine months.
We brought the whole company together. But the executive team that needed a storm and norm and get to know each other because we were new, weren’t getting together at a regular cadence. We ended up getting together once every quarter and it was funny because we were frugal. We were a startup, right?
And so, we there was – there was one week where we were all at my house and I had the CEO sleeping in one of my kids bedrooms. And I had – you know, it was we – kept it fun and we kept it close knit. But it was good to get together once a quarter. So, I think that the teams that feel like they need that should be given the fortitude to have that should decide that they want to hire people within a certain distance from a certain location, if that helps with costs and things.
And I think that we need to just free our minds and be open to a different way of doing business and to question: why can’t we be collaborative online? What technology are we not using that we could be? One thing that drives me the most crazy working for distributed companies and this isn’t just remote companies, distributed companies that have people in different office locations.
When you jump onto a video conferencing meeting with a large group of people attending it, no one talks. They don’t turn their cameras on. They keep their mics muted until the owner of the meeting arrives and begins the meeting. It would never be like that if you were in a conference room or a theater waiting for the meeting to start, you would turn next to the person sitting next to you and you would talk with them. You would chat, you would banter.
We as leaders and we as employees need to make sure we’re doing that as well. When we’re working remotely, when the first person who joins other than ourselves gets onto that video conferencing system, we need to start talking about our weekend, our pets, our kids, our plants, our cooking, our activities. We need to question that project, that thing.
We need to be more deliberate about connecting with each other instead of assuming it will just happen. And that’s one of the biggest areas I see for potential improvement is putting ourselves out there instead of just sitting silently on a video conference call. Chat, have a good time, talk to each other until the meeting starts, just as you would if you were in a conference room together.
That is great advice and I particularly. Like your earlier comment about how we need to go from surviving, which is what people did in COVID. They were happy to keep their business alive when so many actually shut down and jobs were lost to thriving. You know, how do we capitalize on this? How do we make it work? You know, change is hard and we need to grow. And maybe some areas and some types of businesses and jobs can grow faster than others in terms of adapting.
So, this has been really great, Barbie. Thanks so much for your time and these insights about the benefits of remote work for employers.
If you’re listening and you’d like to know more about Barbie Brewer, her work and her book Live and Let Lead: Leadership Lessons for the Future of Work, that information, as well as a transcript of this interview, can be found in the show notes at BusinessConfidentialRadio.com.
Thanks so much for listening. Please be sure to tell your friends about the show and leave a positive review. We’ll be back next week with another episode of Business Confidential Now. Until then, have a great day and an even better tomorrow.
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