82: Remote Work with Hilary Dudek

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 82 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is remote work, so stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. I'd like to welcome back to the podcast today, Hilary Dudek. Hilary, it's lovely to have you back again. We're here to talk about remote work in support today. And your entire team is remote, isn't it?

Hilary Dudek: 0:44

My entire team is remote. Um, especially we're all remote during this time for the most part. Um, but generally my entire team is distributed. I do have one person that is very close to the headquarters in California. Uh so he can go into the office, but typically he works from home as well.

Charlotte Ward: 1:03

So uh, and I mean I think that's uh that's an interesting choice, isn't it? If you've got if you're five minutes from the office and you still don't want to, I think that speaks quite a lot. I've been in that situation.

Hilary Dudek: 1:14

Yes, yes. It can be commentary on the overall culture, but also I think it speaks to the convenience of working remotely too.

Charlotte Ward: 1:23

So do you think that support particularly lends itself well to remote work?

Hilary Dudek: 1:29

I think it does. I think support along with success, I think those are both really well suited for working remotely. Because as long as you have an internet connection, you're good. You can you can help anybody, anyone in the anywhere in the world. And I think it's just more about the culture that will determine whether you're successful or not.

Charlotte Ward: 1:48

Do you think it makes hiring easier or more of a challenge?

Hilary Dudek: 1:53

Uh the actual hiring process, I think, is easy. I I don't struggle to hire, nor have I struggled to interview in the past remotely. I think the challenge comes with the onboarding. If you don't have a really robust onboarding program, you're screwed. It's not going to be a good experience for you or for the candidate.

Charlotte Ward: 2:12

That's super true. I think I think hiring can be really like the process of hiring, I don't think is any more difficult than doing it in the office. I think that you're still meeting people face to face, you're still having conversations, you still have the ability to set uh case studies or test work or whatever. That's that can all still happen as easily remotely. For me, I think it the challenge with hiring remotely is two things. One, it's either that you're trying to hire in a geography or a territory that you're really not familiar with, or you are familiar with it, but the volume of applicants that you get is absolutely enormous because it's a really popular mode of working, right? You get some really good candidates.

Hilary Dudek: 3:00

I'm experiencing that myself right now. We're currently hiring for two support roles, and I had I think 160 in a matter of two days. It's very overwhelming. It's a good problem to have, but it's it's a lot. What did you mean when you said struggling with a specific area? Do you mean like geography-wise?

Charlotte Ward: 3:21

Yeah, and and actually I'm speaking entirely from personal experience at the moment. I I I'm trying to hire on the other side of the world. Almost exactly on the other side of the world for me right now. I think has challenges of not knowing, you know, what the local job markets are like, what where the particular I mean, you can re you can Google, obviously. But but like there there is a certain amount of understanding that comes with being really embedded in a locality. I think I could talk much more, I hope, in a much more informed way about the job market and the and the real local bubbles of skills that are relevant to my needs in the UK than I could even in America. I I'm talking about the other side of the world. To me, that's APAC right now. I have some knowledge, but I don't have a real close contextual knowledge for that geography. And I think that brings its own challenges with hiring remotely, would you say?

Hilary Dudek: 4:14

Yes, I would agree with you on that point. The actual interview process, the actual applicant process, that's all well and good. But if you don't have somebody over there, if you're trying to hire on the other side of the world or even in that state you're not familiar with, that can definitely pose its own challenges. You would need strong backup from your HR or your people team. In my case, I am very lucky that I'm part of a global support team. So I have uh my manager sits in Sweden. So she's able to help inform me on the whole AMIA scene. Uh, so I have it made right now.

Charlotte Ward: 4:48

Actually, there are advantages in being really hyper distributed already as a company that even if your support team is small and still growing, you can you've got a lot of expertise in the wider organization that's probably already pretty distributed if it's a remote culture, right?

Hilary Dudek: 5:05

Mm-hmm. And it's interesting too because the Sweden team all works together typically when it's not pandemic. So they're very used to sitting in the same room and working remote is pretty foreign to them. And so when we were discussing hiring for these North American rules, she brought up the question like, would you hire somebody maybe in the same state or within an hour or so of someone you already have, would you want them to be able to meet up once it's safe and able to work together? So that posed an interesting question that I'm not sure I have the answer to yet. Is that the same thing?

Charlotte Ward: 5:40

I was going to ask you what your answer was and you don't have one. Okay. Yeah, no, that's interesting. Because it is nice to meet up. Distributed companies have away weeks for a reason that that there is a lot of benefit to having the opportunity to build those social connections in person.

Hilary Dudek: 5:58

But I mean, that is an interesting concept, you know, if they could sort of buddy up, have an onboarding buddy and drive and meet up.

Charlotte Ward: 6:06

I did it once, actually. Yeah, um, a lot of years ago, I hired somebody who was in the same city as somebody else who was already on my team. Uh, very, very several hundred miles from where I was, but they were they were across town from each other. It was a half-hour drive. But for the first couple of weeks, they met up. One worked in the other one's house. You know, it does make a lot of things simpler, particularly. I mean, back then I'm talking 2005. So remote onboarding was a little bit trickier than it is now. That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash eighty two for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.