256: The Hidden Advantages of Less Local Remote Teams (or “Get Good at Calendars!”); with Alec Moloney

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 256 of the Customer Support Leaders podcast. I’m Charlotte Ward Today. Welcome Alec Maloney talking about working in a highly distributed environment. I’d like to welcome to the podcast today Alec Maloney. Now Alec is someone I know quite well. Hello, alec, you don’t need to introduce yourself to me. Hey, you don’t need to introduce yourself to me, but would you introduce yourself for the benefit of the listeners and maybe tell everyone how we know each other. 

 

Alec Moloney: 0:51

Yeah, no, that’s probably a good place to start, so I guess I’ll start with what I do. I’m currently a support engineer, and how shall I know? I know each other is. I report into Edwin, who reports into Charlotte, so I’m a support engineer at Snowplow, where Charlotte works. 

 

Charlotte Ward: 1:05

Thank you so much. Yep, so you’ve been with Snowplow a year and a half or so now, right, something in that ballpark Somewhere around there. Somewhere around there. Okay, and the accent might give it away, but you’re based out of Australia. 

 

Alec Moloney: 1:21

Yes, yes, I am Down under Aussie. 

 

Charlotte Ward: 1:25

And my accent might give it away, but I’m based out the UK, and so we’re on pretty much diametric sides of the world, and that’s kind of what we’re here to talk about today, isn’t it? What are we talking about? 

 

Alec Moloney: 1:39

Definitely. Let’s talk about pretty much how to work in like a highly distributed team and, as you know, at Snowplow we have what? 11, 12 people 11. Okay, distributed, you know, pretty much on every continent, well, nearly every continent on the planet. So let’s chat about sort of like how we work together and different experiences from being on one side of the earth to the other. 

 

Charlotte Ward: 2:04

Sounds good, sounds good. I really love this because I’ve covered remote quite a lot on the podcast and we’ve never really talked about it from the point of view of the distribution though. I mean remote can mean just people in their houses in the US right or across a few countries, but we are, as you pointed out, at Snowplow, we’re very, very distributed in support and quite specifically on opposite sides of the world, and that has its challenges, because it’s difficult to get any more than two people together. Let’s put it like that Right. So I have led and worked with remote teams for more than years than I care to admit, and I know you have as well and we’re here, as you know, as in some ways, kind of lead and contribute, and on my side of the organisation there is much more of kind of the gravity. The central gravity of the organisation is much more in the UK and the US. So I have more people, more snowplowers around me, whereas down under in Australia the number of snowplowers in your geography is thinner, isn’t it? So there’s less of a weight of the company down there in terms of number of individuals. So I think that’s kind of an interesting thing to explore as well. Do you want to start with kind of what your experience is Like? Let’s start with the good sides. Maybe we start there. Let’s start happy and I promise we’ll finish happy as well. But let’s start with the advantages and your positive experiences of this environment. 

 

Alec Moloney: 3:49

Yeah, let’s dive into it. So I think positive. I think the best thing right working with a dispersed team is, you know, we get to work with a lot of different people in cultures that we wouldn’t normally, and I think you get really different and really rich perspectives from a group of people that aren’t sitting in the same country, aren’t sitting in the same time zone, and I can even in our team right, we talk about it quite a lot we have not just different personalities, but we have, like different people that bring really different backgrounds. And I think you get that most in that highly distributed environment, not when you’re just sort of like in a single office. Even though you might have people from different places in one office, you’re getting people who every day are having different experiences, so they’re always bringing that to work with them in a new way. So I think that’s like a really big positive. You’re from like even a problem solving angle. You know you can go to someone on the other side of the planet and get a different kind of perspective. Taking a different perspective. 

 

Charlotte Ward: 4:44

Yeah, yeah, I think. I think certainly just the different experiences that people bring in that kind of environment really really accelerates your own growth, both professionally and technically, and personally. Let’s be honest, yeah, so kind of speed of growth, understanding of more viewpoints than your own, Is it? How can I put this? Are there positives from the point of view of, from your point of view, as we just established where there are less people around you in your geography? Is that good? I guess it’s the simple question. For me, it feels like there’s a lot of. So everything you just said about like being able to talk to people, being able to connect, a lot of that is still easier if they’re one or two hours of drift, right, and I have lots of people who are one, two, three, even four hours of drift. I mean, it’s workable, right? 

 

Alec Moloney: 5:52

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think there’s obvious challenges, right, if someone’s like it’s really to UK, where we are, isn’t too bad, because my early evening’s kind of your morning but the US is definitely like a challenge for Australia, because, unless they’re on West Coast time zone and you know they’re sort of like they have that overhang with Australia people like on East Coast it’s really hard to talk to, because if you want to have a meeting with them, you’ve got to schedule it some crazy hour for them, some crazy hour for you. So I think that’s where you can lose a bit of that face-to-face, because you rely largely on like those like Slack or, you know, juror ticket kind of conversations. But I think also part of sort of like the challenge, and I think also how you overcome it, though, is you get used to working within your region really well, where, even if there’s people who are on different teams but they’re in a nearer time zone to you, you’re going to like forge a really good connection with them and you’re going to have like opportunities to connect with them, and you probably see a lot more cross-functional work and, you know, cross-functional engagement from those kind of situations. 

 

Charlotte Ward: 6:59

Yeah, yeah, I think you’re right. Many moons ago I worked for a US company and I was one of a small group, a merry band in the UK and I think I experienced much of what you’re talking about, actually, that the folks around me weren’t necessarily in support one or two were but there were professional services folks and others around me that we were pretty closely bonded to. You know, we were called by the mothership, if you will, in the US a satellite organization, which I’m not keen on because I think that distances you using that kind of language subtly distances you from the rest of the organization. That’s something I was never really that enthusiastic about being called. But the advantages of working with people in different teams are definitely there, aren’t they? Because you have that technical. I think the big one working for a software company is you have that technical expertise around you that is broader than your own as a support engineer, working with your particular technical specialisms, maybe your subset of customers, your particular product or whatever, whereas professional services folk back then, for me at least, were going deeper into the product but were often had a completely different view on it and a completely different set of technical experiences. But they also had a completely different functional organizational experience, so they were much more commercial. They understood that bit of the customer journey, and so it gave me a real appreciation for a different view than my own, just in terms of relating to customers as well, I think. 

 

Alec Moloney: 8:48

Yeah, no, and I think we see the same here. I know I can at least speak, I hope for the Australian team. It’s no plow, but what we’ve really seen. When I first started right, we only had myself and our other support engineer here in Australia and really our nearest person was one of the support engineers in the US who she was working with at the time and when we got into the European hours we started to engage with support and sort of the engineers that would come online. But since we’ve seen the team expand, we’ve brought on to your point like those commercial roles that we’ve seen, like project managers and sales and technical account managers being brought online, and it’s a really good opportunity to connect and understand like what’s the team over in professional services trying to solve right now? How are they delivering training? Is there something we can take from what they’re doing to improve how we’re delivering support through? Is it an article in the KB that can also help them? That’s also going to help us. And then that engineering knowledge I’ve found to be invaluable in snow plow because we have such a huge product that it can be really really difficult to pretty much keep it all in your head at all points in time and we’ve got some people luckily in our time zone who have that sort of legacy knowledge as well as what’s the past 10 years look like, and that’s really, really valuable and I think that’s a strong boon. If you can build those sort of like regional relationships across teams, even if it’s not just with your other support people, you end up with this sort of really good network of people that you can lean on. And then, when you make that effort to then sort of reach out to those sort of I’m going to call them nearer time zone communities where you can start bridging across into Europe or backwards to America if there’s people that are on early enough, you start to then see that knowledge sort of can sort of build into sort of the cyclical version of itself rather than just sort of keeping it in sort of the mothership over in London or Boston. It becomes something that does spread about. 

 

Charlotte Ward: 10:44

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And having that exposure to other teams allow you know, just through one or two team members locally allows you to once you, once you bridge those gaps into other regions, it allows you to I won’t say talk in a knowledgeable way, but maybe, maybe, relate a bit better to other team members in those teams. Right, so you understand a bit of the of the culture and professional services, or a bit of the culture in in pre sales or whatever it may be right? 

 

Alec Moloney: 11:13

Yeah, absolutely. And I think with culture also comes priorities, and I know, I know at least from I think, even even here and you know, roles I’ve had in the past different, you know, departments and sort of divisions across businesses, right, are all going to have different priorities based on what they’re trying to achieve at any one point in time. And having those ties and building that understanding of, okay, this is what they’re trying to solve right now, it helps you not just to necessarily be aware of it, but also, you know, understand, okay, this is why everything in sales is going this way right now. And is there something in support, though, where we’ve solved a problem, where we can try and then go, hey, we’ve got this thing that can help the business in this area here? 

 

Charlotte Ward: 11:51

Yeah, yeah, absolutely All good stuff, right. Well, what’s not so good? 

 

Alec Moloney: 11:59

What’s not so good? I think you know the really obvious one right when you’re talking about, you know, two people sitting in Australia, almost on the opposite end of the globe, to where a lot of the central knowledge is stored. And I think when I say central knowledge, I mean more like the intellectual capital, it’s what isn’t in a knowledge base, what isn’t documented. We’re lucky we have some engineering team members who have a lot of knowledge, but if we don’t go and bug them all day, every day, if we want to understand, okay, what happened 10 years ago and sales, we’ve got to sort of wait for that sort of like that whole loop to go around. If you’re raising asynchronously, you know, I know I’ll happily stay up a little bit later to, you know, hook in with the team and have those conversations, but not everyone is in a position to do that. If you’ve got kids in a family, you can’t really just take the hour out in the middle of dinner time to jump on slack to have a conversation, and I think that’s where people in different situations are going to have really different challenges. And I think, as I hope you know, remote work and distributed working does is probably very likely to increase right and we see more of it. I think we’re going to have to think about, yeah, how do we solve these challenges where, if I’ve got a question in Australia, how do I not necessarily have to wait a 24 hour day to connect every time? And how do we and, if we do like, how do we make that more predictable, more reliable for not just me answering the question, but also the people who are not just me asking the question, but also the people who are answering it on the other side of the world, so that they know, hey, I can get back to this guy and I’ve given him all the information he needs. So I’ve got to make sure I’m asking smart questions so that an engineer on the other side of the globe with specialist knowledge isn’t having to come back to me asking how you can give me an example of that. 

 

Charlotte Ward: 13:49

Yeah, right, it’s front loading. It’s front loading all the context, isn’t it? It makes you much more considered in how you ask what information you provide. And yeah, absolutely Sorry, I completely interrupted you there. 

 

Alec Moloney: 14:04

No, no, it’s so good. I was at the end of my thought. 

 

Charlotte Ward: 14:08

You said a couple of things. One is, you touched on the convenience, say, of taking a meeting at dinner time with a young family. But I think also that remote work allows you to be flexible around that too, and I think that is for me the big give and take here, isn’t it? And I think it’s really important to me also that not everyone, not the same group of people, bear that inconvenience all the time. So I try for it’s easier with certain meetings for sure, but try to rotate some of that inconvenience or make it. You know you find meetings are the big thing, aren’t they? The trickiest thing about a distributed team is getting together live. And I think that for me I try and spread that inconvenience as much as I can so that it’s interrupting someone’s dinner, maybe with the family, at one time, you know, say once every two months, but on the alternate month it’s somebody’s got to come in at 11pm or whatever, right I think it’s. You just try and distribute it as much as you can, as best you can, and that doesn’t always work, it isn’t always possible. You used two of my favorite words in that as well. You said intellectual capital and one of my favorite acronyms. I know you hate an acronym, but is ICM? Intellectual capital management is super important, right? I think we all know that managing your knowledge is the cornerstone of any successful remote operation, and that is really triply true when you’re very distributed, because you have very little of that live overlap. I mean, I’ve yet to meet the company who has perfected that and some of the stuff that you touched on there, particularly that ancient knowledge, decisions that were made before we ever knew we’d need to write them down, that kind of thing that’s really hard to extract and capture, isn’t it? So there, I think, is inevitably a debt that you have to cope with, an organizational and an intellectual debt that you will always have to cope with, and I think that the trick for any organization is getting ahead of that, but sadly no organization ever does. 

 

Alec Moloney: 16:24

I think that’s always the outcome of, like I always call it the startup phase right of any company. But I think it’s always the challenges when you’re young and you’re not operating at scale. So when you’re looking at operational investment right, it’s not the first area you think of, as you know. Yeah, we need to, you know, invest in like KCS internally and externally kind of practices and make sure that every single thing’s written down on a piece of paper. And I think it’s I don’t want to say it’s a trap that everyone falls into, but I think it’s just part of like the maturity curve in a way, where when you know a company’s really early stage, it’s not no one’s really thinking about it. I probably outside of support I’m sure there is probably always some support person there, you know, rallying the troops to try and document as much as possible. But I think, yeah, like it’s probably going to hit this point of critical mass, and I think that’s when it gets to that point of critical mass, and often I think it’s I’ve seen it triggered most often by it’s that person who’s been there since the dawn of time who might they don’t have to be, you know, like Methuselah in the shade, but they’ve been with the company a long time, they’re doing a lot of manual work, there’s a lot of work which goes unseen and that person leaves the company and you lose not just that sort of um, yeah, like the intellectual capital that they’ve been holding, but you also lose like a lot of that sort of like. That’s the way you start to see sort of a few light bulbs go off across the base and people are like hold on. How do we now try and recapture all this information that’s either just walked out the door or you know, you know, being shifted into a different department or a different division. 

 

Charlotte Ward: 18:10

Mm, hmm, yeah, and actually, and actually, that’s that’s often the case, isn’t it? It’s just as companies grow, things have to move around, responsibilities and remit have to move around. So, as you say, part of the maturity curve isn’t isn’t necessarily people leaving, it’s just that other people have to take on some of that workload, and so you have to be able to to capture it and move it around the the organization. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and I think that’s that’s painful at the best of times. But I would only encourage anyone out there thinking of starting their own business to start start thinking about that sooner rather than later, and it’s always going to be later, but make it as soon as you dare, right, okay, I think the final thing that I would like to ask you is is there anything that I should be doing better? There’s a tough question. 

 

Alec Moloney: 19:10

I feel like I’ve just walked into my like skip level. Um, I didn’t know, I mean. 

 

Charlotte Ward: 19:22

I mean, we’re here, we’re here having this conversation with you, you know, on a Friday night, and me on a Friday morning. I do feel like we often end up talking on our skip levels into your evening. And we do talk quite a lot when we talk, because, bear in mind what I just said about trying to distribute the pain, should I come in late at night a bit more? Should we? Should we swap that around a bit? Would that help? 

 

Alec Moloney: 19:48

I don’t think so, because I’m not a morning person by any short means of the words. I think I think we share that affliction. 

 

Charlotte Ward: 19:54

Yes, quite, quite reliably, the 2am Slack messages and yeah, yeah, and I guess I guess I know I threw you on under the bus there a little bit, sorry about that, but I think the point I was trying to make is that, and maybe I should have front-loaded the point I was trying to make to make you feel a bit more comfortable, sorry, but the point I was trying to make was that actually we shouldn’t make assumptions about when people are going to be free or not, right, and I think that often people would assume that something will work for somebody in Australia because it works for them. You know. So I, you know the assumption for me would be I know it’s not true because we’ve been working together for a while, but but I would assume that maybe I should come in late and give you a morning meeting, but that’s, that’s not necessarily what would work for you. And there are people who and I’ve had this assumption made about me People would assume that I prefer a six pm meeting than an eight pm meeting. You know, but actually, like you said earlier, dinner with the family is quite a thing. So actually once, particularly when I had young children getting them to bed, it’s easier to take a 10 pm meeting than a six pm meeting and I think I think one thing that I would encourage anyone listening to do is like put all of those assumptions aside about and actually ask you know or or at least learn over time, when people are expressing this is difficult, this is difficult Like offer something else right, be flexible. 

 

Alec Moloney: 21:19

Yeah, definitely. And then, like from past experience, I’ve been rather lucky Really before here I’ve worked in remote work for that, not remote work for us, but you know, my team has been remote and they were all in the Philippines, which was only about two hours behind me, so we could schedule those meetings in the middle of the day and it didn’t really bother anybody because we just had to make sure that we were one side of lunchtime and otherwise nobody was too fast. But I think here and even I know I do it here where you you’re sort of playing calendar like dodgoms at times, because there’s and I think I think probably this is something you do which I think is really good is you’ll block out your like don’t book time, and I think that’s really a really good tactic and I don’t do it myself, but I think you know if there’s anybody out there who’s like people keep booking my calendar meetings in this horrible time that I don’t want them to like, it’s a really good tactic just to like, set up a recurring calendar block and make it like if you’re on a distributed team, you’re managing one of your out of a distributed team and you’re a sport engineer lock out your calendar and just make it really clear to people. Like you know, book my meetings after this or before this, but just like leave these blocks alone so you can put that family time aside or your date night aside with your partner and you know, make sure you’re still taking time to get that break. 

 

Charlotte Ward: 22:40

Yeah, yeah, that’s really important. I think we underestimate calendars. They’re just such a useful tool. I am. I would encourage anyone and I know support engineers are the worst at this at using calendars effectively because they live in Slack, they live in you know other tools and calendars are because meetings are not a big part of the day to day and most support folks life here at Snowplow or any other organization I’ve worked at. But but particularly once you get to a certain layer in the organization, it’s all meetings and so you get very used to operating out of your calendar. But but I would just advise everyone to get really good at calendars because you can have all of the time zone tools and and everything else that you want, but nothing works better than just going into Google and looking at everyone, everyone’s day, and saying yeah, she doesn’t want, she clearly doesn’t want a meeting there, because it says do not book Like and and and you know it. Just, it just quickly alleviates all of the kind of e free we be. We be bathing the kids Is that you know you still in bed at that time? Just get good at calendars, please. If there’s nothing else you take from this conversation, get good at calendars. That’s my one ask. 

 

Alec Moloney: 23:50

That’s the title, that’s the episode title I’m going to make it that now All right. 

 

Charlotte Ward: 23:55

Thank you so much for joining me, alec. I hope it wasn’t too torturous to talk, to talk to another snow plower on a podcast, but not at all. It’s been a really good time. That’s it for today. Go to customer support leaderscom forward, slash two, five, six for the show notes and I’ll see you next time.