81: Remote Work with Matt Dale

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 81 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, Matt Dale. Matt, lovely to have you back again. This week we are talking about remote work in support. As a company that I know has made the transition, I'd love to talk to you about your experiences there.

Matt Dale: 0:48

Fantastic. It's good to be back. It's been a little while. All right. So as we talk about companies and kind of making the transition to remote, I think there's there's there's a couple of phases, a couple different kinds of companies. You have the fully in office, old school, everybody's here. We can talk to everybody and we see everybody face to face. The second one is everybody's remote. I think the the middle area, which is where many of us prior to this COVID thing have found ourselves, was kind of we have part of our team that's remote and part of our team that's in the office. And that's something that Illuminate we we came up against. We had been basically based here in Southern California, and we hired uh a remote person because we needed East Coast hours support. And it was hard to find people locally that wanted to get up at 4 a.m. and and come and do support in a quiet office with nobody there until eight. And we we hired our first person, uh Calen Bacchus, I think you know Caitlin. And he was off in Boston on his own. And I don't know that I talked to him much in the first four months. After we we did the training in the office, we brought him in and we trained him, and it was kind of like we hit our busy season and he was off doing his thing. And on reflection, that was a terrible thing to do for me as a manager. I was I was a little younger, a little uh less experienced. Uh, but he didn't have the he didn't have the support structure he needed. He was in his house by himself. Um and I think he went a little crazy, like there was a little bit of stir crazy going on there. He didn't have the human contact that he was used to. And there was really a lot of stuff in the office that happened he was missing out on. And so after that period of time, we sat down and he said, Look, we need to, we need to change this. This isn't gonna work if we're gonna build a team around around me. And that was that was the plan was to say, hey, let's expand our remote operations so we can cover eastern and central time zones here in the US. And so, okay, well, what's what's broken, what's wrong? And he said, Well, first of all, like big ol' long list, but first of all, like we're having these meetings and people forget to include an invite for the for the video conference. Now, again, this is five years ago that wasn't the standard feature in in Google Hangouts, but but he said, this all points to kind of this idea of a remote first mindset. He's like, I think we need to change and move from an in-office kind of traditional mindset to to a remote first one. And his challenge to me, and and and I agreed with it completely, was we want everybody on our team to be able to work remotely without a difference, whether they're in the office or whether they're someone else. We want them to know what that's like. We want the communication to be done in a public way, in a way that that everyone's getting access to the same information, that everyone has the same, same opportunities for career advancement, um, and and feels connected, like we're actually a team instead of a bunch of people that are, you know, the in-office people versus the remote people. And so that was the thought process behind it was how do we how do we build this remote first culture and really kind of level the playing field, so to speak, and and provide equal access to that information?

Charlotte Ward: 3:22

I mean, that transition from having one person remote that feels very excluded to having everyone remote and it's a very inclusive environment and a very enabled environment is a really long journey, isn't it? But what would you say is the biggest thing that you changed? I mean, it doesn't have to be really like hyper operational, but do you think it was a mindset? Do you think it was a culture? Do you think it was a tweak somewhere or other that that kind of got the whole ball rolling?

Matt Dale: 3:48

I I think it was all of the above. We started off our meetings and said, uh I told the team, I said, we're gonna be a remote first team. We're building this mindset. Here's what it means. Um, it means that all the stuff that I've just told you, and here's how we're gonna do it. And really, it was a bunch of very small things. If we're having a meeting, you include a Google Hangout link on the meeting. And if people are in office, they join the Google Hangout meeting. Uh I talked to our CEO and we bought a bunch of the Google um Chromebox for meetings for our for office. So we had a TV, we had a camera doing that. And then we said too, everyone that's remote, where everyone that's on the meeting has their camera on. So we can see each other face to face. Nobody's, you know, do folding their laundry or or doing something else. That we're we're focused and we're here just as if we were in the office. We're we're when we meet, we see each other face to face. We also made a more of an effort to focus on um a little bit of connection time. So for the teams that were mixed, where there were some folks that were remote and some in the office, we increased the number of times they met together. If they'd been meeting together once a week, we added in you know daily quick stand-ups for five minutes. Just, hey, how's it going? How are things? We we added a process to where we tried to bring everybody together. Now, this hasn't happened in a little while due to budget things, but we tried to bring everybody to the main office at least once a year so they could come, we could sit down together, have an all-hands meeting where we're all in person and we're doing not just work stuff, but really focusing on how do we how do we build the business, how do we build the relationships with each other. And each each of those days we'd have work in the morning and then in the afternoon we'd have a meal, and then we'd do an activity together, whether it was, you know, um, you know, some trust trust building games or um one one time we took a group out and we did uh we painted pottery, which is not something that I would normally have thought would be a great idea, but it was awesome because we were sitting around this table and we're just having conversations while we're doing kind of a, in my case, a mindless activity. Um but but it was really, it was really good, really healthy. So so things like that where we can come together and develop the connection with each other so that when we go apart, you know, I I have a relationship, you know, I know who you are and you know who I am, and and we're more inclined then to help each other and support each other. So I think it was kind of all of all of those things really kind of put together to say, number one, for me, this is something we're doing as leadership. And then here are the steps that we're gonna do, here's what we're gonna commit to as a team so that we can build these strong relationships. And and I think it's really helped. Like when my boss came to me and said, uh, we're shutting the office down, there's this virus, and we want to make sure we're keeping people safe. How's that gonna affect support? Uh, how's that gonna affect our customers? I said, I it's not gonna affect support, and our customers aren't gonna know because we've already been ready for this, like unintentionally planning for it. It was super easy. You know, and we had challenges like everyone's facing, you know, dealing with kids at home all day and all that craziness. But but the technology, the tools, the relationships were in place in it, and it worked really well because we had that remote first mindset.

Charlotte Ward: 6:41

That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash AT1 for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.