Iwo Szapar on how remote work is the way to future

 

Nirmaan Agrawal 

Today we have Iwo szapar, if I spell it right, he’s a remote work advocate and shaping the future of remote work as the CEO of remote how. How do we log on to remote and understand more about their work? And also a book that Iwo has written. You can check out that remote work is the way. I’m assuming that’s available on Amazon.

 

Iwo 

Yes, that is correct. Okay, cool.

 

Introduction

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

So Iwo is a remote work advocate and co-founder of remote how the world’s leading platform for remote professionals powered by and for the community of  25,000 plus people from 128 countries. Okay, that’s cool. So various initiatives like remote how Academy, or virtual co working together with the world’s top remote companies like GitLab, as the newest remote, I was on a mission to help everyone achieve freedom of choice where and when they work. So evil? Can you just take a minute, helping us understand your background? How did you end up in remote work? How do you feel okay, remote work is the future. So what do you?

 

Iwo

Yes, absolutely. Thanks a lot for having me. remote work. It’s when I look back, it’s already 10 years 10 years journey. But actually, four years ago, it started as a business related journey. So I was working remotely for a couple years. But then we moved to Austin, and noticed this huge shift in how people look at work and in life, the whole experience over possession. And then at the same time, I was leading a team and I had a hard time finding people joining the team because of the talent shortage, right? So it kind of started to connect the dots, maybe we can make people happier, by allowing them to basically work whenever they want, and value the experience over possession. And while it does it, at the same time, help businesses find the talent basically anywhere in the world, outside of their location. So fast forward, that was 2017. And now it’s 2021. A lot of things have changed. When we were starting. The main challenge was the mindset. So most companies, I would say, almost every company didn’t believe that remote work is the future and the work can be done from anywhere. And then on the other side for these companies that were already kind of accustomed to this head to this way of working. And they were exploring this further, they were asking questions like how to do it properly, how to be as productive as possible, as happy as possible, and streamline internal processes. So that’s why from the day one, we focus on education, some of the initiatives that you that you’ve mentioned, right now in 2021, we help companies enhance their existing employee experience, through life learning cycles with top remote and hybrid work experts to basically cultivate the culture of learning within the company, because the learning is the way to change adjust organizations that need to truly become remote first. But that’s a long way to go.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal 

Yes, but I think we’ve all made a good start and continue to expand our understanding of remote work. So can you please explain about the positioning of remote how in the industry and where you wish to take it in the coming years?

 

Iwo

Yes, absolutely. So as I mentioned earlier, it’s all about helping companies on the front. There is an employee lifecycle from the talent search through hiring, onboarding, team management, professional growth, knowledge management, where in all of these aspects of the employee lifecycle, there is learning and the learning right now with especially shift to hybrid work for the huge companies that won’t ditch offices, but also to companies that are going all remote. There is a lot of stuff that is changing and there is a lot of things in the employee experience and that needs to become truly remote for so you can think of remote how as a platform with missing pieces to the puzzle in your remote first employee experience, where we enable HR teams and To enhance this employee experience by adding life learning to different parts of, of their employee journey, we are working with over 200, top remote and hybrid work experts. And they and they are delivering various life learning sessions, either during onboarding of different companies, or professional growth cycles. So at the end of the day, we are helping companies cultivate a culture of learning, learn how to do remote or hybrid work for four different departments, because there is no way we can avoid this change in the future. So we need to learn how to do it, how to do it, right. And because the methods from the past like self paced videos, but also offline training are becoming a thing of the past, everything is moving to online. And the most efficient ways to learn are virtual learning with a peer or with a group of groups of peers. That’s what we are doing. On our platform.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal 

interesting indeed. So I’m quite curious on how you make this transition from being a director of sales and company to founder of remote how.

 

Transition from director of sales to founder

 

Iwo  

Yes, so I’ve always been dreaming about starting my own thing. I had some, I had some trials and trials and errors prior to that. And when we moved to us, and we noticed this, this big shift that is what is happening. And I was also with Shopkick for over five years. I was like, Okay, this is the moment to try this out. But also, because not only we were preaching to other companies that remote work is the future. But we also started to work remotely. We also enabled ourselves to work in the last four years, we worked for more than a month from 16 Different countries on four on four continents. So that also helped us to meet the lifestyle that we were looking for. So that was the kind of transition that happened both on the entrepreneurial side, but also on the life side of things. So for example, lastly, when I arrived here we lived in Vietnam, and it was pretty cool. Working with, with most of our clients based in the US, there was also quite a challenge when it comes to synchronous and asynchronous communication. So yeah, that shift was interesting, but absolutely I’m, I’m not regretting this move.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal  

Straight. So I’m assuming the pandemic, starting March of 2020, must have been like a big inflection point for your company. So how do your numbers stack up? Since then?

 

Iwo   

Yeah, so obviously, he has like you, like you mentioned there, the whole world when free mode, and we saw an increase in the number of on our websites of our clients, etc. The interesting point is that in 2020, most companies still don’t know what they will be doing in the future with remote or hybrid. Majority of companies were thought of, especially companies that were hesitant towards remote. They’re like, Oh, this is just temporary. We’ll come back to the office, right? Right now what we see and November 2021, with all great resignation that is happening all over the world, and companies are forced to change, actually now. Since two quarters, companies are really making strategic decisions, that remote and hybrid will stay forever. So that’s actually a fun fact. Because last year, when pandemic hits companies and the companies that we’ve been working with companies that were taking their existing remote work and hybrid work to next level, froze their their budgets, then the new companies that started to work remotely, they didn’t know if this will be there, something temporary or permanent. So it took a couple of months of big, big unknown what will happen next but Fortunately, this year, the market is changing. And we see this. And this is really amazing to see. Also in our system, some companies that, like in 2019, for instance, were absolutely against remote work. And now they’re coming back to us and say, hey, guys are against hybrid work right now, the majority of plans are coming out with hybrid work and stuff. Hey, guys, can you help us so we see the change. But we also see that actually, this is just the strategic beginning of how it’s changing, especially as more and more companies start to open up to office work while still allowing people to do remote work, because this is where the biggest challenges are.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal 

So I think this is the same time that you must have started doing research and about writing a book. Can you take us through your research process for your book? And what is your book about?

 

Book writing journey

 

Iwo  

Yes, absolutely. So actually, the book was on my mind for a long time. Because I love to write back when I was in high school, then during university as that was the management there was not that much writing. And then I remember in November 2019, I was stalking one of my friends, who is my good friend who has a book, book agent, and he’s like, Hey, I would love to write a book to send me about etc. And I was like doing this and he was like, he was not now I’m let’s let’s wait around. And then one day a proposal came in, and he said, Hey, let’s try it out. Of course, we have this publisher, nothing. Nothing ever happens. But that was kind of this push. I remember I finalized this first proposal, and January 2020. So before the pandemic, and then the topic died. It came back after a couple of months. So when pandemic already happened in the world, people started to realize that this will be a long, long term thing. So yeah, it’s that the whole process of writing to I would say over over six months. And so quite some time while still working, working full time. When it comes to the research. Like the big question was what people are expecting from the book that ended up as a title remote work is the way what kind of questions people would be looking for? And who actually is the audience, that is this decision making audience because we knew from many studies before a pandemic that employees wanted to work remotely, but the big change, but the big block or was on company site, and and then leadership teams, right? So there we decided that this is the main audience, so the business audience needs to change their mindset, that this is how the work will be done forever. And then what are the areas that need to be actually either completely changed or adjusted in order to succeed in the distributed environment? So basically, that’s what we’ve been doing that remote for already three years at that time. So we knew what are the areas, especially looking from the leadership side, from HR sides that we should, we should discuss. And then I also didn’t want that this is only my point of view. And so I invited guests, people that are way smarter in remote work stuff than I am, for example, head of remote at that Git lab or former Chief People Officer git lab. So the most famous remote company, and the list goes on and on. And so basically, it’s like a collective, collective answer, how remote work is the way and how it should be done, according to these best practices that remote companies were following prior to pandemic, and now material of the world needs to really change and not just to replicate the office environment in the individual setup.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal   

Sounds great. And I’m assuming a lot of companies have picked up this book, or at least in their libraries.

 

Iwo  

I hope so. Yes, but but but but looking at sometimes requests are coming in from people, for example, from Microsoft who like to read the book and like, Hey, can we start working together helping our clients or our Employees? Do you see that it’s reaching the corporate world? And that’s where it resonates best. So yeah, I hope that it will be changing mindsets, and also giving them ready instruction on how to do it right.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal  

So, moving on to more specific questions on remote work. So do you think remote work is suitable for certain industries versus some other industries?

 

 Is remote work suitable for all industries

 

Iwo  

I mean, obviously, whenever there is a need for in person contact, like in person, or we need to touch something like hardware, or we need to sell something in the shop, for instance, then, of course, that might be a challenge. But everywhere where you’re looking at using your computer, and an Internet that absolutely can be done remotely. Of course, we are not saying that everything needs to be 100% remote. A lot of companies that were all remote prior to the pandemic, they still hosted in person retreats or in person workshops, from time to time, mainly, they served as a place where people were just hanging out together. And for social purposes, rather than actually working together. So I would say, in 90% cases, if someone was working remotely during the pandemic, that’s absolutely a job that can be done. That can be done remotely or in a hybrid environment.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal  

Okay, so how should companies evaluate the benefits that are derived from being remote during the pandemic? It’s almost more than a year and a half? So, are there any recommendations for frameworks metrics that you have put in your book?

 

Evaluate benefits of being a remote company 

 

Iwo  

Yes, so I would start with asking a question that is like above of the of everything, if there is a trust within your company, if your leadership team trusts individual employees, and vice versa, because if there is a fundamental lack of trust, then any sort of framework, productivity tracking time tracking goals, performance, like the system, the system can be cheated, right? So, we strongly emphasize, to first look at the culture, and how people think about their everyday work. What are their relationships with each other? Not just looking at the trust, for instance, but I don’t know if you’ve heard of a term called Radical candor. No, no, I am not. Yes. So radical candor is basically giving direct feedback without sugarcoating. So if, for instance, something bad happened, I’m telling you this, without, of course, I’m not, I’m not harsh, I’m not, I’m still nice. But if I didn’t like something, I don’t know that you haven’t done something, or you haven’t done something correctly, or I have a suggestion for you to improve things we are just openly talking about. Right. And unfortunately, in the previous and the previous office environment, there were a lot of games around it and people not always being with, with, with fondness with each other. And that’s another area where of course, I can put a lot of frameworks and metrics, but if we won’t be open and honest with each other, we won’t be able to improve things because there is a framework 1.0 But then basically there is an iteration happening every week every month you’re adjusting curate tweaking stuff and the way how you operate right. So I would strongly encourage everyone who listens to answer these fundamental questions on the culture side of things before moving on to frameworks and metrics because these are very different. Depending on the department. One thing that is absolutely important when you’re past that the culture aspect is that everything is outcome based. No longer nine to five, no longer eight hours. Absolutely no more than eight hours like 10 1214 hours like these days are over. One, because more and more people realize, especially last year, that their well being, that their mental health is, is extremely important. A lot of people also started to reevaluate what’s really driving their day to day lives. And the first time, it’s no longer on the job. So really focus on what is actually delivered, rather than how much time someone spends. And that’s really tied back to how leaders are managing their teams. Unfortunately, most managers are bad managers. That’s true. And that’s dependent from remote Hybrid’s office work, just from the principals, we have a lot of bad managers, and this transition that is now happening, and allows a lot of people to truly upskill and rescale themselves to create better, better work environments, and employees shouldn’t be afraid of saying things that they notice. And then this spirit of radical candor, which you can actually look up, it’s like a very well known framework, and be open about this feedback.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal  

So can you highlight an individual consulting case of yours, and you’re talking to a company on the remote work culture? So how did you kind of understand if the remote work culture is right or wrong? And how would you advise them about changing? So this part is also like, heavily in my mind, because I also run a remote company, and a lot of people remotely report to me as well.

 

Consulting case example from Iwo

 

Iwo  

Sure, yes. So first of all, you need to gather a lot of data, gather a lot of data from your, from your, from your, from your company, internally, don’t make assumptions, we still see companies coming to us and take, Hey, these are our problems, we need to fix them. And we’re asking like, Hey, are you sure that this is the problem? And this is not maybe one of the sub problems? Or actually, is this completely something else? Right? So there’s really a lot of stuff that needs to be done on auditing the current way of work, right, we talked about culture, then there is communication, right? How do you communicate async sync? Do you have an internal communication policy? Are people getting messages at 10pm? on Slack or Microsoft Teams? Right? Are they forced to respond and that time, then you’re looking at meeting culture, right? Do you have too many meetings and you don’t have time to do actual work? Are these meetings organized in a good way? Is there always an agenda? Do you always have minutes and action items? Right? Is it clear why everyone is on this call? For example, Elon Musk says that, if you’re on the on your if you’re on a meeting where you think you shouldn’t be, you should just leave immediately, right? Jeff Bezos sent out an instruction that before each meeting, there should be a memo. And everyone is reading the memo when the meeting starts. And then if they’re good, they can just add some comments, suggestions, or and they can all immediately leave the meeting if they don’t need to be there. Right. So those are the kind of things we’re moving from a very high level overview, to really small things that should be evaluated. What is the current status, then you’re moving on to work organization, like how the work is planned? Is it very ad hoc or, or you have clear goals? How is it managed on a daily basis? Is there transparency in your work? Do you know who is working on what if you of course should not be right? So that transparency, that transparency, also in communication, right? Are we always communicating one on one creating silos or do we have open channels when people are discussing right? Then we are moving to collaboration, right? How are we collaborating in an online manner? How are the workshops run? Are they effective, what kind of tools are we using for them? No, and the list goes on and on. So basically, at the end of the day, you’re basically first doing a very in depth analysis, with your individual with your with your team, with your teams, through a service, but also through one on one interviews, then you’re analyzing your policies, how people are actually working, so you really gather as much as possible data on the status is today. And then based on this, you can move forward and see What kind of areas and needs need to be adjusted? Because without this proper assessment, you would simply fail?

 

Nirmaan Agrawal  

Yeah, got it. So, like just taking forward this point on culture and the other tertiary points, have you come across, let’s say a start up, which has done really well in identifying the right culture that could work for them in the Remote Setup. And would you know any of those startups?

 

Companies which has done really well in identifying the right culture for remote work

 

Iwo  

Yeah, I think if you if you look at the reviews on Glassdoor on more on comparatively, companies such as HubSpot, such as good blup, such as buffer, such as the West, they have outstanding reviews about culture, and just about in general, the place that the workplace from from their employees. So, I would really look up to these companies automatically also, right. So all these companies that were doing remote work before the pandemic, and they had time to make mistakes and improve things. Those are the ones that were pioneers, and we should look up to them as inspirations.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal  

And any other enterprise level company that has done well with establishing a writer network also,

 

Iwo  

I would say that HubSpot is coming to this layer of enterprise level companies, of course, you have companies such as IBM, for instance, that basically had their first remote workers in the 1970s. So definitely, there’s a lot of good, good knowledge that comes from them. Also, Microsoft is really good with remote and hybrid, this is one of our clients. And we see how it’s working for them. It’s, it’s, it’s really good. But like I mentioned in the beginning, those are still very early days, for large, large companies to make this change permanent. So probably we should meet again in a year, and then see who really succeeded and who failed. To be honest with you, there will be a lot of failures, there will be a lot of blood and tears from companies that didn’t do it. Right. But then at the end of the day. Yeah, that’s, that’s how it works. Not Not everyone will succeed. Yes.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal   

So are there good, important sites? How about time it worth to model, especially with larger companies? Is it only experimented by these larger companies? Are you also seeing a lot of startups experimenting, experimenting with hybrid models?

 

Experiment with hybrid model

 

Iwo  

startups or rather going all remote so that’s, that’s what we see startups scaleups. Most companies that had offices had their long term leases. Stay with this, I’m seeing most we also saw some that were like, Okay, we’re terminating everything, then we’re going remote. But, hybrid is something that will stay. But it’s also the hardest model. So that will cause a lot of issues for these large companies. And especially as large companies have the biggest, the biggest legacy that needs to be fixed, especially on the leadership side. So this is where we see the biggest challenge with the shift on the large, large company side, they’re also moving slower, right. So they need to finally become more agile, more open, more transparent, and not just say that they are XYZ, but this is just a theory and phrase on their career page. But actually it needs to become their become the reality and that will take

 

Nirmaan Agrawal  

some time. Okay. And also, have you also seen the trend to going globally distributed or is it like locally remote? What is the trend going to be?

 

Iwo  

Oh, yes, absolutely global. Again, more for startups and scaleups that they’re already doing this in the hiring outside of their countries, bigger companies. This is something that we rather see growing slower, obviously. But because of the talent shortage it will be, it will also be the thing that will continue to expand. 

 

Nirmaan Agrawal    

 And what tools do you think are absolutely doing well, just because of a lot of companies going remote, and you’ve also liked working on working on and with those tools?

 

Iwo  

Oh, yes. Everything that it’s simplifying and optimizing daily work with around productivity meetings, this space is going through a tremendous change. Right now to either make meetings more efficient, or remove the certain number of meetings from everyday insert, instead of shifting to a sink, either for text or, or video, obviously, companies are helping with global employment. So you can hire people anywhere in the world who are doing great. So those are the two things that come to my mind right now. There are, of course, some companies that are trying to compete with the enterprise tech stack. And I’m really curious to see how this, how this will go. I think one of the interesting companies is click up. Because they basically started to take over multiple tech stacks that the companies were using, and just put it into the answer. There’s a lot of customization. But there’s also a lot of innovation happening in this space. Plus also on the learning side, for companies because employees are to be more and more like video calls and just like learning this way, ability to learn with people from other countries, from other industries from other companies. That’s also something that we see is growing. So definitely, there’s also a big shift and in the way of learning

 

Nirmaan Agrawal  

Any other resources that you recommend that we can publish on the blue on our transcript for this? You can please share it offline with us. We publish that.

 

resources recommended by Iwo

 

Iwo  

Yes, of course, we have over 40 different free resources in our catalog. So you can just simply go to the remote and look up our resources. Other than that, it has a lot of good stuff. Also git lab, with their handbooks. So those are the couple of things that come to my mind. Right after that.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal 

Sounds good. So can you just identify one or two companies for the audience where you distinctly remember, they tried out something new during the pandemic pheromone work, and it kind of worked out? And what was that?

 

Iwo    

Oh, that’s a tough one. Proof very specific you have there’s so many, so many different ways how we can go about it, but do you have some special areas to highlight

 

Nirmaan Agrawal  

In terms of employee engagement, let’s say they found out that working on the mental health of their employees was very important, especially during the pandemic. So can you think of any company that did something extraordinary for like, maintaining the mental health of their clients?

 

Iwo  

Yes. That’s actually not the topic that we are dealing with directly. But on their engagement we have a lot of clients using donut. So basically a way out, you can set on out the pilot employee engagement between your like new hires, or people just in general, connecting more and more individuals where you’re just adding this to Slack and donut is connecting people for virtual ritual coffees. So that would be one way and then of course, that’s maybe a more general answer but companies that understood that virtual Happy Hour is not it’s not for everyone and you should not over organize them at work. Those were the ones that didn’t come to a select here we’re trying this company culture thing, we’re organizing virtual happy hours, but people stopped coming to this, versus people that were like, Hey, we know it’s, you can come if you want it, we are not forcing you. But also we will be organizing smaller ones with different themes. It won’t be only about just hanging out and drinking beer together. But there will be a book club, there will be a movie club, they will have one, we’ll talk about sports. So really understanding that this free time can be also personalized. These companies where we’re really doing this right. 

 

Nirmaan Agrawal  

And any companies that try out something new and employee monitoring, see, which is a very gray area, right? Like not a lot of employees would like to get monitored. So how do the companies ensure that the productivity was right without having to month?

 

Iwo 

Yeah. One of my good friends, who runs a company that basically offers that time tracking software, told me one interesting thing, how you can look at this kind of software. So how do you, for example, use this for their employees, for example, tracking if someone is working past the time when they’re supposed to work, right? So in the standard, it will be 5pm. But if you have flexible working hours, then it can be different. But if you’re working past your working hours, or if you’re working over the weekend, they’re out semantically cutting off your slack, your email, so you cannot work. So actually the tool that is aimed to improve productivity and measure what’s happening, it’s also helping you avoid overworking. So I’m absolutely not saying that these kinds of tools are bad, should or should not be used. But there is a fundamental question that we’ve discussed earlier around trust. So first, there needs to be trust. And then we can look at how we can out donate things to improve the transparency of work, right. Because also transparency is one of the most important values that needs to be in place when we are looking at this. So I absolutely used tools. But before that to the homework. I think it’s gonna be very important for a lot of distributed companies. I agree.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal  

So as my final question, any folks that you admire in remote work and ask three for their contribution in the last few years to the remote work industry? And I asked you this question, because I want to kind of reach out to them and do my next podcast with them.

 

Iwo  

Yes, sure. Proof that the list is really long as a project. So if you go to add, go to our platform, and we have over 210 right now experts approved we have like a repository. And if you come across someone that has an interesting background that is relevant for you, for your audience, and you can just send me a couple of names and I will and I will connect you guys.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal  

Sounds good. I think we would definitely like to get into writing a very detailed transcript for this podcast. And make sure that we tag a lot of people that you’ve mentioned unspoken code off. And we look forward to reading your book and connecting more on that. So thanks so much vivo. And I can share with you the recording of this both the raw version and the edited version in a week’s

 

Iwo  

time. Awesome. Thank you so much Nirmaan and we’ll be in touch.