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The Power of Remote – a conversation with author Shane Spraggs
38 Plays4 months ago
The Independent Minds is the podcast where we don’t tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think!
The Power of Remote
The world wants to work remotely, but not many employers, of any type or size, nor their employees have really worked out how to make remote working work.
Many managers struggle to adapt to managing people they cannot see immediately.
One manager who has worked out how to make remote working work is Shane Spraggs Partner at Virtira, a provider of project services geared to help revenue growth.
In this episode of The Independent Minds Shane shares with Michael Millward, some of the secrets of successfully managing remote workers that are contained in The Power of Remote the book he co-authored with Cynthia Watson.
You will hear how Shane structures his working day and his relationship with his team which is spread across Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
We are sure you will like this episode of The Independent Minds, so be sure to give it a like and download it so that you can listen any time anywhere.
To make sure you do not miss future editions please subscribe.
The Independent Minds is made on Zencastr.
Zencastr is the all-in-one podcasting platform, on which you can create your podcast in one place and then distribute it to the major platforms like Spotify, Apple, and Google. It really does make creating content so easy.
If you would like to try podcasting using Zencastr visit zencastr.com/pricing and use our offer code ABECEDER.
Travel to Canada
Shane is based in Canada. If you would like to visit Canada, a good place to plan your travel is The Ultimate Travel Club. It is where you will get trade prices on travel including flights, and hotels.
Visit the Ultimate Travel Club and use our offer code ABEC79 to receive a discount on your membership fee.
You can find out more about both Michael Millward, and Shane Spraggs at abeceder.co.uk.
Three – the network
If you are listening to The Independent Minds on your smart phone, you may like to know that Three has the UK’s Fastest 5G Network with Unlimited Data, so listening on Three means you can wave goodbye to buffering.
Visit Three for more information about business and personal telecom solutions from Three. And the special offers available when you quote my referral code WPFNUQHU.
Being a Guest
If you are a podcaster looking for interesting guests or if like Shane, you have something very interesting to say Matchmaker.fm is where matches of great hosts and great guests are made. Use our offer code MILW10 for a discount on membership.
We recommend that potential guests take one of the podcasting guest training programmes available from Work Place Learning Centre.
If you have liked this episode of The Independent Minds, please give it a like and download it so that you can listen any time anywhere.
To make sure you do not miss future editions please subscribe.
Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abeceder is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think!
Thank you to you for listening.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Promotion
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencaster. Hello and welcome to The Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abisida and people who think outside the box about how work works, with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone. The Independent Minds is the podcast where we don't tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think. I'm your host, Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abecedah. As the jingle at the start of this podcast says, The Independent Minds is made on Zencaster.
00:00:41
Speaker
Zencaster is the all-in-one podcasting platform on which you can create your podcast in one place and then distribute it to all the major platforms like Spotify, Apple and Google. It really does make creating content so easy. If you would like to try podcasting using Zencaster, please visit zencaster dot.com forward slash pricing and use my offer code ABACEDA. All the details are in the description. Now that I've told you how wonderful Zencaster is for creating podcasts, we should make one that will be well worth liking, downloading, and subscribing to.
Meet Shane Spraggs and Vertira
00:01:20
Speaker
In this episode of the independent minds, my guest who I met on matchmaker dot.fm is Shane Sprags, the author of the Forbes book, the power of remote and the chief executive. Well, the chief executive of a company who's, I want to make sure I get the pronunciation name of the name of the company. Correct. So I'm going to wait until he tells me how to pronounce it correctly, but hello, Shane, how are you doing? doing well. Thanks for having me. Pleasure. How do I pronounce the name of your company? Vertira. Yeah, Vertira. Vertira. Yeah. Brilliant. And what does Vertira do? We help people be more productive. We are a productivity company and we predominantly work with large enterprise firms out of the States to help them with their sales organizations and help their sales teams be more successful by taking the operational tasks and
00:02:15
Speaker
administrative work off their hands so their sales teams can focus on the strategy of the sale. But we also do a bunch of work in project management and staffing augmentation. And you're doing that work in the United States a lot of the time, but you're not actually in the United States, are you? That's right. Yeah, we've been remote for, I got to check my math, but it's been about 15 years now and so long before the pandemic and we are a across Canada Company. I'm in BC and most of my team is out in Nova Scotia and we have people in Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and it's we're just spread out all over the place and its the it gives us four time zones to work in and allows us to serve our our customers in the the time zone that they need to be in.
00:03:02
Speaker
So you are a company that has people all across Canada. So I've been to Canada, several of the places that you mentioned there. And if anyone listening would like to visit Canada, a good place to plan your travel is the ultimate travel club. It is where you get trade prices on flights and hotels, et cetera. You'll find a link and a membership discount code in the description.
Shane's Career Path to Vertira
00:03:26
Speaker
You've explained a little bit about the company, Shane, but tell us a little bit about you. How did you end up running Beterra? Oh, great. Great. I'll go way back. I started as a software developer way back in the early nineties. And, um, from that first job, I started an entrepreneurial venture with a few colleagues from work. Uh, I was a software developer. They were designers.
00:03:48
Speaker
ah There's one of me, three of them. And we were starting a web development company. And we quickly realized that ah that was the wrong ratio of software to do to designers. so um And we had business. So they were kept they were they were staying busy. And I was running off my ass to stay on top of things. and So we had to hire people. And it wasn't long before I was thrust into the management side of things. And then from there into project management. And I finally left there after about 12 years, went to the local studio here in town. We had a Disney studio. So I worked for Disney for almost five years, started as a project manager and worked my way up to senior manager production operations, managing that the studio roadmap for all the projects and project teams. And then I went on a string of
00:04:35
Speaker
of um smaller independent startups, most of some of them in education, some of them in high tech, and then i took the opportunity to join Vertira in April of 2020, and of course that everyone knows was happening at that time and that was my first venture into
Co-authoring 'The Power of Remote' and Remote Work Benefits
00:04:55
Speaker
remote work. So I brought my management best practices from working in an office to remote work and I learned a lot under the guidance of Cynthia Watson who I co-authored the book with and she was a CEO at the time and she was looking for someone to help take over the the lion's share of the business so she could focus on and her passions. She actually just wrote a big blog about
00:05:18
Speaker
hiking in one of the big like mountains. And she has years and years of experience doing remote work. So she was able to give me some great best best practices, which we eventually combined my experience on management with her experience on remote work. And we put together this book. that was published in February of 2023, which now is a year ago, which is crazy to me. Yes. Yeah. But the book is is published by Forbes. That's correct. Yeah. And it's called the power yeah The Power of Remote. So tell us a little bit more about the the book. Why is it called The Power of Remote?
00:05:59
Speaker
Well, you know there's there's been a lot of discovery about remote work over the the past three years since, I guess I have to say four years now, the pandemic ah being March 2020, but what it really focuses on is the benefits, not just to the employees, but to the employers of managing remote teams. And and it also takes it one step further. It's not just about working from home, ah It's about distributed work. And in the last few years since the pandemic hit, the ah the tools everyone and and the the way people communicate has all changed. I mean, it used to be before 2020, you'd probably pick up a phone and call someone. and People now video call. Most companies are are working distributedly, but not necessarily doing it the best way. And so we wanted to share our best practices. And so the the book starts
00:06:58
Speaker
ah with a general overview of the benefits and then gets into just from soup to nuts. It it goes from hiring, onboarding, management, running projects, ah handling sales, and and going through all the the methodology in between. It's a nice expression, not one that I've heard before, but from from soup to nuts, you're obviously used to to some very fine dining in British Columbia.
Time Zones and Communication in Remote Work
00:07:25
Speaker
it is you You mentioned at the start that you have people that are working across four different time zones and and just in Canada, and of course there are 24-hour time zones in the world, but you are able to do more because your people are in different time zones without having people It's like working overtime. It's that follow the sun type of project. The key is to be able to transfer the work between someone in one time zone to someone one in another time zone so that within the space of like 24 hours, you can get the project done and it's done in one day rather than three days. yeah there' is There's surprising numbers of benefits from it. and
00:08:11
Speaker
What I find interesting is that in BC, I'm four hours away from Nova Scotia, but they're four hours away from the UK. So the way I work with my team in Nova Scotia is the same way they work with people in the UK. And we you know I benefit from they go off offline around five o'clock their time, which is one o'clock my time. I get the entire afternoon to work and can deliver things and have things ready for them the next morning. And by the time I get online, there, a lot of that stuff has already had, you know, a chance, they've already had a chance to, to, uh, to digest it and respond to it. And it really speeds things up. And it's one of the time zones, one of the few ways I've found it properly control meetings. We have a rule that says that, um, no meetings before 8AM Pacific and no meetings after 1PM Atlantic.
00:09:01
Speaker
and And we keep everything in that, in that boundary. And it really forces us to really be particular about which meanings we choose and which which which ones are, and what methods of communication we use. Yes. Because the impression that I'm getting is that remote management. requires structure, requires management, much more than managing management of people who are in the same building, in the same floor as you. You need to have a structure to the way in which you communicate, liaise, delegate with people who are no longer actually physically there. Yeah. Yeah. And the, the keyword, the keyword, the keyword is intentional. Everything has to be intentional. There's,
00:09:49
Speaker
When you're in an office, there's there's opportunities for things to be a little more organic, a little more ad hoc because you might be bumping into somebody in the hallway. um You might walk around their you know to their office and and chat chat with them and learn something um off you know off the cuff. That just isn't possible. But in fact, it actually is a benefit, not a detraction. In a lot of cases, you know the new traditional manager who manages off the side of the desk goes in and walks around the office to talk about to talk to their staff, many times they're actually just interrupting what they're working on and breaking their flow and causing them to causing harm to their productivity and and theirre their thought first. The figure of authority the manager appears. It's stand by your beds guys type of thing. Everybody's, their focus moves away from the work that they're doing, that they're going to be assessed on, that is part of their performance management and they the presence of the manager
00:10:47
Speaker
means that they have something else to worry about until the manager goes back to his his or her office, and then they have to get back into the whole sort of routine. I mean, we use our web developers at our procedure are all remote. And I know that there are certain times of the day when it's just like, just don't bother, just don't bother an email or a telephone call or anything, because they are focused on the test that they have been given, the test that needs to be completed that day. And then there are times of the day, not perhaps as structured or formal as you have it, but I'm learning that
00:11:27
Speaker
that might be a good idea is that at that time, that is when we the phone lines will be open when the email will receive a response because it's not um one of those sorts of situations where I'm doing this, but this email has arrived. I've got to answer that. Which am I going to do? You get a much better quality response because the person is able to focus on it rather than trying to do two things at once. Absolutely. Yeah. That's one of the key things we we mentioned in the book is that is having a communication plan you know that outlines, again, back to that intentional keyword as what how are we communicating with our team? What forms of communication do we do um do? Do people have a good sense of when to use which platform and why? Where are where are folders files stored so and how are they named? and That's all part of of communicating. and
00:12:24
Speaker
how are How is someone going to find out about announcements in the company? So how are people going to communicate up and down and also laterally with each other? And it doesn't take much to create your first draft. You can do a first draft in about an hour, just write down everything you're doing now. And then you have that to reflect on and iterate on over over months and months as you as you learn more things and improve it. And then you have something when somebody come someone new gets hired. say, Hey, here's how we communicate. And that, that sets them up for success from the very start. And it really helps identify the things that are important to, to people. And so for
Structured Management and Onboarding
00:13:04
Speaker
example, and it's a bit of a tangent, but I, I will tell people that use email for facts. Let's not have discussion over email. There's a lot of reasons for that. Um, but most notably because people do a very bad job of communicating emotions on email and they get misinterpreted and
00:13:22
Speaker
There's no threads. and yeah So it it's a for a lot of people, it's obvious, but for many others, it's not. And making sure that there's a common ground across your team about how we're sharing information and how we talk to each other. Yes, I'm a big email fan. I like to select the structure and the formality of an email, but you've changed my mind. I like the idea that an email should be used for something that is factual. And for other things, you can use a platform which enables you to like to track the conversation, to track the learning as you get different pieces of information from different people.
00:14:04
Speaker
your own understanding of the issue changes, and as a result, you're able to make a different, perhaps more valuable, more constructive contribution to the discussion. But this idea that emails are for facts and the platform, a team, whichever one you choose to use, Could be used for the discussions the discovery is really a very interesting way of looking things and also what you've been talking about is that to be contentious for a little while perhaps it may not be but i think that
00:14:41
Speaker
If we look at the way in which we manage people in knowledge type environments, offices, then it is all a little bit unstructured. it It is all perhaps a little bit too relaxed. And maybe one of the problems of those types of environments is that managers don't provide the structure for their teams or help their teams to develop a structure ah structured a way to work which will help those teams be more productive and which will evolve with the requirements that are placed on them. It's all very relaxed.
00:15:22
Speaker
I've worked in many organizations and as a ah HR and training professional being told, create the induction program. In a couple of organizations, it was like, oh, it's your first day. Yeah, your induction program, um well, you're a trainer, you create it. But hand on heart, I have never included within that induction onboarding orientation process a section, which is like, this is how we communicate effectively within this organization. But one of the key messages out of the power of remote is the importance of having a structured approach to communication. Yeah. And so yeah the irony is this is this will be good for office jobs as well, people in an office for them to get this and established process.
00:16:08
Speaker
um that when they start up, you know, when someone joins, ah they learn about how ah the company communicates. But as I said, you know, people leave things to chance and they leave things to learned knowledge that's shared, you know, it's habits that people have to learn and it's part of the culture and they leave it to chance. Yes, there's an awful lot of assumptions when somebody is going to work in well and a shop floor on the shop floor in an office, but particularly with knowledge workers, administrative workers in offices, there is an awful lot of assumptions that are made about what people know how to do. And they know how to do it in the previous organization.
00:16:49
Speaker
which could be different to the way in which we do it here. And this whole power of remote is that the power comes from having structure, the power comes from having a structured way of communicating, a structured way of doing things the same way. I did another po another podcast with somebody who said that there is a right way to do something, there is a wrong way to do something, and there is our way of doing it. And what you're talking about is making sure that everyone knows the correct way to do it here. That's right. Rather than you doing it your own way. I'm thinking as well that once you've got that structure and that communication that a remote worker will I think feel more involved in the organization because they've got that structure.
00:17:39
Speaker
Absolutely. and yeah but and And back to that original point when the communication plan talks about how information goes up as well as down. So how does the CEO find out about what the employees or the people at the the linework line management need to be successful? So for example, on our yearly planning process, we have a step at the very, very start where we do retrospectives to all the team members. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with the concept of a retrospective, but it's a, it's a special type of meeting where you spend the first five, 10 minutes of the meeting establishing the agenda for the meeting. Everyone writes down what they want to talk about on sticky notes. Well, or in the case of remote work, we use Miro, uh, and, uh, you know, it's a digital whiteboard and we put them on virtual notes. And then the facilitator goes through those notes.
00:18:30
Speaker
and talks about it with the team. And we talk about what are things that are working well, what things aren't working well, what things would you like to change, and do you have any ideas? That provides us with a an immense amount of valuable information that we can take into the yearly planning process and filter down to the department heads as well and and look for common areas for us to fix and and change and areas that people need training and and so on and so forth. and And then even if we decide not to go with someone's ideas, we now have the mechanism where we can tell them why as opposed to them not knowing why no one's listening to them.
00:19:07
Speaker
And that has an immense benefit to the team feeling listened to.
Retrospectives and Planning for Remote Teams
00:19:12
Speaker
Yes. this The strange thing is the pandemic is one of the things that came out of the pandemic, an increase in people working remotely. It was always there, but it's been dramatically increased. The technology to enable it to happen has been around for a long time, but was made more use of during that time. But what you're talking about there is basic management fundamentals, which, again, it's like could be applied to people who are working in the same place just as easily as they should be applied to people that are working remotely. But this, because they're working remotely, the power of the remote is that actually when you have that type of meeting where people are coming along with the issues that they would like to discuss,
00:19:59
Speaker
A facilitator, a manager, is going to get a much clearer picture of what is actually happening, rather than the traditional approach, which is where the manager tells people what they will discuss in a meeting, getting the information first. And then me and I say, right, okay, what are the priorities? Let's understand them all. I just think it's a very powerful approach to the whole sort of management of people who who you can't see all the time. I've got people in um my team. I've never met them physically. I know that there are other people managing businesses who've got people on the team that they've never met physically, but we've had a lot, a lot of conversations over
00:20:43
Speaker
meeting software, lots of communication, emails and discussion forums. And you do feel as if you get to know somebody very well. It's almost as if the the lack of the opportunity to to meet somebody means that you need to know them more. And you use the technology in order to enable that. yeah Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, I always push back on this concept that, you know, the you have to have social engagements with people in real life. in face to face in order to feel comfortable with each other. Kids have been demonstrating this for years as they've built up friendships with people on playing games on networks. They'll jump on a call of duty and they will play with kids all across the world and they'll form teams and they'll have just as much of a personal connection with them as someone they may know in school.
00:21:39
Speaker
and And really the adults are starting to learn that as well. We have have a few ah steps we take to encourage that. um And we recognize the underlying psychology for that. ah But the reality is that it's you can you can form equally strong bonds with somebody who you don't see in person all the time. That's not to say that seeing someone in person isn't valuable. It certainly does have some value to it. And I like to like to say that it's nice to meet people to find out how tall they are. I guess when you see them on camera, you never know how tall they are. But that's usually the the main the the main challenge is to show up to someone. you know So um we showed we had, um yes ah when the pandemic hit, we had, ah that was the one thing that affected us. We typically got together once a year, at least, um and we weren't able to for the first couple of years. ah But I did eventually get a chance to meet a lot of people I was working with. and
00:22:39
Speaker
and it was always interesting to show up and see, ah you know, I'm 6'1", 6'2", and some of them may but many of my colleagues are are quite a bit shorter, and and they had no idea that I was tall. I had no idea they were short-ended, so it's it's always the first ah it was first interesting, you icebreaker, essentially. yeah I had that same experience with ah someone who, working with them, they're from the Netherlands, which is where ah the tallest people in Europe and the Netherlands and we met and it was like, yeah, I knew you'd be tall, but I didn't realize you would be so tall. And I'm i'm like, you i'm I'm six foot, six foot and plus a couple. And um it was, it was, it was quite, so quite an unusual experience really. But to
00:23:26
Speaker
It just helps to, you've got a relationship with someone. It doesn't matter what they look like ah because the technology that you're valuing people much more for the contribution that they make when they're remote rather than superficial things because you don't see them all the time. yeah You don't actually have that physical presence. yeah So they are much more the contribution that they make. So thinking like, whilst you've been talking I've been making a few sort of notes and I think like the book contains an awful lot of information but, and you know we've we've skimmed the surface of it in in lots of ways but
00:24:08
Speaker
yeah know The key messages are that if you're going to do this, if you're going to have someone and you know people can request working flexibly, working remotely for all sorts of different reasons, but the it's not a decision to take lightly, but making that decision is easier if you can plan with the employees the way in which work will be structured to begin with. So how are you going to to work? and then also how the communication will happen to enable the work to be done effectively. So how is it that you're going to communicate with them as their manager? How will they communicate with you? How will they communicate with their colleagues? And vice versa, so that the flow of information that people need in order to fulfill the objectives of the structure is there in place and things won't break down.
00:25:06
Speaker
you know, so people can be efficient and effective, more productive and create more productive, profitable organizations as well. Yeah. And it's that word productivity as well that, you know, that is also very important is, is understanding how you measure productivity. And a lot of, a lot of companies before the pandemic were caught in this trap of assuming that someone was being productive if they were at their desk.
Measuring Productivity in Remote Work
00:25:33
Speaker
And as soon as that opportunity went away, They now, a lot of them and installed ah trackers, like you most trackers, keyboard trackers, ah they they would measure how long they were at the computer. And that's only just measuring how many keystrokes they made or how many kilometers they move with their mouse. It doesn't really tell you what they could contribute to the company.
00:25:58
Speaker
And so, but the the challenge to do that properly is it's fundamental to the organization because it has it requires that the organization have a strong set of priorities for the year that all filter into the long-term vision and and mission of the company or the purpose of the company. And those priorities need to be well broken it down into manageable trunks by department and then by individual so they know Every single task they're doing contributes to something and and and and then you can measure what gets done as opposed to how long they're in their chair for. Yeah, it's management of results. Yeah. And that's not new. and you can You can buy books from you know probably the 80s, going back years. and you know A recent one that I yeah i really enjoyed was BE 2.0 by Jim ah Collins. He's a guy who did good to great. and
00:26:50
Speaker
and he He wrote the book before the pandemic and doesn't have a lot of conversation about remote work, but he outlines the the intention of having well thought out priorities for your company and how that how that floods down into ah how your organization runs and how you measure it.
Conclusion and Resources
00:27:11
Speaker
And so it's it's not a secret. it's just and where it' just meet It's just required and remote work forces your company. If you're successful at remote work, it forces your company to be more successful as well. Yes. I can see that you mentioned so many things that I would like to talk to. We need to talk about that and we need to talk about that. But ah for today, we've reached the end of end of our time, but it has been really interesting. Shane, thank you very much for making your time available from British Columbia. I really do appreciate it. And thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
00:27:43
Speaker
I am Michael Millward, the managing director of Abecedah and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, Shane Spraggs, who is the author of the Forbes book, The Power of Remote. You can find out more about both of us at abecedah.co.uk. There is a link in the description. I must remember to thank the team at matchmaker.fm for introducing me to Shane. If you are a podcaster looking for interesting guests or if, like Shane, you have something very interesting to say, matchmaker dot.fm is where matches of great hosts and great guests are made. There is a link to matchmaker.fm and an offer code in the description. We'll also include a link to The Power of Remote and the other books by Jim Collins that Shane mentioned.
00:28:31
Speaker
If you've liked this episode of The Independent Minds, please give it a like and download it so that you can listen anytime, anywhere. To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe. And remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abbasida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think. And thank you for listening. Until the next time. Goodbye.