1787 – Remote Workplace Best Practices with Virtira’s Shane Spraggs

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0:58with us right now Shane Sprague. Shane you are the founder of Virtira that's v-i-r-t-i-r-a.com and you're also the author of the book The Power of Remote Building High-Performing Organizations That Thrive in the Virtual Workplace. Okay every leader listening right now their ears just perked up. Shane, it's great to have you. Thanks. I do have one correction. I'm not the founder. I can't take that credit, but I am CEO of Vertira. Okay. All right. My bad. My bad. My bad. No worries. All right. So Shane, yeah. Tell us about the work that you do before we get into the book. Tell us just who Vertira is and what you do there.

1:36Yeah, absolutely. We are a productivity company. It's people, not software. So we put people into companies to help with the operations and project management and sales operations. And we've been in business remotely for over 15 years. And so when the pandemic hit, we were in pretty good shape. You know, we didn't have to worry as much as other companies did, although it did affect us because we tend to get together once a year anyways. And there's some value of being in person. But we took the opportunity to say, okay, let's take all of our experience of working remotely and put it into a book and hopefully help others with that.

2:10Yeah. Yeah. And so when you're working with your clients at Vertiro, what does that typically look like? Well, so I'll give you a good example. We have a team who works with a bunch of sales, enterprise sales teams in the States, and they do all the backend work to allow the salespeople to focus on the strategy of the sale. So you've got a salesperson, they are hard to find a good one. You want to maximize their time. You don't want them doing all the paperwork, even as far as even putting quotes together and tracking deliveries and doing all the other back-end work, that's where we come in. We help take that off the hands of those busy salespeople.

2:48And we offer what some companies call a deals desk service in that respect. In other cases, we will just do staff augmentation and help a startup with a project manager. A lot of small companies will need a project manager, but if they hire a project manager, that person is being put in as a silo. There's no one on that team who can provide them with mentorship because they're the only project manager. And you're stuck with one person. And you have this individual who may or may not be the right person for the job. And they have no one to look up to and no one to help them with any problems they might come against.

3:21So you can help with providing a project manager fractionally or full-time. Yeah. You've worked with organizations like Cisco, Dell technologies, American Express, Telus, Imperva, VMware. And what might be some of the pain points you hear when you start having those initial conversations with organizations like them? It's just time. The people we work with are so maxed out. And, you know, they have their meeting calendar scheduled chock full. They hardly have time to thank themselves. They're working 60-hour weeks. And this is where we can come in and just us doing the same task that they might do saves them double at a time because they have to stop their work, put that down, go deal with the order, then put that down, go back to their original job.

4:09But we can go through and handle multiple orders at a time. And that just streamlines things and helps them get focused on, like I said, the strategy of their sale and their customer service. Is most of the work you end up doing in, you know, kind of setting up better systems? Obviously, you start with strategy, but, you know, I would imagine a lot of that implementation then is just, you know, kind of establishing those systems that are going to work better for folks that may be in and out of the office or not in the office at all, but yet the leaders are still able to get the, I'd say, maybe the efficiencies of the productivity that they're looking for that maybe they once had when everybody was in the office.

4:47Yeah, that's exactly it. So from a remote work standpoint, I look at it in this lens of what's called the self-determination theory. And this is a theory that was born out of the 1880s by a couple named Edward Desi and Richard Ryan. And they talk about how motivation requires three key things. That's autonomy, competency, and relatedness. And so if you really think those are pretty straightforward terms, and they know what they mean, what you think they mean. And if you think about when everyone went from working in the office to working remotely, then people still had the autonomy in a lot of cases.

5:19A lot of people had the competency, but it was that relatedness really started to suffer. And so we have a lot of approaches to things. A lot of them are very simple. Something as simple as having an icebreaker before a meeting can help build relatedness with the people you're working with. And we find that you don't need to have this strong social atmosphere like you tend to have in the office, all that's doing is organically trying to build a relatedness that you can build if you have a bit of intentionality. So we help organizations figure that out for themselves and help them get back to a place where they can be operational and more productive.

5:52I mean, we hear a lot of results about remote work, depends who you talk to, but in my opinion and opinion of many other research companies that remote work is more productive and more so than that, remote workers tend to be retained by the company longer. They cost less, not because they necessarily have to pay them less, but there's no office. There's no paying their hydro, you're not paying their electricity bill. They have all that at home and they're happier. They can do a work-life balance far better than they can in the office. And they're saving themselves on average an hour and a half of community each day.

6:24And that's saving them money. So it is just a win-win-win for a lot of people. And it's not obviously for everyone. Some people feel some feelings of loneliness and being siloed. So when we hire remotely, we look for people who have a strong social life outside of the office. Not only does that give them a outlet for their social needs, does everyone still need social needs? It also gives them a chance to give them something to work for during the day that they can want to get back to after the weekends and evenings. Shane, let's talk about your book, The Power of Remote, about building high-performing organizations that thrive in the virtual workplace.

7:01Who needs to read this book, and what's the transformation that will occur when they read and apply? There are three main categories of people who need this book. And I say that when the pandemic happened, the employees were ready to go to work out of the house. The managers were not ready. They had no idea how to work remotely. And this book helps them with management. HR was not ready to go work remotely. They had no idea how to hire people, how to fire people. This will help them. and executives had no idea how to continue doing strategic planning and maintaining a yearly plan remotely. And we have bits and pieces in the book for that as well.

7:35Yeah. Well, maybe walk me through, I know you'd offer a free chapter, but if we were to condense the thesis of the power of remote into, let's say like a mini Ted talk, what would be the kind of the conclusion that we'd move people to? Right, right. Sure. And I'll do my best. One of the things with this book, it's not like your typical business book. It's not one theme that's been stretched out across 200 pages. And by the time you're in the end of the book, you're just hoping that you see that index on the next page to get the book over with. It's chock full of practical feedback and ideas on how to run things, as well as includes a lot of history and references to support our claims.

8:13And starting from the top, companies have to do a better job of sharing and communicating their purpose. They have to make sure that throughout the entire hiring process. People know why they're joining the company. We want to hire people who want to join to support the purpose of the company. And then in onboarding, you want to make sure you people with somebody like an onboarding buddy, you want to make sure that you have a strong onboarding plan so that people can learn all about your organization. And what we'd say is that, you know, set up it up. So you meet in the first week and you talk about next week's goals.

8:45You meet the next week, talk about the following week's goals, do the same thing again until you get the first month done. Then you talk about what's going to happen in the next month. And then with the employee, you talk about the next month. And by the time you're doing three months, now you've got a setup where you're talking not just about what their goals are for the next three months, but you have a performance plan already put in place for the employee. And you connect that with the companies trying to do. And so they have a sense of their relatedness, of relatedness to how their tasks push forward the company plan.

9:15What are they doing that's making progress that has impact in companies direction. And that's critical to keep people engaged is like, how am I helping out? And yeah, you know, I'm a big proponent on making sure that employees have at least a weekly one-on-one with their managers. We have some thing in the book about how to do that more successfully than your typical one-on-ones in person. It's not rocket science. There's stuff you need to be able to do. And we say that it doesn't need different management. It just needs better management. So all the management techniques we've all heard about over the course of many, many years, all these books out there that talk about how to manage well, you have to apply much of that concept, but remotely so that you can manage your people well.

9:58I was just kind of glancing over an article that you had written that got picked up on LinkedIn. And you talk about, again, remotely relatedness is the key. And then related requires meaningful connections with others. And if you're in an office, relatedness tends to develop organically, remotely, you're going to need a little bit of intention. And what you talk about is you use the self-determination theory as the roadmap for running a successful remote company. Can you share a little bit more about that? Yeah. And as I mentioned earlier, the self-determination theory is three main components.

10:31It's the autonomy, competency, and relatedness. And as a manager, if you were to try to satisfy all three of those for your team members, you're doing a good job. The focal point for this, and it all comes together at the one-on-one. You can imagine when you're having a conversation with your team member, you need to make sure that you're giving them work that they have control over. So I like to say that it's not about telling, you know, when you have point A to point B, it's not about getting them to figure out what point B is. As a manager, you need to provide point B. You have to let them figure out how to get there, right?

11:03And that's the part most managers miss with assigning accountability is they don't want employees don't want to be on the hook to figure out what needs to be done. They need that leadership from you. So they want to be able to have some flexibility on how they take care of that, how they get from point A to point B. So you take care of the autonomy. You make sure that they are competent enough for the work that they have to do. So, you know, do they have the right skills? If not, do they have the right training? Are they over-skilled for this work? That sort of thing. And then the relatedness side.

11:37How is this connected with the company goals? How are they connected with the people that they have to work with on their team? How are they going to see value from this task when it is finished? And so if you keep those three concepts in mind, for all parts of your work plan, you can work out what needs to be improved upon remotely. Yeah. All right. So again, we've been talking about the power of remote building high-performing organizations that thrive in the virtual workplace, spell seller on Amazon. You can also, I don't mean to steal your thunder here, Shane, on a call to action, but you can read the free chapter right now, no opt-in required at your website, vertira.com, V-I-R-T-I-R-A.

12:23Shane, what I'd like to do is maybe give some action items and folks that are inspired by what we've been talking about today can maybe implement immediately or maybe just one little task, something that they could do so that they could maybe improve their current culture and or performance productivity, just how things are being run? Sure. And I'll start with a basic one, communication. Communication is probably the most important thing in the company. Everyone does it slightly wrong. I shouldn't say wrong. No one's ever happy with how things are communicated. And I have a saying that once you're tired of saying that people are starting to get it.

12:58So a lot of companies do not have their communication plan written down. If you're a small to medium, a large company, you're just getting started and you don't have someone responsible for corporate communications. Just sit down. It takes about an hour. Write down how communication works top down and left and right. So how is the message going to go from the CEO to the worker? How is information going to go from the worker to the CEO? and how is information shared laterally, right? And it doesn't take long to outline this and you can just give you a starting point and that gives you something to improve upon, right?

13:33Well, that didn't work, let's do this differently. So a good example is that you might have, okay, my plan to communicate information down is a quarterly all hands. Well, you do that for a few times. Are people getting the information they need to understand what's happening at the company? No, well, let's throw in a monthly newsletter. Great, that's too much information or people aren't reading it. And you make these changes iteratively to improve things over time, but you got to start somewhere. You got to start with a, just write it down, right? And the same thing applies for your onboarding.

14:02Onboarding is such a critical time for an employee to become, feel a sense of relatedness with the organization. And a lot of times all it requires is you to sit down and write down what things you want them to learn, who do you want them to meet and what goals they have in the first two or three months, right? And by doing that, it's again, it's potentiality. You're not leaving things to chance. So, so many companies will just hire somebody and let them flounder and appear on meetings where nobody knows who they are. And that does a significant disservice to the new hire and it forces them to struggle in those first few critical weeks.

14:41So there's a couple of things. Write down your communication plan, write down your onboarding plan and just start iterating it. And the onboarding plan is a great example where at the end of the onboarding process with your new hire, ask them how to fix it. What did we do right? What did we do wrong? And every time you do that, you get some new little nugget that you can fix and improve upon. So your book, again, The Power of Remote Building High-Performance Organizations That Thrive in the Virtual Workplace. It's on Kindle. It's an audio book. It's a hardcover version. It's all on Amazon. And again, link from your website, vertira.com.

15:13Anything else in terms of resources or, you know, when folks go to your website, you'd recommend their next steps be? We have a number of things. One of the things we did recently that I think people find really interesting is we did a survey. We surveyed all about webcam usage back in 2021. This was of interest to us at the time because when people all went off, you know, on remote, there's a huge push for always being on camera. And that was different for us. We didn't, you know, Vertira as a company, we don't force people to be on camera. And our assumption was at the time that that was onerous on individuals and it causes people to burn out.

15:46So we ran this survey back in 2021. We reran the survey in September. And so we have about a thousand people each time and we got some great results. So if you want some fundamental research that you can use to talk to your boss or talk to a leader on your team about how things should be, have a look at this survey. It talks about meeting fatigue and Zoom fatigue. Zoom fatigue was the big one for the longest time. And people are, I think more or less the last few years, getting used to being on camera. But we still tell people, if you're in a meeting where typically it'd be in a boardroom, there'd be one person talking at a time.

16:22That's a crappy place to have a camera on. You're just going to be sitting there staring at people and that's going to slowly drain that person's life away. So we advocate that in those meetings, do your first 15, 10 minutes of conversation, socializing on camera then get off the camera let people do their job and you don't need to be on camera for that but if you are talking with someone like we're having this conversation yeah of course let's put camera on it you know uh visual cues are you know a big part of the communication so um that we believe in what we found out in 2023 was it's less about zoom fatigue and more about meeting fatigue and for whatever reason i shouldn't say well we kind of know but There are more meetings remotely than there are in the office.

17:06And they are now, unfortunately, people have their whole day booked up. They're back to back. And unlike the office where you if you had a back to back meeting, at the very least, you would stand up after that conversation and walk out the door and get a few minutes of, you know, stretch your legs, set in your mind what it was you talked about. Virtually, you just click the button, go to the next meeting. You're going for one to the other. People need breaks, right? It's just too much. But you can't do three or four hours of meetings in a row without impact. I don't care who you are. That's going to impact somebody, right?

17:37I do it. Maybe Josh has got the power. I'll tell you one of my biggest hacks that I figured out, because I do probably about six hours of Zoom three days a week and probably four hours on Monday. So the biggest thing that I learned I have to do is I have to turn off self-view. Don't look at yourself. And I noticed when I did that, it seemed to be a lot more tolerable. And then I think there is probably a little bit something to the, you know, kind of pushing out the comfort zone initially, like if you go from zero, you know, and I think a lot of people were right there, you know, zero hours on zoom and all of a sudden they're 20 hours on zoom in a week.

18:19Yeah. That's going to be very unsettling for sure. So I think I'm just used to it at this point. Yeah. I think a lot of people are and yeah. And so we have a lot of, you know, have a look at the research. We have all that's covered in there. That's cool. And some real good stats about, you know, and so some recommendations as well. So, for example, at Vertiero, we have earmarked Friday. Friday is no meeting Friday. And I don't always have no meetings on that day. It's a place for me to pick up time if I have to. But having a day where you can work is so productive. And I also benefit from having, most of my team is out east.

18:55So I'm in western Canada. Most of my team is out in Nova Scotia and we span four time zones, which allows us to help customers in every time zone. But it also means we have less overlap for when we actually work as a company. And we have a policy. There's no meetings before 8 a.m. Pacific or after 5 p.m. Atlantic. So that means that from one o 'clock on my time, I have no meetings. And it's brilliant. Right. I get I get so much done in the afternoon because of that. And I'm far more productive. And so if you can take some time to be a little more intentional about what meetings you need, and a lot of times meetings are just there because people set them up and never turn them off.

19:32They don't have an agenda. They don't have any purpose. They just get together and talk. All right. Shane Sprags, CEO of Vertira and co-author of the book, The Power of Remote, Building High-Performance Organizations That Thrive in the Virtual Workplace. Shane Sprags, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Josh. Pleasure.

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