Remote workers saving the planet - Alisa Avelar

Guest Alisa Avelar, Global Director of People at Toptal, discusses all things remote workforce including how to build connection and a sense of community in a distributed environment.

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​Nate:               
Great. So thanks for joining today, Alisa.

Alisa:             
Thanks for having me.

Nate:               
There's a lot of news around a growing rejection of long commute times. People want to see the world, they want to travel more. Digital nomads and rural co-working spaces are a thing now. So is remote work the future, and is it the end-all be-all of where the world is going in your opinion?

Alisa:             
I would definitely say there's a transition to accept remote work. Ten years ago when I was working remote, everybody was, "It must be a scam, or it's not real work. Do they really pay you?" all of those things. It seemed a little shady, so to speak.

Alisa:             
Now it's starting to be the norm. Companies are starting to understand that if they want the best talent, they're going to have to start being flexible in some of their policies and processes. And that's why you see a lot of tools now really catering to a remote workplace. You don't see as much VPN networking as you used to see where everybody had to come in through VPN into a share point. Now you have Google Drive and Slack and Zoom. You have a ton of tools that you can use to communicate with people all over the globe or even if you're just staying within the US.

Alisa:             
I don't think it's the end-all be-all, because as much as I love remote and I know how to navigate that and how to build relationships that way, I know it doesn't work for everybody and it's not going to be in every industry. A mechanic can't work on my car remotely, so we're always going to have industries where you just need that person-to-person. But I do think companies are starting to see the writing on the wall.

Alisa:             
I like to use the example we had maybe about a month ago with the bad weather and the horrible winter storms that were happening on the east coast. And then all of a sudden companies were like, "Oh, but you can work from home these days so you're not missing time off work."

Alisa:             
As my job is to protect the company and the best interests of the company, I also sit on the fence of what's in the best interest of the employees and the workforce. And it seemed interesting that the light bulb finally went on for companies realizing that maybe it would be a benefit if these people could work from home so we don't lose production and work. And it seemed a little self-serving, but on the other end, the employees were able to contribute in a way that the company didn't see them before and may start to change the way companies think about are there workers really working. Because let's face it, that's the number one reason why companies are afraid of remote work is what if I have a bunch of people that aren't working. How do I know they're not working?

Nate:               
Yeah. And I think that goes across HR functions, silos, whatever you want to call it. I think this idea that you can just put things out there or just structure things a certain way and not engage actively and somehow it's going to work. We get a lot of questions around how do you do this, how do you do that. A lot of it is just rolling up your sleeves, solving problems, getting in there, being passionate about it. There's not really a playbook to many of these things. There may be best practices you can look at, but you really just have to be engaged in your work. Is that not the case?

Alisa:             
That is very much the case. It's no different than if I was in a building. I spend a lot of my day talking to people all day long, whether it's in a meeting or it's an ad hoc conversation, or even if it's messaging over Slack, which is our corporate communication chat tool. There's always conversations happening, and it's just being engaged 100% of the time.

Alisa:             
So a lot of my admin stuff or other HR stuff is usually done during the non-busy work hours. And then during the normal work day is when I'm spending time with people. My job is the people and it's also the organization. So I'm working either on initiatives that are making the company successful or I'm working on initiatives that are going to make the people successful. And you can only do that if you're actually engaged in having conversations.

Alisa:             
That's how you find out about what people like and don't like, what are their skills, what have they done before that, where would they like to be, and what does the company, where do they want to go and how does everything tie in together. How can I connect the company goals with this person's goals and make them excited to be on the bus of where we're going? And that's what I always say, we're locking arms and we're following the vision. And when everybody's engaged, that's when it starts to happen and you have that synergy.

Alisa:             
It's no different than being in person in an office. You create that synergy online.

Nate:               
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Nate:               
So there's tons of challenges from your perspective in HR, from management's perspective, from the individual personal perspective around working remote or having remote workers. So one of them that maybe we can dive into, because you kind of touched on it and I think it's very interesting, is relationship building.

Nate:               
It's extremely important to have relationships in our lives. What is the role of HR when you bring on a remote worker with regards to relationship building?

Alisa:             
That is the key to everything. It's not just HR's responsibility. The hiring manager and the team has to be onboard, and everybody has to have the same idea of bringing on new people and how that engagement is created.

Alisa:             
I've been in an environment where I started my first day, I'm at home, and there's literally no interaction. I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing, there's no plan. It's here you are, and oh, my first meeting is not until 10:00. When do I start my day? So I've seen the far extreme where there's no engagement whatsoever.

Alisa:             
And then on the other side of the fence, something that we've created at Toptal is really a white glove service from the time that the candidate is going through the interview process, candidate experience and new hire experience and overall team member experience is absolutely critical to someone's success being remote. It's the village, right? It takes a village to raise a child. Well it takes a village for a new hire to click and to get into the group and to understand the job and their role and how do they participate and how do they contribute and all of those things. So it just doesn't say, "Oh, here you are. Yes, we've done all the interviews and now you're set free."

Alisa:             
We're still handholding and locking arms with them along the way easily into this six-month mark.

Nate:               
Yeah, absolutely.

Nate:               
And I think I would like to take the relationship building and community discussion in a little bit of a maybe creative direction. That's my positive spin on it. So it's occurred to me over the last three years of working remotely that the idea of community changes pretty drastically. And let me explain a little bit.

Nate:               
When you take a job at an office, if you're a technical worker obviously or a person who works in an office, you're creating relationships in a community largely based on your work within that office. But it's a pretty homogenous community. In my world working remotely, and I think many remote workers sitting down to think about it would feel the same way, I do have my community, it's a little bit more of a diverse community, and it's actually located where I live and play and my son goes to school and all of those things.

Nate:               
So I'm at the coffee shop doing my work, making relationships with people that are not necessarily professional workers. They might be retired, they might be tree cutters, they might be mechanics, like you said, whatever it is. So I have a sense that potentially some of the divide that we have between office workers and blue collar workers partially could be solved by people working remotely and engaging in their community. And also, I think we would get more diversity of thought if more people were working remote and interacting with everybody who lives around them.

Alisa:             
Absolutely. Diversity. I almost think that a remote global work environment, diversity is almost built in from the get go. Because you immediately have different cultures, different upbringings, different beliefs, different thought processes, which allows for a much more collaborative and creative discussion on a variety of topics. And you can build that.

Alisa:             
You said that you may be at your coffee shop, and you're talking to people that you wouldn't normally talk to if you went to an office because you would be at work, and they would be at the coffee shop. And it's the same thing for me is being remote, and I have my global network, and I'm talking to somebody that is in Croatia, well they're six hours ahead and what does their day look like at this time and what are the things that they engage in in the weekend and how are we finding similarities. And I think what we find is that we have much more in common than we don't. And that's where the relationship starts to take the form and we realize that we're a much smaller world than we think we are.

Alisa:             
They always say the six degrees of separation, right? And so it doesn't matter who you're talking to, you can always find something very common very quickly, which allows for that collaborative conversation that you may have never had with somebody, you may have never even understood. You may have never even had an opportunity to interact, but because you're at the coffee shop and maybe there's a group of mechanics sitting next to you and you get to talk to them about cars and you get to learn something new, or I'm talking to somebody and I'm learning about some traditional holiday dinner thing because we just happen to be having those conversations.

Alisa:             
But it's not just about the personal level too, it's about the level of thought that comes into the work environment and that collaboration that is brought a whole other level when you're not talking to 10 people in the same city that grew up there their whole entire lives, never moved, the thought process is so same that it's almost a status quo versus actually taking it to the next level.

Alisa:             
Because everybody on my team is from seven different countries, we're going to have seven different perspectives, which is great because what's the number one problem in any relationship, personal or professional, it's communication. And if you can have all of those different perspectives represented when you go to communicate change over an organization, the chances of you communicating it incorrectly, it becomes less and less because you've had so many perspectives brought into the idea of word usage or context or verbiage. And I think that's where the relationship starts to build because you immediately begin to understand each other much more quickly because you've had their ideas, versus everybody thinks the same because we're all from the same city, we've all lived here.

Alisa:             
So there's definitely, when you start thinking remote, it's not just about your town, but it's thinking about who could I work with across the globe that I may actually have something in common with and be able to gain a deeper understanding of people in general, but then also how people function in the workplace.

Nate:               
Yeah, that's awesome. Remote workers saving the planet.

Alisa:             
Exactly.

Nate:               
I love it.

Nate:               
So I want to switch a little bit to technology because that is definitely critical in a remote workforce, but I would say even if you have a distributed workforce. Not many companies these days are all in the same building at the same time having meetings in person. And I think we've all had that experience where you've got 25 people on a conference call, there's a dog barking in the background, there are a couple of people who are heavy breathing and aren't on mute.

Nate:               
So talk to me a little bit about the importance of technology in a remote workforce. Maybe touch on HR tech specifically if you could, and what are the issues and concerns that you see there.

Alisa:             
Great question. Technology is always a big question. It's like this hovering black cloud. It's like now we have a remote work force, but how do we keep everybody connected and on the same page? And there's a variety of tools that will do that for you.

Alisa:             
What I like to remember is having a collaborative tool where everybody can work in and to cut down on some of the things you talked about, the heavy breathing or people not being on mute, we immediately have, when people onboard, communication etiquette, and that is to mute yourself when you join a meeting or if you're not speaking or if you have large background noise.

Alisa:             
The number one item we require is that you have to have a strong internet connection wherever you are. It doesn't matter whether you're a digital nomad or you're working from home or the coffee shop, the expectation is that if you're working remote that you have a strong internet connection. The foundation of being a good remote worker is that you always have connectivity.

Nate:               
Yeah.

Nate:               
I think one of the big questions is what are the tools that you could never live without? What are the critical tools in your world, which is 100% distributed remote workforce?

Alisa:             
The number one tool that I could not live without probably would be Slack. That is our corporate communication tool. When I explain it to new hires, Slack is our office building. Teams each have a channel where they talk about projects and things that are going on with that specific team. And they're public channels, so you could go to any team channel and actually look to see what projects they may be working on or things that they're talking about. We're a very transparent organization, so all of the departments and team discussions are open channels, so to speak, or chats.

Alisa:             
Then there's also lifestyle private channels. So if you like food or animals or travel, or you're in a specific location, there may be channels that are specifically set up for that so that those people can connect. We have fitness channels and things of that nature. Slack would definitely be one that ... we use Slack more than we use email, and I think any technology person listening to this, it was our common phrase is "I'll ping you when I get that information." Pinging you, that's a big technology term. But in Slack, I would rather talk to somebody in Slack than via email. Most of us are living in Slack day to day.

Alisa:             
Zoom would be another one I can't live without, because not only being in HR, but being a professional and needing to connect with people, all of my calls are on video by choice. And when I first arrived here, we were using Skype, and it was just audio and their chat function. And then when we moved to Slack, we integrated with Zoom, and now all of my calls are on video.

Alisa:             
And that's the other way to build relationships, because nothing says more about another person than you making eye contact with them and actually talking to them. Okay, so you can't touch me, but you can see my arm movements. Even now, when I'm talking to you, I can't see you, you can't see me, but my arms are in the air waving and talking. So people can see you as a person and a personality and get to know you versus just when you're typing things out where it can seem very black and white in a text message. On Slack, you can get on Zoom and have a very personal conversation and build that relationship through that. So Zoom and Slack are the two pieces I couldn't live without.

Alisa:             
And then obviously the Google suite, because we do everything inside of the Google suite application, whether it's Google sheets or documents, slides, everything is inside of that.

Nate:               
Is that where most of the technical collaboration is done, or do you have other tools that are used for technical and work collaboration?

Alisa:             
For technical, we have a lot of other tools. GitHub for some documentation. Confluence and Gyra are some other tools that we use. Obviously we're a technology company, so we have a lot of tools that identify issues or things on the back end. So we have bots that actually work within Slack that notify teams of certain things. So there's a variety of tools that we use on the technical side.

Alisa:             
And I think the most important piece for a remote workforce is to stay agile. Don't get caught up in a lot of red tape processes and chain of command type of bureaucracy. You need to keep that flat organization so that you can actually make things happen and be able to talk to certain people.

Nate:               
(phone ringing in background) We have a random phone in our den where I work. And I say a random phone because it came with the house and it's like a landline. And it rings every once in a while. And there are people on the other end from other homes in the area. We're really rural. We've never paid a bill on this thing. I've called myself on it, and it actually has a phone number. So just every once in a while, the mystery phone rings.

Alisa:             
Hello, welcome to remote work. You're going to hear something in the background, you're going to hear a door close. That's just a part of remote work, and that's to be expected.

Nate:               
Yeah, absolutely.

Nate:               
So one last question for you. If you could change one thing about the perception of remote workers, what would that thing be?

Alisa:             
If I was talking to an employer, I would want to change the perception that remote workers are probably more productive than the employee sitting in the office. It's a two-way street. It's a relationship. So the employer has to trust that the person working from home is actually working, and the employee that's working at home has to trust that the employer is actually going to see their value without actually seeing them physically.

Alisa:             
Because that's the whole thing, that employers are afraid that they're not working or they're not productive, employees are worried about that they might miss a promotion or not feel valued because someone doesn't see their work. So there is an intentional engagement activity that must happen on both sides.

Alisa:             
So I would ask that employers really understand that employees do want to go do a good job. They want to be productive and they want to be valued. Employees need to also understand that employers want the same thing. We both want the same thing, but it's two different perspectives. So I think if they just sit down and realize that both want the same thing, both want to be productive, both want to be valued, both want to contribute, both want to be a part of something great. And it doesn't matter where you're sitting at, you can still get it done.

Nate:               
Yeah, absolutely.

Nate:               
Well this has been awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Alisa:             
​Absolutely. I could talk about remote work or the future of work for a long time, because it's actually been a blessing, because I am a mom and I do like to work hard, and so I get the best of both worlds, and my employer doesn't miss out, my kids don't miss out and I don't miss out either.