Designing Resilient Remote Teams: IO2020 Replay with Steph Smith, Trends.co / The Hustle / Hubspot

In honor of our upcoming IO2022 Innovation Accelerated Summit, which is happening September 19th and 20th in Lincoln Nebraska. Thought it'd be nice to pull some of the best interviews and sessions from our IO2020 virtual event. So, over the next few weeks, check out some of our amazing speakers and grab a ticket for the upcoming event. We'd love to see you there. Tickets and more information can be found at io2022.com. And now back to the show. 

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Interview Transcript with Steph Smith, Trends.co / The Hustle / Hubspot

Brian Ardinger: We are excited to have Steph Smith here with the Hustle and Trends to talk about one of these amazing new trends that we're seeing. It's the whole move to remote work. Steph is the Head of Trends and Product Manager at the Hustle, which is a great newsletter, if you don't subscribe to that. Trends is their exclusive group. And I I've got to say it's, it's one of the best groups out there to talk about new things that are happening out there, new business leaders, things along those lines. 

She's got a new book out called Standing Out in 2020. Doing Content Right. And I know she's been doing a series of sessions on that. It's an eBook. You can check it out at stephsmith.io. She's been blogging for a ton of time. And she's also been in this world of remote work. Been a digital nomad for a while. So, with that, I'm going to just turn over to Steph. And we'll talk the trend of remote working. 

Steph Smith: Sweet. Thanks so much. That was a great intro, Brian. Today, I'm going to be talking about something that I care a lot about. I saw some other people in the chat mention that they've been working remotely for a long time. Two, I'm going to be talking about thinking past the office and designing what I call resilient, remote teams. And I do this in a little bit of a different way than I think most presentations on this topic are, which give you a lot of super, super concrete, like you must do this. 

I like to think of this more so as how do we think about what has changed? What does that mean? And what can we learn from this? So, I use three books and I'll get into that in a second to actually convey some of these points. But just quickly, I don't want to talk about myself very much. Brian gave me a great intro. All you need to know is that I have been working remotely for the last four or five years now. 

And I did that originally at a company called Top Tell, which was one of those kind of remote first companies built from the ground up to be remote. Now I work at a company called The Hustle and I've done some remote training for different companies. And in general, have been nomadding around for the last couple years as I work remotely. So that's enough about me. Let's talk about where we are in this world. 

As I mentioned before COVID there was a series of companies I'd say only a couple dozen of scale that were built up to be remote. From the ground up, they said, you know what, we're never going to have any offices. Or if we do, we're going to be remote first. Companies like Zapier Basecamp, Web Flow. All these companies were built from the ground up to facilitate positive remote working environment. 

Now, as we all know, you saw this kind of trend, the slow trickle of people that were searching for remote work overtime. This is Google trends from 2004 to present. Then as we all know, 2020. crazy year. We see this big spike and we're all remote, whether we want to be or not. And this includes huge companies like Google, Cora, Coinbase. Shopify that at least are either going to be remote for several, several years or in some cases like Shopify have just claimed that they are now remote first from here forward. 

The question then becomes with all of these companies with now millions, if not billions of people that are kind of thrown into this new environment, what happens. What happens to these organizations that weren't built from the ground up? Like Zapier, Base Camp, or Buffer. 

Some of the questions that I have here, allude to what I'll be talking about in this presentation. So how does remote work or the shift influence how people interact with one another? How does it influence the social fabric or culture of the company? How does this change how potentially leaders should or can operate at these organizations?

And in general, this all brings me back to the title of this presentation. How do we build resilient teams? And resiliency in this case means teams that thrive in the environment that they're put in, right. It doesn't feel like they're kind of pushing against walls. It doesn't feel like there's friction to achieve certain things.

It feels like they're put in an environment where they're put in a place to succeed by nature, by the nature of the environment that they're in. So, as I said, this presentation is really based on three books that I've read and, and I think are excellent. It's Give and Take, Algorithms to Live By and The Four Tendencies.

And I like using books like this to really frame these conversations because these books are actually not based on remote work at all. They're based on human psychology. They're based on how people interact in given situations or environments. And then I just layer on a question. Is this still true with remote work or how does this change as people go from an in-person environment to remote. 

And so, we'll talk specifically about how giving and taking behavior may change with remote work. We'll talk about how we can design systems. So, using something From Algorithms to Live By, Game Theory. How do we incentivize people to actually act in their best interest? Because they don't always do that on their own. 

And how do we in general make remote work sustainable. And then I'll talk about the potential archetype of remote worker using this four tendencies framework. To preface the three books and the three things that we'll talk about, I want to jump back to summarize where we are.

So, we as a society had a majority of people working in offices. And now we have a majority of people working remotely. And I like to kind of facetiously say that when you work in an office, you work in a box. And that box is predefined for you. And even though it's a little facetious in terms of the analogy, a lot of that is true in the sense that you have a lot of things, whether it's, you know, where you're physically working, how you're working exactly, when you're working. 

A lot of that is super predefined for you. And for some people that's actually better. Some people that's worse. I'm not trying to ascertain whether one is better or worse, but the idea is that before you had a lot of things mapped out for you, right? And now when you're working remotely, the way, the analogy that I like to give is that box is kind of like stripped clean.

So, you get rid of the walls, you get rid of exactly when, how you work. And now a lot of people are left to figure out how t...