BUSINESS INSIDER SPOTLIGHT: COVID-19 has enforced social distancing. Remote leaders Carol Cochran and Joel Gascoigne shared how they foster connectivity. Here's the full transcript.
Buffer; Flexjobs; Samantha Lee/Business Insider
We spoke with Carol Cochran, vice president of people and culture at FlexJobs, and Joel Gascoigne, CEO of Buffer, for the second episode of our Business Insider Spotlight Digital Live Event series.
They told us about how they make employees feel special beyond work duties, get teams together while apart, and onboard new hires from afar. See the transcript below.
Sign up here for next week's Spotlight on remote culture. The digital live event will feature Fernando Machado, the COO of Burger King, and be moderated by Tonya Dua, senior advertising reporter at BI.
Remote work may not be the norm for your company, but it certainly is right now, if you can call working amid the coronavirus pandemic anything near to normal.
So although these are not average circumstances under which people are working, there are measures leaders can take to normalize working from home for their teams. To unpack these strategies, Business Insider Zoom-called two leaders of companies which have been running remotely for years: Carol Cochran, vice president of people and culture at job-board operator FlexJobs, and Joel Gascoigne, CEO of the social-media manager Buffer.
They were interviewed by deputy editor Drake Baer, who runs the strategy and executive lifestyle desks at Business Insider. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Drake Baer: I'd like to welcome everyone to Business Insider Spotlight. This is our Digital Live Events series, and today we have the second in our ongoing series of webinars and other events that we hope will help you navigate the world.
Our aim is to bring together the most insightful people to talk about the most urgent topics. We're going to range across many worlds of business, from investing to healthcare. Next week will be marketing. But this week, like last week, if you saw it, we are starting at the top of the house with leadership and what precisely leaders can do to help themselves and their teams adapt to this new reality of COVID-19 and social distancing.
Today specifically we're talking about mastering remote culture. I should also note that this is, of course, a digitally mediated conversation, so we appreciate your patience if there's a pause or two as people come on or off.
I'm Drake Baer, deputy editor for the strategy vertical at Business Insider, and I am thrilled to be joined by two people who have really learned more about culture and remote organizations than most people learn in a lifetime. These are Carol Cochran, the VP of people and culture at FlexJobs. Carol, can you tell us about what you do at FlexJobs, what precisely FlexJobs is, and one unique thing about its culture?
Carol Cochran: Sure, hello and thanks for inviting me to be here today. FlexJobs is an online job service for people who are interested in jobs that have some element of flexibility to them, whether that's work at home, part-time freelance positions — something with a flexible schedule. We aim to partner with people throughout their career journey and help them along the way. Not only in their job search as a place for it to be easier, faster, safer for them to find that type of work, but also to help them with things like career coaching and résumé reviews, different learning courses, and resources to help them along the way, whatever their needs may be.
What I do for the company is really anything that has to do with supporting the team, the people, and so whether that's in the traditional HR sense or things like helping to expand, extend, support the culture, different initiatives, engagement — things of that nature — learning and development, all things that kind of fall in those buckets.
One unique thing about our culture, I would say — I don't know if it's unique necessarily, but I think what really drives our culture on so many levels is that we were very mission-driven right from the beginning. The whole reason that the company was created was with an aim to help people who had a need or a desire for this type of work. And it really drives every decision that we make, is that goal of helping more people.
Baer: That's fantastic, Carol. And we are also joined by Joel Gascoigne, CEO and founder of Buffer. Some of our attendees might be familiar with Joel's many blog posts and Twitter presence, and in various forms of thought leadership. Joel, we are thrilled to have you here. Can you tell us about what Buffer is and what Buffer does — and also from the inside of Buffer, what's one thing that's unique about its culture?
Joel Gascoigne: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks ,Drake, and hello, everyone. It's really great to be here talking about these topics. So Buffer was started almost 10 years ago now, and we are a social-media management platform for small businesses specifically, and overall we see our purpose as helping to drive small-business entrepreneurship and help companies buy and build their brands and connect with their customers.
And so we have a set of tools and products to help customers to interact with that audience on social-media post updates to Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and other places. And then also engage in, respond, and have conversations with that audience, and then assess the results. So analytics as well is key. And that kind of creates a feedback loop that we've been focusing a lot on recently, from publishing to responding and having that conversation, and then analysis and deciding what to change.
There are a few unique aspects of the culture. One of the key ones that people might be aware of, or not, is our focus on transparency. So we set down transparency as one of our core values very early, and we actually phrased it as "people too transparency," which forced us to really aim to make everything transparent unless there's a very good reason otherwise, and there are good reasons sometimes.
But, for example, our salaries are completely public information, transparent internally and externally. So if you were to Google "Buffer salaries," you'll find a lot of information, you'll find actual numbers for people on the team. And we also have a formula for the salary, which is completely transparent as well, and that is evolving over time, and just creates a lot of accountability for us, improves the system overall because people can have very specific feedback and questions around the actual formula that determines the salaries.
So that's one example, we've also been fully distributed, fully remote, since pretty much the beginning as well. And we've focused a lot on that over time. So I'll leave it that.
Baer: That's fantastic. It's really intriguing that for both of your organizations, the architecture, you might say, of the culture has been baked in for so long. I think it's going to be really cool to explore that in the context of remote culture and transitions in term of culture.
So as with last week, some key questions I want to surface to our panelists (and also, for attendees, please be submitting questions, and you should just see a poll come up). This is your team size and then also what sort of management questions or management insights you're looking for around coronavirus. Myself and the panelists can't vote, so don't worry about that, but if you have a moment please hit us with some responses.
And this is also a good time if you're not really familiar with Zoom, to look at the widgets at the top here, and again that "Q&A" icon, you see the two voice bubbles like in a comic strip, which you click on that you'll have the opportunity to file a question. And for the last 10 to 15 minutes of our call today, we'll be unpacking those.
I'll go ahead and read through the audience survey. So what is the team size? One to 10, 11 to 50, 50 and up and up. Please answer this in light of the team that you're responsible for. Again, this helps guide our conversations to be most applicable to people. And then what are some management insights that would be most useful, within the scope of this webinar and in ongoing coverage from Business Insider: how remote teams work where industries are getting disrupted, what are business opportunities that are emerging in this time, what skills are going to be most useful? That's something I think a lot about, and also something that a remote culture and remote work really informs. And then also which specific leaders in which organizations are being the most adaptive, whether it's from the supply change side to the customer facing side, user experience, et cetera. There's the pole, so let's move into our big questions.
Big question No. 1: What's different about remote culture? So when everyone is working from home, versus colocated culture, where everybody's in the same space. Let's start with Carol, and, in our conversation beforehand, you shared this over email and I think this is a really tidy definition of "company culture." So company culture really refers to the way an organization gets work done. So that's part one, and the way people connect with one another to get that work done. That's so interesting. How do you see these two related points? The way an organization gets work done and the way people connect with one another to get that work done? How's that reflected at FlexJobs?
Cochran: It comes down to the core values of the company and essentially how you relate to one another. And at FlexJobs, what we really hold as a big value first off is that the experience in the way we interact is the same whether we're looking at external or internal. So the stakeholder experience is the same. What you get as a customer or a client, a partner is the same experience you're getting internally as a part of our teams. And it really comes down to a great sense of care. And that's where that core value of being mission-driven, wanting to help people comes in — communication that is very proactive and transparent, and at times feels very vulnerable but necessary in a remote environment where you're missing all of those nonverbal cues.
People have to be willing to be very proactive and upfront with where they're at and what they need, and then a very deep sense of integrity in everything that we do — that we're looking to do the right thing. A phrase that's popped into my head a lot these days in particular has been "people over profits." Joel and I were talking a little bit ahead of time and just know how fortunate we are that our businesses are doing well right now when so many are not. And sort of that push and pull of understanding that while there's so much work to do, being sensitive to the fact that people are dealing with a lot of distractions and uncertainty right now and that effectiveness and productivity is not going to be at the same level that you necessarily expect under quote, unquote "normal circumstances," and really meeting people where they're at and supporting them the best way you can.
Baer: That's great, Carol. So you sent over some photos and some other examples — kind of like the performance of culture, and some norms and habits, rituals, et cetera, at FlexJobs. So I'm going to move us through these, and I'd love if you could kind of narrate them for us.
Cochran: Yeah, sure. OK. So, you know, we do bring teams together, as most remote companies do for in-person meetups, and this actually in Boulder — this is our product and development team. So while we obviously fully believe — we've been remote since day one — that you can be very successful remotely — 13 plus years in, we prove that every day — it is very important to bring your teams together in person and feel that energy and make those connections between the people and celebrate the wins that you've experienced as a team. So this is one of the team dinners from a recent retreat.
Baer: If I can jump in there. Joel, could you tell us about what it means to be convening an entire team, or convening a product group or another vertical, when we're in this time of social distance? How do you bring people together when it's mandated that everyone is physically apart?
Gascoigne: Yeah, absolutely. So this, for us, happens to be more of a norm. Normal 95% of the time. We are socially distanced and working remotely, so I can definitely speak quite a bit to that. We have a few different things — you know, individual teams have regular meetings on Zoom, which is a great platform. We do that with video, we have those calls regularly. So there's definitely structures we put in place to get the actual work done.
And then there's also a communication that's more with the whole company, so we do a couple of different key events regularly, and each one of these happens every two months. So it ends up being something with the whole company at least once a month. And one of them is all-hands, which is more for us to share updates from different areas and make sure we're all kind of rowing in the same direction. We understand the latest strategy and approaches.
And then the other one is called town hall, and that's really more of a pure Q&A event. So we used to have those together and it started to feel a bit strained. We already always, you know, try to rush and fit as many questions in after we've already spoken for an hour to the team and it started to feel a bit awkward. So we separated those out and so we have all hands and town hall as separate events now, and that's worked really well for the town hall. We will encourage people to send in questions in advance and then we'll go through all the questions. We also have a voting mechanism for those questions to get shared with the whole team a week prior to the town hall event. And then people can vote on which ones they want to really make sure get answered. We'll get through everything, but that just determines the order that we'll go through and then people can ask questions in that event as well live. So that's been another key thing.
And then the final type of gathering or convening that I would mention is the casual get-togethers. This is the most important thing as a remote team or in a forced remote setting as we are all in right now through this pandemic. And that is really the casual setting. What would be serendipitous in an office. Normally, you know, getting lunch and you end up chatting about what's going on at home and catching up on things.
So the thing with when you're remote is that you've just got to be really intentional, deliberate about those types of conversations — make sure they're still happening. Actually right now we have four different timings of half an hour casual chats where the whole team is invited per week, so four different, options per week. And it's really just optional, you know, drop into one, maybe get to one of those a week at least, and usually that's about 10 people in total — and in the way of a team of 90. So kind of works out that way.
And it's just a time to, you know, chat — people have kids that are running around and it's just kind of a fun time, catching up, and then also to seeing how everyone's doing. Everyone's in a different place. I know we have people in Asia and Australia. And this, you know, also have different stages that they are at with COVID-19, situations that in different places, we have people all across the US and Europe and then a couple of people in Taiwan, in Singapore. So yeah, that's also a good time to connect and realize all these cultural differences I would add right now as well.
Baer: That's fantastic. I'd like to dig into that a little bit further. Thanks, Joel. So moving on, Carol, because some pretty fun employee experiences here and there, also bringing your whole self to work. I think these are some, usually in a colocated office: flowers might appear at your desk on your birthday, but pulling that off when someone is remote, that's pretty high level. So tell us about how these practices have come about at FlexJobs.
Cochran: Sure. So, you know, as a team — people and culture — we always start with the question, "What would an experience look like if we were colocated?" "How can we best replicate that in a remote environment?" And so, you know, at the holidays, a lot of offices do holiday lunches or teams will go out and have a holiday lunch. Well, we have technology to make that happen, right? So we've done things like these holiday lunches that you can see — this as our QA team. And so they really got into the spirit of either ugly sweater or some other form of holiday attire. Across the company, everybody was invited to join one of many holiday lunches that were being sponsored — and either pick up lunch or have it delivered and then expense that.
We've also done virtual pizza parties to celebrate achievements on teams where we will arrange to have pizzas delivered to everybody's house within a time frame so that they can all enjoy their pizza together on a Zoom meeting also. And then, you know, things like birthdays, we would do something to celebrate a birthday. Frankly, the flowers are probably a healthier cause — often we end up defaulting to cake for a birthday celebration.
I appreciate the comment about it being next level, but you know, you go online and order flowers and have them delivered to somebody's house. And so it's a small thing and it's a small lift, but it means so much to the team because they are being recognized and valued as a whole person, and not just the work that they're doing and those things. It's those little things that can be so important, and so easy to overlook in a remote environment. So you really have to pay attention to those details.
Baer: That's great. That's really the importance of gesture. So scooting back to Buffer. I believe we're looking at snippets of your company values deck here. I'm just going to leaf through — can you tell us about how all of these cultural touchstones written down, how that helps reinforce culture, and then also how would you describe the value of them for remote work? Having committed these cultural values to paper or slide as it were? How does that help establish remote culture or reinforce a culture in a remote setting?
Gascoigne: Yeah, absolutely, I think so. I, I recall early on in the first couple of years of starting Buffer, one of our big inspirations around culture was Zappos. And I distinctly remember I came across an interview that Tony Hsieh, the CEO, did around culture. And one of the questions he was asked was, "what's one thing you would change if you're able to go back to the beginning and start again?" And I was fascinated by his words, "so we will put the values into words, put them in place from day one — and we actually only did that after they were a 100 people."
At the time, Buffer was 10 people. And I felt, well, this person who we look up to at this company, we look up to in terms of culture, said they would do this right away from the beginning. So we should do this right now, we were already 10 people at the time. I think one of the things is, you know, we're talking about culture in here a lot. We're talking about what kind of behaviors were developing within our teams, how we operate. It's all based on culture. We'll talk about how we hire as well, and it really is on this foundation of culture. So you have to really define it. If you're gonna start too awkward and actually, you know, get the whole team involved in and committing to the culture.
So that act of putting them into words is essential. I think the key thing is that without doing that, what happens is that kind of becomes more of a vibe. Things are done based on by band, is it easy to get along with someone. All of these types of things. And that's just where that type of approach is really ripe to bias and discrimination and then, you know, with diagnostic challenges and things which really have a negative impact on the whole company, on the products who build all of that as well. So that's one of the really key things, is by going through a process, getting the values into words, and being rigorous about "are those the right values, the right words?" And does that reflect the company? Does it reflect who we are? But also somewhat are aspirations — that's key, because then it's this foundation you can really draw on, base a lot of the other actions that you take on that.
Baer: That's fantastic. And I that I like it. I'm getting the image, and this is a classic leadership trope, but like a North star or a compass committing to this makes it easy or for everybody to see the direction that you're going and you're throwing together. If I can mix a bunch of metaphors.
Gascoigne: Yeah, absolutely, and it kind of becomes self-selecting as well, I think. And that's where you will show you shouldn't be afraid to lean into being unique with the values that you have in place for your company as well, because it's easy to come up with a really grand, kind of just cliche type values any company would aspire to, but that's just gonna make you similar to other companies. So, how can someone then really feel connected to your company specifically and be like, "I want to be there." So that's something important too.
Baer: Yeah, that's great. So I could see how that also relates to employer brand, right. It's sort of like a radiating like transparency and some people resonate.
Gascoigne: Yeah. And it's OK to be polarizing, I believe.
Baer: That's great. So a question that's very timely now: Everybody is transitioning into a remote culture — or any or every organization that can, right. So what's the most immediate, actionable thing that you would recommend to someone on the organizational side to translate what might be more of a "vibey," Joel as you were saying, implicit culture into a remote culture? Maybe one that's a little bit more exquisite.
Gascoigne: Yeah, I can jump in first if that's useful. I think it is just a couple of things that really come to top of mind when you're making the transition. One of them I think is interestingly solved by this forced social-distance situation, which is that it is useful to go kind of all in if you can. And with transitioning to remote, if you kind of go partway there you have a team of, you know, 20 people, and you say, "Oh, two people can start to work from home." You're going to create a situation where you have information asymmetry. You have people that feel like second-class citizens that don't have the same information because things are being talked about at the office. So if you can, it's best to kind of go all in and really be fully remote, fully distributed.
I remember early on in Buffer when we had an office, we actually don't have an office anymore — we're 90 people — but early on when we did have an office, even when we did video calls, we learned really quickly that the people in the office were much better if they kind of dispersed to different corners of the office and got on their own video call rather than cramming into a conference room and trying to, you know, have everyone fitting into one video and then it sound quiet with some people who are behind all the little things like that. So that's another thing.
And then I would also say focus on trust monitoring. I think that might be something that people grasp on for right now is, "Oh, in an office, I feel like I can see when people are working." So, I still see that remotely, and then you start maybe trying to track people, and I think that's the wrong approach here. That's not going to be really sustainable and work well in the long term. So focusing on trust, focusing on results rather than time at work — that's a key thing as well.
And then I would also just touch on something I had already mentioned, which is the being deliberate about casual chats and conversations. And that's one key thing that's going to happen serendipitously in an office environment, but will easily just not happen at tall in a remote environment unless you're deliberate about it. And that actually does end up having some consequences over time when it becomes very down to business. You can have situations where a meeting has clear agenda and that's good generally. But then it also means that you end up not at all making time for just casual catching up and "How are you doing?" And that connection is really important because it builds trust and it kind of helps everything else happens smoothly as well.
Baer: That's fantastic. I'm going to go ahead and move us on because I want to make sure we have time for some audience questions. So Carol, I will pose this next question to you: How do you recruit for both of these things that are popular in the talent world right now? So I'll go ahead and say them, how do you recruit for "culture fit" or "culture add" when you're full-year mode?
Cochran: So a lot of it comes down to something you just mentioned a couple of minutes ago, which is the branding and really starting with your job posting itself and letting your culture through in that job posting. That's going to, in many cases (not 100%), attract the right candidates, because they will read that and understand that and be drawn to that. And then we have different steps, different phases, different questions, different exercises along the way to sort of vet for that fit, if you will. Whether it's specific questions that we're looking for in the cover letter, we're kind of old school, we still love a good — I'm a sucker for a good cover letter — and it's very intentional.
The questions that we ask are very intentional, because that's where we start to be able to feel whether or not there might be a cultural fit. It's not 100% of it, obviously, but that's kind of where the process starts. And again, through exercises and exposure we have, you know, we keep it streamlined. What we have is, I think, a lot of remote companies do a pretty comprehensive hiring process. And because we are really looking for that right fit — both for us and for the candidate themselves — we want them to be making the right decision also. So that's my short answer.
Baer: We could probably do a whole webinar just on that. One question from the audience was about onboarding — sort of like, obviously the next step after recruiting, is what really sound remote onboarding will look like? I know Joel, I was looking at the blog talking about like a series of timed emails that come out when someone's starting, they have posts like a culture buddy and a role buddy if I'm getting that right. How have you guys thought about kind of building an architecture and a process around remote?
Gascoigne: Yeah, so there are a few different elements, and I think to zoom in on the culture buddy and roll buddy, that might be something that's a little more unique. And so really our goal there was, OK, let's have a role buddy. Someone that's doing ideally doing the same role as the one that you're getting started with, or some in the same team, very close to that role. And that's the person that you could go to and establish right from your start dates. So then you can chat with that person regularly about questions on the role. And I think that the key there is just there are no bad questions. It really helps for people to be able to be vulnerable and ask a question that they might find difficult to then just bring up to — having to decide who to bring it up, see when to bring it up.
So we established that role buddy early on. And the culture buddy is also. The neat thing with that is that it's usually someone in a different part of the company. So that's already creating that bond with other areas, and that person is specifically tasked with helping with all the questions and just helping that person to understand some of the unique elements of how the culture works in practice within the company. So they can go to that person for all of those types of questions.
And then we also have a bunch of different, what time different things that kick in there. Even just making sure that person feels really welcomed. We have in a Slack "general" channel. We'll always celebrate on the start date and welcome someone, make sure they have a bunch of video chats to meet a lot of other people as well.
I also do something personally for new team members called "Before 101," which is actually kind of less than a class and more of a story time. So I try to share the whole journey, which is quite long by now, but the goal is to shift from people saying I work "for" Buffer to I work "with" Buffer, I work "at" Buffer, like Buffer is my company, I want people to feel that as quickly as possible and feel that in some ways they've been part of the history as well. And just like knowing that context. So that's really useful as well too, as maybe like quirky things that we do in the culture that actually West published five, six years ago, and I've kind of lived on. And so that helps people understand, you know, why those things exist or some of the toughest things we've been through as a company that's shaped us, and Why Buffer is special today. Like we've actually bought out investors, we've had a cofounder leaves, things like that. We almost ran out of money in the early days. So that's all really useful as well for finding team members.
Baer: That's great. So one last question, and this is a little bit more macro, if I may: With social distancing, we are suddenly mandated into remote work, so afterward — whenever it is that the afterward comes — that's a different conversation. But on the other side of this, do you see remote — maybe not an exact percentage breakdown — but do you think that colocation will be the same norm that it was before? Do you see any phase shifts happening there?
Gascoigne: Yeah, I can speak to that. I've been thinking a lot about this and I think there's kind of two sides, and even in my own mind, is that I think nothing will be the same again. I do think that now the technology and tools is pretty incredible and it's constantly improving still. And so I think people probably will be working remotely and finding that they can work more leads. It's actually pretty smooth and works well.
But I also think that there's this flip side to it, which is — Carol and I were talking about this just before the call, which is even for us, we've been working in the remotely for a decade or so, both of our companies. And I think that we're seeing, you know, initially I felt like it was this narrative of like, "Oh, these companies have been doing it, they can tell other communities how to do it." But actually our companies have kind of been brought to our knees as well. In some ways, everyone's distracted. It's a pandemic situation. So I think the productivity level will be lower for any company right now. I think the risk though is that other companies were forced into remote quickly, whereas we've spent years figuring it out and evolving, they might feel really like they want to get back to the normal productivity levels, so they might just go straight back to the colocated environment. But I think for me, the first side of that "it will be different" kind of edges out. And I feel like that's going to kind of be the reality.
Baer: That's super helpful. And yeah, I think that's a great point: That in a normal setting, everyone's kids wouldn't also be with them. We wouldn't be teaching school. Carol, can you send us out with any parting thoughts about that possibility of face change with how organizations are distributed through talent?
Cochran: Yes, I agree with everything Joel just said. And also, you know, I'm going to lean back into what we've been saying for a while now, which is the smart organizations will see this and embrace this and act on it, because, you know, pandemic aside — which is a really odd thing to say right now — this is where we're going. And companies who want to compete for the best talent are going to have to be on board with this. And this has to be — you know, this is a sad and weird and uncertain — not a point in time that any of us wants to be in. But when this is over, and I know we all look forward to that day, we have to look at this as not where we set our expectations, but where we build from in terms of extending and expanding remote workforce, because this isn't how it normally is. It has the potential and it's proven to be so much better than it is right now. And you know, our hope and on our optimistic side — we are a half-glass full kind of company — overall is that there's a lot of smart leaders out there who will recognize that and really move in that direction.
Baer: Wonderful! Thank you. So let me again thank our guests, Carol and Joel. I feel like I learned a lot about managing my own team and attending to my team's culture.
And I want to put a commercial in for next week's BI spotlight: So that will be April 9. It'll be at a new time: 2 p.m. And again, as I talked about at the top, we will be moving into marketing — specifically how brands can and should communicate and engage in this time of uncertainty. The guest will be Fernando Machado, the CMO of Burger King, and it will be moderated by the great Tonya Dua, senior advertising reporter at BI. Thank you, guys.
You can sign up for our Spotlight with Fernando Machado here.
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