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Tyler Sellhorn:
Hello everyone, my name is Tyler Sellhorn, and welcome to another episode of The Remote Show where we discuss everything to do with remote work with the people who know it best. Thanks so much for listening. The Remote Show is brought to you by We Work Remotely, the largest community of remote workers in the world. With over 220,000 unique users per month, We Work Remotely is the most effective way to hire.
Today we are blessed with the appearance of Daphnée Laforest. Daphnée is a distributed workplace consultant who is on a mission to help executives, people Ops, and team leaders drive a company wide shift toward remote first ways of working. With 10 years of experience in fully distributed companies, she played key roles in establishing scalable workflows for growth, facilitating business decisions remotely, and building internal products dedicated to digital first teams. Understanding that the way we work plays an essential part of a successful distributed by design workplace and is a key element of memorable employee experience, Daphnée focuses on enhanced Org design in workflows, improve employee wellbeing through flexibility, empowerment, and trust, async and transparent communication processes, coaching and educating leaders in scaling their departments, becoming better facilitators. And as an early advocate of remote work, she previously led the first online conference about remote work as a business strategy with over 1,500 live attendees.
Recently, she launched the Remote First podcast where every week she chats with leaders from large companies, Shopify, Slack, and Elastic, to name a few, about their experience at scaling a digital first culture. Welcome to the Remote First, The Remote Show podcast collab. Daphnée, welcome.
Daphnée Laforest:
Thank you. Thank you for such a great introduction.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Yes. So I'm really, really curious, when you think about your business and your podcast, what are the problems that you're trying to solve? What are you trying to help people accomplish?
Daphnée Laforest:
Well, basically, the workplace had a big disruption since last year, I have been in the area for a very long time in the world of remote work for over 10 years, and I wanted to find a way to create more content around this transition to becoming remote first and helping companies in that transition. So the podcast was a good way for me to give back or give advice for people to do that transition.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Fantastic. Well we are excited to be collaborating with you and expanding the knowledge base that's out there for people to learn from the best so that they can outperform others trying to do the same. And I'm curious, how do you explain remote work to people who have a limited experience of working away from an office or a co-located environment? What's the ways that you use a metaphor to describe what's going on? When you're trying to help people be the best they can be in a remote environment, how do you help them envision that for themselves?
Daphnée Laforest:
Well, I mean, right now, it's very different than how it was maybe three or four years ago. Three or four years ago it was a lot about convincing and then saying, remote work is the right way to go and it's going to be X, Y, Z benefits for your company, and right now, because everybody had a taste of it, everybody has their own opinion of it, of how it works for them or not, but they also don't need to be convinced anymore they just need to understand a bit better how this can scale and be a strategy for long term for themselves, because many of the companies who experienced remote in the past year, year and a half, there's some companies that loved everything about it, but there was a lot of challenges because we were also living in a era that is very challenging. And is to understand a bit of, okay, what does remote really look like on a long term basis when you also live in the normal society of not living in a extremely stressful era at the moments.
Daphnée Laforest:
So it's very different. There's not much convincing to do it's much more about, okay, where do you want to go from here, and then let's take it from there.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Okay, let's zoom in on that. I love the thing that you brought out of that, there are going to be challenges, there are going to be great things. When you think about 2022 and beyond, when we think about remote working, that there's going to be this shift, people have experienced it, now there's going to be a desire, just like there always was for remote working to be a benefit to a particular workforce. When you think about the challenges and you think about the benefits, what are the things that people are coming to you to answer as we think about what's next, what's 2022 and beyond for remote working?
Daphnée Laforest:
The first thing that comes to mind is the main challenge that I've been brought up with is mid-management. We've seen a lot of companies losing a lot of their mid-management team members because of the difficulty that comes with managing a remote team when you never did that before, because when you came from a culture of I'm in the office, I can see them working, I'm managing them, we had poor leadership or people that just didn't know how to lead remotely. So, at the moment, the main request comes with leadership training. So how to train leaders to be better facilitators, better at understanding how their team is doing whether or not able to see them, there's a lot of requests around that.
Daphnée Laforest:
At the moment, also, I mean, if I come back to the what I see more in terms of trends, I think that we talk a lot about hybrid at the moment and how we know we're going to be a hybrid workforce for the future.
This comes with a lot, a lot of challenges, and it's not because you work well in office only, and after that work well in remote only that you're going to be successful at hybrid. It's actually very difficult to be successful at hybrid, you have to have a lot of good intention to make it work. It does work, there's many companies who are successful in the hybrid setup but have very clear and strong remote first approach to their way of working.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Yes, we've been hearing that as a theme through the past guests here at the remote show, and it's interesting to hear you rhyming with them.
Daphnée Laforest:
Nice.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Yes. So okay, so it's story time, we'd love to hear about your first remote role that you landed or your first remote hire. I'm curious, what's the story of your first remote role?
Daphnée Laforest:
So I've been an employee in a remote company but before that I was freelancing, like many people started working remote. About 10 years ago, I was in my early 20s, and finish university, was trying to find a way to know what I would be doing in my life and travel the world like many of us did, or many are lucky that they did, not everybody can do that.
But, yes, travel around and then I realized that in Canada, usually, where I'm coming from, you only get two weeks of holiday a year. And I was like, I can not just live for two weeks a year and then do that forever, and just have two weeks for traveling. So I decided to look for a work opportunity that would allow me to continue working while doing what I love, which was traveling, for other people it's other things, for me that what it was. And started freelancing in project management and marketing, and different other things like that, got my first role, I would say, in an American company based in Phoenix, who was working with a partner in France and I was basically the contact in between and basically product managing and operating their product for the French audience. So that was my first ever opportunity back in 2012 that was quite concrete and everything build up from there, then it just continued and I did a lot of continuation of consulting and freelancing.
And in 2015, I decided that I wanted to join a team, that I didn't want to be on my own anymore, I want to feel what it was to join a remote company and have a job, have a career, feel like I'm part of something bigger. So I joined, at that time, the company called Human Made, which is based in the UK but has employees, when we were there at the beginning was about 20 and grew up to about 80 people, and the company has employees all over the world, timezone agnostic, quite close to the culture of automatic, it's very close, because it's also coming from the world of WordPress. So this was the most amazing experience of my life working in a great company, be able to work, travel, have the flexibility while having a career sense as well. Yes.
And then since then, after that, I started my own thing, I had my own family. I was able to have the lifestyle that I wanted, a work style or career style that I wanted, while also thinking of all the things that people want to have, having a family, having a normal human being, some people want that, everybody wants kids, but some people like me want to have kids and it's also possible to do everything while working remote. So I became very enthusiastic about the topic. In 2015 I was sometimes called the remote work preacher because I was so into the topic of this is the future.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Well we are excited to be talking to a fellow evangelist, as it were. So when you think about the things that really enthuse you about remote working, you mentioned being able to travel and work, you mentioned about having the flexibility to care for a family, what are the things that you say to others, when you are evangelizing, when you're trying to demonstrate the value of a work anywhere remote first culture, what are those things that you really want to draw out? Because we have a community of job seekers and hiring managers at We Work Remotely and one of the things that we're curious about is how to draw out the values that we all care about together. What are the things that you think are those signals to job seekers or from companies that really say, this is that automatic type culture or this is that Human Made type culture that says, we value the same things you value in a remote job?
Daphnée Laforest:
Definitely. I mean, there is different part of the evangelism of it, I used to be very individual driven on the benefits of the individual, which often we talk about a work life balance and X, Y, or Z. The main importance for me was to say to people that, it's okay, you can put your life first. We spend hours and hours a day working, people focus a lot on, who are you? You are this role in this company.
But who are we? We are people who have passions, who have things that we love doing, so usually I try to say to people, it's more about putting the work around your life instead of the other way around.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Goodness, it's so good to hear you say things like that because those are the things that we're rhyming so often. That's great that we've absorbed those same phrases. You were going on though.
Daphnée Laforest:
Yes. So, I mean, I've been saying this for a very long time, put your work around your life, not the other way around, and this was always individual driven. And then after I started to get more interested into the benefits of what it brings to companies and I started working on, back in 2016 when I was doing the out of office online conference, was at one of the first virtual conference about remote work that was bringing all the names, all the Buffer, Zapier, Basecamp of this world that we're coming together to talk about, I was calling it "corporate remote work", which now is just obsolete because everybody just know remote work.
But at that time, I wanted to talk more with companies on the benefits of it because I also wanted to create more job opportunities. I was thinking, not everyone wants to be a freelancer, some people want to have a career, have a role, and then join a company, not necessarily having go through the freelance or entrepreneur journey. So I wanted to create more opportunities because at that time, it was very difficult to get a remote job, there was actually just a few companies that you knew were hiring remotely, it was really hard to find and it was gold if you could find a company that was hiring remotely.
So I was thinking, the more companies that are ready to be remote, the more jobs there will be, the more opportunity it will be for people. That was a bit my mission. And then after, in terms of benefits for the company, I always said, if you put the people first and you focus on making employee wellbeing, employee experience, just your company will follow as being a really great place to work, and then the productivity and the efficiency of the company will go with it, because most of the very good practices that we go for when we are a fully remote company, works extremely well at making a company much more efficient and productive in the way the organizational design is made, or the way the operations are made, the way we are working and we are collaborating is so much more thought through that it can even be used in a office space culture, it's just so much more efficient, in my opinion.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Agreed, co-signed the whole way down. One of the things you mentioned was really trying to expand the surface area of companies that are hiring remotely.
When you think about companies that are hiring remotely and you're trying to coach them into providing job advertisement or communicating on their marketing website, the types of careers and the ways things look on their website to say, yes, we are remote work, we do hire remotely, and we do this in highly efficient, best practices ways. What are those things that we can do to signal to job seekers that, yes, this isn't just, we tried remote working for 2020 and we're going to keep doing it because people are expecting it? How can we communicate that, yes, we're serious about this, and we're serious about doing it well? How can we show that? How can we demonstrate that?
Daphnée Laforest:
Well, you need to show by doing, of course, start there. I think that many people still will see remote work as a perk and will add it as, we do remote work, you can do it once in a while, but then the culture of a company, the way of working might not follow and it's going to be very difficult for these people to join a company if it doesn't feel like there is purpose, there is intention in the way that they are implementing the way they work in the way of collaboration, communication, just the way that the company is designed in general.
But on a job posts what we see a lot is, hire from anywhere, we are remote, but it's not true. Many companies have a lot of limitation when it comes to hiring compliance, they have some countries they can hire in, some they cannot. So it's important to be transparent there and not sell something that is not true.
That's something that I've seen a lot. And it's okay to be like, we can hire you from all of these countries and this is the pool that we are able to hire from. And maybe with time, more and more people will be able to be hired from other countries, but it needs to start from somewhere. So if you decide that you are a EU only company and you are hiring only from the EU, that's okay, or if for you it's a timezone issue, maybe you're okay to hire contractors in other countries where the contractor is possible to hire a contractor compliantly in some countries, then go ahead, but then maybe, yes, be quite transparent where you can actually be hired from.
So that's one of the main thing that I see at the moment, or a certain timezone, who is my team, where my team will be located. You can be saying, you can be hired from anywhere, but then if your whole team is in the US and then you are based in Singapore, it's going to be quite challenging if there is no clear workflows that allows you to work asynchronously. So there's all these things that it's interesting when you apply to know a bit what to expect with that company on the way of working.
Tyler Sellhorn:
I love that you made the transition to asynchronous workflows right away, because as soon as you started mentioning timezones, and I know that, that's a part of some of the things that you talk about and consult on with companies.
Talk to us a bit more about how to set up a company that is embracing true remote work, true asynchronous workflows that allow for work to be done in that way that you mentioned. In the ways that where we say, we're going to fit our work around our life instead of letting that synchronous nine to five onus rather that we are really embracing the opportunity to work when there aren't childcare responsibilities or travel interruptions, that we really are able to fit the working time around those synchronous moments that are about other people, and instead, let our knowledge work happen when it's most convenient.
Daphnée Laforest:
I mean, at the beginning, I have to say that truly async or truly remote is a dream, but there's a lot of challenges also that comes with that where I always say, there's one episode of the podcast was, have we gone too far with async?
Because are we just trying to make this too much of we never talk to each other company culture, which is really, it's a bit against our own human behavior, our natural way of being social and wanting to have some time of having some face to face live communication happening, creating connection. I think that's where it's interesting where you can focus on asynchronous for getting work done, and then focus on synchronous for building relationships, and also a bit more back and forth when you need it. The most important in async, I think there's different type of asynchronous as well. A lot of people define asynchronous as, I write down something somewhere, somebody else can read it at a different time.
So because of that, they will include a messaging platform as part of a asynchronous communication platform, which is completely untrue, in my opinion, or unrealistic because, culturally, with the text messaging culture, for example, that we have, we see text messaging as something that has much more back and forth and a bit more real time. So I see using a real time message like Slack or WhatsApp, people use WhatsApp sometime for business, as really a synchronous way of working and not asynchronous, because of the fact that it is the expectation that you will have some sort of a return quickly.
So what I usually say to people is to focus on first having, it's okay to have back and forth, specifically for social interactions or when you need specific back and forth. It is great to work on time zones where you know you have some overlap, so once in a while you can have a bit of back and forth.
But it's good to have a good system in place where you have a place to have a conversation, but the conversation can happen on different hours and it can be done in a very thoughtful way. So the best way to do that, there are products that exists that are like a blog basically. There is Automattic that built P2, which we also built a version of ours at Human Made, which is, each time you are wanting to start a conversation or a discussion on a specific topic, you would write down a post, or this is what I'm working on, or this is what I'm looking for feedback on, or you need to start a discussion for a product decision or something like that. I come from product management background, so this is more what I know.
So you would post something there and then somebody else can comment on it maybe two, three, four hours later, and then somebody else can come in. And then so the good thing with that is instead of being on Slack or on instant messaging, it's a lot more phrase by phrase and it's really hard to go back to it and have it as a reference, where there when you have these flow of conversation that have everything in one place, everybody takes the time to think about, what is their opinion on the topic, read exactly your posts, digest it, and then post their reply. And then everything is just much more thought through. This can be also done in project management tools like Jira or people use Asana, I use the GitHub.
Tyler Sellhorn:
I wasn't going to interrupt you. But my day job at Hubstaff, we have a project management tool called tasks that we do the very thing that you just described in saying, here's this topic, and we're going to have a common thread, and attachments, and links, et cetera. I mean, I think that really is the future of asynchronous workflows of, how do we build consensus across a workforce that isn't awake at the same time, right?
Daphnée Laforest:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tyler Sellhorn:
Yes. So you even used GitHub, you said?
Daphnée Laforest:
Yes. I mean, we used to use GitHub as a base because it was a development based company.
So most of the employees were developers at that time, now it changed, but it just started being very opensource driven. And actually working in opensource way is usually very successful for remote companies. And we've seen most of the companies you hear about at the moment, are opensource companies or companies that worked in that background.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Those North stars of GitLab, and GitHub, and-
Daphnée Laforest:
And Automattic and Elastic.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Yes, exactly. All of those sorts of organizations have had that workflow back when it was a shared project that didn't have any sort of services company attached to it. So yes.
Daphnée Laforest:
Yes, and everybody was contributing remotely from different places, trying to make software work better and working together remotely. That's why we see a lot of development team or engineering team not having difficulty with that setup. But you do see a lot of other department working in exactly the same approach, and usually it works very well for other departments, marketing, sales, customer service, everything can be done that way as well. So it's just a different way of working.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Yes. the customer experience department that I lead, we operate in those same fashions. So it is something that can be done and should be done when working in a remote environment is to have that atomized conversations built around the work that is to be done. It really is the best way to operate when you are thinking about remote first workflows.
Daphnée Laforest:
Yes, and even if I could add to this.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Of course.
Daphnée Laforest:
People right now are thinking, okay, I'm going to go hybrid, or we will go back and have some office outsource tool. Well, if you keep these flows, then you're much more likely to be successful at having some remote hire and some in-office hire, because you put everybody on the same level as people that all have access to the information. This is so much more easy when you have everything online, even for onboarding new employees, where everything's accessible, you don't need to know someone who knows someone to be able to have the information you need or ask around to be able to get something done because there's nothing written anywhere. It's just a really good way anyway if you decide to have a bit more office in your culture in the future and some remote, to make sure that you're building a culture of work that is equal and equitable.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Yes. I'm so excited to see the next version of remote work that has remote working as an option, even for those organizations that are going to have more of an office first culture, we can't put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak, on the remote working experience of these past 14 months, it's not going to be something that we can ignore. So I'm really excited to see what the both end looks like, right, because it's not either or, it's not all remote or all in office. Where are you going to put the sliders on it? And what works for your organization? And it's going to be really exciting to see people sort themselves into company cultures that fit them better, and excite them to be a part of, even just as you have focused on employee experience, finding the companies that are delivering the experience that they're looking forward to being a part of and joining.
When you think about a post-pandemic world, we're in the midst of a more broadly distributed vaccine situation and numbers are trending to the better, if you think about what you would hope most for, for the remote working movement in the second half of 2021 and beyond, what would you hope to see as the thing that happens because of the experience of what we've just been through?
Daphnée Laforest:
I mean, I think that it's not just the remote work community or something, it's feels like ... I mostly wish that companies won't be thinking, okay, now we're going to go back to normal because, actually, a year and a half of change and challenges, really teaches you a lot on your company, you learn more about your culture, about how your company organization is doing because you were forced to have the problems in your face, because you saw with remote that, our processes are really bad. So I think what I'm hoping mostly is that companies will take the lead on, okay, we need to tackle this for long term, and we need to think about remote or distribute it by design as a scalable strategy for our company, and be competitive and show that they continue to be the greatest company to work for. And this is by rethinking about their ways of working, their employee training for making sure that people feel supported in becoming remote leaders. There is a lot of work to be done still.
Tyler Sellhorn:
All right. Well you heard it from Daphnée, be reflective, take this moment and do not lose the lessons that can be learned. Let's all together think back, what went well? What didn't go so well? What did we learn? What's still puzzling us? And let's get to work on answering those questions together.
Daphnée Laforest:
Exactly.
Tyler Sellhorn:
So we can build the future together. Okay, so, Daphnée Laforest, thank you so much for this opportunity to learn from you and learn out loud together. You can find Daphnée at daphnéelaforest.com, she's on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, she'd love to help you get the best out of your remote working experience for your employees, for your company, for all of the above. Daphnée, anything to say here as we say goodbye?
Daphnée Laforest:
I would like to thank you so much for inviting me on. It was pretty nice.
Tyler Sellhorn:
It was our pleasure. Thank you so much and blessings to you as we move on in 2021 and beyond.
Daphnée Laforest:
Awesome. Good bye.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Bye. Thanks so much again for listening to the show and be sure to check out weworkremotely.com for the latest remote jobs. And if you're looking to hire a remote worker, We Work Remotely is the fastest and easiest way to do so. As always, if you have someone we should talk to, any advice you have, or if you'd like to advertise on the podcast, please reach out to us at [email protected], that's [email protected]. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.
Hello everyone, my name is Tyler Sellhorn, and welcome to another episode of The Remote Show where we discuss everything to do with remote work with the people who know it best. Thanks so much for listening. The Remote Show is brought to you by We Work Remotely, the largest community of remote workers in the world. With over 220,000 unique users per month, We Work Remotely is the most effective way to hire.
Today we are blessed with the appearance of Daphnée Laforest. Daphnée is a distributed workplace consultant who is on a mission to help executives, people Ops, and team leaders drive a company wide shift toward remote first ways of working. With 10 years of experience in fully distributed companies, she played key roles in establishing scalable workflows for growth, facilitating business decisions remotely, and building internal products dedicated to digital first teams. Understanding that the way we work plays an essential part of a successful distributed by design workplace and is a key element of memorable employee experience, Daphnée focuses on enhanced Org design in workflows, improve employee wellbeing through flexibility, empowerment, and trust, async and transparent communication processes, coaching and educating leaders in scaling their departments, becoming better facilitators. And as an early advocate of remote work, she previously led the first online conference about remote work as a business strategy with over 1,500 live attendees.
Recently, she launched the Remote First podcast where every week she chats with leaders from large companies, Shopify, Slack, and Elastic, to name a few, about their experience at scaling a digital first culture. Welcome to the Remote First, The Remote Show podcast collab. Daphnée, welcome.
Daphnée Laforest:
Thank you. Thank you for such a great introduction.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Yes. So I'm really, really curious, when you think about your business and your podcast, what are the problems that you're trying to solve? What are you trying to help people accomplish?
Daphnée Laforest:
Well, basically, the workplace had a big disruption since last year, I have been in the area for a very long time in the world of remote work for over 10 years, and I wanted to find a way to create more content around this transition to becoming remote first and helping companies in that transition. So the podcast was a good way for me to give back or give advice for people to do that transition.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Fantastic. Well we are excited to be collaborating with you and expanding the knowledge base that's out there for people to learn from the best so that they can outperform others trying to do the same. And I'm curious, how do you explain remote work to people who have a limited experience of working away from an office or a co-located environment? What's the ways that you use a metaphor to describe what's going on? When you're trying to help people be the best they can be in a remote environment, how do you help them envision that for themselves?
Daphnée Laforest:
Well, I mean, right now, it's very different than how it was maybe three or four years ago. Three or four years ago it was a lot about convincing and then saying, remote work is the right way to go and it's going to be X, Y, Z benefits for your company, and right now, because everybody had a taste of it, everybody has their own opinion of it, of how it works for them or not, but they also don't need to be convinced anymore they just need to understand a bit better how this can scale and be a strategy for long term for themselves, because many of the companies who experienced remote in the past year, year and a half, there's some companies that loved everything about it, but there was a lot of challenges because we were also living in a era that is very challenging. And is to understand a bit of, okay, what does remote really look like on a long term basis when you also live in the normal society of not living in a extremely stressful era at the moments.
Daphnée Laforest:
So it's very different. There's not much convincing to do it's much more about, okay, where do you want to go from here, and then let's take it from there.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Okay, let's zoom in on that. I love the thing that you brought out of that, there are going to be challenges, there are going to be great things. When you think about 2022 and beyond, when we think about remote working, that there's going to be this shift, people have experienced it, now there's going to be a desire, just like there always was for remote working to be a benefit to a particular workforce. When you think about the challenges and you think about the benefits, what are the things that people are coming to you to answer as we think about what's next, what's 2022 and beyond for remote working?
Daphnée Laforest:
The first thing that comes to mind is the main challenge that I've been brought up with is mid-management. We've seen a lot of companies losing a lot of their mid-management team members because of the difficulty that comes with managing a remote team when you never did that before, because when you came from a culture of I'm in the office, I can see them working, I'm managing them, we had poor leadership or people that just didn't know how to lead remotely. So, at the moment, the main request comes with leadership training. So how to train leaders to be better facilitators, better at understanding how their team is doing whether or not able to see them, there's a lot of requests around that.
Daphnée Laforest:
At the moment, also, I mean, if I come back to the what I see more in terms of trends, I think that we talk a lot about hybrid at the moment and how we know we're going to be a hybrid workforce for the future.
This comes with a lot, a lot of challenges, and it's not because you work well in office only, and after that work well in remote only that you're going to be successful at hybrid. It's actually very difficult to be successful at hybrid, you have to have a lot of good intention to make it work. It does work, there's many companies who are successful in the hybrid setup but have very clear and strong remote first approach to their way of working.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Yes, we've been hearing that as a theme through the past guests here at the remote show, and it's interesting to hear you rhyming with them.
Daphnée Laforest:
Nice.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Yes. So okay, so it's story time, we'd love to hear about your first remote role that you landed or your first remote hire. I'm curious, what's the story of your first remote role?
Daphnée Laforest:
So I've been an employee in a remote company but before that I was freelancing, like many people started working remote. About 10 years ago, I was in my early 20s, and finish university, was trying to find a way to know what I would be doing in my life and travel the world like many of us did, or many are lucky that they did, not everybody can do that.
But, yes, travel around and then I realized that in Canada, usually, where I'm coming from, you only get two weeks of holiday a year. And I was like, I can not just live for two weeks a year and then do that forever, and just have two weeks for traveling. So I decided to look for a work opportunity that would allow me to continue working while doing what I love, which was traveling, for other people it's other things, for me that what it was. And started freelancing in project management and marketing, and different other things like that, got my first role, I would say, in an American company based in Phoenix, who was working with a partner in France and I was basically the contact in between and basically product managing and operating their product for the French audience. So that was my first ever opportunity back in 2012 that was quite concrete and everything build up from there, then it just continued and I did a lot of continuation of consulting and freelancing.
And in 2015, I decided that I wanted to join a team, that I didn't want to be on my own anymore, I want to feel what it was to join a remote company and have a job, have a career, feel like I'm part of something bigger. So I joined, at that time, the company called Human Made, which is based in the UK but has employees, when we were there at the beginning was about 20 and grew up to about 80 people, and the company has employees all over the world, timezone agnostic, quite close to the culture of automatic, it's very close, because it's also coming from the world of WordPress. So this was the most amazing experience of my life working in a great company, be able to work, travel, have the flexibility while having a career sense as well. Yes.
And then since then, after that, I started my own thing, I had my own family. I was able to have the lifestyle that I wanted, a work style or career style that I wanted, while also thinking of all the things that people want to have, having a family, having a normal human being, some people want that, everybody wants kids, but some people like me want to have kids and it's also possible to do everything while working remote. So I became very enthusiastic about the topic. In 2015 I was sometimes called the remote work preacher because I was so into the topic of this is the future.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Well we are excited to be talking to a fellow evangelist, as it were. So when you think about the things that really enthuse you about remote working, you mentioned being able to travel and work, you mentioned about having the flexibility to care for a family, what are the things that you say to others, when you are evangelizing, when you're trying to demonstrate the value of a work anywhere remote first culture, what are those things that you really want to draw out? Because we have a community of job seekers and hiring managers at We Work Remotely and one of the things that we're curious about is how to draw out the values that we all care about together. What are the things that you think are those signals to job seekers or from companies that really say, this is that automatic type culture or this is that Human Made type culture that says, we value the same things you value in a remote job?
Daphnée Laforest:
Definitely. I mean, there is different part of the evangelism of it, I used to be very individual driven on the benefits of the individual, which often we talk about a work life balance and X, Y, or Z. The main importance for me was to say to people that, it's okay, you can put your life first. We spend hours and hours a day working, people focus a lot on, who are you? You are this role in this company.
But who are we? We are people who have passions, who have things that we love doing, so usually I try to say to people, it's more about putting the work around your life instead of the other way around.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Goodness, it's so good to hear you say things like that because those are the things that we're rhyming so often. That's great that we've absorbed those same phrases. You were going on though.
Daphnée Laforest:
Yes. So, I mean, I've been saying this for a very long time, put your work around your life, not the other way around, and this was always individual driven. And then after I started to get more interested into the benefits of what it brings to companies and I started working on, back in 2016 when I was doing the out of office online conference, was at one of the first virtual conference about remote work that was bringing all the names, all the Buffer, Zapier, Basecamp of this world that we're coming together to talk about, I was calling it "corporate remote work", which now is just obsolete because everybody just know remote work.
But at that time, I wanted to talk more with companies on the benefits of it because I also wanted to create more job opportunities. I was thinking, not everyone wants to be a freelancer, some people want to have a career, have a role, and then join a company, not necessarily having go through the freelance or entrepreneur journey. So I wanted to create more opportunities because at that time, it was very difficult to get a remote job, there was actually just a few companies that you knew were hiring remotely, it was really hard to find and it was gold if you could find a company that was hiring remotely.
So I was thinking, the more companies that are ready to be remote, the more jobs there will be, the more opportunity it will be for people. That was a bit my mission. And then after, in terms of benefits for the company, I always said, if you put the people first and you focus on making employee wellbeing, employee experience, just your company will follow as being a really great place to work, and then the productivity and the efficiency of the company will go with it, because most of the very good practices that we go for when we are a fully remote company, works extremely well at making a company much more efficient and productive in the way the organizational design is made, or the way the operations are made, the way we are working and we are collaborating is so much more thought through that it can even be used in a office space culture, it's just so much more efficient, in my opinion.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Agreed, co-signed the whole way down. One of the things you mentioned was really trying to expand the surface area of companies that are hiring remotely.
When you think about companies that are hiring remotely and you're trying to coach them into providing job advertisement or communicating on their marketing website, the types of careers and the ways things look on their website to say, yes, we are remote work, we do hire remotely, and we do this in highly efficient, best practices ways. What are those things that we can do to signal to job seekers that, yes, this isn't just, we tried remote working for 2020 and we're going to keep doing it because people are expecting it? How can we communicate that, yes, we're serious about this, and we're serious about doing it well? How can we show that? How can we demonstrate that?
Daphnée Laforest:
Well, you need to show by doing, of course, start there. I think that many people still will see remote work as a perk and will add it as, we do remote work, you can do it once in a while, but then the culture of a company, the way of working might not follow and it's going to be very difficult for these people to join a company if it doesn't feel like there is purpose, there is intention in the way that they are implementing the way they work in the way of collaboration, communication, just the way that the company is designed in general.
But on a job posts what we see a lot is, hire from anywhere, we are remote, but it's not true. Many companies have a lot of limitation when it comes to hiring compliance, they have some countries they can hire in, some they cannot. So it's important to be transparent there and not sell something that is not true.
That's something that I've seen a lot. And it's okay to be like, we can hire you from all of these countries and this is the pool that we are able to hire from. And maybe with time, more and more people will be able to be hired from other countries, but it needs to start from somewhere. So if you decide that you are a EU only company and you are hiring only from the EU, that's okay, or if for you it's a timezone issue, maybe you're okay to hire contractors in other countries where the contractor is possible to hire a contractor compliantly in some countries, then go ahead, but then maybe, yes, be quite transparent where you can actually be hired from.
So that's one of the main thing that I see at the moment, or a certain timezone, who is my team, where my team will be located. You can be saying, you can be hired from anywhere, but then if your whole team is in the US and then you are based in Singapore, it's going to be quite challenging if there is no clear workflows that allows you to work asynchronously. So there's all these things that it's interesting when you apply to know a bit what to expect with that company on the way of working.
Tyler Sellhorn:
I love that you made the transition to asynchronous workflows right away, because as soon as you started mentioning timezones, and I know that, that's a part of some of the things that you talk about and consult on with companies.
Talk to us a bit more about how to set up a company that is embracing true remote work, true asynchronous workflows that allow for work to be done in that way that you mentioned. In the ways that where we say, we're going to fit our work around our life instead of letting that synchronous nine to five onus rather that we are really embracing the opportunity to work when there aren't childcare responsibilities or travel interruptions, that we really are able to fit the working time around those synchronous moments that are about other people, and instead, let our knowledge work happen when it's most convenient.
Daphnée Laforest:
I mean, at the beginning, I have to say that truly async or truly remote is a dream, but there's a lot of challenges also that comes with that where I always say, there's one episode of the podcast was, have we gone too far with async?
Because are we just trying to make this too much of we never talk to each other company culture, which is really, it's a bit against our own human behavior, our natural way of being social and wanting to have some time of having some face to face live communication happening, creating connection. I think that's where it's interesting where you can focus on asynchronous for getting work done, and then focus on synchronous for building relationships, and also a bit more back and forth when you need it. The most important in async, I think there's different type of asynchronous as well. A lot of people define asynchronous as, I write down something somewhere, somebody else can read it at a different time.
So because of that, they will include a messaging platform as part of a asynchronous communication platform, which is completely untrue, in my opinion, or unrealistic because, culturally, with the text messaging culture, for example, that we have, we see text messaging as something that has much more back and forth and a bit more real time. So I see using a real time message like Slack or WhatsApp, people use WhatsApp sometime for business, as really a synchronous way of working and not asynchronous, because of the fact that it is the expectation that you will have some sort of a return quickly.
So what I usually say to people is to focus on first having, it's okay to have back and forth, specifically for social interactions or when you need specific back and forth. It is great to work on time zones where you know you have some overlap, so once in a while you can have a bit of back and forth.
But it's good to have a good system in place where you have a place to have a conversation, but the conversation can happen on different hours and it can be done in a very thoughtful way. So the best way to do that, there are products that exists that are like a blog basically. There is Automattic that built P2, which we also built a version of ours at Human Made, which is, each time you are wanting to start a conversation or a discussion on a specific topic, you would write down a post, or this is what I'm working on, or this is what I'm looking for feedback on, or you need to start a discussion for a product decision or something like that. I come from product management background, so this is more what I know.
So you would post something there and then somebody else can comment on it maybe two, three, four hours later, and then somebody else can come in. And then so the good thing with that is instead of being on Slack or on instant messaging, it's a lot more phrase by phrase and it's really hard to go back to it and have it as a reference, where there when you have these flow of conversation that have everything in one place, everybody takes the time to think about, what is their opinion on the topic, read exactly your posts, digest it, and then post their reply. And then everything is just much more thought through. This can be also done in project management tools like Jira or people use Asana, I use the GitHub.
Tyler Sellhorn:
I wasn't going to interrupt you. But my day job at Hubstaff, we have a project management tool called tasks that we do the very thing that you just described in saying, here's this topic, and we're going to have a common thread, and attachments, and links, et cetera. I mean, I think that really is the future of asynchronous workflows of, how do we build consensus across a workforce that isn't awake at the same time, right?
Daphnée Laforest:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tyler Sellhorn:
Yes. So you even used GitHub, you said?
Daphnée Laforest:
Yes. I mean, we used to use GitHub as a base because it was a development based company.
So most of the employees were developers at that time, now it changed, but it just started being very opensource driven. And actually working in opensource way is usually very successful for remote companies. And we've seen most of the companies you hear about at the moment, are opensource companies or companies that worked in that background.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Those North stars of GitLab, and GitHub, and-
Daphnée Laforest:
And Automattic and Elastic.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Yes, exactly. All of those sorts of organizations have had that workflow back when it was a shared project that didn't have any sort of services company attached to it. So yes.
Daphnée Laforest:
Yes, and everybody was contributing remotely from different places, trying to make software work better and working together remotely. That's why we see a lot of development team or engineering team not having difficulty with that setup. But you do see a lot of other department working in exactly the same approach, and usually it works very well for other departments, marketing, sales, customer service, everything can be done that way as well. So it's just a different way of working.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Yes. the customer experience department that I lead, we operate in those same fashions. So it is something that can be done and should be done when working in a remote environment is to have that atomized conversations built around the work that is to be done. It really is the best way to operate when you are thinking about remote first workflows.
Daphnée Laforest:
Yes, and even if I could add to this.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Of course.
Daphnée Laforest:
People right now are thinking, okay, I'm going to go hybrid, or we will go back and have some office outsource tool. Well, if you keep these flows, then you're much more likely to be successful at having some remote hire and some in-office hire, because you put everybody on the same level as people that all have access to the information. This is so much more easy when you have everything online, even for onboarding new employees, where everything's accessible, you don't need to know someone who knows someone to be able to have the information you need or ask around to be able to get something done because there's nothing written anywhere. It's just a really good way anyway if you decide to have a bit more office in your culture in the future and some remote, to make sure that you're building a culture of work that is equal and equitable.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Yes. I'm so excited to see the next version of remote work that has remote working as an option, even for those organizations that are going to have more of an office first culture, we can't put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak, on the remote working experience of these past 14 months, it's not going to be something that we can ignore. So I'm really excited to see what the both end looks like, right, because it's not either or, it's not all remote or all in office. Where are you going to put the sliders on it? And what works for your organization? And it's going to be really exciting to see people sort themselves into company cultures that fit them better, and excite them to be a part of, even just as you have focused on employee experience, finding the companies that are delivering the experience that they're looking forward to being a part of and joining.
When you think about a post-pandemic world, we're in the midst of a more broadly distributed vaccine situation and numbers are trending to the better, if you think about what you would hope most for, for the remote working movement in the second half of 2021 and beyond, what would you hope to see as the thing that happens because of the experience of what we've just been through?
Daphnée Laforest:
I mean, I think that it's not just the remote work community or something, it's feels like ... I mostly wish that companies won't be thinking, okay, now we're going to go back to normal because, actually, a year and a half of change and challenges, really teaches you a lot on your company, you learn more about your culture, about how your company organization is doing because you were forced to have the problems in your face, because you saw with remote that, our processes are really bad. So I think what I'm hoping mostly is that companies will take the lead on, okay, we need to tackle this for long term, and we need to think about remote or distribute it by design as a scalable strategy for our company, and be competitive and show that they continue to be the greatest company to work for. And this is by rethinking about their ways of working, their employee training for making sure that people feel supported in becoming remote leaders. There is a lot of work to be done still.
Tyler Sellhorn:
All right. Well you heard it from Daphnée, be reflective, take this moment and do not lose the lessons that can be learned. Let's all together think back, what went well? What didn't go so well? What did we learn? What's still puzzling us? And let's get to work on answering those questions together.
Daphnée Laforest:
Exactly.
Tyler Sellhorn:
So we can build the future together. Okay, so, Daphnée Laforest, thank you so much for this opportunity to learn from you and learn out loud together. You can find Daphnée at daphnéelaforest.com, she's on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, she'd love to help you get the best out of your remote working experience for your employees, for your company, for all of the above. Daphnée, anything to say here as we say goodbye?
Daphnée Laforest:
I would like to thank you so much for inviting me on. It was pretty nice.
Tyler Sellhorn:
It was our pleasure. Thank you so much and blessings to you as we move on in 2021 and beyond.
Daphnée Laforest:
Awesome. Good bye.
Tyler Sellhorn:
Bye. Thanks so much again for listening to the show and be sure to check out weworkremotely.com for the latest remote jobs. And if you're looking to hire a remote worker, We Work Remotely is the fastest and easiest way to do so. As always, if you have someone we should talk to, any advice you have, or if you'd like to advertise on the podcast, please reach out to us at [email protected], that's [email protected]. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.
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