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Tyler Sellhorn (00:02):
Pilot takes care of payroll, benefits and compliance for US companies with remote international teams. Easily onboarding and pay your employees and contractors worldwide in one secure cloud-based platform. Have questions about international hiring? Schedule a free consultation with our experts and claim your We Work Remotely Pilot discount at pilot.co/WWR.
Tyler Sellhorn (00:24):
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.
Tyler Sellhorn (00:37):
With over 220,000 unique users per month, We Work Remotely is the most effective way to hire. Today, we are blessed to be learning out loud with Matt Drozdzynski. Matt is currently founder and CEO of Pilot, a platform that makes it easy to hire and pay people remotely. Matt, welcome to The Remote Show and tell us, what are you trying to solve with Pilot?
Matt Drozdzynski (00:58):
Hey, it's really good to be here. I think there's two big problems we're trying to solve, right? And that is making sure that people around the world can get paid equitably. They can work for whoever they want and get kind of treated the way that a regular team member would be treated, right.
Matt Drozdzynski (01:15):
And hopefully do that in a way that's nice and easy for companies to use and it's a single cohesive experience, right. So how do we make it possible for companies to find and hire and pay the best talent anywhere in the world and how can we make it possible for people to find the best jobs in their lives wherever it happens to be?
Tyler Sellhorn (01:34):
Really interesting. You mentioned a couple ideas there that I'd like to pull apart a little bit. When you describe getting paid equitably, what is it that you're pointing to or kind of hinting at? It seems like maybe there's more to that story. I'm curious.
Matt Drozdzynski (01:49):
Yeah. No, that's a really good question. I think throughout my career, and I've worked in distributed teams for, well, basically all my life, I've never worked a non remote job. And I've seen a lot of companies do remote, attempt to do remote in one way or another.
Matt Drozdzynski (02:04):
And what we've seen a lot was that people that are remote are treated as second class citizens oftentimes, right. That happens in a couple of ways, right? If you're primarily an office first company, right, then immediately anyone who's not in the office is sort of outside of your immediate sort of purview and the people that you interact with day-to-day, right?
Matt Drozdzynski (02:26):
So you end up treating them differently. They're the odd person on a conference line in a meeting room where everyone else is in-person, right. But it also extends to teams that are a little bit more distributed, right. Where we sort of see this prevalence of when people are being hired across borders, they tend to be hired as contractors. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (02:46):
And a lot of the time, what that means is that they get treated as such. Companies use that as an excuse to say, well, we can't treat you like an employee, right. You're a contractor. And they sort of hear that from legal that says for compliance reasons, we have to do this. We have to treat them differently.
Matt Drozdzynski (03:02):
They can't get performance reviews. You can't have one on ones with them. You can't do all of these things, right. And that is really perceptible. That is something that you as a human being working with a team, you notice that you're treated differently, right?
Matt Drozdzynski (03:17):
And that sort of always kind of irked me the wrong way. You get treated differently by the people that you work with potentially, by obviously legal, sometimes by HR. You get paid differently, right? As a contractor, they might tell you, well, we're going to pay you into PayPal or some kind of a wallet. And you have to withdraw your funds from that account.
Matt Drozdzynski (03:39):
And maybe, actually, maybe we'll pay you net 30 because that's kind of what our vendor system allows us to do. And you're going to be responsible for the payment fees on the receiving end, right. And if you told that to an employee at your company, I mean, they wouldn't take it. Right. It's like, what do you mean? Like on my pay date, I don't have money in my bank account.
Matt Drozdzynski (04:02):
I have to go to this platform. I have to withdraw it. I have to do X, Y, Z. Pay some money and then maybe a few days later I'm going to have it, like you would think they're joking. Right. So that's what I mean by equitably is like, how can we make sure that a company can treat all of the team members the same?
Tyler Sellhorn (04:20):
I've gone through those experiences that you described, right. Shout out to the pre 2019 remoters that have felt the inequitable employment arrangements of the past. And we're grateful to you all for leading the charge and being equitable. Right. Let's lean into that. Right. And you mentioned the idea of being treated like a real teammate.
Tyler Sellhorn (04:42):
I think that's so interesting to hear you talk about it in the reality versus unreality, a real versus virtual kind of framing. And I guess maybe I'm curious to hear you talk about, like what does it mean for us to be together in the virtual conference room of our teams that makes it so that we do feel like we're being treated like a real teammate?
Matt Drozdzynski (05:10):
Yeah. I think this is a sort of a tricky question to unpack, right, because it very much depends on the specific setting that you're in, but what we usually mean by that is sometimes it's simple things, right? It's the fact that when you're on a Zoom call, everyone gets the little icon and is their own person on Zoom. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (05:28):
As opposed to what oftentimes happens, which is you have one big conference room sort of view and there's multiple people in there. And then there is some people here and they're sprinkled in remotely, and you can hear some people better and some people not as well because they're sitting a little bit further apart from the conference mic. Yeah.
Matt Drozdzynski (05:46):
So these are kind of the very little tactical things that whenever I talk to companies that kind of are going through this transition of either being hybrid, going towards hybrid or going towards more remote, those are simple things that you can fix that have genuine impact on how people are going to sort of see themselves compared to their peers. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (06:08):
I used to consult with a company where I would actually come in to their office every once in a while. And one of the pain points that I'd seen is that their backlog for their engineers, their sort of kanban board was literally a physical board in the office. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (06:23):
And what they would do is one of the PMs on the project that I was helping with would literally go into that board every morning and sort of realizing that they needed a digital version of it, he would sort of recreate it in Trello. Right. And he would like, as people move sticky notes around, he would move them in Trello to try to kind of have it match one to one. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (06:46):
And that's great. I mean, it's great that they've obviously attempted that, and that's already much better than some other companies where it would literally just be on that board. Right. But that also meant that my list of tasks as someone who was working remote more often than not, was always probably outdated by at least a day.
Matt Drozdzynski (07:06):
Because it got updated in the morning and then I wouldn't see that someone on the team had necessarily made progress, right. So it's things like that that I think you can easily see. It's the fact that as a remote employee, you sign into different portals, like different pieces of software to see your company policies or change your bank account. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (07:27):
And we even see that today, like we have all of these great new platforms for handling international employment, right, but they're oftentimes secondary or tertiary to other systems that already exist at the company. So if you are a sort of a W-2 US based-employee, you sign into a different portal to change your bank account or change your sort of payment preferences.
Matt Drozdzynski (07:49):
And if you're an international employee, you sign in somewhere else. Right. And it's all very fragmented and you get a different experience. Your onboarding looks different. Everything is different. It starts with these tiny little things, right, and it extends pretty much all the way through the company's stack. Especially the sort of the people facing stack, I think that's where you see a lot of differences.
Tyler Sellhorn (08:12):
I just want to underscore the theme that you're describing there. Right. You're saying that when we begin from that idea of equity and a shared experience that is similar or the same across distance, across borders, across cultures, right. We're saying each of us is a part of us.
Tyler Sellhorn (08:40):
We want to make sure that we are building the systems and workplaces that are going to honor each person's contribution. Right. This is a collective project, right? Any time that we're doing something beyond the solopreneur drop shipping, right. No judgment against those that are making their business doing those sorts of activities.
Tyler Sellhorn (09:02):
But anytime we start adding in people that are going to be collaborators on a permanent, semi-permanent basis, how are we going to decide? How are we going to treat those people in a way that honors them and their contribution to the collective project that is a company, that is a set of tasks, right?
Tyler Sellhorn (09:24):
I loved the anecdote of a physical kanban board in the conference room being duplicated in Trello. I mean, maybe let's try just, you have seen a digital kanban board to start with. And I think it's one of those things where you really can picture in your mind that conference room that has the laptop set up on one end.
Tyler Sellhorn (09:48):
It's not even a real camera or a good setup. You can imagine just how that person feels so distant from what's happening in the office. And I think that's something that we need to be thinking about now that we're, the future is hybrid, right. And what are we going to be doing to honor the contributions of people that are not close to us.
Tyler Sellhorn (10:09):
And even thinking about time zone, I guess maybe that's what I'd be interested to hear you talk more about is like, how do you think about equity and shared contributions to companies and to projects when we think about distance as it relates to time and working hours?
Matt Drozdzynski (10:26):
Yeah. I think this is something a lot of companies struggle with. I think there's no one easy solution to this, right. I mean, obviously we live in a world where we're separated by large distances and we have mornings and evenings happen at sort of different time of the day in sort of absolute terms, right.
Matt Drozdzynski (10:42):
The one thing that we do that I think helps with this is if you try to minimize scheduled meetings to the minimum, then you're reducing the scope of the problem. Right. And then ultimately what you have to try to do is figure out, okay, if we do need to have scheduled meetings, right?
Matt Drozdzynski (10:57):
What is the minimum number of participants that have to be in that meeting and how can we accommodate them to be within a reasonable time for everyone? And everyone has to make compromises. And also some things in a sort of traditional 9:00 to 5:00 environment are compromises for some people that aren't.
Matt Drozdzynski (11:18):
There is people for whom who like to break up their day, right. And they prefer to work in a morning for a stretch and then be able to take a longer lunch break, go to the gym and they do a little bit of work in the evening.
Matt Drozdzynski (11:29):
And they would be doing that regardless of whether they might have calls with a time zone that just happens to be better aligned with their evening time. Right. So I think for us, it's trying to minimize meeting time as much as possible. We have one or two all hands meetings a week, they're very short.
Matt Drozdzynski (11:47):
Try to record them, right. So if you can't make it, you can still be able to see what was discussed or see the notes that are distributed after the meeting. And then ultimately the rest is kind of very organic. Each individual sets their own time and then within each team, you coordinate how you want to work. Right. And some teams are going to be more meeting heavy.
Matt Drozdzynski (12:06):
Some teams are going to be more asynchronous heavy. We like the concept of autonomy, right? So it's like, how can we push out some of these decisions to the individuals that are actually affected by these most as opposed to something that's coming out from the top as a company policy, right?
Matt Drozdzynski (12:24):
And we just try to make sure that the company policy is that all teams have space to make those decisions, right? So it's not like it's full achy and nothing is decided. We try to make very intentional decisions to allow people to make their own decisions.
Tyler Sellhorn (12:41):
Plus one to the idea of autonomy, right, and sharing the power. I think that's one of the things that I kind of keep in my back pocket all the time. I'm a huge Brene Brown fan. If you've been a longtime listener you know that that is a stretch goal guest for me is to get people like Adam Grant or Brene Brown here on the podcast.
Tyler Sellhorn (13:05):
Because we're out here in these internet streets trying to be champions for remote work broadly and trying to get more of those types of people believing the things that we've been believing for a very long time. And I think that's one of the things that is rhyming and is a through line to the work of people like Brene Brown is that power is not best expressed over, right, others.
Tyler Sellhorn (13:29):
Power is not scarce or something to be held onto tightly, right. It's something to be expressed to and within and with other people. And when we do that, it grows, it's infinite. It's not finite. It's not something that we're stuck with just this tiny amount and that's all there ever will be, right.
Tyler Sellhorn (13:50):
It's when we infuse that level of autonomy that you describe to individuals that they can then choose, right. They can be invited, they can be held open the space as you describe, right, to choose their best self, to choose a better version of themselves inside of the organization.
Tyler Sellhorn (14:08):
And it might be that they grow past the organization too, or outside of their role inside the organization. These are things that we want to encourage and give voice to and allow for people to become more than they already are, right.
Tyler Sellhorn (14:23):
And that's going to help the bottom line of the business, right? How do we increase productivity or efficiency? Well, if we are inviting and giving people the option to become more than they already are, by golly, sometimes they do. Oftentimes they do.
Matt Drozdzynski (14:38):
Yeah. And I think as a company, you can think about it from as sort of a very selfish standpoint in a way, right? Where if you think about, if you're already a distributed team, right. Let's take this as an assumption, right? You want to have a distributed company, the concept of autonomy is something that you really need to think about.
Matt Drozdzynski (14:59):
And it's not a coincidence that when you speak to a lot of remote leaders, they'll talk about autonomy and kind of distributing decision-making power as well. And it's because of this time zone issue that we kind of started this conversation from, right. We have employees all over the world, right.
Matt Drozdzynski (15:17):
And if we're separated by 10 or 12 hours or however long, and there is a chain of command, right, that decisions have to travel up and down through. Right. Then every time zone jump, it adds a potential for delay. Right. And especially if you can have situations where it's not just, okay, the easy kind of setup is like, okay, you have a team in Europe and a team in the US. And all of the managers are in the US, right.
Matt Drozdzynski (15:45):
And they make all of the decision, right. Now you've delayed a lot of your decisions by a day, that's already happening. With even just one step in that decision-making hierarchy, right. But now picture a situation where you have multiple layers of hierarchy already. You're a larger company, right.
Matt Drozdzynski (16:00):
And you're doing this hop of someone who is kind of in the trenches. Say they're in Europe and they have to make a decision. They ping their manager who's in the US and they wait, right. And their manager wakes up, by the time they're able to make a decision that work is already off work. Right. So okay, they've made the decision.
Matt Drozdzynski (16:16):
Then that employee comes back and they're like, okay, well, now maybe I have to get someone else to okay this. Right. And that person is on the other side of the world. Right. And you're playing this game of ping pong and it takes time for your company. If your kind of decision-making pace is hindered by forcing everyone to go through this type of chain of authority, you're going to be slow at making decisions.
Matt Drozdzynski (16:39):
And you're going to be slow as a business. And we know that for high-growth businesses being slow is literally death. So it's a really bad outcome, right? This is why the sort of remote and autonomy, they really come together. I don't believe you can run an effective distributed team without a really high level of autonomy sort of at the edges, right?
Matt Drozdzynski (17:02):
So my role as a leader and the role of the sort of the management within my company is how do we make sure that the people that are in the trenches, the people that are doing the actual work, and that's not to belittle management work, but the people that are sort of frontline, right? How do we make sure that they're empowered to make decisions?
Matt Drozdzynski (17:18):
And that comes with A, letting them know, "Hey, you can make decisions," which for a lot of people, they're not used to that. A lot of people are coming from more traditional corporate environments and they're used to being told you can't make a decision, right? So one is really trying to draw it into them, "Yes, you can make these decisions."
Matt Drozdzynski (17:35):
But then second is how do we make sure they make good decisions? That is what transparency comes in. If you, as an individual, don't have access to the same information as I do as a CEO and I'm asking you to make a decision, you are making a subpar decision because you don't have access to the same set of data that I'm looking at. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (17:55):
So how can I expect you to make a good decision? I can't. And this is why if you kind of start thinking from it from the standpoint of, okay, we're building a distributed company, these things like autonomy and transparency, they almost, like you get them kind of from first principles if you try to reason, like what would it take to build a successful effective distributed team?
Tyler Sellhorn (18:19):
Yeah. I think it's really interesting to hear you use the framing of selfishness inside of that, but I think there's this idea that some people are shortsighted with their selfishness. Right. If we want to win as an organization, well, yeah, we're going to be thinking with both short and long-term decision-making framings, right.
Tyler Sellhorn (18:40):
But the problem is where are we going to make decisions on the things that are in opposition to one another? And I think that's what you're inviting us into is that, hey, organizational design and communication norms, and who gets to know what inside of an organization is really, really important in a team.
Tyler Sellhorn (19:00):
And I think this is that, we always repeat this so often when we have these conversations is to say that we're being invited into that usual intentionality conversation that Darren Murphy, OG head of remote at GitLab has told us that remote working is a forcing function for intentionality.
Tyler Sellhorn (19:21):
And we don't get away with things being assumed or implicit anymore. We have to write it down. We have to get explicit. We have to record things. Decisions can't be known by someone that's working 12 time zones away unless I have decided to share it with them, to tell them, to be working out loud.
Tyler Sellhorn (19:43):
That's kind of my phrase is that I wanted us to even embrace the idea that this is a growth mindset, right? You 12 hours from now are going to be able to take what I learned and then build on top of it. Let's be iterative. Let's be agile. Let's learn from each other, even when we aren't working at the same time.
Tyler Sellhorn (20:01):
Well, how can we do that? Well, we have to write it down. It has to be recorded. We have to have these opportunities to learn from one another in ways that do not require us to be on a video conference or get in a plane. That's the promise of remote work.
Tyler Sellhorn (20:15):
People are starting to catch on that, you know what, maybe we don't need to be so hardcore about where people are working. Well, now we need to start embracing the idea that when people are working is less important than that we do it, right. And I think that's so key.
Tyler Sellhorn (20:30):
I mean, this is even going back to a previous career when I was a school teacher. I really tried very, very hard to allow for students to embrace the learning that was required of them no matter when it happened during the semester. And even that is kind of silly at some point to say that like, well, these six months are the only times that you can ever learn something.
Tyler Sellhorn (20:50):
And the only way we're ever going to be able to demonstrate that you learn something is if you can do it on that exam that's at this time, right. That's silly, right. We want to know if people have learned it, right, no matter about when they did.
Tyler Sellhorn (21:02):
And I think that's the thing that we're being invited into now that we are starting to hire across time zones, hire across borders, hire across cultures, right. Is to say, I don't care. I mean, there's a certain amount of, just like you described, speed is important in high-growth organizations. Right.
Tyler Sellhorn (21:19):
And so there needs to be some sort of guardrails around boundaries about, you do have to reply at some point to this idea that I've shared. Right. But when is that expected? And if you can communicate when you expect to respond within the day, there we go. Now we've got an opportunity to be collaborative in a way that isn't bound by our location or when we're working.
Matt Drozdzynski (21:44):
Right. Yeah. No, that makes a ton of sense. And I think what you're saying, all of these concepts, like we're intimately familiar with them because we've done this for a long time now.
Tyler Sellhorn (21:54):
Shout out to Pilot and all of the people that have been working in this space long before March of 2020.
Matt Drozdzynski (22:01):
Right. And this is where I think what's been going on for the past two years is at the same time the biggest opportunity and threat for remote work. Right. I mean, it's a huge opportunity because it's effectively a sort of a forced trial, right, of remote. Everyone kind of had to do it whether you liked it or not, right.
Matt Drozdzynski (22:24):
And a lot of companies are going to come out of that realizing that this is great. A lot of employees are coming out of realizing this is great. A lot of companies are like, okay, this is like, we're moving in this direction. This is actually worked out a lot better than we expected. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (22:37):
But those are the companies that have put in the work. Right. Those are the companies that have decided to think through, okay, now that we have this constraint of people are not in the same building, we can't wave to each other and tap each other on shoulders, right, to start a conversation.
Matt Drozdzynski (22:56):
How are we going to do that? Right. And that's not to say that we need to recreate the office environment, right. I think that's also a sort of a full errand. Right. But how do we accomplish the same goals? Right. What are the new protocols now that we're distributed? Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (23:11):
And if you've, as a company, as a team done that homework, like if you've kind of really thought about it and made these decisions, then more likely than not your sort of trial of remote work was a success. Right. I have a feeling that there is a large number of companies that have not put in that work. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (23:34):
And this is where the threat really comes is that if you don't put in the work into designing your company to be remote first, then you sort of foe remote. Right. And you might be able to get by for a period of time, but you're going to be sort of really wanting to go back to the way that things were because, oh, things are so much better when we're in the office, right.
Matt Drozdzynski (23:56):
Things worked so much better. And I feel like that's kind of, coming out of this pandemic, we're sort of going to see companies really making up their mind about remote and some sort of swinging the other way being like, well, maybe in the past I didn't really have an opinion, now I've done two years of working remotely and I hate it.
Matt Drozdzynski (24:15):
That's a real, real outcome that we're seeing. And obviously my hope is, and I think from what we are seeing kind of happening, more companies sway in the way that is remote is great. We're going to continue doing it, but there are some that are going to be swaying the other way or trying to kind of thread this path of hybrid which is really difficult to do.
Matt Drozdzynski (24:36):
You kind of get the worst of both worlds if you try to do that. When you say, "Well, we kind of do remote, but not really. We'll be hybrid."
Tyler Sellhorn (24:47):
I think one of the things that I'm hearing you say is where does your company fit on that spectrum? Right. I think it's really important that we are, as you describe, transparent and allow people to be autonomous and make decisions for themselves about which kinds of organizations they want to be in.
Tyler Sellhorn (25:04):
Chris Herd, a previous guest, CEO of Firstbase HQ that does provisioning for home offices, his phrase that he has been repeating over and over again, I saw again today on Twitter, right, is that, "Companies that are more remote than their closest competitors will over time outcompete them for talent."
Tyler Sellhorn (25:24):
And I think that's really, really important that we do the work, whatever level of remote that we are going to choose to become, whether it's not at all or totally remote, you can't do, as you just said, do the faux remote version right.
Tyler Sellhorn (25:40):
Where we aren't doing it on purpose because no one is going to get away with having a workplace that's kind of, willy-nilly on accident, sort of just doing the office thing because that's what we've always done. There's no more getting away with that.
Tyler Sellhorn (25:54):
And it's very, very obvious and it is no secret to anyone observing anyone's career page, like whether or not they've actually embraced any of the phrases. If you're listening to The Remote Show, you know those job descriptions that are really obviously not going to be serious about their remote working policies. Do they mention time zones, right?
Tyler Sellhorn (26:17):
Do they mention whether or not there's going to be any in-person parts of the job? Is there going to be an expectation for a remote retreat or not, or how often that is, right? There's so many different signals that we can point to say, hey, we're actually taking this seriously. And we're interested in delivering, as you describe, Matt, an equitable arrangement with our workforce.
Matt Drozdzynski (26:43):
Right. And to be fair, you can be a lousy remote company. So it's not like that kind of absorbs you of the... And you sort of-
Tyler Sellhorn (26:54):
I'm calling out all of the faux remote companies that exist, whether they state that they're remote or not, you have to do the work. Right. There's no hiding the fact that you have done it on purpose or not.
Matt Drozdzynski (27:05):
Yeah. What I meant is that I don't think just being remote necessarily makes you a better performer, right. I think it can. There's also a lot of really well performing companies that are not remote, right.
Matt Drozdzynski (27:15):
I don't know if I subscribe to this argument that in the absence of sort of other factors, a remote company will always win. I think you have to kind of, like an equally competent remote company.
Tyler Sellhorn (27:28):
Well, let's lean into the bayesian kind of normal distribution. This is not going to be true 100% of the time, but on balance factoring in other factors, right, we're going to see that be the case. Is it similar to the way the metaphor is the internet or eCommerce or computers, right?
Tyler Sellhorn (27:48):
The more that we can embrace a digital mindset, the better we're going to become. And then sometimes, and oftentimes most times that's going to include a remote working version of things. Okay. Well, I want to just conclude with this final thought, we've talked about what was before and what's been during the pandemic.
Tyler Sellhorn (28:07):
I'm curious to hear you do some forward thinking with us. What do you think is going to be the next version or the improved version, or what's even next for us as a remote working community here in 2022 and beyond?
Matt Drozdzynski (28:22):
Yeah. So I think I touched upon this a little bit with sort of companies now coming out of the pandemic, kind of making those decisions as to whether they're going to swing one way or the other. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (28:33):
So I think we're going to see more of that, where there's going to be companies sort of enthusiastically being like, okay, finally, we don't have to be remote anymore, but there's going to be a large number of companies that are like, yes, remote is great.
Matt Drozdzynski (28:45):
We're going to invest more into that. Right. And I think then there are a lot of things that we as a society and as a community have kind of put on hold over the past two years because of COVID. I don't think we have quite figured out yet how that's going to work. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (29:02):
So I mean, we've been a distributed company since the beginning and I've pretty much only ever worked at distributed companies. And one of the things that was always really important to me was making sure that we meet in-person at a very regular cadence. Right. And over the past two years, that's not been the case. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (29:20):
And I think that's really important to team building and we kind of have to figure out going forward, how can we do more of that? Right. So I think there is a lot of interesting thoughts around if you're the type of company that can afford actual real estate, like how is that going to look? Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (29:37):
Are we going to see more companies invest in building kind of their own work resorts in a way? We've all had this experience of going to a hotel and Wi-Fi being really and not having great spaces to work from, but you still wanted that experience of being together and kind of doing an offsite, right.
Matt Drozdzynski (29:55):
I think we still need those, but where are we going to have them? And this is why I think the companies that are kind of thinking about this concept of building these studios or locations that people can travel to and work together for short periods of time, I think that is really interesting to me. And that's a concept that I'm kind of excited to see companies explore further in the future.
Tyler Sellhorn (30:15):
Well, I'm excited for the work resorts of the future as well. Shout out to the alpha for people to think about investing in those sorts of experiences. And I'm really excited to see what gets created here shortly. Thank you so much, Matt, for learning out loud with us today. We appreciate you.
Matt Drozdzynski (30:34):
Thanks Tyler. My pleasure.
Tyler Sellhorn (30:37):
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.
Tyler Sellhorn (30:48):
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.
Pilot takes care of payroll, benefits and compliance for US companies with remote international teams. Easily onboarding and pay your employees and contractors worldwide in one secure cloud-based platform. Have questions about international hiring? Schedule a free consultation with our experts and claim your We Work Remotely Pilot discount at pilot.co/WWR.
Tyler Sellhorn (00:24):
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.
Tyler Sellhorn (00:37):
With over 220,000 unique users per month, We Work Remotely is the most effective way to hire. Today, we are blessed to be learning out loud with Matt Drozdzynski. Matt is currently founder and CEO of Pilot, a platform that makes it easy to hire and pay people remotely. Matt, welcome to The Remote Show and tell us, what are you trying to solve with Pilot?
Matt Drozdzynski (00:58):
Hey, it's really good to be here. I think there's two big problems we're trying to solve, right? And that is making sure that people around the world can get paid equitably. They can work for whoever they want and get kind of treated the way that a regular team member would be treated, right.
Matt Drozdzynski (01:15):
And hopefully do that in a way that's nice and easy for companies to use and it's a single cohesive experience, right. So how do we make it possible for companies to find and hire and pay the best talent anywhere in the world and how can we make it possible for people to find the best jobs in their lives wherever it happens to be?
Tyler Sellhorn (01:34):
Really interesting. You mentioned a couple ideas there that I'd like to pull apart a little bit. When you describe getting paid equitably, what is it that you're pointing to or kind of hinting at? It seems like maybe there's more to that story. I'm curious.
Matt Drozdzynski (01:49):
Yeah. No, that's a really good question. I think throughout my career, and I've worked in distributed teams for, well, basically all my life, I've never worked a non remote job. And I've seen a lot of companies do remote, attempt to do remote in one way or another.
Matt Drozdzynski (02:04):
And what we've seen a lot was that people that are remote are treated as second class citizens oftentimes, right. That happens in a couple of ways, right? If you're primarily an office first company, right, then immediately anyone who's not in the office is sort of outside of your immediate sort of purview and the people that you interact with day-to-day, right?
Matt Drozdzynski (02:26):
So you end up treating them differently. They're the odd person on a conference line in a meeting room where everyone else is in-person, right. But it also extends to teams that are a little bit more distributed, right. Where we sort of see this prevalence of when people are being hired across borders, they tend to be hired as contractors. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (02:46):
And a lot of the time, what that means is that they get treated as such. Companies use that as an excuse to say, well, we can't treat you like an employee, right. You're a contractor. And they sort of hear that from legal that says for compliance reasons, we have to do this. We have to treat them differently.
Matt Drozdzynski (03:02):
They can't get performance reviews. You can't have one on ones with them. You can't do all of these things, right. And that is really perceptible. That is something that you as a human being working with a team, you notice that you're treated differently, right?
Matt Drozdzynski (03:17):
And that sort of always kind of irked me the wrong way. You get treated differently by the people that you work with potentially, by obviously legal, sometimes by HR. You get paid differently, right? As a contractor, they might tell you, well, we're going to pay you into PayPal or some kind of a wallet. And you have to withdraw your funds from that account.
Matt Drozdzynski (03:39):
And maybe, actually, maybe we'll pay you net 30 because that's kind of what our vendor system allows us to do. And you're going to be responsible for the payment fees on the receiving end, right. And if you told that to an employee at your company, I mean, they wouldn't take it. Right. It's like, what do you mean? Like on my pay date, I don't have money in my bank account.
Matt Drozdzynski (04:02):
I have to go to this platform. I have to withdraw it. I have to do X, Y, Z. Pay some money and then maybe a few days later I'm going to have it, like you would think they're joking. Right. So that's what I mean by equitably is like, how can we make sure that a company can treat all of the team members the same?
Tyler Sellhorn (04:20):
I've gone through those experiences that you described, right. Shout out to the pre 2019 remoters that have felt the inequitable employment arrangements of the past. And we're grateful to you all for leading the charge and being equitable. Right. Let's lean into that. Right. And you mentioned the idea of being treated like a real teammate.
Tyler Sellhorn (04:42):
I think that's so interesting to hear you talk about it in the reality versus unreality, a real versus virtual kind of framing. And I guess maybe I'm curious to hear you talk about, like what does it mean for us to be together in the virtual conference room of our teams that makes it so that we do feel like we're being treated like a real teammate?
Matt Drozdzynski (05:10):
Yeah. I think this is a sort of a tricky question to unpack, right, because it very much depends on the specific setting that you're in, but what we usually mean by that is sometimes it's simple things, right? It's the fact that when you're on a Zoom call, everyone gets the little icon and is their own person on Zoom. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (05:28):
As opposed to what oftentimes happens, which is you have one big conference room sort of view and there's multiple people in there. And then there is some people here and they're sprinkled in remotely, and you can hear some people better and some people not as well because they're sitting a little bit further apart from the conference mic. Yeah.
Matt Drozdzynski (05:46):
So these are kind of the very little tactical things that whenever I talk to companies that kind of are going through this transition of either being hybrid, going towards hybrid or going towards more remote, those are simple things that you can fix that have genuine impact on how people are going to sort of see themselves compared to their peers. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (06:08):
I used to consult with a company where I would actually come in to their office every once in a while. And one of the pain points that I'd seen is that their backlog for their engineers, their sort of kanban board was literally a physical board in the office. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (06:23):
And what they would do is one of the PMs on the project that I was helping with would literally go into that board every morning and sort of realizing that they needed a digital version of it, he would sort of recreate it in Trello. Right. And he would like, as people move sticky notes around, he would move them in Trello to try to kind of have it match one to one. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (06:46):
And that's great. I mean, it's great that they've obviously attempted that, and that's already much better than some other companies where it would literally just be on that board. Right. But that also meant that my list of tasks as someone who was working remote more often than not, was always probably outdated by at least a day.
Matt Drozdzynski (07:06):
Because it got updated in the morning and then I wouldn't see that someone on the team had necessarily made progress, right. So it's things like that that I think you can easily see. It's the fact that as a remote employee, you sign into different portals, like different pieces of software to see your company policies or change your bank account. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (07:27):
And we even see that today, like we have all of these great new platforms for handling international employment, right, but they're oftentimes secondary or tertiary to other systems that already exist at the company. So if you are a sort of a W-2 US based-employee, you sign into a different portal to change your bank account or change your sort of payment preferences.
Matt Drozdzynski (07:49):
And if you're an international employee, you sign in somewhere else. Right. And it's all very fragmented and you get a different experience. Your onboarding looks different. Everything is different. It starts with these tiny little things, right, and it extends pretty much all the way through the company's stack. Especially the sort of the people facing stack, I think that's where you see a lot of differences.
Tyler Sellhorn (08:12):
I just want to underscore the theme that you're describing there. Right. You're saying that when we begin from that idea of equity and a shared experience that is similar or the same across distance, across borders, across cultures, right. We're saying each of us is a part of us.
Tyler Sellhorn (08:40):
We want to make sure that we are building the systems and workplaces that are going to honor each person's contribution. Right. This is a collective project, right? Any time that we're doing something beyond the solopreneur drop shipping, right. No judgment against those that are making their business doing those sorts of activities.
Tyler Sellhorn (09:02):
But anytime we start adding in people that are going to be collaborators on a permanent, semi-permanent basis, how are we going to decide? How are we going to treat those people in a way that honors them and their contribution to the collective project that is a company, that is a set of tasks, right?
Tyler Sellhorn (09:24):
I loved the anecdote of a physical kanban board in the conference room being duplicated in Trello. I mean, maybe let's try just, you have seen a digital kanban board to start with. And I think it's one of those things where you really can picture in your mind that conference room that has the laptop set up on one end.
Tyler Sellhorn (09:48):
It's not even a real camera or a good setup. You can imagine just how that person feels so distant from what's happening in the office. And I think that's something that we need to be thinking about now that we're, the future is hybrid, right. And what are we going to be doing to honor the contributions of people that are not close to us.
Tyler Sellhorn (10:09):
And even thinking about time zone, I guess maybe that's what I'd be interested to hear you talk more about is like, how do you think about equity and shared contributions to companies and to projects when we think about distance as it relates to time and working hours?
Matt Drozdzynski (10:26):
Yeah. I think this is something a lot of companies struggle with. I think there's no one easy solution to this, right. I mean, obviously we live in a world where we're separated by large distances and we have mornings and evenings happen at sort of different time of the day in sort of absolute terms, right.
Matt Drozdzynski (10:42):
The one thing that we do that I think helps with this is if you try to minimize scheduled meetings to the minimum, then you're reducing the scope of the problem. Right. And then ultimately what you have to try to do is figure out, okay, if we do need to have scheduled meetings, right?
Matt Drozdzynski (10:57):
What is the minimum number of participants that have to be in that meeting and how can we accommodate them to be within a reasonable time for everyone? And everyone has to make compromises. And also some things in a sort of traditional 9:00 to 5:00 environment are compromises for some people that aren't.
Matt Drozdzynski (11:18):
There is people for whom who like to break up their day, right. And they prefer to work in a morning for a stretch and then be able to take a longer lunch break, go to the gym and they do a little bit of work in the evening.
Matt Drozdzynski (11:29):
And they would be doing that regardless of whether they might have calls with a time zone that just happens to be better aligned with their evening time. Right. So I think for us, it's trying to minimize meeting time as much as possible. We have one or two all hands meetings a week, they're very short.
Matt Drozdzynski (11:47):
Try to record them, right. So if you can't make it, you can still be able to see what was discussed or see the notes that are distributed after the meeting. And then ultimately the rest is kind of very organic. Each individual sets their own time and then within each team, you coordinate how you want to work. Right. And some teams are going to be more meeting heavy.
Matt Drozdzynski (12:06):
Some teams are going to be more asynchronous heavy. We like the concept of autonomy, right? So it's like, how can we push out some of these decisions to the individuals that are actually affected by these most as opposed to something that's coming out from the top as a company policy, right?
Matt Drozdzynski (12:24):
And we just try to make sure that the company policy is that all teams have space to make those decisions, right? So it's not like it's full achy and nothing is decided. We try to make very intentional decisions to allow people to make their own decisions.
Tyler Sellhorn (12:41):
Plus one to the idea of autonomy, right, and sharing the power. I think that's one of the things that I kind of keep in my back pocket all the time. I'm a huge Brene Brown fan. If you've been a longtime listener you know that that is a stretch goal guest for me is to get people like Adam Grant or Brene Brown here on the podcast.
Tyler Sellhorn (13:05):
Because we're out here in these internet streets trying to be champions for remote work broadly and trying to get more of those types of people believing the things that we've been believing for a very long time. And I think that's one of the things that is rhyming and is a through line to the work of people like Brene Brown is that power is not best expressed over, right, others.
Tyler Sellhorn (13:29):
Power is not scarce or something to be held onto tightly, right. It's something to be expressed to and within and with other people. And when we do that, it grows, it's infinite. It's not finite. It's not something that we're stuck with just this tiny amount and that's all there ever will be, right.
Tyler Sellhorn (13:50):
It's when we infuse that level of autonomy that you describe to individuals that they can then choose, right. They can be invited, they can be held open the space as you describe, right, to choose their best self, to choose a better version of themselves inside of the organization.
Tyler Sellhorn (14:08):
And it might be that they grow past the organization too, or outside of their role inside the organization. These are things that we want to encourage and give voice to and allow for people to become more than they already are, right.
Tyler Sellhorn (14:23):
And that's going to help the bottom line of the business, right? How do we increase productivity or efficiency? Well, if we are inviting and giving people the option to become more than they already are, by golly, sometimes they do. Oftentimes they do.
Matt Drozdzynski (14:38):
Yeah. And I think as a company, you can think about it from as sort of a very selfish standpoint in a way, right? Where if you think about, if you're already a distributed team, right. Let's take this as an assumption, right? You want to have a distributed company, the concept of autonomy is something that you really need to think about.
Matt Drozdzynski (14:59):
And it's not a coincidence that when you speak to a lot of remote leaders, they'll talk about autonomy and kind of distributing decision-making power as well. And it's because of this time zone issue that we kind of started this conversation from, right. We have employees all over the world, right.
Matt Drozdzynski (15:17):
And if we're separated by 10 or 12 hours or however long, and there is a chain of command, right, that decisions have to travel up and down through. Right. Then every time zone jump, it adds a potential for delay. Right. And especially if you can have situations where it's not just, okay, the easy kind of setup is like, okay, you have a team in Europe and a team in the US. And all of the managers are in the US, right.
Matt Drozdzynski (15:45):
And they make all of the decision, right. Now you've delayed a lot of your decisions by a day, that's already happening. With even just one step in that decision-making hierarchy, right. But now picture a situation where you have multiple layers of hierarchy already. You're a larger company, right.
Matt Drozdzynski (16:00):
And you're doing this hop of someone who is kind of in the trenches. Say they're in Europe and they have to make a decision. They ping their manager who's in the US and they wait, right. And their manager wakes up, by the time they're able to make a decision that work is already off work. Right. So okay, they've made the decision.
Matt Drozdzynski (16:16):
Then that employee comes back and they're like, okay, well, now maybe I have to get someone else to okay this. Right. And that person is on the other side of the world. Right. And you're playing this game of ping pong and it takes time for your company. If your kind of decision-making pace is hindered by forcing everyone to go through this type of chain of authority, you're going to be slow at making decisions.
Matt Drozdzynski (16:39):
And you're going to be slow as a business. And we know that for high-growth businesses being slow is literally death. So it's a really bad outcome, right? This is why the sort of remote and autonomy, they really come together. I don't believe you can run an effective distributed team without a really high level of autonomy sort of at the edges, right?
Matt Drozdzynski (17:02):
So my role as a leader and the role of the sort of the management within my company is how do we make sure that the people that are in the trenches, the people that are doing the actual work, and that's not to belittle management work, but the people that are sort of frontline, right? How do we make sure that they're empowered to make decisions?
Matt Drozdzynski (17:18):
And that comes with A, letting them know, "Hey, you can make decisions," which for a lot of people, they're not used to that. A lot of people are coming from more traditional corporate environments and they're used to being told you can't make a decision, right? So one is really trying to draw it into them, "Yes, you can make these decisions."
Matt Drozdzynski (17:35):
But then second is how do we make sure they make good decisions? That is what transparency comes in. If you, as an individual, don't have access to the same information as I do as a CEO and I'm asking you to make a decision, you are making a subpar decision because you don't have access to the same set of data that I'm looking at. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (17:55):
So how can I expect you to make a good decision? I can't. And this is why if you kind of start thinking from it from the standpoint of, okay, we're building a distributed company, these things like autonomy and transparency, they almost, like you get them kind of from first principles if you try to reason, like what would it take to build a successful effective distributed team?
Tyler Sellhorn (18:19):
Yeah. I think it's really interesting to hear you use the framing of selfishness inside of that, but I think there's this idea that some people are shortsighted with their selfishness. Right. If we want to win as an organization, well, yeah, we're going to be thinking with both short and long-term decision-making framings, right.
Tyler Sellhorn (18:40):
But the problem is where are we going to make decisions on the things that are in opposition to one another? And I think that's what you're inviting us into is that, hey, organizational design and communication norms, and who gets to know what inside of an organization is really, really important in a team.
Tyler Sellhorn (19:00):
And I think this is that, we always repeat this so often when we have these conversations is to say that we're being invited into that usual intentionality conversation that Darren Murphy, OG head of remote at GitLab has told us that remote working is a forcing function for intentionality.
Tyler Sellhorn (19:21):
And we don't get away with things being assumed or implicit anymore. We have to write it down. We have to get explicit. We have to record things. Decisions can't be known by someone that's working 12 time zones away unless I have decided to share it with them, to tell them, to be working out loud.
Tyler Sellhorn (19:43):
That's kind of my phrase is that I wanted us to even embrace the idea that this is a growth mindset, right? You 12 hours from now are going to be able to take what I learned and then build on top of it. Let's be iterative. Let's be agile. Let's learn from each other, even when we aren't working at the same time.
Tyler Sellhorn (20:01):
Well, how can we do that? Well, we have to write it down. It has to be recorded. We have to have these opportunities to learn from one another in ways that do not require us to be on a video conference or get in a plane. That's the promise of remote work.
Tyler Sellhorn (20:15):
People are starting to catch on that, you know what, maybe we don't need to be so hardcore about where people are working. Well, now we need to start embracing the idea that when people are working is less important than that we do it, right. And I think that's so key.
Tyler Sellhorn (20:30):
I mean, this is even going back to a previous career when I was a school teacher. I really tried very, very hard to allow for students to embrace the learning that was required of them no matter when it happened during the semester. And even that is kind of silly at some point to say that like, well, these six months are the only times that you can ever learn something.
Tyler Sellhorn (20:50):
And the only way we're ever going to be able to demonstrate that you learn something is if you can do it on that exam that's at this time, right. That's silly, right. We want to know if people have learned it, right, no matter about when they did.
Tyler Sellhorn (21:02):
And I think that's the thing that we're being invited into now that we are starting to hire across time zones, hire across borders, hire across cultures, right. Is to say, I don't care. I mean, there's a certain amount of, just like you described, speed is important in high-growth organizations. Right.
Tyler Sellhorn (21:19):
And so there needs to be some sort of guardrails around boundaries about, you do have to reply at some point to this idea that I've shared. Right. But when is that expected? And if you can communicate when you expect to respond within the day, there we go. Now we've got an opportunity to be collaborative in a way that isn't bound by our location or when we're working.
Matt Drozdzynski (21:44):
Right. Yeah. No, that makes a ton of sense. And I think what you're saying, all of these concepts, like we're intimately familiar with them because we've done this for a long time now.
Tyler Sellhorn (21:54):
Shout out to Pilot and all of the people that have been working in this space long before March of 2020.
Matt Drozdzynski (22:01):
Right. And this is where I think what's been going on for the past two years is at the same time the biggest opportunity and threat for remote work. Right. I mean, it's a huge opportunity because it's effectively a sort of a forced trial, right, of remote. Everyone kind of had to do it whether you liked it or not, right.
Matt Drozdzynski (22:24):
And a lot of companies are going to come out of that realizing that this is great. A lot of employees are coming out of realizing this is great. A lot of companies are like, okay, this is like, we're moving in this direction. This is actually worked out a lot better than we expected. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (22:37):
But those are the companies that have put in the work. Right. Those are the companies that have decided to think through, okay, now that we have this constraint of people are not in the same building, we can't wave to each other and tap each other on shoulders, right, to start a conversation.
Matt Drozdzynski (22:56):
How are we going to do that? Right. And that's not to say that we need to recreate the office environment, right. I think that's also a sort of a full errand. Right. But how do we accomplish the same goals? Right. What are the new protocols now that we're distributed? Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (23:11):
And if you've, as a company, as a team done that homework, like if you've kind of really thought about it and made these decisions, then more likely than not your sort of trial of remote work was a success. Right. I have a feeling that there is a large number of companies that have not put in that work. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (23:34):
And this is where the threat really comes is that if you don't put in the work into designing your company to be remote first, then you sort of foe remote. Right. And you might be able to get by for a period of time, but you're going to be sort of really wanting to go back to the way that things were because, oh, things are so much better when we're in the office, right.
Matt Drozdzynski (23:56):
Things worked so much better. And I feel like that's kind of, coming out of this pandemic, we're sort of going to see companies really making up their mind about remote and some sort of swinging the other way being like, well, maybe in the past I didn't really have an opinion, now I've done two years of working remotely and I hate it.
Matt Drozdzynski (24:15):
That's a real, real outcome that we're seeing. And obviously my hope is, and I think from what we are seeing kind of happening, more companies sway in the way that is remote is great. We're going to continue doing it, but there are some that are going to be swaying the other way or trying to kind of thread this path of hybrid which is really difficult to do.
Matt Drozdzynski (24:36):
You kind of get the worst of both worlds if you try to do that. When you say, "Well, we kind of do remote, but not really. We'll be hybrid."
Tyler Sellhorn (24:47):
I think one of the things that I'm hearing you say is where does your company fit on that spectrum? Right. I think it's really important that we are, as you describe, transparent and allow people to be autonomous and make decisions for themselves about which kinds of organizations they want to be in.
Tyler Sellhorn (25:04):
Chris Herd, a previous guest, CEO of Firstbase HQ that does provisioning for home offices, his phrase that he has been repeating over and over again, I saw again today on Twitter, right, is that, "Companies that are more remote than their closest competitors will over time outcompete them for talent."
Tyler Sellhorn (25:24):
And I think that's really, really important that we do the work, whatever level of remote that we are going to choose to become, whether it's not at all or totally remote, you can't do, as you just said, do the faux remote version right.
Tyler Sellhorn (25:40):
Where we aren't doing it on purpose because no one is going to get away with having a workplace that's kind of, willy-nilly on accident, sort of just doing the office thing because that's what we've always done. There's no more getting away with that.
Tyler Sellhorn (25:54):
And it's very, very obvious and it is no secret to anyone observing anyone's career page, like whether or not they've actually embraced any of the phrases. If you're listening to The Remote Show, you know those job descriptions that are really obviously not going to be serious about their remote working policies. Do they mention time zones, right?
Tyler Sellhorn (26:17):
Do they mention whether or not there's going to be any in-person parts of the job? Is there going to be an expectation for a remote retreat or not, or how often that is, right? There's so many different signals that we can point to say, hey, we're actually taking this seriously. And we're interested in delivering, as you describe, Matt, an equitable arrangement with our workforce.
Matt Drozdzynski (26:43):
Right. And to be fair, you can be a lousy remote company. So it's not like that kind of absorbs you of the... And you sort of-
Tyler Sellhorn (26:54):
I'm calling out all of the faux remote companies that exist, whether they state that they're remote or not, you have to do the work. Right. There's no hiding the fact that you have done it on purpose or not.
Matt Drozdzynski (27:05):
Yeah. What I meant is that I don't think just being remote necessarily makes you a better performer, right. I think it can. There's also a lot of really well performing companies that are not remote, right.
Matt Drozdzynski (27:15):
I don't know if I subscribe to this argument that in the absence of sort of other factors, a remote company will always win. I think you have to kind of, like an equally competent remote company.
Tyler Sellhorn (27:28):
Well, let's lean into the bayesian kind of normal distribution. This is not going to be true 100% of the time, but on balance factoring in other factors, right, we're going to see that be the case. Is it similar to the way the metaphor is the internet or eCommerce or computers, right?
Tyler Sellhorn (27:48):
The more that we can embrace a digital mindset, the better we're going to become. And then sometimes, and oftentimes most times that's going to include a remote working version of things. Okay. Well, I want to just conclude with this final thought, we've talked about what was before and what's been during the pandemic.
Tyler Sellhorn (28:07):
I'm curious to hear you do some forward thinking with us. What do you think is going to be the next version or the improved version, or what's even next for us as a remote working community here in 2022 and beyond?
Matt Drozdzynski (28:22):
Yeah. So I think I touched upon this a little bit with sort of companies now coming out of the pandemic, kind of making those decisions as to whether they're going to swing one way or the other. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (28:33):
So I think we're going to see more of that, where there's going to be companies sort of enthusiastically being like, okay, finally, we don't have to be remote anymore, but there's going to be a large number of companies that are like, yes, remote is great.
Matt Drozdzynski (28:45):
We're going to invest more into that. Right. And I think then there are a lot of things that we as a society and as a community have kind of put on hold over the past two years because of COVID. I don't think we have quite figured out yet how that's going to work. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (29:02):
So I mean, we've been a distributed company since the beginning and I've pretty much only ever worked at distributed companies. And one of the things that was always really important to me was making sure that we meet in-person at a very regular cadence. Right. And over the past two years, that's not been the case. Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (29:20):
And I think that's really important to team building and we kind of have to figure out going forward, how can we do more of that? Right. So I think there is a lot of interesting thoughts around if you're the type of company that can afford actual real estate, like how is that going to look? Right.
Matt Drozdzynski (29:37):
Are we going to see more companies invest in building kind of their own work resorts in a way? We've all had this experience of going to a hotel and Wi-Fi being really and not having great spaces to work from, but you still wanted that experience of being together and kind of doing an offsite, right.
Matt Drozdzynski (29:55):
I think we still need those, but where are we going to have them? And this is why I think the companies that are kind of thinking about this concept of building these studios or locations that people can travel to and work together for short periods of time, I think that is really interesting to me. And that's a concept that I'm kind of excited to see companies explore further in the future.
Tyler Sellhorn (30:15):
Well, I'm excited for the work resorts of the future as well. Shout out to the alpha for people to think about investing in those sorts of experiences. And I'm really excited to see what gets created here shortly. Thank you so much, Matt, for learning out loud with us today. We appreciate you.
Matt Drozdzynski (30:34):
Thanks Tyler. My pleasure.
Tyler Sellhorn (30:37):
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.
Tyler Sellhorn (30:48):
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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