The Remote-First Revolution: Building Borderless Teams with David Nilssen

Hello, everybody. Welcome once again to the Long Distance Worklife Podcast, where we help you survive, thrive, arrive alive, whatever. In this crazy world of remote and hybrid and the evolving workplace. My name is Wayne Trammell.

This is a Marissa Alice episode. Marissa will be back next week. But that means I get to talk to somebody really cool about an important topic. And so today we are going to talk about building international teams, working internationally, and probably ruffle a few feathers along the way, I suspect.

My guest is appearing on screen now is David Nelson from Docs and Talent. He is in Boise, Idaho. Hi, David. How are you?

I'm doing great, Wayne. Thanks for having me on today. Well, thank you for being here. Listen, the question is, who really quickly.

Who are you? And docs and talent and what makes you qualified to talk about this? Yeah. So, docs a talent is a socially conscious outsourcing firm.

We help, companies in the US build and scale up high performing teams of global talent. What makes me qualified to talk on this topic? We actually have about a thousand employees across seven different countries, and we have zero office space. So I'm a real, I'm passionate about remote work.

I think it is the future. And I love talking about this with people. So glad to do it today. Now, before we started recording, we were having a conversation, and you said something interesting, which strikes me as, a little paradoxical, which is that you have no office space.

But you told me before that you are remote first. Yes. You had. How do you swear that?

How do you make that work with this many people? Yeah, I think a lot of people have this assumption that the reason why companies go remote is to save money on office space, and. And the reality is, what I tell people is that when we chose to go fully remote, meaning no office space whatsoever, we weren't remote, only we were remote first. It's not a cost cutting exercise.

It's just a strategic move to embrace what we think are modern workforce trends. And so for us, when we say remote company, it does not mean that we don't ever get together, as an organization. So, for example, next week, my entire leadership team, and other members are flying into Manila and we're going to have, a week long, event where we do some cultural training, where we do some strategic training, we unveil our annual plan, we do some teambuilding, and then we have our annual holiday celebration, and we'll have approximately 700 people ascend on Manila for us to be able to have that.

So that's obviously a pretty large expense. We're not saving money, we're just investing it in different ways. And that's really important. I, I think this is a little sidetracked, but I think it's important, this notion that people look at remote as a way to save money and therefore investing in getting people together is something we don't need to do because we're remote.

Yeah, I don't think that's actually true. I mean, I do believe that in an office you have this great opportunity to build relationships, but you generally do it unintentionally through osmosis, right? You and I meet at the water cooler. We have a little coffee together.

Or we have these crazy events. And I remember, you know, a decade ago when I had everybody in one office in downtown Seattle, we had all these fun events that we would do. And it's really about creating a fun environment when you move to the remote world now, also, you don't get a chance to sort of build that connective tissue that you would just build, naturally through, being in an office and so we have to sort of create those opportunities in small, digestible snippets. And so that's what we are we're doing in that regard with the group.

The other thing I would say, though, is that also, instead of investing what I would call fun, and that's what people often think of culture as we're investing more in professional development and tools and training resources to help elevate them as people, professionals, along the way. What kind of skills when you are putting a team that is going to be remote first and more than that, international, what kind of skills are you looking for? Well, in our in our company, we help companies.

We help our clients. I say build teams of everything from, administrative professionals to finance and accounting, data science, software engineering. So the skill set that they need, will vary depending on the type of roles that our clients need them to play. But I would say aside from that, there are some characteristics of the way people work in this sort of, internal needs that they have that are important.

So we actually use an assessment to help us as one indicator towards predicting whether this person can be successful in a remote environment. One is have they done before? And if they haven't. And we want to understand are these people autonomous workers or do they need a lot of direction and sort of support, or are they social people?

Because if you have a very high social need, the remote world can actually feel very isolated. For someone who's really a high producing individual, doesn't need a lot of social stimulus, though it can actually be a very freeing environment. And then the other thing that I would say that we do is we spend a lot of time, working with our clients to make sure that they have the right process and systems and collaboration tools and rhythms to get the the outcomes that they want from the workers that we have, because we could provide the best worker in the world.

But if the company is instead of to actually support a remote worker or an international team member, then it may not be successful. Anyways. What kind of pushback do you get? What don't they expect they're going to have to do?

The workers with the clients? The clients? I'm not. The person with the money makes these decisions in the long run, and are largely responsible for whether it works or not, right?

Yeah. The thing that's always the most surprising and the place where people are challenged, the greatest working with remote workers, whether they're offshore, onshore, it doesn't really matter. The question is, do they have the tools and the sort of rhythms to work with people in our environment? Oftentimes we default in office practices when we have in office workers.

And so we haven't built the the sort of muscles that we need as leaders to make sure that people are clear on the outcomes that are expected of them to, ensure that they've put the right person in the right seat and that, everyone feels like they're on the same playing field. So that would be the first one, is do they understand how to work with the remote, workforce? The second, though, is do they have standard operating procedures for the roles that are, you know, required for people to do similar work constantly, which is often what gets outsourced.

They need to have standard operating procedures. Well, it's pretty interesting to me, as I've worked with large scale organizations up to public companies who didn't really have strong SOPs. And so that tends to be the place where there's the biggest friction point when you're trying to blend international remote with standard work. Yeah, the notion of this is how we want you to do it.

As you say, it happens a fair amount by osmosis. When you're in the office, it's kind of in the oxygen. There that you breathe, which also leads to something else, which is you are very definitely remote first, and you're not a big fan of hybrid work, or at least what a lot of people call hybrid work. Now, here's your chance there.

Here's your soapbox, buddy. Have. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, look, I would say, my first experience.

So pre-pandemic, we were sort of playing with should we go remote? We've been a centralized organization for almost two decades. And, the company that I was running at the time and, you know, we celebrated culture, but we were starting to get the, you know, people reaching out to saying, hey, I'm having to move further to a for a home. I want to work here.

I love the company, but I can't can't commute two hours a day. Would you be open to this? And so we started playing with that. And we constantly heard little grumblings from our team.

That was just a bad experience. Well, it became, true to me when I was traveling on the road, we were having a leadership team meeting, and everyone sitting around the table. And here I am sitting in cyberspace on a zoom call. They kept forgetting about me.

I was I wasn't able to barge into the calls. I couldn't read the body language of the people around me. And I realized really quickly that by creating a hybrid environment, we created two classes of people. Those that had access to information, access to leaders could read the body language and those that did not.

And so when we looked at it, we zoomed out, we said, hey, look, in an office, we built all the same sort of muscles around. How do we how do we think about productivity and employee experience and what management, skills and tools do you need, and how do we train people and the same thing is true in remote. If you're fully remote, you build the same sort of muscles. When you're in a hybrid environment, you have to do both.

So you do both and you pay for both. But you can't really be best in class either. And so for us, we decided we wanted to be a remote organization. We felt like that was the future of the modern workforce.

But I'm not against in-office work. I just believe that in the hybrid environment, it's the most expensive and potentially the most dangerous for employee experience. There you go. Now, some of that, of course, has to do with what we think of as hybrid.

And are we aware of these dynamics and taking steps to deal with them? Right. Well, where I'm in violent agreement is when it's done badly, all of those things. Yeah.

Okay. Well, you talked about training just a second ago when you brought that up. I thought, you know, that's a great example of one. Right.

So when we used to have salespeople that would onboard with us in an office, I would say, hey, Wayne, welcome to the company. And I'm over generalizing, of course, just to be illustrative here, but hey, great to have you here. You're to be our orientation with our HR leader. And then I'm going to have you sit next to Dave.

Dave's been in this role for two years. You're going to watch him for the next 2 to 4 weeks. You'll pick it up, you'll be great. And that's sort of how people think about training.

It's really training by osmosis. But in a remote environment that is absolutely impossible. So if your company is set up to onboard and train and develop people in a, in an in office environment that is not aware of or sensitive to the remote workforce, then the remote people get the short end of the stick and oftentimes, are much less successful. Absolutely.

So we're going to put a pin in that for the moment. Let's get back to the notion of building an international team. If you're remote first and probably on some levels shouldn't matter. In the job and you have the infrastructure, it'll work.

I suspect human beings don't work quite that easily. What are some of the challenges when you're putting together an international? Yeah, so there's a couple of things. One is, most people are actually not terribly clear on what sort of outcomes and activities are required of the people.

So I can't tell you how many times I get sent a job description. And it looks like somebody took a, an executive assistant, a finance, professional and a software engineer and just sort of merged them together and said, hey, we're looking for this unicorn. And I think when a company is thinking about outsourcing, be very clear about the specific skill set, and outcomes are looking from a particular role. I know that sounds like table stakes, but, it is not.

The second thing that I would say is that most people don't realize that. There's nothing there is nothing natural. There is nothing natural or simple about doing things naturally and simply. Yeah.

Totally true. The second thing we've already covered, which I won't go into, it's just it's the management side of this. I find that most of the time when offshore teams fail, they either have the wrong provider, which is possible, or the management team is not really equipped to deal with both remote or international talent. The remote side we will talk about because we did just a minute ago.

But when it comes to remote workforce right now, two really hot destinations, both of which we serve, are the Philippines and Colombia. And when you think about how do we communicate, how do we evaluate, problems with an organization, how do we lead? How do we make decisions? How do we build trust?

How do we disagree? Those are all very different based on the cultures you're in. So I'll give you a couple of examples. One is, how we communicate.

So, you know, in the Philippines, they've been a country, living on these islands for thousands of years. They've learned how to communicate through cultural nuances and very sophisticated level communication. Well, there you go. To us.

We've been around for 250 years. We're a, a country of immigrants. We have to be very explicit what they call low context. And the way that we communicate Philippines high context, U.

S. low context. So oftentimes the Filipinos to the Americans can feel avoidant in a conversation when in fact, actually the way that they communicate is just very, very different. The other thing is how we build trust.

So here I'm very task based, which is very U.S centric, very in the way that I built trust. When you told me you were going to do X, you did it on time and you did it well, I now trust you to do the next step in the Philippines. Well, they want to have long coffees and lunches and get to know you as a human being and those kind of things before they trust you.

And so understanding some of those nuances, they're not wrong. They're just different. But I think a lot of times we expect everyone to be very American in the way they work, when in fact we also need to be open to and embracing, the cultural nuances the others. So one example of that would be, when it comes to giving feedback, in the US, we like more direct feedback, not quite like the Germans, but we like more direct feedback.

And then in the Philippines, indirect negative feedback is how you give it. So you have to sort of sandwich, the feedback one positive, a negative and then another positive. In order for them to be able to hear and understand it. So there's just things like that that make a big difference.

I'm curious. And maybe this is my Canadian American centric brain. It seems to me markets like the Philippines. And this has to do with colonialism and all kinds of things, probably function with Americans a little bit, probably better, but certainly different than a country like Colombia, which is unifying you all, which you know, is there challenges there?

Well, surprisingly, the Colombian culture is actually, closer aligned to the American culture in terms of the business environment, the Filipinos. Yes, I would say from a the standpoint of it is primarily an English speaking country. To your point, at one point, American said had, certainly occupied the territory. There's a great alliance from a government standpoint.

There's a tax treaty. There's a lot of reasons why you would think that. But, they are still very, you know, hierarchical in terms of the way that they operate. Then it's got to be very prescriptive in terms of what's expected of them.

And so, just a little bit different, though, in terms of the business environment, they've not quite yet adapted as a full culture in that way. Obviously, there's some people have been working with, American business for a long time. That's not an issue. But in general, what I've seen is actually the Colombian culture is a little bit further towards, or closer aligned to the American way of doing business.

Well that's fascinating. And I could geek out on this for a very, very long time. When you go into these markets and looking for talent, are you looking for locals? Are you looking for expats who happen to be living there?

No, actually, the I'm in fact, I would I would venture to say I'm not aware of any expats that work for us. These are all, local, individuals who who want to work with and learn from, American companies. And so, you know, a lot of the skill sets are the same when it comes to design and, email marketing and finance and accounting. A lot of those standard principles are the same.

So it actually translates very, very well. But the things that we look at when we go to these markets is, is there, you know, safety, currency stability, is there the right infrastructure? Both. We look at, you know, the the possibility of, natural disasters, all these sort of things that we look at to say, hey, is business continuity going to be an issue for us for one reason in these particular areas?

And so that's one of the things that we look at in addition to time zone and talent density and things like that. Very, very cool. We are nearing the end of our time already, which is amazing to me. If you are advising somebody to put together an international team that's going to be remote first, that you know it's going to do this, what are the 1 or 2 very first things that they need to do in your mind to be successful?

Yeah. I would say first I would look at the places in my organization where I need to add excess capacity, but doing their fiscally responsible way, or where we have people who could be adding even greater value to the organization doing, work that that could be potentially moved somewhere else. Standard work. That, could be moved someone else so that they can focus their time and energy on higher value out of test.

So that would be the first thing that I would look at. The second thing is I would look at is, what are some of the things that are on the back burner that have been your perpetual second or third priority that you know, need to get done, but you just haven't yet had the time, energy, or capacity to address? Those are the first two things that I would look at. And then downstream are the things that we talked about, which is making sure you got the right standard operating procedures and the tools and resources to be able to help to collaborate with those individuals.

But deciding why you want to do it, and that this is a good business thing to do, is probably a good first step. And you'd think that would be a natural thing for people. Absolutely. You would think so.

But I think a lot of people still just believe that outsourcing is really for, you know, low level tasks. Outsourcing can actually add value in every part of the organization. And my expense I've seen the further we move up in New York chart, the more value we extract from that experience. And so I would not limit yourself to just thinking about administrative work, more about where are the parts of organization that you want to advance, faster than you are today?

Absolutely. David, thank you so much for being with us. Ladies and gentlemen, we will have links to David to, to the future is Borderless podcast Host, which is his podcast. We will have that on our show notes at Long distance Work life.

com. David, I'm going to dismiss you and I am going to wrap up the show here. Thank you so much for being with us, man. Thanks for having me.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Well, come back, long distance work life is based on the books. The long distance leader, long distance teammate, and long distance team. If you want information on our new book, long distance leader, revise rules for remarkable remote and hybrid leadership.

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