The challenges of managing a distributed workforce and how to overcome them with Cody Rogers

Speaker A: Our mission is illuminate and accelerate global work. And so it really means two things. One, the trends that are happening, we want to illuminate and accelerate that trend. Global work is awesome. We believe in it. There's a lot of value for a lot of people. The second piece is within Hubstaff. Uh, we want that work to have increased transparency and productivity for everybody. So we are helping businesses grow faster and that's really what we believe in. We all work remotely and we love it and it's something that we really care about.

Speaker B: Welcome to the SMB Tech Innovators podcast. Powered by Gusto. On this show we explore the intersection of fintech, vertical SaaS and how software combats the rising complexity of running a business. Our goal is to share stories, advice and best practices from the leaders and investors behind today's cutting edge platforms. This episode of the SMB Tech Innovators podcast is brought to you by Gusto Embedded. Gusto has spent a decade building and testing its payrol tax filing and compliance infrastructure, which is available as a robust set of APIs so you can develop custom tailored payroll solutions. For more information go to embedded.gusto.com here's your host, Brian Bush

Speaker C: on, um, this episode of the SMB Tech Innovators podcast. My guest is Cody Rogers, Chief product officer of Hubstaff, a time and attendance platform for global teams. Cody, welcome to the show.

Speaker A: Thanks Brian. It's good to be here.

Speaker C: Let's dive in. Tell us a little bit about the career path that brought you to this role as a chief Product officer. And especially were there any previous experiences that you feel like really shaped your approach to product development?

Speaker A: Yeah, sure. So my background is design. I studied design at ah, the Ohio State University. Moved through some multimedia design type jobs, uh, and then I was at ebay for a few years and so that was I think pretty formative in my experience. When I was there I got more into software, product design, product management. And this is kind of around the time when design thinking was new. And so the team I was on, we called it the Pre Vis Team. We worked as this kind of in house design consultancy for the other teams at both eBay and PayPal. So this is right before they actually split. So learned a ton there. For a few years after that I was at a startup, we mainly built software for the photography industry that was pretty unique, very like community led growth for a couple years there and then landed at Hubstaff. So been at Hubstaff now for almost seven years. When I started it was I think I was right around number 30 and me and the CEO were just building everything pretty much ourselves. We did the roadmap, we did the designs, the spec docs, work with development to get things done. So super fun, very quick. And it's scaled and a lot of change throughout the years. Now we have I think right around 130 people all over the world. I have the privilege of leading the product department now and I work very closely with my CTO and the engineering department. And you know, Hubstaff serves tens of thousands of people. They rely on Hubstaff every day for their business. So it's been a lot of change and a lot of growth and lots of fun.

Speaker C: Well, I hope 3M um, thanks you and Ideo for all the sticky notes we use these days because now so many of those exercises. It's well spread throughout the tech industry. So thank you for that and I imagine some of the maybe examples will come up as we go. Before we talk about Hubstaff specifically, let's talk a little bit about the time and attendance space and some of the trends we see. And especially that's a crowded space. Like there are plenty of tools that are trying to solve this problem for a range of businesses, especially small businesses who need to deal with a lot of different either side scheduling challenges or just hourly worker payments. So let's talk about Hubstaff and where you see Hubstaff as different.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. We're the way that we see where we have an advantage is we're in this intersection of three areas, right. So this first bucket is the time and attendance one, right. What are people working on, when are they working, how much are they working? Is anyone taking advantage of this freedom to work remotely? There's a lot of tools that do that in a very simple way. There's sort of this second bucket of uh, workforce analytics. And this is more about collecting data while employees or contractors are working and then showing management some of the, some of these metrics about the work that's being done. And so that's things like, are we in too many meetings? Are we productive? Are we efficient? Are we spending time on the right stuff? Generally people want to be productive. It's just, it can be really hard to measure. And if you're just waiting on outcomes of work, it's ah, a very lagging indicator. And so we, we solve that problem very well too. And then this sort of third area is workforce management. There's also a lot of people that do workforce management, right? Like Understanding contractors, are they compliant? How are they paid? Are we profitable with our clients and our projects? How do I see that? The thing that we do well is we cover all three of these areas and you can probably find a tool for one and a tool for another and a third and pay for them separately or Hubstaff really does all three of them well and then we even connect to adjacent tools that you probably are already using. I would say that's the advantage that we have. Really between do you feel like this

Speaker C: is an area, those three buckets, time and attendance, workforce analytics and then the management or workforce management piece, are they better? Is there a better together story here? And if there is, I'm curious if it comes from having the data seamlessly integrated or connected. Yeah, I'm curious where these three, where there's really a plus one versus piecing together three different tools.

Speaker A: I mean everybody's looking at the tools they use and thinking, do we need all of these things? The benefit of consolidating into one is like, continues to be a, ah, trend and it's a pitch of a lot of new tools.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: Like why pay for these four when you can do one? That's not how we like attack it, but really because we have people that just use one or two in sometimes all three of these buckets. But there is a lot of value if you can get rid of some of these other tools and use Hubstack for all this.

Speaker C: Well, maybe after we stop recording here, I'll ask you how the tool can tell you if you're in too many meetings. Because I feel like that's another trend across tech that we see. Everybody feels like we're in too many meetings. But you actually said something really interesting on the first bucket, which is just tracking time and attendance. Are folks taking advantage of working remotely? And I feel like in there there's. There must be something to unpack just over the trends and how work has evolved over the past five years now. So I know you all have a fair focus on distributed, uh, workforce in particular. So tell us about maybe some of the underlying trends, particularly for remote workers today and especially where you think that's going tomorrow.

Speaker A: Sure. The big one is obviously Covid 2020 the world. It was somewhere around 6% worked remotely. It jumped up to 60 or 70, leveled off after that around 20. But people have realized that you don't have to be physically in the same location to work well together with people. What's interesting for us, and you know we saw that jump when that happened for Us the bigger trend and just continued tailwind is global hiring. And so I can. If I'm a business owner, I can hire talented people anywhere in the world. Not just my team doesn't have to be in the office, but I can look in Spain, I can find people in Mexico, in the Philippines. There's a lot of people who would be a really good fit for this business model that I have. And so that trend is continuing, which is great for Hubstaff. And we. We're serving a lot of people that are. That are riding that. That tailwind as well. The overseas talent piece is there's just. There's a lot of ways to scale your business more affordably by doing it this way. And finding talented people overseas is one of those ways. And then, yeah, you've said the. The balance, I think, is remote work and the freedom that you have. And we try to even that out with this idea of transparency. And so if you want to have the freedom to work at home, work whenever you want, clock in, clock out, like, there should be some visibility from your boss, your manager, the company, in order to understand and have this kind of peace of mind about the work that you're doing and when you're doing it.

Speaker C: I think that's a fascinating point. As much as an employee, I might feel like, oh, uh, somebody, big brother looking over my shoulder. It's almost what I hear you saying is that a little bit of transparency and a little bit of accountability, if you will, might actually be the antidote to some of that feeling we read about in the press about senior managers just saying, I want everybody back in the office. And when you ask what's underlying that, it's often this feeling that, well, if I can't see folks getting it done, I don't really trust that they're doing it.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's a fair concern, right. If you're. It's easy to play the bad guy and say Hubstaff is spying on people, or you don't need to be looking at what I'm doing. But if you put yourself. If you've ever started a business, if you've ever been bootstrapped and hired people in another country, there is like this fear of being taken advantage of. And, uh, we're trying to help people understand that there's a lack of trust. And we're. By increasing the transparency, you really can understand the work that's done. And, yeah, we're there to support those small businesses.

Speaker C: 100. I feel like the analog we see often with gusto with payroll. A lot of small business owners, they really, as much as they want to automate and save time on getting their payroll together each week or each month, they still want to check it at the end of the day. Like, they don't want to give up that step. They don't want it to be fully automated because, again, it's their business. And there is that sense of, I'm responsible for this, both it being correct, but. But also making sure that the numbers square at the end of the day. So, Cody, I'm curious, how does Hubstaff fit in some of these trends?

Speaker A: What's good for us is that we've been remote since day one. And so for 12 or 13 years or so now, we've hired globally. Everybody is remote. We have no headquartered office anywhere. So we understand very well the complexity of having a global workforce. There's a lot of challenges that go with that. Our mission is illuminate and accelerate global work. And so it really means two things. One, the trends that are happening, we want to illuminate and accelerate that trend. Global work is awesome. We believe in it. There's a lot of value for a lot of people. The second piece is within Hubstaff. We want that work to have increased transparency and productivity for everybody. So we are helping businesses grow faster, and that's really what we believe in. We all work remotely and we love it, and it's something that we really care about.

Speaker C: Yeah, and I love just the word choice there. Illuminate and accelerate. However, you mentioned the global nature of both Hubstaff's employee base, but also of your customers. My understanding, at least, being not the expert here, managing a global workforce comes with a lot of complexity from a compliance angle. So talk to us a little bit about some of the challenges on the compliance side and how Hubstaff or a similar platform can really help folks manage some of those challenges and avoid liabilities that could come with that.

Speaker A: Yep. Yeah. So some of them are obvious ones. Just if you're new to working globally remotely with your team, things like just asynchronous work challenges are pretty common. Communication. When do we meet up? When do we just do it? Async. There's also just compliance things around how to hire people, how to pay people, uncertainty about really, when are they working, if they're working, what are they working on? Are they productive? Am I being taken advantage of that whole sort of piece? And then there's even, like, this employee experience and culture. Like, one thing that's much, I would say, much harder to do in a remote culture is to build, like a really a good team culture together. When you're in person every day and you're taking breaks together and hanging out, grabbing a, uh, drink after work, it's just easier to build relationships and you have to be pretty intentional if you're going to do that with a remote team. So all those things are tough. The compliance stuff that we really zone in on, we don't try to solve every single problem. But the ones that we really zone in on are the productivity piece.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: Understanding the transparency, the work that's being done, we connect to the payment tools that allow you to be compliant. So if you want to send simple global payments to your team, if you want to have compliant contracts, we partner with deal. So you can do those sort of things. And even things like, I can't have contractors working over 40 hours a week, like, great, we set limits for that. If you only want people working during their shift, you can do that. There's all kinds of. That's where the workforce management piece comes in. There's a lot of tools that allow you to really set the field for how your team should be working.

Speaker C: Okay, so what I'm hearing you say is there's two buckets. One is paying people compliantly, dealing with labor regulations. And it sounds like that's where it's sort of a combination of a Hubstaff plus, uh, integration with a deal, or if it's in the U.S. maybe Augusto for W2 payroll. You've sort of split the world for some of those pieces. But there's a lot of internal controls, if you will, that aren't specifically might not cause you to be legally out of compliance. But for the way you want to run your business, it's how you set the rules internally and that's more on the workforce management side and stays within hubstaff. Do I understand that correctly?

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And there's a lot of flexibility. We've built a tool that can really accommodate all kinds of businesses. And so there's flexibility in all these settings. And so you can tweak it and set it up, whatever works best for you.

Speaker C: I'm curious on that one, how from a product design standpoint, we see this come up with a lot. Both the partners that we work with gusto embedded, but I think a lot of software, you get to a certain scale and you need a lot of configurability in the platform. Yet if you hit users with all that configurability upfront, it can kind of be overwhelming. And it can delay that time to value. So I'm curious how you've gone about giving users robust control to cover a wide range of needs and use cases without needing an implementation team still giving you making it self serve from a setup standpoint?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's definitely tricky and we have, I think to our advantage, done this in a way where we've built a lot of features with a lot of uh, customizing ability and yes, sometimes it can be overwhelming during the onboarding. We have success team that can help with that. What we've started to shift towards though is a little bit more of um, a specific. We build a little bit more for our. We uh, call it our ideal customer profile. And this is like, who are we really building this for? Yes, anybody on a computer can use this tool. Anybody with a global team at all. But like who do we really want to build it for? And trying to build a little bit more opinionated software for that group. And so there's less bells and whistles for everybody else. But if this is who you are and you fall in this bucket, it's going to be very easy for you to see the options that are built for you specifically. So that's been just a growth thing that we've gotten to over the years and has helped us say no to things that sound, um, good but are not really where we need to be going.

Speaker C: So Cody, I want to take a small detour or really come back to something you mentioned. When you're describing the three buckets of needs that Hubstaff serves, you said, hey, there's a value to this being integrated. And I think that's a theme we see on the show the push, especially from small businesses asking for consolidation, asking for more, quote, all in one solutions. And so the question becomes how we're going to deliver that. Often on this show what folks are talking about are bringing in, embedding other platforms, building sort of branded feature and functionality. Hubstaff, you all have a wide range of integrations, 30 plus I think was the count we chatted before we hit record. And it spans a range right from Asana and ClickUp, payroll and payments. You mentioned deal. I think we mentioned wise before hitting record. But you haven't built say a Hubstaff branded payment product. So talk to us a little bit about your philosophy of using integrations to solve problems for users and where you think about finding the edges of your product scope.

Speaker A: Yeah, the one that I like to share too, just because I really liked building this product. But we did for a while it's easy to try and build everything yourself, especially when you're profitable and you're growing quickly and you want to try something new. So one of the things we did was we built Hubstaff Tasks, which is a, uh, nice little project management tool. It's a lot like a trello. It's a simple tool. It's great for teams of like 50 or less. We've, and we actually include it in most of our plans for free. What we've seen as we grow is that you can't just build everything and there are some things that you need to say no to, but there are still other ways to add that value to customers. Right. So what we're trying to do is focus on where we deliver the most value, which is understanding the work that's being done. Right. So this is a lot of the workforce analytics and workforce management features for our customers and then connecting to these other tools. And so, and I'm not saying we would never have a Hubstaff Pay branded in the app and have that be part of the flow, but right now we're really trying to make our, uh, payments features easy to use, easy to discover and set up and then connect to these tools that people are already using. And so like you said, there's, you know, wise is awesome for easy, quick, global payments with low fees Deal. If you have contractors eor global payroll and you care about compliance, Deal is probably the best tool out there and we partner very closely with them and it's very easy to connect Hubstaff to deal gusto. Like you mentioned, if, uh, you have full time employees in the US that's the best tool to use and we connect with you guys. We're trying to, we may add more, we may make those integrations deeper, but the idea is we don't have, we can't build everything. We want to build the stuff that we're best at and then connect to the other tools that are doing it really well.

Speaker C: Yeah. And I, what I hear you saying is it really comes back to that ICP question of you've defined a very clear customer profile you want to serve. And in this case it sounds like you have. Rather than say, how do we maximize our revenue potential or ACV potential with each customer, you've said, hey, we really want to go solve this problem. What I hear you saying is it's largely, it's a lot of the workforce management, it's a lot of the workforce analytics. There's, it sounds like there's a lot more to do there, if you will. And so even though you might say, be able to increase ACV a little bit by building a payments option that's taking you away from solving sort of the core problem for the core icp. I don't want to put words in your mouth. Does that feel like a reasonable summary of how you've chosen to say no to things?

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And what we've seen too is just people with any of the, literally any of those integrations, their retention is so much higher in Hubstaff. So even though all we're building is just ah, an integration to send data out to a different tool, they're staying so much longer, they're getting so much more value and we've put a lot less time and it's not something that we had to build from scratch.

Speaker C: So I'm curious how you think about um, let's call it brand and trust then if you integrate with a wise, that's a brand that folks knows, folks may have been paying contractors say with something like that or sending payments already. So, so you can see like, hey, the integration actually gives you a little bit of trust, peace of mind because you're connected uh, with a reputable brand. The flip side is you're building a lot of brand equity around Hubstaff. People love the solution, they're using it, they're growing with the platform, so on and so forth. And so you can see that's where making again, they'll take payments. As an example, a Hubsaf branded payments product could have a lot of interesting intangible benefits from that angle too. So Cody, as you think about the trade offs between building core product, where you want to focus your team's time and resources versus where you want to integrate, obviously it does take a little bit of time to, to maintain those integrations but at the end of the day I'm curious if there's something about the intangibles of integrate versus build a Hubsaf branded product that, that also drives your calculus in terms of where do you want to spend product time or not.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I would say the formula that we're putting together to make that decision is a complicated one. It's part of it is time and resources that we want to put into building up front and obviously an integration or even there are connector tools that allow you to integrate to uh, multiple other tools at once. Those are options that are very quick and easy to solve. Building things in house means you have to say no to a lot of other options. And so sadly a big Part of product management is saying no to sometimes really good ideas, but they're just not the ones that need to be done right now. And so that's definitely a big part of it. The other thing that really weighs is the short term and long term revenue opportunities. So shorter term there's always, if we're partnering with someone and getting a uh, rev share off something, we can make money on the payment volume that's sent through Hubstaff. That's a, that's an option. There's also the option of just. We know that retention is much better and if anybody's going to use these tools they're going to stay a lot longer and retention is going to be one of the key factors for us. When we look at growth over the next three, four years. We're weighing both of the near term, long term scope and impact, uh, as well as just value to customers. What's going to be the easiest way for them to pay their team? How do they really want to pay? Are they doing credit cards? Do they have these accounts already? Do they just want to do ach transfers? So pulling all those pieces together to decide what's the best move for us right now.

Speaker C: Well, I appreciate and of course payments is just one concrete example to try and get at your frameworks and your thinking. It's interesting that you mentioned retention as a key driver your beyond your day job so to speak. You founded a company called Raft IO, which I understand as a SaaS tool focused on reducing customer churn. I understand you've been at this for several years. So tell us a little bit about that journey, why you decided to do that and maybe some of the key lessons that you've learned from having this side project if you will.

Speaker A: Yeah, so Raft was, I think it's been six or seven years since we started it actually started. So when I was at the startup uh, in town here with a buddy, it came from like the first and best customer model of we need to build this for our startup. Like we don't have a cancellation flow. It sat on our to do list for quarter after quarter. We finally built it and we said like uh, why don't we just productize this and allow other people to plug and play because they're probably having the same problem. Everybody looks at top of funnel. Nobody's worried about this sort of exit, this exit funnel. And if you look at the big guys like they do it, if you leave audible, Amazon, LinkedIn, whatever, they're going to have this custom built out flow. They have a team that manages it. So we really turned that into a little product. It grew, it's grown slowly over the years. He sold his share. So now I have some great partners in Portugal, and we're still working on it. On the side, the things I've learned from Raft, I would say it's been super fun. It's. To have your, uh, to build your own thing is. It's just exciting to get your first customer is. It's just a really cool feeling. So that one, I wouldn't take any of it back. The second piece is especially if you can find the right people that you trust, that you enjoy, that you really want to build something with, go for it. It's a great learning opportunity. And then I think the last one is I have such respect for anybody that's gone through it and has just been through the hustle. I think it's funny that we have this term called founder led growth. There's like product led and sales led. Founder led is just. You're doing everything like you have to do it. And so anytime I see somebody that's, oh, I'm the founder, I'm doing the sales call, I'm like, nice. Like, I. I have respect for anybody that's gone through that. And so it's just. It's a. It's fun and it's. Yeah, it was a great. It was a great choice, a great opportunity and really fun to do.

Speaker C: So thank you for sharing a little bit on that. And maybe to wrap up, you've shared a little bit of, hey, if you're doing your own thing, some lessons learned and just a bit your experience. Flip side, I know a lot of listeners are the type of folks who would love to see themselves in a Chief Product Officer role in the future with a company like Hubstaff. So for those folks who are aspiring to where you are now, what advice do you often offer to folks who are earlier in their career around product management? Yep.

Speaker A: So I think the, uh, the one earlier on that I actually look for a lot when I'm hiring PMs, is this the soft skills. Right. How well can you communicate? How, uh, much ownership do you have over your work? Those are things that can really be overlooked. And if you can communicate well between customers, development teams, all the stakeholders, connecting the dots and communicating that clearly is super powerful. And, uh, then ownership of just like, this is my thing, I'm going to figure out a way to get it done. It's just a. It's a quality that not everybody has. And, uh, it's just it's great to have in anything in product. The second one I would say is I think it's overlooked a lot is just building trust within your team. Besides enjoying work more, which is super fun, and the speed at which you can move and the quality of work that you do when you take the time to build trust with your team, when you have clear responsibilities and you know you're going to do your thing and they're going to do theirs and you're going to the same place, it's super valuable for any team. And I think the last one that, that I try to keep doing is just learning, right? There's never an end to okay, I got to this position, I'm good to go. Just keep pushing yourself, be uncomfortable. Whatever problem you have, somebody else has already had that problem and figured out how to solve it. So go find those people who have done it and just keep pushing yourself and keep learning.

Speaker C: Cody, that's a wonderful way to wrap up. And I think your second bullet around building trust. I imagine that given Hubstaff is a remote team yourselves, you're building tools for remote teams. I've got to imagine you all have some good content out there about some of the ways, particularly good content about some of the ways that folks working remote can in fact build trust even if we're not at all able to jump into the platform. Cody, thank you so much for your time today for sharing some insights. Before we wrap, if folks have any questions want to go deeper with you on anything we chatted about today, is there a best place to reach out to you, say, on social media or LinkedIn?

Speaker A: Yeah, LinkedIn, Instagram. I'm on there. Find me, send me a message. I'd love to connect, whoever.

Speaker C: Okay. Cody, thank you again for your time today.

Speaker A: Okay, thanks, Brian. It's great to be here.

Speaker C: Thanks again for tuning in to this episode of the SMB Tech Innovators podcast. We'll make sure to link to any resources that were mentioned in today's show in the show notes, please. Also feel free to leave us a review wherever you listen to your podcast or to connect with the Gusto embedded team via LinkedIn. In particular, we'd love to hear any future guests you'd like us to have on the show. Thanks again for listening and keep a lookout for the next episode.

Speaker B: Uh,