Recorded on 01/20 in Toronto, Canada at Ryerson University’s Sheldon & Tracy Levy Student Learning Centre. Director of People & Operations Mari Moreshead and Communications Manager Victoria Heath spent some time with Remoter to talk about Creative Commons’ dedication to remote work since they’ve transitioned to fully remote 5 years ago. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a globally-accessible public commons of knowledge and culture. Being a remote-first company has made them more aware of the little details in upholding an inclusive remote workplace, down to the verbiage used when communicating as a team.
Recorded on 01/20 in Toronto, Canada at Ryerson University’s Sheldon & Tracy Levy Student Learning Centre. Director of People & Operations Mari Moreshead and Communications Manager Victoria Heath spent some time with Remoter to talk about Creative Commons’ dedication to remote work since they’ve transitioned to fully remote 5 years ago. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a globally-accessible public commons of knowledge and culture. Being a remote-first company has made them more aware of the little details in upholding an inclusive remote workplace, down to the verbiage used when communicating as a team.
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Josephine Tse 0:00
It's time for season two of the Remoter Podcast. I'm your host Josephine.
Josephine Tse 0:05
As a continuation from season one with Alex and Andres, I had the opportunity to interview some remote work leaders, ranging from companies, consultants, advocates and more to add to Remoter's stash of free resources and human-centred stories, enriching our educational platform about remote work. This podcast is sponsored by Torre, a new kind of professional network that automatically connects talent with opportunity. Founded by Alexander Torrenegra, our goal is to make work fulfilling for everyone find the job of your dreams by visiting torre.co. That's T O R R E dot C O.
Josephine Tse 0:49
Hey there, I've got Mari, Victoria and Alison's story today. I met up with Mari and Victoria in Toronto, Canada at my alma mater, Ryerson University and it just so happens that as we were recording our conversation, to our left, the Minister of Finance appeared and was having a meeting or something. So what that meant was, as we were recording our conversation, there were people in very formal business attire just roaming up and down the halls. Nevertheless, Mari, Victoria and Alison story is one showcasing Creative Commons' dedication to continue bettering their diverse and inclusive remote workplace.
Josephine Tse 1:32
I'm here today with Mari and Victoria from Creative Commons. We are currently in Toronto, in a little red and grey study room in the Student Learning Centre, which is now called the Sheldon and Tracy Levy something, something something something, and you know what? Good for them. He was a good president. I'm not really sure who's the president now, but that's besides the point but thank you very much for joining me on the Remoter Podcast.
Mari Moreshead 2:03
It's our pleasure.
Victoria Heath 2:04
Thanks for having us.
Josephine Tse 2:05
Would you like to give the audience a little brief or a summary on what you guys do at Creative Commons and introduce yourselves?
Victoria Heath 2:15
My name is Victoria. I'm the Communications Manager at Creative Commons. I've been there for about six months now. So I'm one of the newbies of the team. So Creative Commons is a nonprofit organisation that was founded in 2001. And essentially, we're at the heart of the open movement, which is a movement that aims to solve global problems through transparency and collaboration, reuse and free access. So our mission is to make it easier for people to share creativity and knowledge as well as access and build on the creativity and knowledge of others.
Mari Moreshead 2:48
My name is Mari Moreshed. I'm the Director of People & Operations at Creative Commons and I've been there for five years.
Josephine Tse 2:55
Have you guys worked remotely before Creative Commons? Or is this your first gig?
Mari Moreshead 2:59
For me, it was my, this was my first one. It took a lot of getting used to. But now I have two colleagues that are in Toronto with me. So we try to get together about once a week. And that's really nice.
Victoria Heath 3:10
Yeah, for me, this was my first full time, all the time remote work, but I did realise that I am so much more productive, not being in an office full of people because I would I talk a lot and people would always kind of come to my office to talk to me. So that's been one of the benefits as I've realised, I get things done a lot faster now that I'm not really surrounded by a bunch of distractions.
Mari Moreshead 3:33
Do you want me to start interrupting you more at work?
Mari Moreshead 3:37
Just what it would be like, hi I'm walking into your office. Yeah, perfect.
Josephine Tse 3:43
I like having my own co working space. But if I'm bouncing around a lot, then I kind of have to go to cafes. And I understand like the most awkward, like I spent seven hours at this cafe once and I was just working I forgot I didn't realise seven hours passed, but I also didn't realise I only had a glass of orange juice for seven hours.
Josephine Tse 4:02
I was like, AUGH. Oh, no.
Mari Moreshead 4:04
But there's also you know, it's like when I work from home, it's nice because I have a nice big monitor. So having my monitor is important. And for a lot of people that we work with, like if you're a developer, maybe you have two monitors. Yeah, so it's like, yeah, you got to make sure you have the right setup.
Josephine Tse 4:16
I was wondering if you can give me an insider's look into Creative Commons.
Victoria Heath 4:20
Mari and I and the other person who works in Toronto, Alison, who we'll talk to later, we work on sort of the East Coast time zone, because I do most days try to work out of my apartment, I try to go for a walk in the morning so that I'm sort of separating myself from just like wearing my pyjamas all day, I think it's important to sort of separate that and make yourself actually wear human clothes and get yourself outside for a bit.
Mari Moreshead 4:45
I call that time hatching. Because that's like, oh, you wake up and you're in this egg and you have to wake up and like, become a human being right? So that's why I get extra early because I need a little bit more time to hatch and be ready for human consumption.
Victoria Heath 5:00
Great. I really like that.
Josephine Tse 5:04
I'm gonna dial it back a little bit because I realised there was one thing that I really wanted to ask you guys, when you were giving your explanation about the company, I'm sure a lot of people know that Creative Commons works with licencing materials online and all that. But do you guys have any other projects, initiatives that people may be like, oh, I didn't know you guys did this as well!
Victoria Heath 5:26
So one of the things that we have is called the CC certificate, which is a programme that people can take online or in person, it's sort of like an educational programme, and it's for people who want to learn more about copyright and how CC licences work and open licencing. And then the other one that I really did want to mention because I think it's probably the newest is CC search. CC search and CC certificate were probably started around the same time. But CC search is this really cool free search tool that we have that makes openly licenced. It makes it easier to discover and used openly, licensed material and just last week, I believe we launched the CC... let me get the name right the CC search browser extension, which is a plugin that you can download to your browser. So you can just look for openly licenced images and illustrations and other things straight through your browser. So it's really awesome. I've used it a couple of times since we launched it. I actually found these really hilarious GIFs, I'm going to say GIFs, these really hilarious GIFs of cats in outer space. And it was like the best day when I found that.
Mari Moreshead 6:34
But also there's food. It was like a cat on a burger.
Victoria Heath 6:36
Yeah, there's like a cat on a burger-burger. And it was this really great thing that someone had made, but I found it through the through CC search and through the browser extension. So we do a lot. That's just like, really surface level of what we do, but everything's essentially connected back to our mission.
Josephine Tse 6:53
So to bring it back, I saw on your website that your company mission and values is basically you guys are committed to building a globally accessible public commons of culture and knowledge. I want to know how that trends like how that external mission statement translates into your internal company culture, work values, etc.
Mari Moreshead 7:14
Sure, we do our best to be really transparent with each other. It's really easy to be siloed when you're working remotely and not know what everyone else is doing. So every two weeks, we have a staff call where we just sort of talk about what's up, if someone needs help with something, if someone wants to show something off, they can do something like that. But then we also use project management tools like Asana, so everyone can see what everyone else is up to. And I mean, of course, there are always a few exceptions of things that need to be private. But for the most part, I mean, I can always go and look at what Victoria is doing, and see what her week, her week is going to be like. And maybe I feel comfortable asking your help with something if I see what she's up to.
Victoria Heath 7:50
Yeah, I was gonna say the other thing is, we all can see each other's calendars because if you're not seeing people in the office every day, you're not entirely sure if they have a million meetings because usually you will talk about that. I think that's been that's been something that's really been good for me at least coming in to a remote company for the first time.
Josephine Tse 8:07
So on top of project man-, like being very transparent about seeing what your other colleagues are doing, or do you guys have anything else you're doing to make your colleagues feel like they're being included?
Mari Moreshead 8:18
Actually, just last week, someone shared a really cool calendar with me that had a lot of holidays and celebrations from around the world. So I think that's something that we're going to implement. And I'm kind of excited about it, because it's really interesting to see what other people are up to.
Victoria Heath 8:33
Yeah, that's really cool. I think the other thing that we do that's really nice that I don't know when this started, but is every whenever you do get up at whatever your time is, and you start your day, you go on slack and say hello, yeah. And so we've all been doing that, but then I have to remember whenever because usually I want to say good morning, but then I have to remember oh, some people have been up for a few hours. So that's one way we- that's a very small thing, but it's something we try to be conscious of when we you know how we phrase things because some people have been ups for a while. That's easy to say, Hey, what's up instead of saying, Oh, good morning, like first coffee of the day. So there are some things like small things like that I think are important.
Mari Moreshead 9:14
It's very tempting to say good morning.
Victoria Heath 9:15
It's really hard. Yeah, it's very, very tough.
Josephine Tse 9:17
I've actually never I have not thought of that.
Victoria Heath 9:20
I just thought, yeah, I didn't think of it either until I think you mentioned it to me. I was like, Oh, yeah, like that person's been up for a while. So they're probably like...
Mari Moreshead 9:27
Especially you know, Europeans. It's like, we wake up, yeah, and they're like, my days almost done. Do you feel like you're also very aware of seasons because that's our other one.
Josephine Tse 9:38
Very aware of seasons?
Victoria Heath 9:39
Yeah. Like, it'll be like winter here.
Mari Moreshead 9:42
Oh, even like talking about the year, right. It'd be like, well, we could do that next winter. It's like the habit of not calling it winter because it's not for everybody. It's like, let's call it Q1. Right? Yeah, there's got to be other words we can use.
Victoria Heath 9:57
I would say the last thing I mentioned that I think is important too is we for the holidays, we did Secret Santa. But then we realised that it wasn't inclusive. So we actually changed it to secret friend is which is actually how they say it in Brazil like in Portuguese. Okay, so that was one instance where we're like, oh, well let's be inclusive for people who don't celebrate Christmas but also people who maybe they call it something else or it's not that so
Josephine Tse 10:24
It's a lot of the verbiage and like the what language.
Victoria Heath 10:28
It is. Yeah, it's really important.
Josephine Tse 10:30
The season thing like I stopped myself recently with that, or I've been trying to be more aware of it because like we're doing a month end newsletter every month. And I was like, oh, maybe we can do some like winter themed, coloured.
Victoria Heath 10:46
Like happy fall and our creative directors like, but it's not fall for everyone that's on our newsletters.
Josephine Tse 10:51
Oh, yeah, that's true. And I'm like, okay, I can't just make it all like cold blue kind of thing, because some people might be warm orange, and yeah, I can actually so Yeah, no, the language is really, really important. Yeah, but it does take time to turn out of that mindset. I've heard that you guys also applied for a diversity equity inclusion grant. And could you tell me a little bit more about that? Because I feel like that really sums up like your guys's focus and efforts on having an inclusive workspace.
Mari Moreshead 11:22
Sure thing. So one of our bigger funders is the Hewlett Foundation. And the year before last they had this grant that was for DEI - diversity, equity and inclusion. And it was it was pretty broad. You could take the money and sort of do whatever you wanted with it. So for the first year, we felt really focused internally. So we looked at how we do our meetings, and how our calendars work, how we communicate with each other in general, because being remote, that can be really tough, and we actually got a renewal of that grant. So this year, we're going to work on the hiring process in onboarding and our handbook. We have staff all over the world. So we're trying to figure out a way to improve where we find people and what our hiring process is for, for that kind of thing. And then lastly, the Hewlett Foundation focuses a lot on OER - open educational resources. And that was something that we really wanted to give them as sort of a thank you for the grant is something that we can share with the rest of the world. So currently, we have a pretty good handbook, but I want to make it a little bit more human friendly and sort of make it a how to work your guide and have it openly licenced so that others can remix it.
Josephine Tse 12:35
On top of all the initiatives that you guys are doing right now. I know you guys do events as well. And you had said that your other colleague Alison is the one who's in charge of it, perhaps now would be the great uh, would be a good time to get her in on the conversation.
Mari Moreshead 12:51
Let's call her, our events and operations manager.
Josephine Tse 12:55
Allison hi! I'm, my name is Josephine. Thank you so much for joining us on the call and on Remoter Podcast Season Two of the Creative Commons episode. To give view- listeners a little bit of context, we're gunning it and we can't, we couldn't hear Alison from the regular headphones. So now my headphone is now just the speaker on the table. And everyone's just listening to that. Alison, tell me what you do at Creative Commons.
Alison Pearce 13:22
Sure, my title is Events and Operations Manager, changed a little bit in my time at Creative Commons. I first came on the organisation to work on the summit, which is our 400 person business conference that we hold every year. But we bring our members of our community together once a year from all over the world to further their work. I also plan the two intown weeks that we hold and those are our week long meetings for our staff that we get together twice a year. We have four really, really full days of hanging out and furthering our work, doing some fun kind of staff bonding things together. So I also do that.
Alison Pearce 13:59
So before I joined the team, we kind of had a system where organised Creative Commons groups in different countries to kind of bid on hosting the summit. It had some really great benefits that model but it also we started to miss out on things like reporting and continuity. And you know, just being able to hold certain things at the staff level. When I first started, we brought everything back in to that. And so that's when we had the event here in Toronto, which is where I'm located. So I was able to be the boots on the ground, I was able to be the sort of everything to the event with support from Mari and others from our team, of course, and it went really well in Toronto for two years. And then we decided that we wanted to move out of North America. And so last year 2019, and in 2020, we're holding the event in Lisbon. So that's come with a whole set of challenges because I'm not based in Lisbon. And so that's kind of tricky that way. But we've settled on a model this year where we hold most of the cast in staff jurisdictions. And then we have an event producer, which we just hired, which I'm very excited about. And she is going to work part time contract hours for us in Lisbon, to kind of to be the boots on the ground. And then we also have an excellent volunteer team and listen as well. And so they are passionate about some of the arts focus, and they really brought that to life and they help us make connections with the local communities. But they're volunteers.
Josephine Tse 15:29
Local support is probably one of the ... oh my God.
Victoria Heath 15:33
Yeah, really big.
Josephine Tse 15:34
Just having somebody speak the language and know their way around.
Alison Pearce 15:39
Yeah. You don't know what you don't know. Right? And so we just had a bunch of surprises that probably would not have been surprises had we had someone bear on the ground. We learned. We're moving on.
Josephine Tse 15:53
Do you have any other any other stories or lessons learned from your previous year of event planning and that you've kind of added to this model?
Alison Pearce 16:03
Um, yeah, I think that we have done a really good job of increasing the ways that people can participate and volunteer members of our community can participate in building the summit. And so we give people the opportunity to join the programme committee, the scholarship committee, there's an application process for both of those. We have our event day volunteer. So it's really an event that we make sure it is for the community and built by the community and give people chances and really like clear ways of participating.
Josephine Tse 16:37
And on top of the summit, as you said, there were internal events, I would assume as like company retreats that you are planning as well.
Alison Pearce 16:47
Yep. So twice a year, usually one in the first quarter and one in the third or fourth quarter, depending on what the schedule looks like, we get our whole staff team together. from all over the world, we try to incorporate some staff bonding because it would be too intense if we did like Work, work, work, work work for four days.
Josephine Tse 17:06
So I was wondering if you guys had any kind of personal stories from like, from your retreats that you would love to share with our listeners?
Mari Moreshead 17:17
Sure. I have two that I'm thinking of right now, actually. One is, so we always have an opening circle in the morning and a closing circle at the end of the day, and sometimes it's just to check in and say hello, and see how you're feeling. And sometimes it's a little bit more share-y. And there was one that we actually did last year in Miami that I loved. And I think it was a closing circle. And we went around and everyone had to tell one story or phrase that was a local -ism to where they lived. So something that they wouldn't somebody else wouldn't understand. So there was somebody from Canada, for instance. It was not me. Who explained the Saskatchewan bunny hug, which is a hooded sweatshirt and people were just like, what is a bunny hug? And it was like, Yes, that's what it is. And I remember one of our colleagues from Brazil told us a really interesting -ism. That was, I wish I could remember the Portuguese word, but it was about homesickness. And Alison, do you remember?
Alison Pearce 18:26
I don't remember the word, no.
Mari Moreshead 18:28
But it was about it was about like, if you've, if you've been gone for a long time, and you come back home and you meet up with your friends, the thing that you say to them is like, Hey, I'm glad you're back. Like why don't we meet up and kill the homesick?
Josephine Tse 18:42
Okay, okay. Okay.
Mari Moreshead 18:43
And I thought that was really neat. So I feel like we're always trying to share things that our culture for sure.
Josephine Tse 18:49
What did you share?
Mari Moreshead 18:51
Something that my grandmother used to always say if you asked her how she was, if she would always say, "fair to Midland" and it just met, she's like, she's fine. That's pretty cute.
Victoria Heath 19:01
I love it. Yeah.
Alison Pearce 19:05
Yeah, me too.
Victoria Heath 19:06
And Alison's a trooper because she's the only one of us of me and Mari that have kids. So we're always just amazed.
Mari Moreshead 19:15
She does it all. I don't know how.
Victoria Heath 19:17
How she does it all. And like I never, whenever I complain about something, I always think about Alison's like, Oh, yeah, she has children. I have, like, not even a pet.
Alison Pearce 19:24
Yeah, I mean, the benefits of the benefits to my entire family of working remotely are undeniable, for sure. You know, it really, I was working in an office environment with very rigid rules on attendance, and no one was allowed to work remotely. It was another events role for an organisation that I really love before I came to Creative Commons. And it became really hard because my kid goes back to school or daycare. You know, she's one year old, she starts daycare, she picks up all the germs and I think like, two months into the year I was out of sick days and so for just to be able to work remotely and like, if my kids had a terrible evening, like a night or you know, they didn't get enough sleep or they're sick under the weather, things are happening. I can choose to keep them at home, I can prioritise, I dropped my, my daughter off at school every single morning and I join the morning circle and sing O' Canada, the whole deal, which is awesome. And, you know, it's just it makes it makes such a difference in my time with my children and my partner, because I have time to get things done during the day during my breaks, and I'm not commuting. I have real quality time to spend with my family, which is priceless.
Josephine Tse 20:39
I mean, I kind of hope the world continues going that way because of all the realised benefits, especially for parents.
Victoria Heath 20:45
Yeah. Or at least be more flexible, you know?
Josephine Tse 20:47
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us for this section of the podcast.
Alison Pearce 20:52
Yeah, I love you guys.
Mari Moreshead 20:54
Thanks, Alison. We'll talk to you later. Okay.
Josephine Tse 20:58
Thank you.
Mari Moreshead 21:00
Her babysitter was not here last week, and it was hard. It was really hard for her. But it was awesome because of this. He'd be there. You'd be talking to her and you can just like see him off in the background. And then he like, brought a toy that I bought for him. He was like, Look, it's the chicken that you got for me. It was like, cool. It was super cute.
Josephine Tse 21:24
Curious question for you guys. Do you consider your company as a team or a family?
Victoria Heath 21:32
Oh.
Mari Moreshead 21:34
I think team.
Victoria Heath 21:35
Yeah, I think we're a team.
Mari Moreshead 21:36
I think we're a team.
Victoria Heath 21:37
Yeah, it's an interesting question, though. Because I think to get that, that I know what you mean that family feel because uh, my first job out of my master's degree, I had that with my team in my company. But the reason we had it is because pretty much I mean, we spent so much time together like probably too probably too much time together. Like I actually knew probably too much about them. That, you know, probably on like unprofessional level how the details I knew about their lives because we would just talk all the time about like very personal things that maybe you should do right here, right there. Yeah. And you would go out drinking together and you would do stuff like that. And so I think I get what you mean. I don't necessarily miss that though.
Josephine Tse 22:20
Okay.
Victoria Heath 22:21
Because I think to some extent, in some places, it can get to like a weird, like, unprofessional level where, you know, you do know too much personal details about people, and there gets to be sort of like this gossiping and stuff. And we don't really have those types of issues. So yeah, I agree with Mari. I think we're really focused on the mission and what we're doing work wise. Of course, we have personal discussions, but it's not to the same extent that I've sort of had in other places I've worked and I kind of like that.
Josephine Tse 22:51
Okay, that's something that I had to really adjust because my first my first job out of school, I was in like, post production studio and I really like I called people like it felt like a family. Yeah, just because we were there together all the time, too long and I was just like, working on projects where, you know, we'd be angry about the same thing. We all understand each other's anger, complain about it. Yeah, together. And it's kind of like you, it just the nature of remote work, you just do not get as close. So it's true how it is. Yeah, on Remoter like we have a course and like a free online course on how to build scale remote teams learn about remote work. And one of the chapters is basically on, like our CEO gives a little section a little talk in a little part of it, where he talks about how you consider your like your work as a team, not a family. And it's important to think that way, especially in this remote work world. So I was curious to see what where you guys were at and I guess we're aligned. We think the same. It's more of a team than it is of a family.
Mari Moreshead 23:59
We're a team that is changing the world.
Victoria Heath 24:01
Yes.
Mari Moreshead 24:02
A family doesn't change the world.
Victoria Heath 24:04
They fight.
Mari Moreshead 24:06
But a team changes the world.
Josephine Tse 24:08
Finally, I wanted to ask if you guys think that Creative Commons, your the company's story, mission and values will encourage and enable more leaders and companies to transition or to go remote first.
Mari Moreshead 24:23
I hope so. We talk about it often. And we certainly promoted as much as we can.
Victoria Heath 24:29
I think so whenever I tell any of my friends that I work remotely, they're all extremely curious. Mm hmm. So I think it's something people are really interested in and they want to learn more about especially with smaller organisations, like you said, it gives them the ability to find talent, anywhere doesn't mean it has to be outside of their country of origin, but then you could just go across your country too. It doesn't mean people have to move to like San Francisco and spend so much money to live there. Like it just opens up so much more possibilities. I hope so yeah.
Mari Moreshead 25:00
It's like people have a chance. They know people know that they have a chance to work on something cool, like our mission, if they're anywhere. So, I mean, what other- what other organisation? Well, a few others do it. But what other organisations like not a lot of them. It's like, if you see someone who is doing something cool, you're like, well, I don't live there. So I certainly could never work for them. So like, if I want to work for NASA, I guess I better move to like, Florida.
Victoria Heath 25:27
There's a few places but yes.
Mari Moreshead 25:30
You know, but if you really believe in the mission of Creative Commons, there's a chance that you could work for us, right, like you can be anywhere. And I think that's kind of nice.
Victoria Heath 25:39
I think the other thing too, is that if you're an organisation that has a globally focused mission, and we're still like, we are not perfect on this whatsoever, but we're, we really want to work on it. We don't if we have a globally focused mission, we shouldn't just be hiring people who are from, you know, America, especially from like New York or DC. And I think that's an issue for a lot of nonprofits who do have a globally focused mission. They're sort of, they only get to hire people and get the ideas and experiences of people who are in sort of these bigger cities. And I think that can be sort of to the detriment of their mission.
Josephine Tse 26:16
So, especially like having the perspectives of the people. Yeah. Yeah, that's really important too. Yep. So you've heard it here first. Yeah, go remote.
Victoria Heath 26:27
Go remote!
Mari Moreshead 26:27
Absolutely.
Josephine Tse 26:27
So I just want to thank you guys so much for being a part being a participant of the Remoter Project coming here to do this with me.
Victoria Heath 26:35
Thank you.
Mari Moreshead 26:35
Thanks a lot.
Josephine Tse 26:40
Remoter Podcast season two is recorded, produced and edited by Josephine Tse. It is mixed and mastered by Stephen Stepanic and Vanesa Monroy. Graphics and visuals by Valentina Castillo. The music track used is Skip by OBOY from SoundStripe. Follow and subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple podcasts wherever you listen to your podcasts. Don't forget, we've recently made our Founding and Growing Remotely online course completely accessible and listed on our site. Visit us at remoter.com, that's R E M O T E R dot com for more relevant content. Follow us on social media @remoterproject to stay up to date with our latest initiatives and collaborations with other remote first companies around the world. We'd also love to hear your thoughts about each episode, so feel free to tag us on socials anytime. And remember, we're here to make work fulfilling, so what part will you play in shaping the future of work?