This is the final episode for season 1! As Andres says in the episode, "This is where you plant your flag.This is where you can say, hooray, we've done it. It's time to onboard members of your team, new members of your team, to your company."
Support Us! We'll be posting new episodes every Tuesday AM (EST), so please subscribe for updates or follow us on social media.
Please leave a rating and review on Apple Podcast & Soundcloud! You can also find us on Spotify.
Tweet us @Remoter Project.
Follow us on Instagram @RemoterProject.
Give us a like on Facebook @RemoterProject.
Check out some other creations:
The Founding and Growing Remotely online video course with informative details about going remote-first.
The Remoter Guide, created to help you hire and onboard remote talent, efficiently and effectively. Remoter Salaries, an on-going research project noting benchmarks for remote workers' average, median, minimum & maximum salary ranges.
If you have any additional questions, feel free to e-mail j@remoter.com.
—————-
A big thank you to our post-production wizard, Vanesa Monroy.
[A moderately paced, trip hop song that is best described as chill and cruising. Synth and techno drums are the primary instruments in this track. This is our podcast background music, it starts playing at the very beginning]
[00:00:00] Andres: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Andres
[00:00:04] Josephine: [00:00:04] and I'm Josephine. Welcome to the Remoter Podcast.
[00:00:07] Andres: [00:00:07] Follow us in season one of this journey as we cover anything and everything you need to know in order to successfully build and scale a remote first team. Someone who's been working remotely for over a decade, our CEO, Alexander Torrenegra shares his personal experiences, lessons learned and advice for those of you who are curious and interested in exploring the future of work.
[00:00:33] [00:00:30] Josephine: [00:00:33] This podcast is brought to you by Torre, the end to end recruitment solution for Remoters. Get our free AI powered sourcing and processing tools, or let Torre recruit on your behalf at torre dot co. That's T O R R E dot C O.
[Music stops playing]
[00:00:53] Welcome to our final episode of the Remoter podcast. Uh, this is really bittersweet and I [00:01:00] cannot believe we've been going at it for so many weeks now. And we're finally here. Thanks for joining us on our journey as we learned about building and scaling remote based teams. So we're glad to have you a part of this.
[00:01:13] Andres: [00:01:13] So for our very last episode, this is where you plant your flag. This is where you, can say, hooray, we've done it. It's time to onboard members of your team, new members of your team, to your company. So welcome to the episode where we [00:01:30] talk about on-boarding.
[00:01:35] This is a great story. I know that Alex doesn't think my stories are fun, so I'm going to say great. So I was living in a farmhouse...
[00:01:42] Alex: [00:01:42] With a cook. And in seven rooms, but it's a farmhouse anyway.
[00:01:46] Andres: [00:01:46] With a completely strange family to me for a week. Don't get me wrong. It was great. It was a great experience, but I don't know if there's a culture would where like, meeting other people and get, blending right in [00:02:00] is just normal, but at least not for me. That one week, one intense week of farm life with a family that was not mine that I had just met. Literally just met, like literally met at the farmhouse was my onboarding.
[00:02:14] Erik: [00:02:14] So for what job was that?
[00:02:17] Andres: [00:02:17] So it was for Torre, and the point here is, onboarding for companies is very important, and companies go through great lengths to meet their teams and have them feel part of the company and explain how they do things in their [00:02:30] culture and whatnot.
[00:02:31] But in remote work in particular, and it doesn't necessarily have to be these way for all kinds of positions, but at least for positions in where there has to be a really good working relationship in between the person that's coming to the team and its leader, also where, you know, important decisions are to be made together.
[00:02:47] I like to say that when you partner with someone, it's like if you were getting married, right? It's a really important, important commitment and you're going to fight and you're gonna have arguments and you're going to disagree on things and you need to kind of feel [00:03:00] comfortable disagreeing and working through issues together and going through highs and downs and whatnot.
[00:03:04] In the case of my onboarding on Torre, I think it was literally like four days after I had talked for more than 30 minutes with Alex. I was on a plane to an unknown city. I swear to God, my mom was like, this guy's going to get like, kidnapped or something. It ended up being Alex's family. I had a great time with him and then we got to know each other and of course I have my room, so no weird things going on, but [00:03:30] and the important thing is that I knew and we knew that because we were building things from scratch and we were setting things up and we really didn't know exactly how things were going to go, like it was kind of obvious for us that we needed to have some face time to like, you know, go fast through things and get to know each other and whatnot. What made you decide to invite me to your farmhouse where you were staying with your family for a week?
[00:03:53] Alex: [00:03:53] Easy. Had an extra room. On boarding of remote teams, I think it's something, [00:04:00] um, when I provide some tips in the book, but I haven't yet to identify which is the best way of doing them. I continue experimenting even though I've been doing it for a long time already. I continue experimenting. Because there are two ways in which you can do it. You would, you go fully remote on your onboarding and that is the person on-boards working from wherever they are going to work as they are going to continue working eventually in the future.
[00:04:23] Or you fly the person somewhere else to work alongside another member of your team. Hopefully the leader [00:04:30] or one of the leaders that the person is going to be reporting to. In the case of Andres, I decided to fly him to a little country house, a coffee farm house that we rented for a month in, uh, Armenia, a small town in, in Colombia.
[00:04:45] I wanted my daughter to get the full Colombian experience of going to school over there for at least a month. She was four or five back then. Four. And it just happened that at that moment in time I had the chance of recruiting Andres and we were there. If it had not been that farmhouse, by the [00:05:00] way, it will have been San Francisco probably.
[00:05:01] I would have flown him to San Francisco, but Armenia, the coffee growers area of Colombia, it was, and, and I believe it was a great experience, not only to get to know Andres in person over there. But in general, just being in that area of Colombia that I hadn't visited in the past. What surprised you the most out of the onboarding experience?
[00:05:21] Andres: [00:05:21] I've had this happen befor, in, in the last, in the previous couple of months with people that join our team. So I now understand that it's not that I wasn't a [00:05:30] weirdo, because at the time, I had such a level of like admiration for the company, for the team that it's like when you meet, when you have a rock star that you follow and then you meet them in person, you're so excited and you're like, oooh, but then you humanize the person.
[00:05:45] And I think that humanizing the people you're going to work alongside, it's very important. So you can stop paying attention to how cool they are and start paying attention to how they work. Right? And if your culture of work fits or could work [00:06:00] alongside their culture of work. So I think that the most interesting part of it was really getting to understand your culture of work and your routines and how do you make decisions and how do you think, and going off script, you know, because the onboarding process that we have.
[00:06:15] It's a very structured onboarding process with all the like, setting up the email and access to different accounts and all those things, it's a very structured process, and that's very important, I think, for companies to have templates and checklists and whatnot. So that's important. But [00:06:30] also being able to go off topic and hanging out and getting to know each other, I think it's a very important aspect.
[00:06:37] So the most, yeah, I think the most fascinating thing was, seeing how for the first time, so close, because I've met other personalities and, and you know, idols in different sectors of, of life, uh, and, and humanizing them in a, in a physical way, but being able to humanize how a CEO of a multimillion dollar company works and operates and does things [00:07:00] allowed me to understand, okay, there's a fit for us to work together.
[00:07:03] Alex: [00:07:03] Today I'm biased towards the... we recently hired five engineers at the same time. That was the most recent hire, and having them all fly to my house was not viable. And I also, because we... They wouldn't fit with my house. Of course, we can get them hotel rooms. San Francisco is expensive for that, but also they were on a test period.
[00:07:23] Although Andres was also on a test period. So the next thing I'm going to be experimenting is having that in-person on-boarding after [00:07:30] the person completes the test period. Okay? It's kind of a graduation from that test period and see how it works.
[00:07:37] Erik: [00:07:37] I've had a lot of remote jobs and there's just sort of, you show up one day and you're an employee all of a sudden, and nothing really has changed. Does it help to have that break that says, you're with us now? Things are different.
[00:07:51] Andres: [00:07:51] I've seen a bunch of companies, uh, small teams and companies that are not very well structured, not properly do onboarding. I think that's the worst kind of thing you could do to a [00:08:00] hire because then they have to figure out on their own and start making assumptions and supposing how things should be done.
[00:08:06] And so you're going to start fighting with a person and going into arguments, and person's not going to do things the way you are used to having things done, or they're not going to fit well within the process. So we onboard people on how should they do the job so they fit within the overall structure of the organization. How does, how does HR work? How does paperwork works? How does reporting [00:08:30] works? What kind of performance based management style do you have? What kind of, in our case, product development frameworks do you use? Leadership management and what and so on. So it's really important. So, and the current state of things, right? What are you currently working on? What have you been working on? Why did you stop working on this? Why are you starting to work on that? So that actually helps you a lot to be able to understand, okay, where am I getting into? Because I've seen this happen. I don't know if it happens as much in corporations.
[00:08:57] I don't have enough information about it. [00:09:00] But in smaller and medium sized companies, I've seen that they just hire a person, person shows up, "Hey, this is your email. This is your ID to get into the building. Welcome to the company. We're going to have a meeting to discuss your priorities." That's it.
[00:09:13] Erik: [00:09:13] Yeah, pretty much.
[00:09:14] Andres: [00:09:14] But that's not enough and let enough... Let alone being a remote employee, or part of a team working remotely, there's a lot of questions you're going to have because you're not going to be able to learn just by copying what other people do within the office. Or by asking, you know, your colleague from [00:09:30] the desk on the side, "Hey, how should we do this?"
[00:09:32] It's going to be harder for you to do that. So onboarding's become particularly relevant for remote teams.
[00:09:37] Alex: [00:09:37] Onboarding is extremely important and you have to have a checklist, and I think I go about that on the book and the videos just in case the areas where I continue experimenting and I haven't yet made my mind is whether we want the person to fly and work side by side next to someone else. At the beginning after the trial period has ended, or if ever at [00:10:00] all.
[00:10:01] Josephine: [00:10:01] So Andres, um, your onboarding sounded insane. I can't believe you got to go spend time on a farm with Alex. And I mean, all, I, I, I'm so glad I came to San Francisco to meet you guys. But... what. That is so cool. That is something that you know, that you can't do in an office.
[00:10:27] Andres: [00:10:27] Wait, wait a second. Your [00:10:30] onboarding... Part of your onboarding was going to Las Vegas for three days. Everything paid. What are you talking about?
[00:10:35] Josephine: [00:10:35] It's a different
[00:10:36] Andres: [00:10:36] type...
[00:10:37] There is a Instagram story that I saw the other week where we were checking out each other's personal branding thingys, and I saw your foot there in Las Vegas. So no complaining.
[00:10:48] Josephine: [00:10:48] Okay. Okay. That's fair. It's on a different, it's on a different level. It's a different scale. It's something, I don't even think we can compare it or anything, basically, [00:11:00] so that's why maybe I'm just like, Oh my God, it was out of North America. Wow. That's really, really cool. At least for me to hear it.
[00:11:07] Andres: [00:11:07] Well, by the time this episode goes out, you must have probably been through a gazillion countries already. So...
[00:11:18] Josephine: [00:11:18] Fingers crossed.
[00:11:19] Andres: [00:11:19] Yeah. Yeah. Well, um, let's make sure to give our listeners an update right now.
[00:11:26] Josephine: [00:11:26] Hi everyone. I'm Josephine here, recording [00:11:30] season two of the remoter podcast. By this time, you will be hearing our finale and I am in Austria doing my, I can't even count, I think we're nearing number 10, the 10th episode for the Remoter Podcast or so? And I'm really excited to have you guys hear what we've been collecting so far? There's a lot of stories, a lot of very different and diverse stories, and we've only started scratching the surface as in, I've only [00:12:00] been in Europe, like I haven't even hit the Americas yet and other continents, so season two is going to be a good one.
[00:12:09] Andres: [00:12:09] So it's been a wild ride and I want to thank you all personally for taking the time to hear and comment and share and discuss ideas on all of our chapters so far. I want to make sure that we create an awesome experience for you, an awesome audio experience for you for season two, and I also want to make sure that you are part of the [00:12:30] conversation and part of the voices that we're going to be sharing on the next session.
[00:12:34] So you're still in time to share your ideas, to share your thoughts, to share your topics you'd like to discuss, to let us know who we should bring onto the podcast, um, because right now we're wrapping up on the last, last chapters and I want to make sure that your voice is there. So thank you so much for taking the time to listen to us and to learn from the diverse perspectives that we share with you and [00:13:00] Josephine, thank you so much for taking the time to build Remoter into what it is today. I think this is exactly what we imagined when we started the project.
[00:13:08] Josephine: [00:13:08] Thank you Andres, and thank you to all our listeners for sticking by and we'll see you in season two.
[Podcast music background track - stinger]
[00:13:18] Andres: [00:13:18] Thank you so much for tuning. A few last words, if you enjoyed that episode, please...
[00:13:23] Josephine: [00:13:23] Follow us on social media @remoterproject and let us know what you think about the latest episode.
[00:13:28] We'd love for you to join us [00:13:30] as we continue building the Remoter library on our website, remoter dot com. That's R E M O T E R dot com.
[00:13:37] If you want even more resources, sign up for our free Founding and Growing Remotely online course. You can find that on our website or check the description for links. Don't forget to follow and subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, SoundCloud, wherever you listen to your podcasts.
[00:13:53] Andres: [00:13:53] And remember, we're here to make work from. So I'd like to ask you, what part will you play in shaping [00:14:00] the future of work?
[Cue podcast background music track, same one used in the introduction]