How do you efficiently work with a globally distributed team? What are some factors you should consider? Should you even HAVE people spread out over different timezones? All these questions, and more, answered in episode 13 of the Remoter Podcast.
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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] 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.
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[00:00:55] Hey guys. So for this week's episode, Andres and I are actually not in the [00:01:00] studio together. I'm still in Toronto. He's actually in...
[00:01:04] Andres: [00:01:04] I'm in San Francisco.
[00:01:06] Josephine: [00:01:06] And you're there for a conference, was it, you're attending a workshop or...
[00:01:11] Andres: [00:01:11] No, yeah. It's actually a conference. It's Wired, this mag- futuristic magazine thing that they do, so that you're having a little event here. Well, not little, it is quite big, I feel like, in San Francisco,
[00:01:24] Josephine: [00:01:24] So whenever I am in the West coast, I feel like, I feel like I have all the time in the world. Maybe it's just cause I live on East coast time, so of course there's a three hour difference. Right now it's 4:00 PM here, so it's only 1:00 PM there.
[00:01:38] It just feels like he has.... 27 hours in a day. I know that's not true, but like I, I just feel that way, you know? Um, so I feel like, I feel like you have so much time left in your day and I am jealous. Um, but I am really glad that most of our team is within a one to three, [00:02:00] four hour difference. Um, because man, I can't, like, I can't imagine if right now you, I was calling you and it was 4:00 AM or something and you had to pick up the phone to do this with me, that would be so brutal.
[00:02:16] Andres: [00:02:16] Well, you know, actually Rodrgio, uh, who works out of Australia. And, um, we will, the first one we tried, um, working remotely at such a different time zone, um, and they have been working well. Um, but they, the intersection, like there's four hours in the morning, he wakes up really early, like, I think 4:00 AM and he works for four hours alongside, um, the engineering team, uh, which is, afternoon for the engineering team in the, in the, um, Colombia, Brazil, Uruguay area where we have some of them.
[00:02:52] Um, and that's where they get to think and work and work together. And so on. Um. And that's quite nice. Sorry. But it [00:03:00] is working,
[00:03:00] Josephine: [00:03:00] I guess. Yeah. He has admited, like he's the one who has decided to go. Um, so I'm glad we have like, something that's working out for the team right now. And I, I just remembered, um, in episode three, like when Alex was talking about his time in Japan, man, that was, that sounded rough.
[00:03:20] Andres: [00:03:20] Well, I mean, I, I would hate it to not sleep. I hate it when I'm not, when I do not sleep. Well, you're, you don't want to be anywhere around that.
[00:03:32] Josephine: [00:03:32] But, uh, yeah. Listeners, let's move on to the episode.
[00:03:40] Andres: [00:03:40] When recruiting remotely, and particularly if you're a startup, what should you prioritize and why, Alex?
[00:03:46] Alex: [00:03:46] So actually good, uh, on one of my trips to Japan, I got a, a really good idea, and this is how it happened. I was on a subway station, which of course Tokyo is, is full of. And my wife was looking for a book for my [00:04:00] daughter, and I was just looking at the magazines they had, and it came across this magazine that has a load of different job openings and they have like a magazine for skilled work and another magazine for semi-skilled work and another magazine.
[00:04:12] Andres: [00:04:12] But it was a magazine.
[00:04:14] Alex: [00:04:14] Yeah, it's a magazine. It's a magazine full of job openings. That's how, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Recruit is the company that pretty much owns the job listing marketplace in Japan. Oh. So you could see like the yellow magazine is for the skilled work. The blue magazine is for semi-skilled work and the green one is for non-skilled work, something like that.
[00:04:33] Like you know which magazine to get, and I think they are free for people to grab on the bookshops,
[00:04:38] Erik: [00:04:38] like the apartment finder or something.
[00:04:41] Alex: [00:04:41] Very similar. And of course, I mean given that I'll, that that's the topic. I love, matching expertise with demand. I started looking through through them and it got my attention that most of the listings on the semi-skilled one had pictures of the team that the person would be working with. So for example, [00:05:00] 7/11 it's a popular corner store in Japan. There are many 7/11s over there. This magazine had openings per store, and on each store you see the group of people. Like taking a selfie for them to post it as part of the job opening.
[00:05:14] And, uh, I use my phone to translate some of the copy from, of the texts and it makes reference to the environment, like how did it feel to work on that, on that store. Plus some of the other things. So
[00:05:26] Andres: [00:05:26] They have a lot of 7/11s and each 7/11 has a different opening?
[00:05:30] Alex: [00:05:30] Yeah, because you look for the openings, like based on location, which makes a lot of sense.
[00:05:33] Erik: [00:05:33] Close stores.
[00:05:34] Alex: [00:05:34] And each one is doing their own employee branding to some degree. Like. Like taking a picture of the team that you're going to working with. This came as a shock to me because I mean, Japanese culture is. in general, serious, like, like they don't this smile that common compared to other cultures. Yet this magazine was full of pictures of people smiling.
[00:05:55] Wow. Okay. So anyway, fast forward when we implemented uh, [00:06:00] Torre,, I decided to add that to Torre. So today, in Torre, when you post a job opening, you can add. I load of pictures, and if you're a remote team, we invite you to add pictures of you having a video conference with your members, the members of your team, or pictures of theq retreat that if you have had retreats and such, bwecause that tells a lot of, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I think that for job openings, it's very true.
[00:06:23] Erik: [00:06:23] Can you see yourself in this picture?
[00:06:26] Alex: [00:06:26] Yeah, I mean, if you go to the openings of Torre itself, you'll see me on all of the openings and on many other members of the team, all of them.
[00:06:34] Andres: [00:06:34] What else is important to be considered in a job opening that it's remote, particularly?
[00:06:39] Alex: [00:06:39] I mean many things. The one that is potentially the most unique compared to traditional job openings is, is time zones.
[00:06:47] It's very important to make it explicit so the person know whether it's a good match for them. And, uh, also what kind of flexibility they are going to have in terms of potentially moving to other places while they are on that job.
[00:07:00] [00:07:00] Andres: [00:07:00] But some jobs can be performed on different time zones or is it like a rule for like every kind of job?
[00:07:07] Alex: [00:07:07] It depends. So there are some jobs where do you need a lot of interaction with other people on a day to day basis, where when you have to be on the same time and you can pretend that you're not. I mean, in the same trip in Japan, actually, that that happened to me. Um, the, the reason I went to, to Japan, I've been to Japan a few times. The first time it was for like a week. And, uh, we fell in love with it, with my wife, and then we decided, you know, we should leave in Japan for the police three months. Uh, we were finally able to do it. This is summer of 2015. And we went there. We were ther with my daughter, she was almost two and my parents, so that they could take care of my daughter while we were working.
[00:07:44] And we went and, uh, I was CEO of BunnyStudio back in the day. And I was to some extent, doing the work of product manage, product designer as well. That meant that I was interacting with, my engineers and UX researchers all day long, we had like [00:08:00] 15 people on that team back then. I assumed that I was going to be able to keep up with different time zones.
[00:08:07] So picture this, I will wake up. Alright, 5:00 AM my time in Tokyo and that will be at a time in the Americas, depending on what you live, somewhere around 4 and 5:00 PM.
[00:08:20] Erik: [00:08:20] So you just barely overlap with...
[00:08:22] Alex: [00:08:22] Yeah. Yeah. We overlap for like two hours in the morning, if they were working late. Then I will have breakfast with my daughter and then I will go to the coworking space that we had while we were in Tokyo.
[00:08:33] Andres: [00:08:33] When was this?
[00:08:34] Alex: [00:08:34] 2015 summertime. Okay. And then I will work and be waking up so early I will be quite sleepy. So every now and then I had to take naps.
[00:08:43] Andres: [00:08:43] And at what time do you take a shower then? Cause you like wake up 5:00 AM and would go straight to work.
[00:08:48] Alex: [00:08:48] Well I, I work from home like 5:00 AM to 7:00 AM until my daughter woke up.
[00:08:54] Andres: [00:08:54] Okay. And then you took a break and then...
[00:08:55] Alex: [00:08:55] Yeah, I mean took a break for breakfast and shower and then I would go to the office.
[00:08:59] Erik: [00:08:59] Okay.
[00:09:00] [00:08:59] Alex: [00:08:59] And then, uh, in the office, I will work until like 6:00 PM or so. And then my parents would arrive with my daughter and we will go out and enjoy Tokyo and have dinner and whatnot.
[00:09:11] Andres: [00:09:11] Are coworking spaces in Tokyo as, as colorful as WeWork?
[00:09:16] Alex: [00:09:16] Well, back in the day, WeWork didn't exist in Tokyo. Uh, today. My guess is that it's full of, WeWorks all over the place, but the, the coworking spaces that we saw, they were like, coworking spaces in other cities. You have some amazing coworking spaces, but you have some other coworking spaces that, eh. The problem for us wasn't so much the availability of coworking spaces or whether they were cool or not. It was our capability of communicating with them to let them know that we needed, I could work in your space for three months. Today, you go with a WeWork membership.
[00:09:45] Andres: [00:09:45] And that's it.
[00:09:46] Alex: [00:09:46] Yeah, that's it. Thank, back in the day, it was tricky, and this was only four years ago, but anyway. And then we would get back home at el-, hopefully before 11:00 AM in the morning, 11:00 PM at night, so I could join [00:10:00] the daily meeting, the daily stand up of the next day.
[00:10:04] Oh, sorry. Of the previous day of my team, because I was kind of working in the future. And, uh, I will then have a couple of meetings until whatever time they needed me. And that meant that sometimes I was able to go to bed at midnight, sometimes at 1:00 AM, sometimes at 2:00 AM in the morning. But regardless, like usually I needed to wake up at 5:00 AM in the morning to be able to answer some questions they, they had to, they had for me.
[00:10:27] Erik: [00:10:27] You didn't get much sleep then.
[00:10:28] Alex: [00:10:28] No, and the first month was cool, I mean, we were super excited with being in depth behind and the flexibility of remote work and this is amazing, like this is the life. The second month, it started to kick in. I started to feel really tired, but I was able to cope with that.
[00:10:44] The third month, I hated it. I hated it so much. I mean, I wasn't sleeping well. I was getting anxious. I felt that it was blocking my team, that I ended up implementing a policy for our companies, and that is, if you [00:11:00] are a member of a team and you are expected to interact frequently with other members of your team because you have dependencies with them, you cannot be more than three times zones away from them.
[00:11:12] So from then on, we implemented that. And if you are going to be traveling somewhere else on earth, we allow you to do it, but you have to time yourself so that you can share a significant number of hours with the other members of the team. And you cannot do it for more than a month because we don't think it's sustainable.
[00:11:27] Andres: [00:11:27] We do have one exception though.
[00:11:29] Alex: [00:11:29] We have one exception, but recently there is a member of our team that moved from Colombia to Australia, Melbourne, and um, we are running right now, it's been an exception, but it's kind of an experimental exception. And that is, we allowed him to continue working from Australia even though we have no other members of the, of our tech team, uh, in such a different time zone.
[00:11:52] But the reason we did it was because a) we had been working with him for five years, so we know he's highly reliable and dependable, and b) [00:12:00] um, he is going to be working on efforts that have low dependability from other members of the team.
[00:12:09] Erik: [00:12:09] So he can work by himself.
[00:12:11] Alex: [00:12:11] So he can, and if he gets blocked, he can jump into other things. He's managing a queue of what we call the chores. Chores, small improvements to the platform that are not necessarily like full fledged features that are going to take us several engineers to complete. Those are things that usually one engineer can accomplish in a couple of hours, a couple of days at the most.
[00:12:29] So he has many on his queue. You can jump from one to the next and if he gets blocked, he can always wait until the next day to get an answer on that, that chore. Still, he is timing his schedule to wake up at 5:00 AM Melbourne time to be able to overlap four to five hours with most of the other members of the engineering team and the Americas.
[00:12:48] Erik: [00:12:48] Okay, so, but you're really explicit and it's an experiment, you know, whether it's going to pass or fail, you know exactly what's going on upfront at least.
[00:12:56] Alex: [00:12:56] Well, I hope so. We'll see.
[00:12:59] Erik: [00:12:59] And it doesn't matter [00:13:00] if he's upside down. That's in Australia.
[00:13:03] Andres: [00:13:03] Was that a joke?
[00:13:05] Erik: [00:13:05] It's a bad joke. Okay.
[00:13:07] Alex: [00:13:07] You know that in, in, in the Southern hemisphere, we draw the globe the opposite. With South America being upside.
[00:13:15] Erik: [00:13:15] Might as well, you know.
[00:13:17] Andres: [00:13:17] Colombians are being in the middle regardless of how you... Colombia is always in the middle anyways...
[00:13:23] Alex: [00:13:23] The equator is closest Columbia, right?
[00:13:26] Andres: [00:13:26] There are some rules that don't seem to really matter where they are located. For which ones would you, would you hire remotely regardless of the location?
[00:13:34] Alex: [00:13:34] Actually in some cases, you want the time zones to be different. In the case of Bunny Studio, Bunny Studio offers mission critical, creative outsourcing. So companies that need something outsourced and they need to deliver no matter what. So most of the project management is done by algorithms, but sometimes our team needs to jump into it to make sure that everything is working fine.
[00:13:57] So imagine a company that [00:14:00] needs a voiceover recorded with a very specific voice, and the voice actor got sick. And the system couldn't find a replacement for that person automatically. So we have a team that we call production management that jumps to solve the issue because of how time sensitive our services are, we have a 24 seven team. And to be able to offer that 24 seven team, we have actually actively looked for people in different time zones. That way, uh, it doesn't matter what time it is, you're going to get someone paying attention to projects that need attention. So last time I checked, we had on the operations team of Bunny Studio, we had people in the U.S. Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, South Africa, Egypt, Dubai, Portugal, India, and Japan.
[00:14:42] Erik: [00:14:42] If I'm not mistaken, that covers the globe.
[00:14:45] Andres: [00:14:45] I have a friend of mine who happens to have a, running a VC startup and they have a VP of engineering. I don't remember if it's three, somewhere around three to six engineers in a country called Georgia
[00:15:00] [00:14:59] Alex: [00:14:59] Beautiful country.
[00:15:01] Andres: [00:15:01] I've never been, but yeah.
[00:15:03] Alex: [00:15:03] Can we go?
[00:15:06] Andres: [00:15:06] Well, these engineers...
[00:15:07] Alex: [00:15:07] They were the creators of wine, or at least at the cradle of wine.
[00:15:14] Andres: [00:15:14] Well, these engineers living pretty comfortably with a $1,500 per month salary. So it makes a lot of sense for him to have them and have, and what they do is they have this VP of engineering, which is also there, but gets paid a little bit more, uh, or, yeah, significantly more than the other engineers. And he makes the effort of overlapping as much as possible with the team in the Americas because they have a product designer in Mexico and marketing girl in San Francisco and CEO is in San Francisco as well.
[00:15:46] And it seems to be working for them. I mean, that's a solution they found and they're working that way. Seems to be working for them. But what kind of issues do you think they could maybe come up with, with that kind of structure?
[00:15:58] Alex: [00:15:58] The most obvious one, [00:16:00] there are two obvious ones. One is as you scale, you're going to have communication issues.
[00:16:04] Um, because not everyone is going to be willing to cope with these strange hours to be able to be on the same time or relative, or overlap with members of the team that are 12 hours away. Then the second one is potentially professional growth for different members of the team because by default, you're going to potentially give priority to people that are on the same time zone that you are because you get to communicate with them more frequently.
[00:16:31] So, yeah, those are the two most obvious ones. So it's going to be difficult for him, for example, to offer this company to have some of those engineers become eventually VPs of engineering, or to grow them into a product role, et cetera.
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[00:16:57] Josephine: [00:16:57] Man, now I'm thinking about it. Yeah. I'm glad that you [00:17:00] guys were able to figure out a schedule with him, but just re-listening to Alex's experience in Japan, it's too bad that it was a difficult one because like, I would love to do what Alex did, but I also value sleep and just, you know, just like you, like everybody I value sleep as well.
[00:17:17] Andres: [00:17:17] Yeah. So, I mean, it really depends on what role you're fulfilling within a team and, uh, how your team does things. I've, uh, I've met actually uh, Amir from DoIst. Um, and he has a very, very distributed team. Um, well they do that intentionally also because they build a lot of tools for remote teams, um, or rather, distributed teams.
[00:17:40] And, um, there's just different ways to go at it. So in the case for you, for example, and I don't know if you knew this, uh, but the marketing team, we can actually work from anywhere because we don't need to synchronize so much, as in we don't need to work side by side and discuss ideas so [00:18:00] much, so that, um, that it's actually something good, I think of being part of the marketing team at Torre. Um. That in the case of like engineers, they have to discuss, you know, the best, um, architecture for, um, a certain solution that they have to write up or, um, the best solution for a given bug or a, um, context around what they want to build. So, so it takes for them, it takes a little bit more of discussion and side-by-side working.
[00:18:26] Well, that's just the way they do it. So, yeah. Actually, you know what? I have to leave you right now.
[00:18:32] Josephine: [00:18:32] Are you going to, your conference right now?
[00:18:34] Andres: [00:18:34] Yeah. Yeah. I have to. I have to go into the conference, but I'll, I'll see you. I'll see you. Uh, and the listeners will actually, I'll see you. I don't hear the listeners, um, or read the listeners comments next week on the next podcast.
[00:18:47] Josephine: [00:18:47] Yeah. So as you guys have heard, Andres will be back in the studio next week, and thank you for joining us on this week's episode of the Remoter Podcast.
[00:19:00] [00:19:00] Andres: [00:19:00] Thank you so much for tuning in. A few last words. If you enjoyed that episode, please....
[00:19:05] Josephine: [00:19:05] Follow us on social media @remoterproject and let us know what you think about the latest episode.
[00:19:10] Andres: [00:19:10] We'd love for you to join us as we continue building the Remoter library on our website, remoter dot com. That's R E M O T E R dot com.
[00:19:19] Josephine: [00:19:19] 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.
[00:19:35] Andres: [00:19:35] And by the way, we've got some exciting news. We're gearing up for season two. This time, we're going to go further into interviewing remote work leaders all around the world, and we'd like to ask you, what are some questions or topics you'd like to hear covered next time?
[00:19:50] Who would you like to hear on the show and let us know through Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, e-mail. Um, you know, carrier pigeon, whatever it is you like, we're all [00:20:00] ears.
[00:20:00] Josephine: [00:20:00] And remember, we're here to make work fulfilling. So what part will you play in shaping the future of work?
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