[Bonus Episode 2] The Remote Work Blueprint

Transcript

[00:00:03.92] [Jenny] Before we dive into today’s episode, we want to recommend another great podcast, Pfeffer on Power, with Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer. The show equips leaders with tools for navigating power dynamics, influence, and negotiation.

[00:00:20.39] [Sameer] It shares a similar focus on empowering leaders, just like our podcast does. Check out Pfeffer on Power. It’s also part of Professors.FM, the podcast network that makes sense of the world with top scholars.

[00:00:40.99] [Sameer] From Berkeley Haas and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation, this is The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer.

[00:00:49.01] [Jenny] I’m Jenny Chatman.

[00:00:50.39] [Sameer] And I’m Sameer Srivastava.

[00:00:53.52] [Jenny] We’re professors at the Haas School of Business. On this podcast, we’ll answer your questions about workplace culture.

[00:01:00.08] [Sameer] We’ll give you practical advice that you can put to work right away.

[00:01:03.79] [Jenny] Join us to start building your culture toolkit.

[00:01:07.95] [Sameer] Hello, and welcome back to The Culture Kit.

[00:01:11.02] [Jenny] What do you got for us today, Sameer?

[00:01:13.12] [Sameer] Well, remote work is a topic that’s here to stay, and there’s a lot to talk about. So as part of our summer bonus season, I’d like to share one of our recent culture exchange events titled The Remote Work Blueprint. The session was held on April 11 and featured Harvard Business School Professor Raj Choudhury and Brandon Sammut chief people officer at Zapier, on how to create high-performing, inclusive, and engaging remote work cultures.

[00:01:41.79] [Jenny] That was a super interesting conversation, so I’m excited to share it more widely with our Culture Kit listeners. Let’s hear what Raj and Brandon have to say.

[00:01:52.56] [Sameer] Welcome, everyone, to our culture exchange session today on the topic of the remote work blueprint. My name is Sameer Srivastava, and I’m one of the cofounders and codirectors of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation. My partner in crime, Jenny Chatman, is unfortunately not able to join today, but she sends her regrets.

Jenny and I are delighted to have this series of sessions– some of you have come to prior ones– because they’re really a unique opportunity to hear both from an academic who’s doing research on a topic that matters in the world today of work and also cutting-edge practitioners who are doing really interesting work and to really understand what we can learn from both sides. And, today, I am delighted to have a session with Raj Choudhury, a professor from Harvard Business School, and Brandon Sammut, chief people officer from Zapier.

[00:02:48.46] [Sameer] So let me start with Raj. Raj is the Humphrey Family Associate Professor at Harvard Business School and really is one of the pioneers in research on the future of work, especially the changing geography of work. His research has been published in all of the leading academic journals– I won’t give you the full list– and has been very widely cited. In 2023, Forbes included him in the Future of Work 50 List. In 2024, he was included in the Times Charter 30 List of Future Work Thought Leaders. There’s a lot more I could tell you about Raj, but let me stop there.

[00:03:20.98] [Sameer] Brandon is a two-time chief people officer currently at Zapier, a software automation platform with over 800 employees and, interestingly, an all-remote team that spans over 40 countries. Brandon believes that remote work is the way to extend both individual opportunity and business results. And he draws on a lot of his prior experience in talent acquisition, talent development, strategy, consulting, business development, and venture capital. Again, I could go on about Brandon, but I will stop there.

[00:03:51.55] [Sameer] So Zapier made a very deliberate decision to move to a fully remote model. Can you tell us a bit more about the context there. How and why was that decision made? And how has it evolved as the company has grown to over 800 employees?

[00:04:08.08] [Brandon] An interesting thing about Zapier’s story and path to an all-remote workforce is that the company started that way. So Zapier started 13 years ago and decided to start all-remote before it was considered even unconventional. I mean, 13 years ago, to be perfectly honest, it was considered a really bad idea to start a software company all-remote. The three cofounders were undergrads at the University of Missouri, and then came to the San Francisco Bay Area to do Y Combinator, which is a startup incubator.

[00:04:41.89] While they were there, they met with a lot of other founders, and they would swap notes on how were you planning to hire your first nonfounder employee or the one after that and the one after that. The conventional wisdom at the time was, well, we’re in the Bay Area and we’re planning to stay in the Bay Area. We’re going to hire those that first person, that fifth person, that 15th person, and so on in the Bay Area.

[00:05:03.13] And for three founders who kind of grew up in middle America, they kind of had two realizations. One, they knew, that there was talent all over the place, not just in geographies like the Bay Area. And the second thing they knew is that if they kind of swam with the current and tried to recruit their first couple dozen employees in the Bay Area, like all of these other very talented founders, it was going to be an uphill battle.

[00:05:28.88] And so they decided to do it differently. They started all-remote, and I think they benefited both from starting that way– it’s easier to figure that out when you’re at a smaller scale– but also maintain that as a pure play model, which is something I think we’ll talk about later. So that’s a little bit about how Zapier came to be remote.

[00:05:48.87] And then to the second part of your question, Sameer, about how the journey to scale from three founders to over 800 people today– I would say that a lot of the fundamentals persist. There are certain things we’ll talk about in this conversation around transparency, working in public, building the company in a very user-centered way that served the company well when they had 5 or 15 people and are even more important now with 800.

[00:06:16.28] [Sameer] Great. And we’re going to talk a lot more about your model and how you make it work. But want to bring Raj into the conversation as well. And Raj, you’ve been thinking about this issue of remote work and doing research on it across a range of settings. So based on your research, what do you see as the key advantages and disadvantages of remote work compared to traditional models, particularly in terms of productivity, quality work, employee well-being– the range of outcomes that you looked at.

[00:06:44.34] [Raj] Yeah, so the form of remote work that has been most exciting for me to follow and study is what I’ve called work from anywhere. And let me just take a minute to distinguish work from anywhere from what we know as work from home, which I guess almost everyone has practiced, especially during the pandemic. So work from anywhere, in the way we have conceptualized it, is a form of remote work where the individual gets a choice of where to live. And we’ve more formally called that geographic flexibility. So individuals can choose where to live. And we can talk about meeting peers and mechanisms to do that later.

[00:07:25.40] And so what that– of course, that’s going to be good for individuals in many ways. They can choose to live in cheaper towns. They can choose to live closer to mom and dad. They can choose to live in the mountains if they like skiing, near the beach of the ocean. But for the organization, like a company like Zapier, what that does is once you award individuals a geographic flexibility, you expand your labor market. You are no longer tied to the local labor market where you would otherwise have an office.

[00:07:58.70] And I’m sure Brandon will tell us more about this. But organizations like Zapier, even with a few hundred employees, have been hiring from 30-40 countries and hundreds of cities. So I see– yes, there could be productivity gains, and we can talk about that. I have some research on the Patent Office, which, for all the places, was an early adopter of work from anywhere in 2012. And one of my studies documents a 4% productivity gain in that setting. So there could be productivity gains, of course, real estate savings.

[00:08:36.25] But I would say the main reason is hiring from anywhere. And we can talk about what that means in terms of the diversity of talent, but I’ll just pause.

[00:08:47.58] [Sameer] Great. Thank you, Raj. Let’s go back then to some of the Zapier specific practices. And one of the things I’m curious about, Brandon, is in a distributed work environment, how do you provide employees with support and resources to really help them thrive? So if we’re thinking about professional growth and mentorship, particularly mentorship and skills development, that’s been written about a lot as one of the downsides, potentially, especially for younger employees. What are your thoughts on that?

[00:09:14.40] [Brandon] I’m actually going to start with what happens before someone even joins a company like Zapier. So when a company makes a hire, we often focus a lot on the decision the employer makes to hire the candidate. But what we found is equally important is architecting the experience of being the candidate and making the decision to join the company, and particularly so when you’re hiring into a company that has, even today, still a fairly unconventional model– All-Remote workforce, very global.

[00:09:43.29] And so, at Zapier, what we have learned over time is the more context and information we can provide, even for folks looking at our careers site, and certainly as they interview with the team about what it’s really like to work in this environment, including the things that might be perceived as merits or benefits, but also the things that might not be for them might be challenging or just not of interest, helps both parties make a better decision. So it actually starts there.

[00:10:09.94] Then, when it comes to onboarding new employees, Zapier’s onboarding is extensive. And one of the reasons it’s so elaborate is because we know that, like Raj says, many of us have worked from home before, certainly especially during the pandemic, but actually even to this day, only probably a single-digit percentage of folks that join Zapier have worked at an all-remote company before. And so we really take that to heart when we’re designing the onboarding experience.

[00:10:40.26] [Sameer] Can you just give us maybe an example of something that you do in onboarding that’s maybe different from what other firms would typically do?

[00:10:48.58] [Brandon] Sure. Here’s one practice in particular. When someone joins Zapier– again, a really distributed environment– making those human connections and understanding whether it’s with my manager or with my new colleagues how each person likes to work, how you like to give and receive feedback, a lot of the things that kind of can’t be known if you just jump into the work per se but that really strengthen the collaborative relationship or the manager-managee relationship, Zapier solves for this during onboarding in part through a practice that we call the “ReadMe.” You can think about the ReadMe as like a personal instruction manual. And when every single person joins Zapier, part of the onboarding experience is learning about the Zapier tradition of the readme and then writing your own and then sharing it, swapping readmes with your manager, who has already written theirs as part of their onboarding some time ago, and with your colleagues. And that practice, that tradition in and of itself really humanizes a lot of those relationships at the onset, and it becomes a durable artifact that can be used any time you start working with a new manager or maybe rotate into a new project or team.

[00:12:01.49] [Sameer] And something you could presumably update over time as your preferences shift.

[00:12:05.47] [Brandon] I’ve updated my at least three times since I joined 2 and 1/2 years ago. I mean, the last thing I would say in terms of just ongoing learning and skill development is we make an investment. I mean, one of the things, if you look under the hood in terms of the economics of Zapier and the investments we make, is that for a company of about 800 people, we have a seven-member learning and development team. There are kind of more typical software firms, for example, or other firms that maybe have or 2,000 or 2,500 employees and I don’t have a seven-member learning and development team. So that’s a very intentional investment that we’ve made, partly because of the kind of particulars of developing skills and growing folks within this particular layer.

[00:12:47.81] [Sameer] Yeah, great. So Raj, let me get you back into the discussion as well. So back in January, we had our annual Culture Connect Conference, and one of the speakers there was Nick Bloom. And one of the themes that he talked about was how the move to remote and hybrid forms of work were hitting different tiers of workers quite differently. The impact was different across different socioeconomic strata. I’m curious, from your work, what’s been your experience about how different the experience of remote work has been based on job roles, seniority, other demographics. What are you finding in your research?

[00:13:29.96] [Raj] Yeah, so I think there’s a lot of variation. I mean, you’re totally right. So I guess I’ll mention a couple of things here. So there is the new employee or the younger employee versus the more established employee comparison because the established employee or the older employee has the social capital already quite well-established. And so the need for mentoring is much higher for a newer employee or a younger employee. And we can talk about the mechanisms that all-remote organizations employ to make that happen. The other sort of divide that’s been debated a lot is the blue collar/white collar. And there, for years, I used to think that remote work or work from anywhere would be more prevalent in the white collar or, should I say, more desk-based jobs. But there’s a very interesting phenomena which I’ll just briefly mention in case folks are interested.

[00:14:18.26] So now, with digital twins, which is a combination of sensors, automation, data on the cloud in real time and machine learning algorithms, it’s possible to create a virtual replica of any physical operation. So I’ve studied this with the Unilever factory. I’m studying this with a Turkish power plant. But digital twins are happening in all kinds of settings– hospitals, airports. And once you have the virtual digital replica of the physical operation, a lot of people can work remotely. You don’t need then everyone to work in-person at that manufacturing site.

[00:14:54.92] [Sameer] Yeah, when we think about future of work, I think that’s a really powerful trend and a possible real game-changer for people with more blue collar type work. So I want to actually go back to you now, Brandon, and ask you about diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. I think your particular acronym at Zapier is DIBE. And what I wanted to ask you– I mean, we obviously are seeing DEI and the set of topics in the news a lot these days, and I could imagine the challenges of helping everyone feel included is just much, much greater in a fully-remote model. So how do you guys address that set of issues in your organization?

[00:15:35.76] [Brandon] Absolutely. One of the surprising things that I’ve come to see at Zapier on this topic and have read in some of my limited reading on the research is that a highly-flexible model can, in fact, actually be a net promoter of inclusion and belonging– like, truly, truly. And I see it with the Zapier team when I talk with folks on a regular basis.

[00:15:58.86] Some examples of what I mean by this– so one, from an inclusion, belonging point of view, it’s hard to understate the fundamental reality of working in a highly flexible environment, being able to choose, roughly speaking– it depends on roles. I mean, even at Zapier, for example, there are some roles that have more regimented timings than others, like our customer support team. We have a lot of roles there where you’re kind of in the queue during specific times of the day. However, even in those cases, what I often hear from folks is, yes, that’s true.

[00:16:29.11] However, I have a lot of flexibility around when I do my nonqueue tasks as part of my job. And then there’s also just the reality that I get to choose where I get to do the work in the first place. And that by itself is a form of flexibility I have not enjoyed before. It’s really meaningful to me. It makes the employer-employee relationship honestly stickier because even in today’s market where, in general, things have become more flexible, there’s certainly more demand for this type of work than there is supply in many cases. So that’s one thing that we often hear from folks.

[00:16:59.88] When we’re designing a lot of these kind of talent-related experiences– think about job benefits, for example– one of our design considerations is if we’re going to create a new perk or a new benefit, we work really hard to figure out how to make sure it’s accessible to everyone in our workforce in all 40-plus countries. And a specific example of this, before I turn it back over– 2-plus years ago, we were looking to provide expanded family planning and fertility benefits outside of what insurance typically provides in most markets. And, again, even at that time, we had a workforce in 35-plus countries, and we were looking for a partner we could work with who could meet us there and provide that type of additional benefit in all of these markets. That, by itself, narrowed the funnel of options down to effectively two partners, and then we ended up choosing one.

[00:17:51.28] Even in that case, we had to be creative because– let’s say we had 35 markets at the time– they were able to provide the benefit directly in 32 or 33– we had to design our own supplemental benefit to close the circle. But we commit to do that. And when we make those choices, we try to be really transparent with the company about our decision criteria, and folks typically can see and appreciate that if we’re going to do something in any conceivable way, we want to make sure it’s available to the entirety.

[00:18:19.92] [Sameer] Well, I want to take a little bit of a step back and just remind everyone that when Jenny Chatman and I started this center, the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation, over six years ago, one of the vision statements we had was to try to really bring together the worlds of academic research and industry practice because we see huge potential in bringing insights from both worlds together and actually codesigning some experiments that give us better evidence about what really works and what doesn’t work. And we’re very fortunate because the two of you are actually a great embodiment of this principle because Raj, you partnered with Zapier on a really exciting research study. And so I wanted to ask you if you could describe the study as a starting point, and then tell us a little bit about principles that you’ve learned over the years about effective academic industry partnerships. And then, Brandon, want to hear about that from your side as well.

[00:19:15.63] [Raj] Sure. So this particular study is focused on understanding how all-remote organizations organize in person. So unlike more traditional companies which have offices and might require employees to show up a day or two every week, all-remote organizations don’t have offices. But almost universally, every single all-remote organization that I’ve spoken to organizes retreats offsite. And it could be all company offsites or team-based offsite. And the all-company offsite could happen once a quarter, while the team could meet more frequently. And now teams are meeting at events which coincide with their own business purpose, like if it’s a sales team, they would meet at a sales conference. They would just stay back for a couple of days.

[00:20:04.50] So I think the in-person is just being reimagined. So instead of an office, it’s an offsite or a sales conference. Instead of every week, it’s now done once a month or once a quarter. One of the questions that, as academics, we were interested in is what is the effect of these retreats or offsites on communication that happens after the offsite? So, thankfully, Zapier partnered with me and my coauthors, and we studied a retreat that happened before COVID. It actually happened in January 2020, and we studied the communication patterns for a few months before and a few months after.

[00:20:45.67] And if I have to summarize the two main results, the first thing we find is that once two people go to a retreat who have not previously met and are from different departments, on average, their communication on Slack increases after the retreat, as you would imagine. But the effect we found was stronger if the two employees had ethnic similarity, so if they were ethnically similar. And I think that’s just a homophily bias of human beings, that even when we go to a day-to-day office, we tend to look for people like us.

[00:21:25.17] [Sameer] Raj, let me just interrupt for a quick second. So for those who may not be familiar with the term, “homophily” is just an academic term for similarity attraction. So people tend to form ties to similar others or birds of a feather tend to flock together.

[00:21:40.68] [Raj] Sorry. Thank you. And this has been established in lots of research for decades. In company mixers, at conferences, we tend to hang out with people just like us. But the second finding, which I find more interesting, is the following. Then, how do we make sure people who are not similar are also meeting at conferences? Because, at conferences, people have the freedom to go and talk to whoever they want to talk to. And so what we found in this study is that if two people who were not similar shared the same cab ride from the airport to the retreat location, they started communicating after the retreat. So we’ve been more formally calling this “constrained colocation.” You can give it your own name. But the idea is that the design of these retreats is extremely important. It’s not just sufficient to organize a retreat and let people go and mingle. There has to be a lot of thought given into how these interactions are being engineered, and we’ve called that “engineered serendipity.” So what I’ve learned from this process over the years, Sameer, is I think– prior, I was a consultant. I used to work for McKinsey. So I’ve really enjoyed research that’s grounded in organizations. And I think, as academics, we learn so much from managers. We, of course, teach managers in business schools. But my summary has been I’ve learned equally from smart people like Brandon.

[00:23:07.83] [Sameer] And Brandon, Zapier is engaged in research with academics. Say a little bit more about how you think about that process and what makes for an effective partnership from your side.

[00:23:20.06] [Brandon] Sure. Well, I think what makes it valuable for us is it’s a two-way learning exchange. The question that Raj presented here was of equal interest to us. And then, as one of the more well-known all-remote companies, and older all-remote companies, there’s a part of this that’s a little bit about paying it forward.

[00:23:41.67] There’s so much that we have learned that now feels like something we could take for granted, but for other organizations– and I have conversations with their CEOs or chief officers pretty regularly on these topics. And it’s always a reminder that while we are still learning, we also have things where we can help and support. And research is a really structured way to promote that type of learning. And, again, the results that Raj and team produced were both insightful and actionable for the team here at Zapier.

[00:24:14.39] To your question around what makes for a good partnership, I think this one’s a good example is we like to align on a question that’s both of interest to broader society, but also to the team here at Zapier. So that aligns interest from the beginning. And from there, we really lean on the research team to help us think through a methodology that can produce insight that is both useful for Zapier but can be generalized or used beyond the organization.

[00:24:43.65] [Sameer] Let me stick with you, Brandon, for another topic, which is in a fully remote world, how do you think about performance management and measurement of productivity and outcomes, and what’s different about that in your world relative to a traditional organization?

[00:25:01.40] [Brandon] Sure. I’ll say something that might be provocative or surprising, but I actually think it’s companies that are highly distributed or all-remote actually have an advantage in figuring this out. And the advantage is because you don’t have folks in the office either at all or frequently, you cannot confuse looking around and observing whether people are at their desk or who’s being the fastest or who’s got one screen versus two screens going at the same time– you cannot confuse those things for actual understandings of performance or productivity. What I would call that crutch or that false signal falls away, and you are left with the plain reality of, how do we know? How do we know?

[00:25:48.84] And then it comes back to what I would call org design or management fundamentals. Anything I’m about to say from this point forward is not specific to Zapier. It’s not specific to an all-remote company. It’s just good management. It starts with things like senior leaders aligning on what are the goals of this part of the organization, how will we know how we’re doing against those goals. Basically, how do we measure? Then how much of that can be measured at the individual employee level, then how do we make sure that employees are aware and are taking those decisions and feel accountable for them.

[00:26:26.41] Like, here’s an example. I have this– whether it’s average handle time or a number of recruits per month or whatever the case may be. And we all know these metrics and goals are imperfect. But what we found is so important is you refine them over time. You don’t let perfection get in the way of having a point of view. You have to start somewhere. And that’s really served us well.

[00:26:47.56] So having a point of view on the productivity metrics, making sure those ultimately translated into goals all the way out through the organization, And then it’s other things, like making sure that managers and their employees are having regular one-on-one conversations in which the manager’s helpful and unblocking folks in pursuit of their goals. And where you’re talking about progress within those goals themselves, it’s measurement. Do you have the right dashboards or repeatable visibility into how things are going? And then, also, do you have a way to roll all of that perspective into some performance or impact appraisal system that’s ultimately connected to things like advancement or different types of rewards like pay raises or bonuses?

[00:27:27.79] [Sameer] But we know that the future of hybrid and remote forms of work is yet to be written. We don’t yet know how things are going to play out. And so want to ask each of you to do a little bit of speculation about the future, but also help us understand what is on your research agenda going forward. So I’m going to start with you, Raj. What are some of the research questions that are animating you these days?

[00:27:52.86] [Raj] So I’m very hopeful of this new model, and I’ll tell you why. I think it comes back to that central argument about this being a win-win for the individual and the organization. The individual– the choice of geography has been neglected for far too long. And for the organization, it expands the labor market.

[00:28:11.79] So I have three questions on my mind. The first one relates to management practices that makes this model work. And so we talked about the offsite and in-person. The other one that’s top of mind for me is coordination. And, at a very high level, at least in my view– and Brandon, you should chime in– the way all-remote companies have done coordination and learning well is to embrace asynchronous. So at a very high-level, it’s been about reading and writing instead of talking and speaking or listening.

[00:28:45.25] So I think a critical skill for an employee in an all-remote organization is the ability to codify what he or she or they are doing and to read a lot. So I think the asynchronous reading and writing management practice is just fascinating.

[00:29:02.38] And two other quick things, Sameer– so we talked about digital twins and how the frontier of work from anywhere is moving into hospitals and airports and supply chain and warehouses. The other one I’m really focused on is what this does for society. And, at a very high-level, in my view, what this does for society is it leads to a more equitable distribution of talent. For far too long, our smaller towns have lost talent to the coastal cities. For far too long, hundreds or thousands of people from emerging markets have come to the west. Now, with work from anywhere and all-remote, we can get some reverse brain drain– so talent flowing back to places like Tulsa, which I’ve studied. So I would say those are the three exciting questions on mind.

[00:29:47.30] [Sameer] Excellent, thank you. And Brandon, what are some of the things that you guys are still trying to learn about?

[00:29:52.55] [Brandon] I’ll build on top of a couple of things that Raj said because I agree with all of it. The study that Raj mentioned gets into one angle on the purpose and impacts of in-person connection within a highly-distributed or remote environment. That’s still of great interest to a place like Zapier. We make a big investment of our people’s time and our capital in in-person connection. And we’re still very curious about how to tune that and put that to its best use.

[00:30:19.46] The second and last thing I’d mentioned in curiosity is the role of the role of AI and generative AI in particular, and expanding even further the range of individuals who could work in a place like Zapier, including from a language point of view. Even at a place like Zapier today, we’ll hire an almost any conceivable place in the world, but we still require English fluency to work at Zapier. With some of the things I think many of us have seen just over the last 6 to 12 months, it does make you anticipate a time in the near future where that may not be needed. And you think about how that can further expand access to opportunity. Again, it’s that win-win that Raj is talking about.

[00:30:59.55] [Sameer] Yeah, I mean, generative AI could be the great equalizer, but could also be a big driver of greater inequality. And that remains to be seen. I’ll just add, I really like the phrase that you used Raj a little while ago about “engineered serendipity,” and when I think about both automation but also culture– one of the core topics that the center focuses on– I think thinking about more systematically engineering serendipitous interactions that both help build connections but also help build and maintain and preserve the culture. And the set of practices for that, I think, is going to be really important. So thanks to both of you. But one of the things I wanted to ask you both to reflect on is there are some firms listening into this call that might be considering moving to either fully-remote or more remote forms of work. And what would you say are some of the misconceptions and pitfalls that they should be aware of as they make this transition and any kind of key success factors that come to mind for it for you? Let me start with you, Brandon.

[00:32:04.06] [Brandon] I think 80% of this game or this transition for companies considering it starts with about two things– one, a durable rationale and management alignment. So let’s go back to the first one. Durable rationale– so what is that? Maybe we talk about what that doesn’t look like. What that probably doesn’t look like in some cases is if you have a team that, where other companies are starting to provide more flexibility, you haven’t done that yet. And you’re getting pressure. You’re getting pressure from your employees that’s showing up in your engagement surveys, your Q&A sessions, or company meetings. And you just feeling the heat from your current workforce. Now there might be something underneath that that’s a durable rationale, like staying competitive in the talent market, for example. But that pressure by itself isn’t durable, in my view. There has to be a durable business reason for making this shift because it is both, even initially, a lot of work. You have to really mean it because it’s a big change. And you have to sustain a commitment to that over time. And so it has to be deeply connected to your business strategy, what you think is best for both your customers, and the financial health of your company. So that’s thing one. And then the management alignment around that, too– I’ve seen a lot of these kind of shifts to greater flexibility fall apart, even with a fairly durable rationale, just by virtue of a lack of alignment, where certain managers don’t get on board with certain understandings or practices, and then, before you know it, you’re not running one model. You’re running multiple models.

[00:33:34.58] [Sameer] Raj, how about you? What are your thoughts.

[Raj] Well, I’ll add three quick things. So the first misconception that I fight almost every day, Sameer, in my conversations, is that hybrid needs in-person every week. And I strongly challenge that. So in an experimental study– not with Zapier, with a different company– we found that the optimal was about 25% in-person days. But you can think about 25% in many ways. It could be a day a week. It could be a week a month at a retreat, or a longer period every two months. And think a one-size-fits-all, top-down mandate is honestly, I don’t think, the best way to go. So my suggestion for larger companies is to let teams experiment and figure out what’s the right frequency and what’s the right venue for them. It doesn’t have to be the downtown office every.

And the last thing I’ll say is that, just to reiterate something Brandon said, that getting this right is just not about the technology and the home office or Zoom or whatever we use, Slack. It’s also about management practices. It’s about asynchronous reading and writing. It’s about performance being measured on the output, not the input. It’s about wellness, which we didn’t talk about, but I think it’s a huge, huge topic. So it’s about the top leadership owning, embracing, and really focusing on a new way of a new set of management practices.

[00:35:01.61] [Sameer] One thing I want to come back to is the role of technology, which you both talked about. So let me start with you, Brandon. What are some specific tools that you’ve found to be useful? We’ve seen, in the past few years, an explosion of platforms and tools that help firms manage people and people practices better. What are ones you found to be most helpful?

[00:35:22.41] [Brandon] I would say a couple of things. One, the fundamentals are fundamentals– so having a good video conferencing platform, Slack– the Slack team has told Zapier that in terms of just sheer utilization of that tool, the only company that uses Slack more than Slack is Zapier. And that’s for a reason, like for some of the reasons that Raj mentioned earlier around asynchronous communication and what have you. So that’s that.

[00:35:51.42] Now we also talked about serendipitous connection earlier, and we use a very lightweight tool called Donut to engineer that at Zapier. And what Donut does is you can set it up to randomly connect any number of folks from different teams across teams, within teams, across the whole company on whatever frequency you choose. And it has lots of delightful features around sharing things asynchronously about what people are into personally. And then you can also choose to meet live.

[00:36:20.05] And one of the ways I personally use that is for my listening tour. As the Chief People Officer of Zapier, it’s really important that I’m in conversation every week with folks across the company, hearing about people’s experiences, because our employees are my customers. And I use something like Donut to randomize those interactions. And it’s a nice form of automation that removes some friction from doing something that’s really important.

[00:36:43.80] The last thing I will say on this, before turning it over to Raj, there’s a set of tools that have nothing to do with productivity that I think are huge unlock for companies shifting into a highly-distributed staffing model. And that’s the much larger than historical range of employment partners that companies cannot work with. I mean, since when can a sub-1,000 person company staff folks in 40 countries in a financially-efficient way, in a compliant way?

[00:37:14.01] That’s a relatively new capability. The biggest companies in the world have had access to that. Some do it in-house. Some do it through a conventional partner. There are many more and newer options for much smaller companies to do this now. And so I think that’s an unsung– and a lot of this powered by technology. That’s the newer piece of the puzzle. So that’s, I think, an unsung part of the equation when it comes to companies being able to unlock this model.

[00:37:39.87] [Sameer] Perfect. Thank you. And Raj?

[00:37:45.90] [Raj] So I’ll just quickly add something that Brandon briefly mentioned. I’m also very, very interested to study and follow how LLMs could help. So I can think of many ways, but I think Brandon mentioned language translation. I’ll just say knowledge codification, knowledge search– there could be lots of ways. And Brandon’s friends at Doist have explained this beautifully.

[00:38:04.60] So I wrote a case study with Doist, which is also an all-remote company, and their view has been that the way machine learning LLMs can help is to create a little private lagoon for each employee out of the vast ocean of information out there– so predicting what information would help Sameer this week or what information would help Brandon next week. So I think there’s a huge opportunity for us to get right, relevant information, especially when we can’t [? tap ?] shoulders and ask questions.

[00:38:37.81] [Sameer] Great. Last question for me is the following, which is going back to the well-being which you mentioned, Raj, earlier. We know that there is a mental health crisis in the country and elsewhere, and I could imagine the challenges of that being even more difficult in a fully-remote world. So talk a little bit about how each of you thinks about that set of challenges, maybe starting with you, Brandon.

[00:39:01.34] [Brandon] First of all, just validate– incredibly important. When it comes to everyday workplace practices, we think a lot about norms around how do I tell my colleagues what I am and am not working? And so at Zapier, for example, we have a set of statuses within Slack, and that’s the source of truth.

[00:39:22.37] But then it’s also– then, the real cultural component is it [INAUDIBLE], and what happens when someone violates that? What happens if I’ve been, clear as day, seeing Slack, like, I’m not around, and someone’s like pinging me or making a lot of, you know, “I need this ASAP” or “I need this right now” type of thing? How does that get handled? So there’s all these “what happens when” moments that really define what the company’s culture really is, regardless of what the company wants it to be. And a lot of those aspects of culture have implications for well-being. So we pay attention a lot, not just to what the stated practice is, but we try to really understand how is it actually being lived out in the organization.

[00:39:59.00] Beyond that, there are very practical things, like letting folks use a wellness budget for any range of things, from physical therapy to therapy and everything in between, that our folks have told us they find helpful.

[00:40:12.72] [Sameer] Perfect. Raj?

[00:40:14.25] [Raj] Yeah, two thoughts– so just to extend what we discussed about folks now working in teams with team members across multiple countries– what that means is it’s multiple time zones. So, I guess, managing time zones has to be– and that’s why asynchronous work and reading and writing is extremely important.

[00:40:35.64] The other thing that I would say– and this goes back to your question, Sameer, earlier, about what are some of the misconceptions– one misconception that I’ve heard some managers who are not part of all-remote think about is all-remote means you never meet any other human being. And that’s completely incorrect. And so just to give you an example, at the US Patent Office, which was allowing work from anywhere back in 2012, the patent examiners spread out all over the country, but they were finding each other and they were meeting in golf courses and they were meeting in shopping malls. And in my work, I’ve called that informal communities of practice. So even for Zapier or other all-remote companies, there are colleagues around you. And there has to be a mechanism to help people find each other and meet occasionally, informally, to share gossip and have a beer together and talk about work.

[00:41:28.16] [Sameer] Yeah, you mentioned golf. That was also something that came up in Nick Bloom’s presentation back in January, where he talked about how the distribution of tee times across the days of the week have really shifted. It used to be primarily a weekend activity, and now people are golfing throughout the week, in part enabled by the shift to remote forms of work. So, with that, I will stop and, again, thank Brandon and Raj one more time and thank everyone for joining us today.

[00:41:55.67] [APPLAUSE]

[00:41:56.44] [Jenny] Thanks for listening to The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer. Do you have a question about work that you want us to answer? Go to haas.org/culture-kit to submit your Fix It Ticket today.

[00:42:09.20] [Sameer] The Culture Kit podcast is a production of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at the Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to hit that Subscribe button, leave us a review, and share this episode online so others who have workplace culture questions can find us too.

[00:42:29.60] [Jenny] I’m Jenny.

[00:42:30.41] [Sameer] And I’m Sameer. We’ll be back soon with more tools to help fix your work culture challenges.

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