RWL014 From Courtroom to Tech Hub: Darren Chait’s Journey to Revolutionizing Remote Work and Team Collaboration

Remote Team Collaboration and Transformation

Speaker 1

0:00

We'd catch up with the team at the end of the day and the team were just so disconnected. I tried to say, you know, yes, alex had this great idea and that customer didn't like this and that partner's really interested on that. But there was just this disconnect where they just didn't get what I was saying because everything had to come through me. So we built for ourselves a Slack plug-in that would integrate with my calendar and ping me after every meeting that was in my Google Calendar and say, hey, I saw you just met Alex. And ping me after every meeting that was in my Google Calendar and say, hey, I saw you just met Alex. What happened? And I'd reply to the Slack message saying good chat with Alex. We discussed this, we discussed that we should do this and it would share it with the rest of the team via Slack. Then, of course, we realized that work gets done in Trello in our case. So we added a Trello integration and literally overnight, our team was transformed.

Speaker 2

0:50

It was like everyone was in every meeting. Hey, it's alex here from the remote work live podcast and that was the voice of darren chate, who is the coo and co-founder of meeting notes software called hugo you can find hugo at hugoteam and he kindly agreed to join us on the remote work live podcast to share his ideas, not just on how we can collaborate in a more efficient way, but how we can maximise our teams and what it takes to really maximise your team. And, as you know, the Remote Work Life podcast is a growing community and podcast where tech and digital marketing professionals from around the world with a shared interest in remote work come to learn how to grow a remote career or business from those who know the world of a shared interest in remote work. Come to learn how to grow a remote career or business from those who know the world of remote work best. And, as I said, I'm Alex Wilson-Campbell. I'll share with you the interviews from SaaS product and service CEOs, leaders and entrepreneurs and talk to you about the benefits of remote work. And Darren fits into that category of expertise.

Speaker 2

1:41

And it was a great conversation because not only did we talk about Hugo, but we talked about his transition actually from the field of law to becoming a COO of a SaaS business and that was intriguing for me to listen to and the value that he now brings to the world from having that transition, which sounds like being in law, didn't suit him and it's much better now the way things are for him. We talk about that. We also talk about, like I said, the mission of his business, which I thought was great, and essentially it's a mission to connect the way we meet to the way we work, and that's so important as remote workers. Together with that, we talked about his book as well. I think you should look out for that and in fact, I'll put a link to the book so you can download it for free.

Speaker 2

2:30

The book's called 10x Culture, the 4-Hour Meeting Week and 25 Other Secrets from Innovative, fast-moving Teams. That's an intriguing read as well, especially if you're looking to build your team, especially if you're looking to understand things about I don't know cultivating what he calls a shared consciousness in a remote team, as well as what makes a 10x team, and these are all the ideas and thoughts that come from those at Hugo, so check out the show notes. You'll be able to download your copy of the book for free and listen out in this episode for one of the most unusual places I've heard in terms of where a remote worker would work. Darren shares with us one of the most unusual places that he has worked and it's something that you probably wouldn't expect. So listen out for that. So until then, enjoy the show.

Speaker 1

3:26

So, as you can probably hear, I've got a different accent again. I feel like everyone you have on the show is a slightly different one. But I'm originally Australian. I'm from Sydney, australia, and grew up in Sydney and actually was a corporate lawyer. That's how I started my career worked for a big law firm.

Speaker 1

3:42

Those crazy hours suited up every morning and went to go and build my time in six-minute increments to work on something that is probably so inconsequential and so insignificant, but making lots of money for other people. And one of the big frustrations there was around meetings and that was the sort of genesis of Hugo. But the more interesting, I guess, reason why I left the law and co-founded Hugo was the excitement of building something that can create value when you're not working. So the thing about lawyers, right, is you build your time. So if I'm sitting doing some work for you on the clock and I do an hour of work, you'll get a bill for an hour of time. I then head home, I head on vacation. I can't create any more value from you unless I'm sitting at my desk.

Speaker 1

4:26

But on the other hand, many businesses software especially I can wake up in the morning and have a thousand new customers, or I can hear from a customer who's in a completely different time zone, like in the UK, and they've been getting value out of something I've built while I've been on holiday or while I've been asleep and that there's something about that that really got my attention and really got me excited. So I teamed up with an old friend who I'd done some work with before. We co-founded Hugo and decided to flip up and move to the Bay area, to San Francisco, california, to build the business. But very quickly and we'll talk a lot about remote we realized that that's not the best way anymore to build a business.

Speaker 2

5:07

And why did you choose? I mean, this might be a dumb question, I don't know, but why did you choose the particular part of the world that you're in right now?

Speaker 1

5:16

Yeah, I think going back a few years already. There's obviously, you know, there's a reputation being in Silicon Valley, in the Bay Area, where a lot of innovative tech is produced, and, coming from Australia, we thought that we needed access to great talent, great investors and to be on the doorsteps of our partners and competitors. So that's why and there is a lot of great talent here in the Bay Area what we didn't realize early on was that we could also access talent in other places without being headquartered there too, and that was a real new idea for us, which sounds so ridiculous in retrospect, but we didn't know that at the time. So we founded here, started hiring here initially.

Speaker 2

5:57

Okay, so the evolution came about because of your need and your want to access talent wherever they may be in the world. Right, exactly, exactly. And so right now, you describe yourself as a, as a fully remote team. I would say right or fully remote business, or do you still hire people locally to you? Have a? You know you're fully decentralized, aren't you?

Speaker 1

6:21

uh, basically there's there's three of us here in San Francisco and the rest of the team are completely decentralized. So around the US and parts of South America as well.

Speaker 2

6:31

Mm-hmm, what would you say? I mean, for me, remote work has just liberated me and a lot of people I speak to have a similar sort of feeling, I guess, but what effect has it had on your life?

Speaker 1

6:46

Yeah, so interesting. So there's so many ways to look at it. There's the obvious right If you don't work remote, there's the bit that everyone gets, which is obviously. There's some bit of flexibility, there's easier ways to achieve balance. Perhaps there are risks too, of course, but having access to family and working, more fluid schedules and things like that, they're the obvious things. What I guess is more interesting about remote is the access to even better people, wherever they are. So if you think about when you're trying to collaborate with someone, whether you're trying to hire them, enter into a partnership deal, even sell to a customer, you have a natural funnel based on geography.

Speaker 1

7:23

If I want to hire a software engineer with these skills, normally going back a decade, san Francisco is the stopping point. How many are there in San Francisco? How many people are willing to commute to where our office is and work those hours? And all of a sudden I'm left with this pool to hire from All of a sudden. Same goes for partners, consultants, contractors, you name it.

Speaker 1

7:40

Right now, with remote, that just doesn't exist. I have the entire world's population. So that's one, having access to everyone in the world is incredible. And two, the diversity is really interesting. I really want to talk a bit about diversity today as well. But diversity is incredibly important for lots of reasons, but number one is diversity of perspective. If I hire a bunch of software engineers from San Francisco, they're all the same. They've come from the same sort of schools, in many cases similar, you know, racial, socioeconomic, gender backgrounds. That for me means it's not only boring and sad that I'm surrounded by a team like that. I'm losing very different perspectives, whereas when I hire people from all over the world, we have people from all walks of life and all different backgrounds, and the ideas they contribute, the work they do, takes that into account.

Speaker 2

8:34

It means they're contributing a completely diverse perspective, different to mine and different to my co-founder, different to everyone else on the team, and that for me is an opportunity unlocked by remote that's great and it's refreshing to hear that, and I think, yeah, diversity is something that's really important to me as well, and really something that we try to push here at Remote Work Live, so it's really great to have you talk about that too, and so your team is all over the world. Where are they based, sure?

Meeting Notes Software for Business Growth

Speaker 1

9:08

So around the US and through South America, so all the way through Brazil particularly. That's where a lot of our engineering talent comes from.

Speaker 2

9:15

Excellent, excellent, and so, like I said at the top of the show, hugo is just such a wonderful, wonderful tool. And again, another reason I wanted to have you on as well, darren, is because I think you're an unsung hero in many ways in terms of remote, and I think there are certain tools that and I think in a way we have a similar sort of outlook on tech and software that it's built to make people's lives easier. Um, it's built to uh, you know, it's one of this kind of business that, like you said, you can, it can be working for you even when you're you're you're asleep. So, I think, tell us a bit more in your own words about hugo, how it's all you know, how it's all put together and come about, sure totally so, hugo.

Speaker 1

10:06

Today we call it connected meeting notes software. What that means is centralized, searchable meeting notes and agendas built on top of your calendar so we automatically organize all your notes and agendas by the contacts and companies you meet. So next time alex and I catch up, notes from our discussion today are resurfaced and available to anyone else on my team and connected to all of your tools. So as I'm writing my meeting notes, the insights get pushed out via Slack so people who aren't in the room know we sync with your CRM. We'll create the actions as tasks, issues and tickets in your project management tools. We'll link the recording from your Zoom call right to your meeting notes. So my entire software stack and my entire team are on the same page with our meetings and, to be honest, the vision we had actually wasn't exactly like this.

Speaker 1

10:52

We knew meetings were. You know there was a big opportunity with meetings. So much has changed about the way we work Remote definitely number one. But, as we know, looking back even five, ten years, the way we worked was so different, but the way we meet hadn't changed. Yeah, we've got video now and the Skypes and Zooms and BlueJeans of the world is great, but we still need to be in the room to have that conversation. Our colleagues who aren't sitting here right now don't have the value of this conversation and we're using, you know, on average 130 different SaaS tools in an enterprise, all disconnected from the meeting.

Speaker 1

11:26

So we knew the opportunity was exciting to us, but we tried to solve it in a really different way, with a mobile first step actually, and Josh, my co-founder, and I spent a lot of our day out on the road talking to customers, talking to partners, talking to investors, running around town on video calls, and we'd catch up with the team at the end of the day, and the team were just so disconnected. And we'd catch up with the team at the end of the day, and the team were just so disconnected. I tried to say, you know, yes, alex had this great idea and that customer didn't like this and that partner's really interested on that, but there was just this disconnect where they just didn't get what I was saying because everything had to come through me. So we built for ourselves a Slack plug-in that would integrate with my calendar and ping me after every meeting that was in my Google calendar and say, hey, I saw, you just met Alex. What happened and I'd reply to the Slack message saying good chat with Alex. We discussed this, we discussed that we should do this and it would share it with the rest of the team via Slack.

Speaker 1

12:15

Then, of course, we realized that work gets done in Trello in our case. So we added a Trello integration and literally overnight our team was transformed. It was like everyone was in every meeting. I'd come back and it'd be like everyone had traveled with me the whole day. They'd heard it all, they'd already actioned the stuff I'd heard before I was even back from the meeting, before I'd even pressed end on the Zoom call. So that for us transformed our team to create this open, transparent, aligned and remote-friendly business, and our customers were more excited about what we were doing as a team than the product that we were working on. So that became Hugo, and that's the story of how we got to connect to Meeting Notes software.

Speaker 2

12:54

It's like I said, some of the best remote businesses come from. You know the idea to help people to do things, things better, to do things more efficiently. Connectivity is such a big talking point where, especially where remote work is concerned, and they're just like the, the the market is just littered with um. You know great, great software. You know there's hubspot's, a great piece of software, salesforce is a great piece of software. But when it comes to sort of really things that make life easier, um, I think hugo is is up there and hugo the. I just want to let everybody know about the url so they can go and have a look for themselves. It's hugo dot, hugo dot team team. So that's h-u-g-O dot, t-e-a-m. Have a look at it. Certainly worth considering for your team. And do you have a typical sort of customer who uses Hugo?

Speaker 1

13:55

Yeah, absolutely so. Most of our customers are SMB or mid-market companies. They're all tech savvy. They get software as a service. They're often using other tools, like you mentioned. So the Slacks and Trellos and Jira's and HubSpots and Salesforce of the world and they're very commonly B2B, because B2B companies often have meetings at its core, both internally and with your customers. So that's sort of a typical customer for us.

Building a Culture of Team Collaboration

Speaker 2

14:23

Well, literally, the people who are listening to the Remote Work Life podcast. That's sort of a typical customer for us. Well, literally the the people who are listening to the remote work life podcast. That's useful, isn't it exactly exactly excellent, excellent, and from this I mean you've built. You built a great business, you built a great team. How are things now for you, business wise, how you are you in a growth phase? What? How are things going?

Speaker 1

14:45

for.

Speaker 2

14:45

Hugo.

Speaker 1

14:46

Yeah, sure, absolutely. In a growth phase. We that's what we spend most of our days focused on growth, and growth for us means obviously new, new, new, new, new, new customers, new teams using Hugo. It means teams and companies growing so horizontally we obviously want to be powering the whole org. But it means something more important as well, which, coming to our why we're in this space, where we see ourselves very much as part of the future of work.

Speaker 1

15:12

The future of work is a buzzword that's used all the time and there's so many different aspects to it. But we see Hugo as part of the stack or the technology out there that's dictating the new way we work together. That enables remote teams, that allows people to make decisions in a decentralized way, that enables equity of voice, where everyone can join the conversation and have access to all the information they need, even if they're not often heard in a face-to-face meeting or they're not asked for their opinion in the office and going to knock on the boss's door or whatever it may be. So that for us is about growth too, the thought leadership and really asking those questions, you know, taking a long-term view on the space and the role we play there.

Speaker 2

15:58

And I think I mean you've been going since 2014, I think it is now. So you've obviously built a solid foundation in order to sort of take that growth to the next level, do you have? I mean, it's obviously evolved as well. I can actually literally see the evolution from your description earlier on in terms of starting out with Slack and then incorporating other pieces in there. What's the view? What does the future? Do you think that looks like for Hugo?

Speaker 1

16:31

Sure. So the future for Hugo at a product level. We are very interested in the changing definition of team. So Hugo is used by teams. Right Is what we've always said, and when we started we thought a team meant colleagues, coworkers. We share a domain name, we may sit in the same office, we may be in a different time zone, it doesn't matter. We work together for this company.

Speaker 1

16:53

What we've learned in 2019 and beyond is that that's not what a team is anymore. I have a team with a contractor I found on Upwork that I work with every day. I have a team with an agency that does some PR work for us. I have a team with an intern who's joined us for the summer. There are different domains, different companies, part-time, full-time, casual, whatever arrangement you want to name. So Hugo as team meeting note software needs to recognize that. So we're very focused now on how do I collaborate around meetings with people in my extended team, people that I'm working with who may not be coworkers of mine. How do I share meeting insights across between companies? In many cases, that actually could be a business and customer relationship where they're working, they're meeting regularly and they're on a team even though one's serving the other. So that's what the future of Hugo is looking like at the moment. Intercompany collaboration for this broader definition of team.

Speaker 2

18:05

And I guess the thing that is going to really the glue that sort of pulls all that together is, you know, is the culture of a company, because if you don't have the right culture, then none of that sort of collaboration, none of that, you know, that's right, um, integration is going to really work and I think that's that's I. You know, I can really feel your, having looked at your book as well, I've started to read your book 10x culture, the four hour uh meeting, week um and 25 other secrets from innovative, fast-moving teams. That's something that's come about from, obviously, your passion of not just Hugo but teams, you know in their overall, you know the overall perspective of teams. Tell us a bit more about how the book came about and why.

Speaker 1

18:33

Yeah, sure it's funny when you talk about imposter syndrome for founders. Having written the book, that's probably the greatest example for me. You know, I often think, like how can we be writing a book about team culture? And really it happened organically. We obviously were very involved in meeting culture specifically, so it's something we really care about and try and understand every day. Talking to customers, partners speaking at conferences, really being strong in that space, talking to customers, partners speaking at conferences they're really really being strong in that space.

Speaker 1

19:03

And we started keeping a bit of a running list of some of the great ideas that we had ourselves, that we picked up from customers, that partners were talking about or other authors had written about, and really quickly meeting culture just morphed into team culture, because it's just one element of it.

Speaker 1

19:15

It's much the same. So we had this running list of all these amazing principles, practices, ideas, stories and which we were using as a company ourselves to build better culture and build a stronger team, and we thought it was only fair to share that and that became the book. We wrote them all down, we told the stories and all the ideas and the thesis behind the book is that you can read, flick through, read all these great little ideas on a plane ride or on one afternoon, um, and then go back into your business and just try a few out. Um, it's not a wholesale, you know, refresh of your culture. It's why don't we try this to make decisions, and why don't we meet like that and why don't we make these small tweaks to the way we hire or the way we promote, and that together, is what's going to change your culture.

Speaker 2

20:02

And you know that book has come about from your thought leadership in this area of you know, team culture. What I don't know, because obviously you're building something successful. You build a successful team, you build a successful um team, you build a successful um platform. But along the way, have you had any sort of learnings that you've actually any mistakes that you've made that you perhaps learned from and sort of used to, to really sort of um drive forward?

Speaker 1

20:35

plenty more more yeah, more more mistakes than I, than I could name. So some interesting mistakes to share on the team side in particular. So I obviously made a big adjustment. I came from the corporate world very hierarchical, very old fashioned partner in their suit who's been there for much longer than you dictates everything, and this is, you know, young lawyers are meant to be seen and not heard, and all those sorts of things. So I definitely came at it from a different angle and a lot of that translated into some bad leadership decisions we made early on.

Speaker 1

21:14

One big mistake, for example, that can be summarized quite simply, is thinking as a leader that the obligation, the onus, is on you to make the right decisions to solve problems and then guide your team. That's not the case at all. You spend so much time and money hiring great people. There's no problem with taking problems and challenges to the team and letting the best solution or the best idea surface. So my co-founder and I put a lot of weight on ourselves in the early days to fix everything and then come to the team with the magic answer to deliver the way out of it. One that disengages the team and two we're two people. Why not go and enjoy the other tens of brains that you've paid a fortune to have in the room, and that's really changed the way we work. Today Our problem are business problems and the team love getting involved and solving them, and that again supports the diversity argument, the diversity perspective point I made before too and that that that is also I mean in reading the book and I recommend that, uh, everybody download the book.

Speaker 2

22:15

Is there a? Is there a link I can give the audience afterwards to download, so you sorry it's on amazon or you can go to hugoteam forward, slash 10x and we've got a free ebook um version on that site what I'm going to do is I'm going to leave that link in the show notes, because it's something that, whether you're whether you're um, you know, you're leading a business, leading a team, or even if you're going into remote business, this is something that there's certain books that you, you should read, um, you know.

Speaker 2

22:45

Start with why is one of them yeah I love that book, but this, this book, um, I've just started reading it, but I'm I'm really captivated in terms of um darren's thoughts and perspectives on culture, on team. He mentions in the book the heart of a 10x team. Can you talk to us about that, darren?

Speaker 1

23:08

Sure, yeah. So the concept of a 10x team obviously is the team that's going to outperform all others, and we really tried to boil it down to a few simple concepts, because there's obviously so many facets and factors that make up a great team For us. The three concepts we came up with was teams that need to be adaptable, that need to be networked and they need to be tempo-oriented. So if I just zoom into each of those briefly, please, adaptable teams. The concept of an adaptable team is a team that can change rapidly based on the challenge at hand. Now that sounds pretty obvious, right? Of course that's always what you're looking for, but really it's a very different sort of team. You need to hire people who can morph their skill set into the skills they require. You need to find people who are very comfortable with rapid change and uncertainty. In many cases, you need to find people that can change their behaviors and language based on the environment and the people they're working with. And for us, that was something we'd never expressly thought about in the early days. We didn't intentionally go out looking for adaptability, but we realized very quickly that that provides us the advantage and, especially as an early stage company, you don't know what lies ahead. We're solving problems we didn't know would be problems. Challenges we didn't know come up, and a lot of that as well comes from another great book on the list of recommendations called Team of Teams, by General Stanley McChrystal, and they look a lot at a military setting for some of the most successful teams out there, and he tells a story about Lieutenant Colonel John Boyd, who famously says, like he who can handle the quickest rate of change survives. And you know, we know that, being innovators and entrepreneurs, definitely, but that's something we think about all the time. So adaptable teams are the teams that win At the same time.

Speaker 1

25:06

Networked Now. Networked it means lots of things to lots of people. We look at it in one quick way, which is two things. Sorry, one quick way which I can split out. The first is tools that talk. So one of the temptations in 2019 is to adopt more and more tools, more pieces of software, more place where data is fragmenting all these insights wherever they are. We only now adopt tools that connect to our existing stack. We don't want to be fulfilling this data fragmentation risk. We don't want to be fueling the fragmentation of knowledge across the business. So networked teams are tooled that way and, at the same time, the way we communicate is very much a part of being a networked team. I want to talk a little bit about high bandwidth communication, especially with remote teams. Very important, but we need to communicate in a high bandwidth way as much as possible to remain networked and connected in such a tight sense. So video and these sorts of forums, rather than that quick Slack message or that WhatsApp and I'll talk about why in a moment but very important to understand that the winning teams are consistently well-networked, well-connected and communications.

Speaker 1

26:19

That bit there. And the last bit, um, which I think is really why we've been successful to date. Um comes down to tempo. So in tempo, um is very oftenly confused with speed. Speed is um, the, the time that elapses um for to to perform something and that's how. That. The speed, that's how fast you do something. The tempo is the rate at which a movement is performed. Now, the big difference sounds like a bit of a nerdy difference between the two, but what we've learned is that everyone needs to move fast to compete.

Building a Diverse and Aligned Team

Speaker 2

26:54

But the way we can differentiate ourselves on high-quality product.

Speaker 1

26:59

making the right decisions and doing things properly is by moving at a fast tempo, but not at a fast speed. So, for example, we relaunched our brand and website in a matter of days. We didn't rush through everything at all. We slowed down for all the elements of design and testing and ideation. We sped up for the build and those sorts of bits.

Speaker 1

27:21

I mean, if you go and speak to one of the best marks people in the world, the most accurate, fastest shooters out there, and you try to race them, they'll surprise you what they do. They don't just shoot fast to be accurate and quick. They pull the trigger really, really, really slowly when they're on target and then they release really quickly. So they're spending all their time getting that bullet in the middle of the target really slowly and not wasting a fraction of a second when they're recovering, when the trigger's going back out for the next shot. And a bit of a strange metaphor, I appreciate, but that's how we think about things. How do we move at the fastest tempo, but we don't just sprint consistently, because some things need to be slowed down, and that's, for us, is the third part of a really good, strong team.

Speaker 2

28:08

Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting analogy there and I think, yeah, this world of not just remote work, but because of technology, because of your competitors, because so many different things you have to be able to do all those things that um I dare mention it adapting, networking the tempo, so it really makes sense. And that's why I'm saying to you that check the book out, because if you're looking to to to build a successful team, or to build a team that can really deliver what you're looking to, to launch, then these are things that you should really consider. And it's always good to listen to somebody like Darren, who's who's been there and he's done it. So he's been there since 2014 and he's doing it now. So we also talked.

Speaker 2

28:56

Darren also talked about earlier on diversity and diversity of thought. And one thing I will say actually, I usually take these podcast interviews for 30 minutes, but I want to keep Darren a little bit longer, if he doesn't mind, because there's a few more questions that I want to ask. So I don't want to rush through this because this is really, really important. So Darren and I, we really sort of you know, in terms of diversity, something that is really important to us. It's obviously very important to Darren and his team. I want to know from you, darren, what initiatives do you have initiatives to encourage diversity in growing your team and growing your business?

Speaker 1

29:33

Yep, absolutely so. Our view on diversity is that it's something that every business needs to think about from day one, and I think it's very tempting to leave it in the worry about later pile. Or we can hire diversity, leadership and things like that. That's definitely the case, but it doesn't mean to say you can't do anything from day one. When you make your first hire, there's a very good business case for it. So when you're hiring for diversity, it's actually a lot easier to achieve these benefits, to encourage that diversity of perspective, the varied ideas in the room, the different people who are coming up with very different ideas. It's not something that you have to wait till Google to do. So specifically, there's a couple of things we do. One is the way we hire. Some of the best advice I ever got around hiring for diversity is actually not hiring for diversity, but hiring with diversity, and that was from Aubrey Blanche, who's the chief diversity officer at Atlassian, and she says what you need to do is not look for people of a different background or whatever the diverse factor is that you're talking about, but rather make sure your pipeline is diverse. Whatever you need to do to have conversations with people from different backgrounds, no one's asking you to make a hire to achieve a diversity goal, because that's not the object of diversity. Diversity is opening our minds up to consider different ideas, different backgrounds, different perspectives, and you can only do that if you're talking to people from different backgrounds, different perspectives, and you can only do that if you're talking to people from different backgrounds with different ideas and with different perspectives. So we do everything we can in the early stages of hiring to fill that pipeline with lots of different people and whatever happens after. That point is based on your normal recruiting processes, which, of course, should consider diversity. But again, no one's asking you to make a hire to tick a diversity box just to have those conversations.

Speaker 1

31:39

The second thing is your company itself needs to be set up in the right way to achieve diversity, the right tools, for example. So you know, something we often hear about some of our customers and customers of other products is you can achieve diversity by enabling communication through different forums or channels. By enabling communication through different forums or channels, so we often see people of specific backgrounds or certain backgrounds aren't heard as well in meetings because they don't speak up. Perhaps other people talk over them. They don't ask them for their opinions. So if all your decisions are made and all your discussion occurs in meetings, you're going to completely wipe out all that diversity and all those great ideas.

Speaker 1

32:19

So what about other channels? Can they Slack? Can they use Slack to chat? Can they comment on a meeting note in Hugo? Can they add to the specification for the work in your project management tool? Can they record a quick video asynchronously where they can share their ideas and what they're passionate about, which they didn't feel comfortable knocking on your door about on raising in a meeting? You need the tools to enable diversity, so that hiring approach and that tooling approach is how we've done it, hugo great, all great um ideas there, and I think particularly that perspective from last year.

Speaker 2

32:54

Now I'm going to look at that actually, because it's something that I've not, I've not come across myself. So certainly worth looking at, certainly worth considering um yourself if you're, if you're looking to, if you're just starting out, or if you're building your team, if you're a stage that Darren is at the moment and Darren is what I mean, another it's not hiring is is really. It's not an easy thing to do at all, is it? It? It's a difficult thing to do.

Speaker 1

33:17

No, that's for sure, absolutely.

Speaker 2

33:20

And one common thread that has cropped up in each conversation I've had is that when people are approaching hiring managers or leaders of business, they tend to lead with the skills that they have and they say how good they are at this, that and the other, but they fail to sort of talk about things like you know their values, you know how they can really connect with the business, the mission, etc. How do you identify, you know, how do you sort of separate those people in your process? How do you identify the people who are, I guess, values aligned in many ways?

Speaker 2

33:59

yeah so it's really difficult, really difficult.

Speaker 1

34:02

Yeah, it's much easier to assess technical skill or look at someone's work than it is, but that's actually less important, because values are something that don't change very rapidly. Skills do I can teach you things or I can help you learn things, um, so the way we do that if you go, is actually just talk about them. So right early on, that's the way we do that at Hugo is actually just talk about them. So right early on, that's the conversation we're having. We're having cultural interviews that actually centered around values. So we will raise that with you and say this is really important to us. We care a lot about diversity. Let's chat about diversity for 10 minutes. Talk to me about how you felt another organization in this context. Who's done it well, who hasn't, why? How would you solve for that? That's a value and we've had a really deep conversation about it and I can see if that's something that excites you or scares you, if that's something you add value or detract value. So I think that's one.

Speaker 1

34:49

The other thing we do heavily is we rely on great content out there. So we send a lot of our candidates and every hire books to read and why One is obviously educating them and opening their eyes up to things we care about, the values we share, but it's also letting them know what's important to us. So the type of books that we send them and the things that they read during the hiring process is a great indicator for them of what we care about, who we subscribe to and what matters, and that's another good way. It's very polarizing. We see people who come back and a little bit don't quite get why we like that book, why we shared that author. Others come back of jumping, you know, off the table so excited about uh, how, how similarly our, you know. So we view things. So that's another great way that's worked for us in making sure there's good value and culture fit.

Speaker 2

35:38

Nice. I like that and that's very similar actually to. I interviewed Eric Ryan from Method Products a few years ago and they have their own book. But they also encourage people who are potentially coming in for an interview to basically do some homework. They give them homework to do and a lot of that homework involves reading and it kind of eliminates those people in one way who either can't be bothered or at least when they get to the interview stage or the face-to-face stage, you can understand if it sort of lit them up or if it kind of really sort of Exactly.

Speaker 2

36:13

You know, really poured water on things, sort of thing.

Speaker 1

36:16

Exactly, exactly, that's it.

Speaker 2

36:18

Great ideas there and so they're in your team. Now they're there, they're active, and you talk about cultivating that shared consciousness within your team in the book. And if you want to check out the book, I think, as I said at the beginning, I'm going to leave a link to the book. The book is called 10X Culture, the 4-Hour Meeting Week and 25 Other Secrets from Innovative, fast-moving Teams, and part of Darren's book talks about cultivating a shared consciousness. Tell us more about that, darren.

Speaker 1

36:56

Yeah, that's probably one of my favorite topics actually in the book. Shared consciousness is the idea that we all know how each other thinks. It's a sign of any great team. And it's actually one of the biggest challenges of remote in my view, because one of the ways you can achieve a shared consciousness is just by sort of osmosis, by being around other people, by overhearing things, by seeing them work, and, of course, the way we work remotely is a little different to that.

Speaker 1

37:23

So what we do at Hugo is a couple of things. One is I mentioned earlier high bandwidth communication. So if you look at a spectrum of communication, one is a few words in a text message and the other is face-to-face. We now, as millennials and working in 2019 in this generation, default to low bandwidth. It's easier. I don't need the social elements to it, I can do it asynchronously. So whenever I don't have to be both be available at the same time, I can message at 3am and wait till 10am for the response, and there's lots of other reasons why we go that way. But you're missing out on a lot. There's so much in your body language, in your tone, in your voice, even just being able to react to each other and seeing each other's faces, that's lost. If all your communication's low bandwidth Now being remote and being distributed, of course that becomes a little more difficult, but not really so.

Speaker 1

38:15

We at Hugo have prioritized that by using video extensively. So we use all the tools the Zooms, bluejeans, skypes of the world, um, but not only for scheduled meetings. If I want to run something by, or I had an idea, I was in the shower this morning and thought of something really cool, I'll just ping you and say hey, um, do you have a minute? Or I'll just try to call you because I want to share what I'm passionate about and I can have a three minute conversation, like we would have at the coffee machine if we're in the same office, just via video, and that's something we just don't do.

Speaker 1

38:46

Or better still, time zones of course sometimes make it challenging. We can do that asynchronously. So at Hugo we record videos all the time, all day, every day. There's videos flying around the place where I'll wake up in the middle of the night with a really cool idea, or I want to give you feedback on your work, or I want to congratulate you for something. I'll send you a five, 10, 31 minute video where I can just talk about something, watch it in your own time, reply in your own time. But we now have this high bandwidth communication. We can be humans and that's how we can achieve a shared consciousness by getting to know each other really well, even though we may never have met.

Speaker 2

39:20

Yeah, and I think that's a good idea. I mean, I tend to do a lot of audio communication in that sense, so rather than typing something by email, I'm tending to use a quick 20 minutes or a 30, sorry, not 20 minutes. 20 seconds, 20 seconds yeah, 20 minutes is a bit long. 20 second conversation and it goes backwards and forwards. It's a lot more natural, isn't it, than just running something down.

Speaker 2

39:45

So I like that video. Maybe there's an idea in that there, an app in that somewhere? Yes, snapchat for business. Well, there you go. Exactly exactly. It's something that I a. It's a great idea and it's it's something that's needed, and I think lots of people are trying to really discover the best ways to to um, to communicate. And you know, if you, like you said, go about it in a low bandwidth way, then it becomes a bit more a, it becomes a bit more heavy lifting, a bit more hard work, doesn't it? So I'm glad you don't know what you don't know.

Speaker 1

40:24

You don't know what you're losing, right, and that's the problem. It seems fine I can read your message on WhatsApp or Slack, however we're chatting, but there's so much that's hidden in there that I just can't pick up from text, so you don't even know what you're missing a lot of the time exactly, and it's all as well part of really helping, because when you're working remotely you you can especially if you're new.

Speaker 2

40:46

Obviously there's a there's a certain aspect of feeling isolated if you're not used to it and you're just starting starting to do it, so that that video interaction, that face face interaction, can really sort of help to alleviate that.

Speaker 1

41:00

I listened to the episode where you're talking about loneliness and that for me, the video actually was the first thought I had on that topic.

Speaker 2

41:07

Oh nice, and I think it's all part as well of helping you to, because if somebody's thinking about their loneliness or their isolation, then they're not obviously giving their best at work, are they? So it's all about helping them reach their potential. And in terms of, I mean, if somebody worked with Hugo, we're getting a good idea as to how you work in your culture already. How do you help your team, your distributed team, to achieve their potential, apart from the things that we've mentioned?

Speaker 1

41:38

distributed team to achieve their potential.

Speaker 1

41:39

Apart from the, you know the things that we've mentioned, yeah, so the same way we do is if they weren't distributed one-on-ones, regular conversations, high bandwidth communication everything was spoken about we definitely one of our values and a culture we have here is directness and being very direct with feedback, congratulations as much as criticism, and being open and everyone feeling comfortable to talk really openly.

Speaker 1

42:01

And with that comes personal development, because in the end you've got an interesting opportunity, especially in a young company. We're all working very hard based on a shared vision and shared mission. These people are like another family to me, right? I see them more than I see my kids or my wife. So if I'm not able to learn from them, if they can't give me that feedback and help me develop, I'm wasting one of the biggest opportunities I've got in my career, in my professional life. So we definitely have a culture where everyone is very much not only encouraged but they do take advantage of that, where I can reach out and give someone feedback and say I thought you could have told that story better, or that was really impressive and you really motivated me, or I didn't love the way you did that, and doing that all the time, every day, with the positive intention of personal development, or that mindset means that we all come out every single one of us as better people and better professionals, taking advantage of the opportunity we have, working so closely together.

Speaker 2

43:03

No, that's great, and that is the beauty of remote teams. I think there's that intention isn't there to really help each other out. There's that intention to do your best work. There's that intention to really of really help each other to, you know, to move from the way for where you are now to the next level. So, no, that's that's, that's wonderful. It's been really great speaking to you, actually. And there's just one last question I want to ask you before we, before we wrap things up, because it's a question I ask everybody, because I mean, I work in some unusual places myself what's?

Speaker 1

43:41

the most unusual place that you've worked in. I've worked in the Norwegian fjords. We were lucky enough to travel there a few years ago. We're literally in amongst the fjords, with the cliffs overlooking us, and daylight at 4 am, I was working and was working, working with my, with the american team, um, as it was um from there, um, in one of the most incredible, beautiful places on earth, um, but I could have been anywhere. Uh, it may that that, for me, was when the penny dropped, when I realized that it actually makes no difference um, where I am to to achieve what we need to achieve. So that's a memory I definitely have, uh, as far as exotic places to have worked.

Speaker 2

44:20

Well, there you go. If you're working in your you know your cubicle, what you know, can you really say that you've achieved those sorts of memories? I don't think so. So yeah, exactly. Thanks so much, Darren, for being with us today on the Rant World Life podcast.

Speaker 1

44:38

I just want to wish you all the best with Hugo.

Speaker 2

44:40

As I said, go over and, uh, have a look at hugoteam. I think it's a tool that you should have in your in your toolkit. I think it will make things a lot easier. So have a look. And, darren, we're going to keep in touch because I want to keep up to date with how hugo is going definitely and?

Feedback on Interview Format Preference

Speaker 2

44:56

um, yeah, we'll. Uh, we'll speak to you soon, hopefully. Hey, it's Alex again, I hope you enjoyed that. Let me know what you thought and please, if you've not subscribed, please subscribe to the remote work life podcast, because we're going to have lots more interviews from some of the top uh remote sass and service uh COOs from anywhere in the world and something that you shouldn't miss out on.

Speaker 2

45:19

All the interviews won't all be this long and I think it'd be good if you could feed back to me to let me know do you prefer longer form interviews like this or do you prefer something that's a bit more compact, because what I'll also be doing is sharing little outtakes from some of the interviews that I've done with the likes of Darren, with the likes of Steli Efti, nick Francis, in the not too distant future for you, so you can just really grab the bits of the tips, the advice that you need, and do it in a way that's nice and compact for you.

Speaker 2

45:49

So let me know, please give me a rating and make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on the next episodes. And I'd also encourage you, please just to check out my website at remoteworklifeio. I'm on a mission to change, underrepresentation in tech and I want you to join me, so click through on the show notes. If you scroll down on the show notes, you'll see more information about that. Like I said, I hope you enjoyed the show. Make sure you subscribe and I'll see you next time on the Remote Work Live podcast.