RWL050 How a Sydney Lawyer Built a Remote Work Revolution with Hugo’s Co-Founder Darren Chait

Building Global Teams Through Remote Work

Alex Wilson-Campbell

0:00

Darren, great to have you today on the Remote Work Live podcast. I've got Darren Chait with me. He is a co-founder of a really interesting piece of software. You know, because I tell you why it's the kind of software that you think to yourself. Why didn't I think of that? Why did I not think of that idea? Because you know, when you're working and you're using all these different applications and, by the way, the software is called Hugo when you're using all these applications, you're using Slack, you're using Salesforce, you're using HubSpot and you've got things here, there and everywhere. You're probably writing notes with your pen, you're probably doing audio at the same time, and Hugo is something that it's like a light bulb goes in your head where you're probably writing notes with your pen. You're probably doing audio at the same time, and Hugo is something that it's like a light bulb goes in your head where you think, yeah, this can integrate all of my meeting notes in one place and it's just a great piece of software and I'm going to start using it now myself, because I have a lot of meetings. I use a lot of these applications.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

1:02

So, darren, first of all I wanted to welcome you here and thank you for joining us. Well, you know, I want you to talk about it as well, because it's something, I think, that the listeners, whether you're you know, whether you're a sole opener, whether you're you have a business, if you're looking as a manager or a CEO to kind of get your team all together in terms of the communication, I think it's something that can really cover a lot of different bases. So I think, obviously, you're the best person to tell us. Tell us all about, uh, about hugo and how it all came about. But, first and foremost, I'm interested to hear more about you, because you're, yeah, just tell, tell us about you and how it all got started.

Darren Chait

1:54

Yeah, totally so. As you can probably hear, I've got a different accent again.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

1:58

Oh yeah, I feel like everyone has a slightly different one, but uh, it's good.

Darren Chait

2:02

Australian from sydney australia um and uh I grew up in sydney and actually was a. Everyone you haven't met has a slightly different one, but I'm a resident Australian from Sydney, australia, and I grew up in Sydney and actually was a corporate lawyer. That's how I started my career. Worked for a big law firm. Those crazy hours Stood up every morning and went to go and build my time in six-minute increments, something that's 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 genesis of Hugo.

Darren Chait

2:31

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 and get a bill for an hour of time, I then head home, I head on vacation. I can't create any more value for me unless I'm sitting at my desk.

Darren Chait

2:56

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, while I've been asleep, and 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.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

3:37

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? I think?

Darren Chait

3:47

I'm going back a few years already. Um, there's obviously, you know, there's a reputation being in silicon valley, um, 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, um, and to be on the other 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.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

4:23

So we founded it here, started hiring here initially okay, so the evolution came about because of your, your you know your need and your want to access talent wherever they may be in the world. Right, 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?

Darren Chait

4:50

basically, there's three of us here in san francisco, um, and the rest of the team is decentralized, so around the us and lots of south america as well what would you say?

Alex Wilson-Campbell

5:02

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

Darren Chait

5:15

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 court schedules and things like that, they're the obvious things.

Darren Chait

5:36

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. 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 of fire from All of a sudden. Same goes for partners, consultants, contractors, you name it. 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.

Darren Chait

6:26

I really want to talk a bit about diversity um 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 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.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

7:03

It means they're contributing a completely diverse perspective, different to mine, different to my co-founder, different to everyone else on the team, and that, for me, is an opportunity unlocked by remote now, that's great and it's refreshing to hear to hear that, and I think, yeah, diversity is something that's really um, you know, 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?

Darren Chait

7:38

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

Alex Wilson-Campbell

7:45

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. It's built to you know, it's the kind of business that, like you said, it can be working for you even when you're asleep. So I think, tell us a bit more in your own words about Hugo, how it's all put together and come about.

Darren Chait

8:34

Sure, totally so, hugo. 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 Connect is all good tools.

Darren Chait

8:57

So as I'm writing my meeting notes, the insights get pushed out via Slack, so people who run in the room know we sync with your CRM. We'll create the actions, 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. 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.

Darren Chait

9:30

But, as we know, looking back at even five, 10 years, the way we worked was so different, but the way we meet hasn't changed. Yeah, we've got video now and the Skypes and Zoom. The word jeans 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.

Darren Chait

9:47

And we're using, you know, on average 130 different SaaS tools in the enterprise, all disconnected from the meeting. So we knew the opportunity was exciting to us, but we tried to solve it in a really different way, with a mobile burst path. 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 would just sort of disconnect it. I tried to say no, yes, alex had this great idea and that customer didn't like this and that partner's really interested on that. But it was just this disconnect where they just didn't get what I was saying because everything had to come from me. So we built for ourselves a slack plugin that would integrate 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? I had a reply to the slack message saying good chat with alex, and it would share it with the rest of the team.

Darren Chait

10:44

Then, of course, we realized that work gets done in Trello in our case. So we had Trello integration and literally overnight our team was transformed. It was like everyone was in a meeting. 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 for 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 mode software.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

11:23

It's like I said, some of the best remote businesses come come from. You know the idea to help people to, to do things better, to do things more efficiently. Connectivity is such a big talking point where, especially where remote work is concerned, and it's 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, the URL, so they can go and have a look for themselves. It's Hugoteam. 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?

Darren Chait

12:25

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 there's Slack and Trello and Jira and HubSpot and Salesforce of the world, and they're very commonly B2B, because B2B companies often have meetings at the store, both internally and with your customers.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

12:50

so that's sort of a typical customer for us well, literally the, the people who are listening to the remote work life podcast. So that's, that's useful, isn't it? No, excellent, excellent, excellent. And from this I mean you've built a great business, you've built a great team. How are things now for you business-wise? How you know, are you in a growth phase. How are things going for Hugo?

Darren Chait

13:16

Yeah, sure, absolutely. In a growth phase. That's what we spend most of our days focused on growth. And growth for us means obviously, obviously, new, new customers, new teams using hugo um. It means cut teams and companies growing so horizontally. We obviously want to be empowering 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.

Darren Chait

13:42

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 staff 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 that road to thought leadership and really asking those questions and taking a long-term view on the space and the role we play there and I think I mean you've been going since 2014, I think it is now.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

14:32

So you've obviously built a, a solid foundation in order to sort of take that growth to the next, uh, 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?

Darren Chait

15:01

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? This is what we've always said, and when we started we thought a team meant colleagues, co-workers. We share a domain name. We may sit in the same office, we may be at a different time zone, it doesn't matter. We work together for this company.

Darren Chait

15:23

What we've learned in 2019 and beyond is that that's not what a team is anymore. 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. They're of different domains, different companies, part-time, full-time, casual, whatever arrangement you want to name so Hugo as team meeting. Our 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 co-workers 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 Fugue is looking like at the moment intercompany collaboration for this broader definition of team.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

16:18

And I guess the thing that is going to really glue, that sort of pulls all that together, 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, integration is going to really work and I think that's 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 meeting week 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 in their overall perspective of teams. Tell us a bit more about how the book came about and why.

Darren Chait

17:03

Yeah, sure it's funny when you talk about imposter syndrome. The 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? We do it organically. Obviously, we're 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 to conferences, really being strong in that space.

Darren Chait

17:30

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 this is one element of it. It's much the same. So we had this running list of all these amazing principles, practices, ideas, stories, um, and which we were using as a company ourselves to build better culture and then build a stronger team, and we thought it was unfair to share that um, and that became the book. We wrote them all down, um, we told the stories and all the ideas, and the thesis behind the book is that you can read, click through, read all these great little ideas on a plane ride or on one afternoon and then go back into your business and just try a few out. It's not a wholesale 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?

Darren Chait

18:25

or the way we work and now, together, it's going to change your culture and you know that book has come about from your.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

18:34

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

The Secrets to Building Strong Teams

Darren Chait

19:10

So it's an interesting mistake to share on the team side in particular. So I actually made a big adjustment. I came from a corporate world, very hierarchical, very old-fashioned, and that was my lens on leadership that the partner in their suit, who's been there for much longer than you, dictates everything. And this is is you know, the young lawyers are meant to be seen and not heard, all those sorts of you know things. So, um, I definitely came at it from from a different angle and, uh, a lot of that translated into some bad leadership.

Darren Chait

19:42

Decisions were made early on. Uh, 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 we like I'm kind of right 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 paid a fortune to have in the room? And that's really changed the way we work today. You know, our problem are business problems and the team love getting involved and solving them, and that again supports the diversity argument.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

20:36

the diversity perspective point I made before too, and that is also I mean in reading the book, and I recommend that everybody download the book. Is there a link I can give?

Darren Chait

20:50

the audience afterwards to download the book. Yeah, go ahead. You can go to Amazon or you can go to Hugoteam forward slash 10x and we've got a free e-book version on that site.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

20:57

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 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 should read you know start with why is one of them? I love that book, but this book I've just started reading it, but I'm really captivated in terms of 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?

Darren Chait

21:38

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 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 yeah.

Darren Chait

22:04

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 walk 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 could 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 of the 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.

Darren Chait

23:33

At the same time, networked Now. Networked it means lots of things to lots of people. We look at it in one quick way, which is two things. 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 um, fragmenting all these insights wherever they are um. We only now adopt tools that connect to our existing staff. We're not, we don't want to be um fulfilling this data fragmentation risk. We don't want to be fueling, uh, the the fragmentation of knowledge across the business. So networked teams are taught that way and, at the same time, the way we communicate is very much a part of being a networked team.

Darren Chait

24:20

I want to talk a little bit more 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. But very important to understand that the winning teams are consistently well networked, well connected and communications that bit there. And the last bit, which I think is really why we've been successful to date, comes down to tempo. So tempo is very oftenly confused with speed. Speed is the time that elapses to perform something. That's 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 a bit of a nerdy difference between the two, but what we've learned is that everyone needs to move fast to compete.

Darren Chait

25:24

But the way we can differentiate ourselves from a high-quality product. Making the right decisions and doing things properly is by moving at a fast tempo, but not at a fast speed.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

25:34

Right.

Darren Chait

25:35

So, for example, we relaunched our brand and website in a matter of days. We didn't rush through everything.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

25:40

Yeah.

Darren Chait

25:41

We slowed down for all the elements of design and testing and ideation. We sped up for the build and those sorts of things. 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 that time getting that, getting that, 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 is going back out for the next shot.

Darren Chait

26:22

Um, and a bit of a strange metaphor, I appreciate, but um, that's how we think about things. How do we move it as fast as tempo, but we don't just sprint consistently because some things need to be slowed down. Um, and that's that's how we think about things. How do we move it as fast as tempo, but we don't just sprint consistently because some things need to be slowed down. And that's, for us, the part of a really good, strong team.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

26:38

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, like darren mentioned 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 launch, then these are things that you should really consider. And it's always good to listen to somebody like Darren, who's been there and he's done it. So he's been there since 2014 and he's doing it now. So Darren also talked about earlier on diversity and diversity of thought.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

27:29

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, important, um. So darren and I were really sort of uh, 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, what initiatives do you have initiatives to encourage diversity in, in growing your team and growing your business? Absolutely?

Darren Chait

28:04

um. 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. When we're the size of Google, we can go and invest in STEM education for females and genders, or, you know, 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. You know. I'll try to decide. The more diverse your team, the better your diversity of perspective and the better diversity of ideas you're going to have darren sorry, darren, I lost you for about 10 seconds there 10 or 15 seconds.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

29:02

The last part I heard you say was um, when you're hiring for diversity. That was the last part. Sorry about that.

Darren Chait

29:13

Okay, I know it from my side. 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 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 said 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 different backgrounds.

Darren Chait

30:10

No one's asking you to make the 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 if you only do that, if you're talking to people from different backgrounds with different ideas and with different perspectives, and if you 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 build up a 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 take a diversity box just to have those conversations. The second thing is your company itself needs to be set up in the right way to achieve diversity, the right tools, for example.

Darren Chait

30:56

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. So you know, we 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.

Darren Chait

31:28

So what about other channels? Can they Slack? Can they Slack? Can they Slack the chat? Can they comment on a meeting or an interview? 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 or raising the meeting? You need the tools to enable diversity, so that firing approach and that tooling approach is how we've done it great, all great um ideas there, and I think particularly that perspective from last year.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

32:03

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

Darren Chait

33:11

Yeah, it's much easier to assess technical skills yeah 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. So 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 are actually centred 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.

Cultivating Shared Consciousness in Remote Teams

Darren Chait

33:40

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. 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? It's obviously educating them and opening their eyes up to things. We care about the values we share.

Darren Chait

34:12

But it's also letting them know what's important for 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 care but that's why we shared that author. People who come back and a little bit don't quite get why we shared that or that. Others come back jumping, you know, off the table, so excited about, uh, how similarly our units we view things. So that's another great way that's worked for us in making sure there's good value and culture fit nice.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

34:48

I like that and that's very similar actually to um. I interviewed eric ryan from methods, uh, method products a few 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 there are, if it sort of lit them up or if it kind of really sort of you know, really poured water on things, sort of thing. You know so exactly great ideas there and they're.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

35:29

So they're in your team now they're, they're there, they're, they're, they're active and you talk about um, cultivating that, that shared consciousness within within your, within your team, in in the book and um, if you're, if you uh 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 uh, 10x culture, the four hour-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.

Darren Chait

36:06

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 speaks. It's a sign of any great team and it's actually 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. So what we do at Hugo is a couple of things. One is, I mentioned earlier, a high bandwidth communication, um. So if you look at a spectrum of communication, one is a few words in its text message and the other is face to face.

Darren Chait

36:46

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 um 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 3 am and wait till 10 am for the response, um, and there's lots of other reasons why we go that way, but you're missing out on the lot, um, 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 is low bandwidth Now being remote and being distributed, of course, that becomes a little more difficult, but not really so.

Darren Chait

37:24

We at Hugo have prioritized that by using video extensively. So we use all the tools Zooms, bluejeans, skypes of the world but not only for scheduled meetings. If I want to run something by you, 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, 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 by video, and that's something we just don't do.

Darren Chait

37:55

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. I want to give you feedback on your work, or I want to congratulate you for something. I'll send you a 5, 10, 30, one minute video, um, where I can just talk about something. Watch it in your own time. Reply in your own time. We 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 yeah, and I think that that's that's a good idea.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

38:31

I mean, I 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 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 writing something down. So I like that video. Maybe there's an idea in that there an app in that somewhere and forwards. It's a lot more natural, isn't it, than than just just writing something down. So I like that video.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

38:56

Maybe there's an idea in that, there a lap in that somewhere, but who knows? Well, there you go exactly exactly. So it's, it's, it's something that, um, I, I think it's, it's 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 bit more, a bit more heavy lifting, a bit a bit more hard work around it, doesn't it? So some great ideas, though you don't know.

Darren Chait

39:33

You don't know you're losing, right, and that's the problem. It seems fine I can read your message on whatsapp or slack, everywhere chatting, but there's so much that's hidden in there that I just can't pick up um from text, so you don't even know what you're missing all 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.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

39:55

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

Darren Chait

40:09

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

Alex Wilson-Campbell

40:16

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

Darren Chait

40:44

apart from the, you know, the things that we've mentioned yeah, um, so the same way we do is if they weren't distributed one-on-ones, regular conversations, um, high bandwidth communication everything was spoken about we definitely one of our values and the 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.

Darren Chait

41:10

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 and 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. 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.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

42:12

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 sort of really help each other to move from where you are now to the next level. So that's wonderful. Darren, it's been really great speaking to you actually. And there's just one last question I want to ask you before we, uh, 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 the most unusual place that you've worked in with the remote work?

Darren Chait

42:51

I've, uh, I've worked in the norwegian fjords. I was lucky enough to travel there a few years ago and we're literally in amongst the fjords, with the eclipse overlooking us and daylight at 4 am and working with the American team, as it was from there, in one of the most incredible, beautiful places on earth, but I could have been anywhere. That, for me, was when the penny dropped, when I realized that it actually makes no difference where I am to achieve what we need to achieve. So that's a memory I definitely have as far as exploring places to have worked.

Maximizing Efficiency With Hugo

Alex Wilson-Campbell

43:29

Well, there you go. If you're working in your cubicle, can you really say that you've achieved those sorts of memories? I don't think so. So you know. Thanks so much, Darren, for being with us today on the Right World Life podcast. I just want to wish you all the best with Hugo. Everybody, as I said, go over and have a look at hugoteam. I think it's a tool that you should have 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. And, yeah, we'll speak to you soon, hopefully. Thanks so much, Alex. Thanks for having me Excellent.