RWL226 How To Create a Bonded Team Without a Physical Office

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
0:00

Hello everybody. It's Alex again from the Remote Work Life podcast. I hope you're all doing well. I have a wonderful guest with me today, somebody I've been watching for a little while, matthew Stibber. He runs Articulate Marketing and Articulate deals especially with B2B marketing for tech businesses, especially with B2B marketing for tech businesses. So they're all things websites and leads and content and I thought this would be ideal for you, because I know that you're in the world of tech, you're in the world of digital, and who better to ask than somebody who is in the world of tech and digital themselves and has built a successful and sorry, is building a successful business, and a successful remote business at that? So, matthew, I really want to thank you for for joining me today. Thanks so much.

Matthew Stibbe:
0:51

I'm delighted to be here, alex. Thank you for asking me pleasure, pleasure, pleasure.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
0:55

And you know I've got a few questions for you. We may not have time for everything because I had so many questions, but, um, I wanted to find out more about you, about your business, about how you got it all set up, and I think the question I always normally ask at the beginning is can you just talk me through your journey, how you came to be, uh, running such a, such a great business?

Matthew Stibbe:
1:19

I think that's a very um glowing introduction. I wasn't sure if you were referring to me, so okay. Well, right, I articulate marketing 20 people, remote working, specializing in B2B technology. How did I end up running that business? Well, I'll tell you a funny story. In the 90s, when I was much younger than I am now, I set up and ran a computer games company and it got to about 70-something people and I sold it in 2000. And I left the business. I left the office on the day, I signed the papers, sat in my car and went right. I am never going to employ anyone ever again and I'm never going to have an office ever again.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
2:09

Famous last words.

Matthew Stibbe:
2:10

Well, the funny thing is, I kept one of the promises and I broke the other. I have employees now. Lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely colleagues, I don't have an office and so, if you want to know how kind of the germ and the genesis of articulate it was really out of that, that moment where I didn't want to have an office and I wanted to do something. Why it could be work from home initially and, and as the company has grown in the last four or five years, work from home and let other people work shops or whatever they want to do. Um, so the reason they didn't want to have an office was it was very expensive and, um, you know, we had 10, 11, 000 square feet and we had, you know, receptionists, cleaners and air conditioning and maintenance and security people and all this stuff rates bloody rates.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
3:04

Oh yeah.

Matthew Stibbe:
3:06

Wiping checks all the time. But there's sort of a hidden cost to it as well, which is that you have to sort of hire people who can get to that office, which means suddenly you can't hire the best people, you have to hire the best people you know who live within a reasonable commute, and that was a limiting factor. So I walked out of that games business and I thought, right, I'm not going to hire people and I'm not going to have an office. And then I thought, what the hell do I do now? I hadn't had any thought about it. I had started the business when I was 18 and I had not really a moment thinking that I thought they'd carry me out of my coffin.

Matthew Stibbe:
3:42

So I sat there and I thought, well, I've solved this, I've got nothing to do. And I was active, decisively and creatively and imaginatively. I went and had lunch and then I went for a walk. I thought about it for a bit. I ended up spending the next couple of years sort of as a bit of a dilettante writer and I wrote for Wired and Popular Science and Director and I learned to fly and I started reviewing business jets for an American magazine which is, you know, nice work if you can get it.

Matthew Stibbe:
4:14

And, off the back of that, after a couple of years, started getting the occasional corporate job, including one less than with Microsoft, and Microsoft has been a client since 2003. And it started with me setting my games company and thinking it would be a luck to become a writer. So that's the genesis of the company. How did it become how it is today? Four or five years ago I broke the first promise and I hired somebody. She's my chief happiness officer now, as she is today, but when I hired her she was my pa? Um, and so her career has developed over the last seven, eight years? Um, as the company has grown.

Matthew Stibbe:
5:00

and and then I started hiring writers, and you know now here we are lots of people doing lots of clever techie writing and marketing stuff for tech companies. Does that help? Is that a good answer?

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
5:10

that's brilliant, that is great, and I think the genesis genesis, if it were, as I can't say the word genesis of it all is very similar to many other people I've interviewed. Actually, in terms of, you know, you want to give opportunity for people who aren't in the immediate vicinity. Um, you want to be able to, you know, work from home as well, work, I suppose, on your terms, for for much, for much of it and you want to provide a good service, and it seems you've been doing that since 2003 now, and has that always been remotely?

Matthew Stibbe:
5:46

Yes, the initial freelance writing and journalism was all remote. I've always worked from home since 2000. So, yeah, all remote. We don't have an office at all and everybody who works at Articulate now is remote and they're all over the place. I have a colleague in Bucharest, another in Vienna, another one who seems to flit around Canada quite a lot but spends a lot of his time in the UK, some up in Scotland, some in Wales, all over, and I think that's rather lovely and they're an amazing, amazing bunch of people. And here's here's the funny thing. We, we, as, as the business has grown and we've kind of got a little bit more, I would say, reputation, but a little bit more to offer and a little bit of a better story to tell for ourselves. It's incredibly appealing this remote working thing. I mean we get um. Last week, last round of in intern adverts we ran last intern recruitment we had 650 applications.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
6:47

Wow, and is that typical for you? Because I mean again, that's something that I get from speaking to lots of managers like yourself, lots of business owners like yourself is that when you put out an application, people, you just get inundated?

Matthew Stibbe:
7:02

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I think, because people some people doesn't suit everyone want to work in this remote way, want to have that flexibility. I think for us, it's partly that, partly also, I think, as we have grown, we've put a lot more emphasis on our company culture and I'm beginning to think that is now coming across in the way we talk about ourselves and some of the things we do. For example, we have a chief happiness officer out, you know, in a company of 20 people. That's a very deliberate investment in around motivation and engagement. And um, we we became a b corp last year, which means that we're making a commitment to our community and our stakeholders and to the environment, as well as to the bottom line.

Matthew Stibbe:
7:50

Obviously, it's the only way to care about the bottom line, but people want to belong to something that's sort of aligned with their values, something that is going to let them have some flexibility and freedom. And the next thing that we're working on we've been working on this all year is towards investors and freedom. And the next thing that we're working on we've been working on this all year is towards investors and people. So we want to become investors and people certified by the end of the financial year and what that talks to is making investment in people's careers and in their development and their personal growth. So I think that all these things interrelated, but it helps us, it helps attract people and it helps, you know, build this amazing culture and how do you do I mean 600 applications on, if that's like a whole lot of applications.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
8:36

How do you deal with so many um applications in one go?

Matthew Stibbe:
8:40

it's very hard because you, you, you want to give everyone a fair shake of the stick and you also, you know, in a small company you don't have a lot of hours. I mean, if you've got to make money and do client work and stuff, everyone's working at full capacity. So if I say, you know, here, review these 200 CVs, oh, that's going to take me a few hours Dividing up the labor. I do a lot of CVs. Oh, that's going to take me a few hours Dividing up the labor. I do a lot of CV reviews. I think perhaps I've got quite an eye for it now.

Matthew Stibbe:
9:11

In my life I've seen so many you develop some heuristics about CVs that are obviously inappropriate. I mean, a fair few of them are from we do try to recruit in the UK or EU. So US applicants or Australian applicants. If that's too far, it's too difficult. There's a few simple rules like that. But once we get to a long list and I suppose we had 35, 40 on the long list we had to hire an HR consultancy to just pre-screen them and get the list down to a manageable number for interviews. And because we interview very intensively, we give people homework and then they meet five, six people over a course of multiple interviews. That's the real time commitment for us. So we have to really be sure. But we had the most amazing candidates. I astonish.

Matthew Stibbe:
10:04

We had a woman who we hired in here, um, who'd done a ted talk, for example, wow, and she was just looking for a second, looking to explore a second career in marketing and writing, and, and, despite being having been incredibly successful in her educational career, just said well, you know, I will come and work as an intern for you and I'll learn something new, and if it works for everyone, I'll stay. Well, you know, I will come and work as an intern for you and I'll learn something new, and if it works for everyone, I'll stay. And I think that's the sort of thing that it's not just, oh, we can work with somebody in Bucharest or Birmingham or Glasgow. It's also, you know, for someone like her who has young children, who's looking for a change of career, looking for something that's a little bit more interesting and quirky, flexible. It works really well for her. We've got something to offer for her.

Matthew Stibbe:
10:48

Another example we just took on a junior consultant, our sort of word for salesperson in some ways, although it's more complicated than that. Anyway, his life, his passion is parachuting. He's a parachute instructor and he lives now in the Netherlands, although when we hired him he was in Italy. And what he does, I'm serious, it's extraordinary. He works all morning. He bases himself at an airport, sits in their cafe, works all morning and at lunchtime to relax, goes and does a couple of parachute jumps, and then he works all afternoon and then just to wind down at the end of the day he goes up and does another couple of parachute jumps.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
11:33

Well, I'll tell you what. So go ahead, Matthew. Go ahead.

Matthew Stibbe:
11:37

No, I just think that's the most extraordinary thing imaginable. But that works for him. There he is in a Dutch airfield doing his job, parachuting.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
11:47

Well, I'll tell you what. I always ask the question on my podcast what's the most unusual or exotic place that you've worked? Well, the most unusual place I've heard so far is the Norwegian fjords, but I think that what you just said, that tops it, that takes the prize. I think somebody who what you just said, that tops it, that that's um, that takes the prize.

Matthew Stibbe:
12:06

I think somebody who goes parachuting um on lunchtime another reason how we've hired um has splits her time between Guernsey and Valencia in Spain, and just you know the fact that she she just wants to spend time with her family in in these different places and doesn't want to come to London to work. But here's the thing it's not all remote, meaning we spend quite a lot of time and effort and money to bring everyone together.

Matthew Stibbe:
12:38

So, there are regular meetings in London. We probably have six, eight a year, a couple of days each. Everybody we could possibly get to come in comes in and joins us. You know we have some social events. We have a couple of days of training and discussion and planning or projects. So we try very hard to form the bonds that you get in a business and I don't think it would save us any money if we we're not doing it to save money. I think we spend everything we would spend on an office doing all this other stuff, having Liz and having the meetings and things.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
13:18

Do you think that's I mean? Because, again, that's something that a lot of remote businesses try to do. They put a lot of effort into bringing everybody together to have that face-to-face time, if you see what I mean. But is that something that you, um, you think is perhaps more important in a remote business as opposed to a co-located business?

Matthew Stibbe:
13:41

I think it's important in both kinds of business and it's one of my regrets that I didn't do it more at intelligent games Games, to be honest and spend more time as a company together rather than as teams or as management. If you run a business, you spend an awful lot of time talking to the same people team leaders, your bookkeeper, your accountant, your lawyer, this sort of stuff. You know that the, this sort of stuff and and what. What the company meetings allow us to do is to, to kind of work and meet people who aren't in our team.

Matthew Stibbe:
14:13

Yes, they contact group um and I think that's that's very, very valuable.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
14:18

It's it's sort of um sparks new ideas and it's a great way to get to know each other. And I think another thing is that, as well as that, it's working remotely. You don't have that spontaneity, do you, in terms of conversation. Obviously, working in a Colocate situation, you can, after work, you can go down to the pub or you can ask your friends, you know who's sitting next to you, what's the time or whatever it is. How else do you get to to sort of like form those bonds and get to know each other?

Matthew Stibbe:
14:53

Liz does a really good job with that.

Matthew Stibbe:
14:54

She has all kinds of little schemes, things going on. For example, we have a book club, so we read a book and then we chat about it on Skype, well, on Zoom, and we have happy half hours, so everybody. At the end of Friday afternoon people go and get a drink and whatever they want and they sit in front of their computer and they have one of these mosaic boxes of everybody talking and chatting and there's a little bit of and it's surprising, I deliberately don't join very many of them, not because I'm antisocial, but I think on a Friday afternoon they probably want to pitch and moan about it and I don't want to be like the school teacher who tries to be cool by going to these parties, you know. But, um, I go to a few of them and the people quite happily sit and chat for hours and it's really funny and so that that's a, that's a lovely thing that happens. And, um, we, we also have a company stand up every Tuesday morning, so everybody's on that call, that's it's. It's as close to mandatory as we get. So there's lots of opportunities to meet people and do things.

Matthew Stibbe:
16:01

Um, uh, both video conferencing and otherwise. But we also have slack, like a lot of companies, and that the bits of slack that work very well and not the kind of you know, businessy, messagey bits, but there's the sort of random chatter and the sort of nonsense that comes up. That's very bonding, I think. And we have a lovely thing that emerged spontaneously called the validation channel. Um, we have a validation center we had a prospect trying to sell to about three years ago. They were called the validation center and what they did was they, you know, hardware and software testing. It was a testing company. Well, we never won them as a client, but somebody in the company picked up on this name and set up a slack channel called validation. And so you know, whenever anyone does anything nice, people just say oh, you know, well done, maddie, you did this.

Matthew Stibbe:
16:51

Or well done, alex, you did that and it's really good. Or thank you for your help, and it's not me making that happen, sort of topped out, you know, employee of the month and all that stuff incredibly organic and spontaneous and and I'm enormously proud of them for it. I think that it's. It's a lovely. I mean, I think this is one of the things that I've been learning, because I'm an old fart really, but from from the, the, you know the gen x types, um, that work in the company. They're very um open with their emotions and their gratitude and their respect for people. Like you know, it's, it's rather nice I, I like that.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
17:29

So, yeah, some of the things well, I I think you mentioned a word that actually sprung to mind. Uh, you were talking just now organic. Everything seems in your business, to happen quite organically and obviously you're managing your team, but they're, for most parts, obviously self-managing by the sounds of it, and they have their own activities, and you call them a free-range team as well, don't you A free-range team? How did that come about?

Matthew Stibbe:
18:02

Is that because of I think a lot of that stuff on the About Us page. You know, they just wrote that and there's a little video on our About Us page that they made. And that was quite delightful actually, because I just said somebody wanted, we wanted a video. And I hired a film crew for a day when we were having a company meeting and a couple. I just said to a couple of people, look, just make a video. And they were in another room just making video and they would grab people and go and I had no idea, um, and they just produced that video themselves, um as a team, and um, they also and this I think is lovely they made all the music for it as well.

Matthew Stibbe:
18:43

There's quite a musical uh group in the company, lots of different instruments and writers and things, um, so that sort of thing emerges very naturally. And what that's very helpful for is is it gives me a sense of how people are. I mean, it gives me a sense of how people are. I mean it gives me a sense of how they are when they're not trying to be polite to the boss a bit, but there's quite a lot of deliberate culture quite a lot of deliberate work and that doesn't mean that one has to be skeptical or cynical about it.

Matthew Stibbe:
19:13

I mean, I think all companies have a culture to be skeptical or cynical about it. I mean I think all companies have a culture, you know, but if you don't work on it and you don't think about it and you don't try and make decisions in the right direction, you get perhaps a hostile and negative or neutral culture or you get one where people are disengaged and cynical about it. You know, I think Liz puts in an enormous amount of work just on sort of you might call it pastoral care, checking in with people. But she also does formal surveys and we have a tool called WorkBot that does employee NPS scores and that's amazing. So we have there's a sort of a numerical data-driven backbone and a very sort of soft, gentle, human front to it. We also there's some odd things that we do that are deliberate choices.

Matthew Stibbe:
20:03

But people think that we have this organic culture and sometimes people can say to me oh, you know, we're doing this new thing and it doesn't feel as organic as it used to be. And then I say, what do you mean by that? And they'll tell me something that they think was organic and natural and I'm like I was in a meeting for four hours before. We worked really hard. You think that just is natural, how it just happens to be like that. And it's not. It's bloody hard work. We agonize agonize sometimes over some of the choices and, god knows, we make terrible mistakes, change our mind and do something different. A couple of examples we have a model of measuring work. We don't use timesheets.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
20:49

Okay.

Matthew Stibbe:
20:58

We have gone through several evolutions of this, but we measure output using a points pricing, points menu, points menu thing. We ended up building an app to do this, so if you write a blog, post, you don't go.

Matthew Stibbe:
21:02

I spent three hours working for this client writing this blog post you go. You know one blog post title this this client on delivered on this date and it gets logged and there's a sort of a rate card for the work. Um, so nobody is being measured by hours, but there is an element in which they're being measured by output oh, yes, yeah and this.

Matthew Stibbe:
21:27

This has been on some levels. That's really attractive. Companies, people who've never worked in a sort of billable hours environment don't know what a terrible load of bs that is and all the politics that can come with it, and they just assume that what we do sometimes is a terrible load of bs with a lot of politics that come with it and I go, well, yeah, because it's too much work. But we we had. We had some fairly painful lessons as we sort of adopted that and kind of thinking about the culture of how we use it, not to build clients or to plan work, but how we use it to plan work force. You know how many people? Yes, yeah, how we measure people's performance and what role does it play in appraisals and and so on, and and and and kind of.

Matthew Stibbe:
22:11

There's been some misunderstandings, but so that that that's. That's an example of something where something that looks from the outside. Now, if I told you the positive, spun version of that, oh, we use points, we don't do billable hours. It's. Everyone loves their work and we can do this. We can see that, you know, and it's very good. Now it's a good, positive thing and people appreciate it, but it hasn't always been that way.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
22:36

Well, tell you what I mean from. You mentioned all those things about how your culture has evolved from you know, from the bottom up, and how you become a b corp, how you've you're attracting the right sort of people. It does take a lot of hard work behind that and I think it from when I looked at your website and I I got the inkling as well that I wanted to interview. Because of all of that, I got a sense that there was something about articulate that I I liked and I think a lot of businesses can probably take note of this, because if you look at articulate at marketingcom, there's lots of things on, there's lots of information that gives you an understanding of who they are, how they work, not just what they do. It's all about why as well why they do what they do, and I think that in itself has led to them receiving 600 plus applicants to a job and a TED applicant and people you know building a team.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
23:39

That just sounds. You've got a really cohesive team by the sounds of things. That's right. Yeah, I have to take my hat off to you and I think lots of people who may be skeptical about you know putting together remote teams. This is a great example of the hard work it takes to build a team, but the fact that it is possible and you know what the outcomes can be from all the hard work and you mentioned, martin, you mentioned some mistakes. Are there any other mistakes along the way that you? Perhaps, if you look back now, you think to yourself, actually we should perhaps have taken a different tack to doing that certain thing.

Matthew Stibbe:
24:27

No, there's an ongoing issue challenge which is around um, discussing and capturing our culture. So you know, in 90 percent of culture is what you do, what happens around it. You know how, what instincts or preferences or principles you use to make decisions. It's not what's written down in a book right, that's not culture. But there is value in writing something down in a book. There is value in trying to capture and distill it. You're on board new people and you kind of want to explain it. You want to put it on the website. It's a requirement for investors and people certified and we have been through a couple of fairly lengthy exercises in the history of the company, working on our culture and documenting it, and a couple of them have been very successful.

Matthew Stibbe:
25:25

When we were smaller, the last attempt, and there were specific, unique reasons why it didn't work so well, but it didn't work so well and it ended up being a little bit feeling a little bit unfinished, a little bit uncomfortable, not like people were cross or cynical, but I think I think there were a lot of passionate views about things and everybody wanted to put something into it and a few people wanted kind of like I want the culture to documentation, to say this kind of thing and I want it to say this kind of thing, I wanted that kind of thing and we didn't quite spend the time.

Matthew Stibbe:
26:03

We needed just to land it. And then, as I say, there are good and specific reasons why that happened. Um, but it it reminds me of the obvious point, which is, if you all of it takes work, you can't just blithely go oh well, we're going to work on thursday on our company culture and write something down. I mean, everybody has opinions and ideas and thoughts and everyone and everyone has a. In some ways it's a tribute to the fact that people are passionately invested in the future of the company. They care so much In most companies.

Matthew Stibbe:
26:34

That kind of culture workshop stuff you know, so what we've actually done is the woman who helped us with our company culture three, four ago, um, now has a full-time job doing something in hr in a very big corporation and we've done a deal with her two days of marketing advice, if we can have her for two days to run our next nice workshop next year. So we pulled her back in um and we're going to have another, another go at that to really try and dig into it, um, so that. But you know I'm looking forward to that um, but I, I, I, you can't phone it, you can't phone the stuff in. I think that's that's the observation you have to put. You have to put in the hours, let people have their, and you have to work through the pain a little bit. I think it's very easy to reduce pain by you know, for me as the boss, by exercising my. You know, I'm the boss and we're doing it like this Whenever I do that, not whenever I do it if.

Matthew Stibbe:
27:41

I do it solely for the purpose of bringing a difficult conversation to an end. That never works. You kind of have to lean into the pain a little bit.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
27:50

And about culture. I mean, there's a big topic of conversation now in the remote world, not just the remote world actually, but hiring people that actually I suppose fit or are culture fit I don't like that expression. But hiring people, that I just don't like it. But how do you know, when somebody's right At the top of the call you mentioned that, okay, not everybody is suited to remote work, that's one thing. But how then do you, from these 600 applicants you've narrowed it down to say I don't know 10. How do you know who's?

Matthew Stibbe:
28:29

going to work. You don't always know, yeah, unfortunately, um, but you don't always know works in both, in two directions it. Most people try to reduce the risk by hiring people that are more like themselves, or more like people who've been successful, or, you know, relying on apparently objective factors like education or experience.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
28:56

Yes.

Matthew Stibbe:
28:58

When those things are probably easier to test in a CV or an interview, but they aren't necessarily indicative of whether someone's going to be any good. So what do we try and do? Well, yes, you're absolutely right, we're trying very hard to read out people who are not going to be comfortable working on their own. So we do a lot of. We give them people homework for every interview. You know they have to write a blog or they have to do some sales consultancy role, they have to do some analysis on something so we can see whether they're capable of hitting a deadline, reading a brief, understanding something, giving us something back, and we try very hard to do that before. We've spoken to them very much because we're in, you know. We then look at their work. Another thing that we do it's a very small thing that actually incredibly helpful on our applicant management system. We ask yeah, send your CV, send a cover letter, whatever, whatever, whatever.

Matthew Stibbe:
29:47

We ask three questions. For example, what are you geeking out about at the moment? And if you could be doing anything at the moment, what would you be doing? And they sound a little bit cliche interview questions. But what we're interested in is given an application form for a job that you might like to do. How much thought are you going to put into what you write? Are you going to write? Oh, the third one is in 280 characters a tweet. Tell us why we should hire you. It's a bit of a sneaky test of people's ability to write. Easy said and done. Yeah, so these questions. When I'm reviewing CVs, that's what I look at first. I go to those questions and if someone just puts, leaves them blank.

Matthew Stibbe:
30:30

Oh dear, no If someone puts in something sort of vacuous. I don't like it when people mention bland TV shows, because it just doesn't show enough imagination. They're not engaged in the world enough. And if it you know love. What are you geeking out about? Love Island? What I like is someone who's actually geeking out about something like really, passionately yeah so we're looking for attributes of behavior and attitude and life skills.

Matthew Stibbe:
30:57

So we want people who are curious about the world, people who have the ability to self-motivate to learn a new thing, parachute jumping right, people who are, you know, got a bit of get up and go about them.

Matthew Stibbe:
31:08

People who've got a hit for remote working, people who have their own hinterland, their own life outside work. They're not expecting work to be all their friends and all their social life. They have friends, family, sure. So you know we're looking for that, we'd like it when we see good academics, but we don't. We don't hire on academics, but what that says to us is when people have applied themselves intelligently to something but we've hired.

Matthew Stibbe:
31:35

Well, we haven't hired yet because they won't release her from the. We wanted to hire and offered a job to a woman who works in the armed services and not an enormous academic career, went in at 18 but an amazing military career and has has had management leadership training, has had writing training for her work, very intelligent, very insightful about what she and it would. It came across very clearly in her cv and it came across in her answers and it came across in her cover letter. When the military release her, we're hiring her in a heartbeat, same with our former head teacher. Actually, she had got an academic thing, but it was in PGCE 20 years ago. That's not really a qualification for marketing, but a.

Matthew Stibbe:
32:22

TED talk hell yeah. Of course we hire that Of course we're looking for those kinds of things and you can see it very quickly in a CV. If someone's actually done something interesting and and had a bit of a life, um, then we interview a lot. I mean they, they meet a lot of people we hire them at. So one, one other thing, one other thought no, please, please wherever we can, we start people as interns.

Matthew Stibbe:
32:47

We give them three months on the job training. We put a lot into the internships but it gives everybody a chance to see whether it's right for them before we commit to a full-time permanent role and they commit to full-time remote working.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
33:02

And is your in terms of your strategy? Is it more of an in terms of your strategy? Is it more of an in terms of your hiring? That is, is it more inbound or outbound? Because I noticed when I look at your website that there is. I think when I first contacted you, I mentioned about the underrepresentation in tech, um, especially of women, and you've got your team is probably what? 70 women, 60 is it?

Matthew Stibbe:
33:32

yeah, it's it. But if women are underrepresented in tech and I think that is probably borne out by the statistics certainly I was talking to andrew about this and women going into STEM subjects is very underrepresented, I remember in my computer games company we had two women working for us, one woman programmer and a graphic designer, which was terrible. Out of that time, 30, 40 people, but it was a representation of this lack of women coming in, lack of africans, lack of, but it was.

Matthew Stibbe:
34:09

It was enough to enough for cosmopolitan article about them so really I don't know if we were the only computer games company in cosmo, but we were certainly one of them, um which, which I think is extraordinary. Even looking back on it now, it seems extraordinary that it should be so remarkable. But yes, ok, women are underrepresented in tech. True, I think men. I think there's a slightly less extreme but slight gender imbalance in marketing. In my anecdotal experience of 15 years in marketing, there was probably slightly more women than men. So I think we actually rep we, I think we reflect our gender imbalances in our industry right not.

Matthew Stibbe:
34:52

We're not doing a great job of getting women into tech. We're doing, you know, an inadequate job, perhaps getting men into marketing. I'm afraid, yeah, yeah, I don't know. I have to be careful about this, because I'm not sure it's completely true. It's only my instinct.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
35:04

Yeah, I have a similar instinct to you and um, and I don't know, I have to be careful about this because I'm not sure it's completely true. It's only my instinct. Yeah, I have a similar instinct to you and um, and I don't know it's. It's, it's something that's that's close to my heart because I've got, you know, two girls who really are passionate about both marketing well, not marketing, but tech. They kind of gravitate towards the tech things and my, my family, my family, were in in stem subjects, and so it's something that was passionate that I, I again, I'd noticed about your um, about the visuals on your website, but, um, I think you're doing a, a great job in terms of your team building, your team building your business, uh, growing as well, and just one, I suppose, one.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
35:45

Well, a couple of last questions for you in terms of um, managing, I mean again, lots of hiring, lots of managers in general, they, who, who, perhaps, in the co-located business they have, I suppose, a I don't know if it's mistrust when it comes to allowing people to, to, to work remotely, and there's still a bit of skepticism there, isn't there? What advice would you give to them in terms of, you know, again, building a team You've got 20 in your team Building a team that's, again, cohesive and is just right on the ball.

Matthew Stibbe:
36:24

Yes, I wrote an article about this a couple of years ago and I just saw it again yesterday looking through an old blog and the title was a bit provocative Managers care about absenteeism but leaders care about presenteeism and the thought that that rather glib headline sort of captures is. If you're a kind of insecure manager, you know the thing that you can control and if you're insecure you're interested in control is whether or not john or jane are sat in their desk at you know six o'clock working on your project, whether they are or not, whether it helps to have them there working later, whether it matters if they come in at 10 o'clock in the morning and go at seven o'clock, or come in at 6 am and go for or work remotely, you know.

Matthew Stibbe:
37:20

But the thing that you can control is can I see them? Are they there? And there are definitely, you know, insecure managers who want that level of control and I've come across them in my life. I've certainly heard about them. Like my wife had a manager who who, if ever she booked a day off to work from home, would book immediately like a call at nine o'clock to make sure she was sat at her desk.

Matthew Stibbe:
37:43

On some spurious pretense and and you know, would it would come up behind her in the office and it all seemed a same sort of package of insecure kind of control freak behavior. So I think I think the the answer has to be something about trust. I think the answer has to be I'm going to give up the control of hours and presence and I'm going to gain some control through relationships, through trust, through expectation setting, by providing context, by having the difficult conversations about productivity if someone's output isn't as it should be. But you know, assuming that they're going to do a good job and assuming if they're working from home, they're working right. I mean, and here's here's the flip side of that, if you, if you make force people to commute every day and in london that means you know 10 hours a week, yeah it's a lot of people.

Matthew Stibbe:
38:47

If you let them work from home, you're probably going to get most of those 10 hours for work. I mean everybody you talk to who has to commute. Now I love working from home because I get so much done, the phone doesn't rig and I don't have to bloody commute. And then they feel guilty because they've got to work. You know they're not out in the office so they work really hard. So you know my experience. You let people work from home, remote work they actually get much more out of much more productive.

Matthew Stibbe:
39:11

Um, so, trusting in that, um, one of the things that we do, I think, as I mentioned, was we measure output rather than hours, and that that's a very profound.

Matthew Stibbe:
39:20

The other thing that people find really hard to deal with we don't set deadlines so people understand sometimes, when client work has to be done by a certain date, you know there's an event or a website launch or whatever. Well, you know that. You know if you're working on a project, you know what the key dates are, if there are any. And people understand also. We have to deliver a certain amount of work for a client every month. There's a program and a schedule, but I'm not going to tell you you need to do this by friday and then you need to do the next thing by wednesday and the thing after that by friday. If I have set this up and communicated the context correctly, you know what needs to be done this week. You know what needs to be done next week. I'll leave it up to you to manage your time, your schedule, your workload, your planning to get the right work done at the right time for the client.

Matthew Stibbe:
40:06

And that, I think, is I explain try and explain this to some clients, you don't. You, I need deadlines, I want a table. You get it by the end of the month, it's all it'll come. It's like wagamama you'll get it when it's ready and everything, and it will be fresh. But that that's very. I think that's probably at the cutting edge of of remote working, right for me, getting people to accept. And it's interesting because people come into the company and they want me to set deadlines for them and I'm like I'm not doing it, you've got to figure your own stuff out, that's your workload. So actually this is, and I promise I'll shut up.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
40:43

No, this is great. I love this.

Matthew Stibbe:
40:48

That thing about setting deadlines can cause some stress for people, right Meaning if they've just got a heap of work and they don't know what to do first. So we do have to do some training, we have to talk to people, we have to communicate about how to manage your task list and how to communicate with your boss saying I'm not going to get that done because, or you saying I'm not going to get that done because, or I've got too much to do this week. I've got these five things on my to-do list and I can do any three of them. What's the most important thing for you, account manager, for me to get done first? Those are life skills and those are valuable things. None of that. Nothing is going to be solved by me telling you what your deadline is, except 50% of the time you'll miss the deadline, and then everybody will get stressed out, of course.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
41:32

Well, I'll tell you what that was the voice of Matthew, or this is the voice of Matthew Stibbeck on the Remote World Life podcast. He's the CEO of Articulate Marketing and I'd listen back to this particular marketing and I'd listen back to this if you're, if you're in management, if you're building a remote business, then this is just gold, because it's it tells you about not just the, the trust issues, the culture issues, the, everything when it comes to building a remote team building, remote business, and one that has been successful for the last well since 2003. So have a listen back to this recording, matthew. I just really want to say thank you for your time and we'll be looking out for Well since 2003. So have a listen back to this recording, matthew. I just really want to say thank you for your time and we'll be looking out for what articulate marketing is doing in the future?

Matthew Stibbe:
42:19

In fact, what's on the horizon for articulate marketing? Well, we just launched an app last week HubToolkitcom so anyone who's using HubSpot, it's a tool that makes HubSpot does SEO and social media things in HubSpot more efficiently, and we're working on the new version of our Points app, which will eventually surface in our application, turbinehqcom, which does purchase orders, expenses and time off requests.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
42:42

Wow.

Matthew Stibbe:
42:44

So besides being a marketing company, we also geek out on this other stuff, and geeking out is what people look for, too, from.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
42:48

Articulate Sounds good, and where can we find that Across at articulatemarketingcom. Or is there another domain that you want me to share with the audience?

Matthew Stibbe:
42:59

Articulatemarketingcom has a tools page and everything we do that's not Articulate is on there.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
43:04

Matthew, thank you so much for your time. It's been great talking to you and I'll be following and watching with a keen eye to see what articulate marketing is getting up to in the future. Thank you so much for your time.

Matthew Stibbe:
43:16

My pleasure. Thank you very much, Alex.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
43:18

Thank you.