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How to Create a Remote Workforce Communication
Plan for Your Nonprofit
Nicole Jones: Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's webinar. I'm your host, Nicole Jones with TechSoup and today we're talking about how to create a remote workforce communication plan for your non-profit. And as we're getting settled in here, I see some more people arriving, why don't you go ahead and share in the chat where you're joining in from ... that's part one ... and part two is what's your superpower. I'll give you an example, and I've done this before, if you've heard this on previous webinars. It's becoming my favorite thing to start seeing who've we got in the room. I'll give you an example. So, I'm tuning in from Oakland and my superpower is resiliency. Your turn, and we'll give you just a few moments as we get some other people coming on in the room, but go ahead, share where you're coming in from and your superpower.
Cool, Adam. Communications. We've got Gray from Madison. Welcome, Lydia from Massachusetts. We've got Jennifer from El Cerrito, and Elise from Boston. Shelly from Oregon. We've got Laney from Tampa and superpower is ... Oh, it's going so fast, I can't keep up. Sometimes it's hard to scroll. Oh, superpower is consistency. That's a good one. We've got Coral, superpower creativity. Cool. Dan, superpower perseverance. Michelle, I love this one. From Texas,
superpower is strangers often tell me personal information. I'm sure sometimes it's beneficial. Other times, probably best not to know.
All right, I love these. Keep them coming in and thank you so much for being here with us today. So, let's dive in to a little bit of housekeeping. I'm sure as you've noticed, all lines are muted but you can ask questions at any time by typing them into the Q&A panel of your webinar and you can also ask questions and share comments in the audience chat. But, best if you put your questions in that Q&A panel on your platform and that helps us to make sure that we don't miss anything.
If you lose internet connection, you can reconnect using the link that was emailed to you. Lastly, you're going to get a lot of great information today. I'm super stoked for this, but if there's something you might have missed or you want to go back, fear not, because you're going to get an email with this
presentation, a PDF of it, so you can go back at your own pace, in addition to the recording and any links that are mentioned. So once again, you can go back and watch anything that you might have missed, and it's also great to share it with others.
There's lots of ways to engage with us and now I know you guys found your audience chat, and I can still see some superpowers coming in like Natalie from Vancouver says her superpower is empathy. We have someone joining,
[inaudible] from Los Angeles saying guiding people to awareness of their possibilities, and then I've got to share this last one because I love it and I do
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think of it as a superpower. Melinda from Houston is saying superpower is being introvert. Yes, introverts are an important, important part of being able to consume information, digest information so I love that you shared that as a superpower, Melinda.
All right so keep your comments flowing in the audience chat, and you can also ask questions, as I mentioned, in the Q&A section of this panel. We're also going to have a poll question, so look out for that, and we'll have a post-event survey we'll launch at the end. Please do take just a few moments to fill that out. That will help us to make sure we are improving our content in future webinar calendar. Then lastly, you can tweet at us. We're at TechSoup and you can use the hashtag, #TSWebinar.
All right. So now that we have that covered, a little bit about TechSoup. We're a global network bridging tech solutions and services for good. You may know TechSoup for a software program, but we're much more than that. We also provide support, training, community and much more to help over one million non-profits in more than 200 countries and territories. And we absolutely love being your resource partner. To help make that possible are the 100+ corporate donors and providers of software, hardware and services who have chosen TechSoup to create and grow impactful and kind donation programs. These are made available to you and you can check out all the great offerings from our partners by vising our non-profit tech marketplace at TechSoup.org/Get-Product-Donations. We'll make sure to include that link in the audience chat.
I just want to share a special resource page that we created a couple months ago when the shelter in place orders started happening and when just the ramifications of COVID-19 was really starting to hit non-profits. We created this resource page and TechSoup is committed to equipping your non-profit with tech resources to meet your mission. We wanted to put together resources from tools to support remote work, webinars like this, related blog posts, free courses and much more, and we're updating this page all the time, so it's a good one to bookmark. But yes, if you're looking for the list of things here like policy resources, we also have lots of conversations happening in our community forums. It's all here on this page and we'll make sure to share that with you, and I see Steven shared it in the audience chat.
Okay, now onto introductions. Once again, I'm Nicole Jones at TechSoup and we're joined by Steven Davidson, who you'll notice his name pop up in audience chat. He'll be assisting with links and helping to answer any technical questions or issues you're having along the way. And on today's webinar, we are joined by Adam Walker. He is CMO at TechBridge and co-founder of 48N48. I just realized I've always seen it. I don't even know if I pronounced that right, Adam, but you can correct me-
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Nicole Jones: I got it? Whew. Score, check and check. So, Adam is a husband. He's a father of six, a wearer of fedoras, as his picture shows. A startup co-founder with exit, non-profit co-founder and CMO. Also, Podcast host of Tech Talk Y'all and Real Pink. Adam, it's so great to have you back here. You are a TechSoup favorite, a TechSoup webinar favorite, and you've done so many past webinars for us, so we're delighted to have you back. Welcome.
Adam Walker: I'm really glad to be here, and I'm real excited to talk about this. This is a topic that I've been pretty passionate about for a long time, so I'll skip ahead to a couple of slides and explain why I'm passionate about it. That's me, still wearing the fedora. Always. I'm wearing a fedora right now, even though you can't see me. I want to be on brand, even audibly so you can hear me being on brand. Like Nicole mentioned, quick background. A husband, father of six. We're in the process of actually adopting our sixth child, who is an 11 year boy in China. We're really excited about that. And, a couple of podcasts that are listed there. This speaks to why I'm giving this webinar is that the first company that I found, Sideways Eight, was a digital agency. We were a remote, virtual digital agency for the entire 10 years that we existed.
So, we never really had a technical office space. We had a space we could meet at once a week and that was it, and we didn't even use it that much. Since that time, I've gone on to do a couple of other things. Most recently, I came on as CMO at TechBridge and interestingly enough, I joined TechBridge in May. I am told that we have an office. I have never seen the office. I don't know that for a fact, but I have talked to a lot of different people virtually. It's been a really great experience. That's been really fun.
And that's why I'm passionate about remote work in particular. I did also want to mention on this slide, you can take a look ... A couple of links for you ... The first is that I do have a non-profit marketing and technology newsletter that I send out once or twice a month. You can check out a link there if you want to sign up. Also, if you want to check out 48N48, the non-profit that I co-founded where we build free websites for small non-profits, you can do that there. If you want to check out the work that I'm doing in technology to alleviate systemic poverty at TechBridge, you can check that out at that link as well. I want to make sure you have access to that.
With all that said, my format for all of these things is to give a presentation, hit all the high points and then begin to answer questions so that I can really deal with the issues that you're dealing with more pertinently right now. So please, please, please make sure to ask questions in the question area. I would really love to be able to answer your specific questions as we're going along and make sure I'm the most helpful to you that I can possibly be.
With that said, let's dig into how to think about remote work because remote work is not like office work. It's very, very different. You can't track the same things. You can't communicate in the same way. You can't lead in the same ways. There are a lot of temptations to do those things. There's a lot of
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temptations to track the exact same things and to have people sitting at their desks at specific times and to try to communicate all the same ways, and to really begin to lead in that command and control same way, and the problem with that is it just doesn't work well.
So, I want to change the way we think about remote work and focus on what is important, what does work well and that way you can set up your team to be truly successful. The first thing we have to do in doing that is to reconsider our defaults. New circumstances and new situations require new approaches, but first let's consider the default in what our thinking is like. Let's reconsider these things. Reconsider how you manage. You can't and should not micromanage a remote workforce. It's tempting to try, but it's ineffective. It's frustrating for you, the person that's doing the managing. It's frustrating for the person that is being managed.
So, it will not end well if you try to micromanage a remote workforce. Don't track time meticulously. Tracking time is fine. I get it. I've done that. I've tried to be that boss that forced my team members to track every minute of every single day and the reality is that they just can't do it very well. It's just very hard to do effectively. Clocking in and clocking out, sure, if you want to go that route, that's fine but don't try to track it so meticulously that you get stressed out because the reality is that if a person is working for 45 hours and they're even doing the best job possible of tracking their time, they're still probably going to track around 35 hours. And then you're going to be looking at their hours and going, "Wait, but you're a full-time employee. Why aren't you working 40 hours?"
The reality is they are working 40 hours. You just don't realize it, so just be careful about that. Also, there's a lot of software coming out to record screens and record screen snapshots so you can see are your team members on Facebook, are they spending time on YouTube or are they wasting time on Netflix? Don't use it. It's not worth it because the payoff from that is yes, you know what your people are doing but you've now lost trust and you've lost an amount of camaraderie in that team and it's just not worth. The reality is if you have people on your team that are going to waste time, they're going to waste time in person in an office and make it look like they're not, or they're going to waste time at home.
It doesn't matter. They're going to waste time either way, but if you have people on your team that are really dedicated, that are go-getters, they're going to work even harder remotely than they were in the office. They're going to do a great job for you no matter what. So, don't try to manage their time. Let them manage their time.
Next, how you trust. Remote work requires a greater level of trust on the part of the leader. That's alluding to what we just talked about. You've got to trust your people, and you have to extend trust to them in degrees and quantities that you may not be accustomed to, but you have to be willing to do it because you have to choose to believe the best in your people and it makes your team stronger.
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The secret of remote work, the dark side of remote work is that it's incredibly tempting to believe that because you can't see someone at a desk that they are somehow doing less, and you have to resist that temptation because it's not real.
And, you have to extend trust and you have to believe the best. Next, how you judge performance. Again, a lot of times as leaders, we are often judging performance by, "Are you at your desk? Are you there on time? Are you at the meeting on time?" These are all performance indicators but they really are minor performance indicators. They really don't matter in the grand scheme of things. Instead, you've got to judge work performance based on outcomes only because nothing else really matters, and honestly nothing else is provable or trackable. So, is your team still producing the level of outcome that it was producing before you were remote? Are they producing that same level of outcome now? And if they are, that's great. You really don't have much to worry about.
If they're producing more, even better. If they're producing less, then you probably need to start thinking about what's not working and what you can do to begin to supplement and help your team. We'll talk more about some of that here in just a minute. The last thing is how you build your culture. I mentioned earlier I had a virtual company for 10 years and I never understood companies that spent so much money on offices. I would talk to business owners that were friends of mine and they'd say, "Oh well, we spend all this money on this office because it's such a great, nice place to work and we're building this culture."
I even had a friend that spent thousands of dollars to bring thousands of pounds of sand into one of his conference rooms, and make the conference room into a beach with beach chairs. Later he sold his company and had to move, and I always wonder if he had to haul all that sand back out himself. But, my point is that there's all this idea around you have to have this physical space in order to have a great company culture, and the reality is its just not true. That was never my experience. My company was remote. It had one of the best company cultures I've ever seen. We were actually acquired in August of 2019. I still regularly talk to almost everyone that was an employee of mine in 2019. We're still very close. We actually still chat on Slack on a regular basis.
We're still even involved in some of the same charities that we were involved in as a company. We had an amazing culture. You can build an amazing culture that is virtual, so please don't fall into the trap of thinking that you can't. Before we move to the next slide, we do have a little poll that I think Nicole's going to pull up for us and it's just going to ask you how you think your team is doing. Nicole, do you have that for us?
Nicole Jones: Yes, it has just launched and the question is do you think your remote workers are working more or less? And as you see the results coming in, they're coming in live. Just a little bit of a lag here.
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Adam Walker: Nichole, I don't see those results so if you can read them out for us in a moment that would be great.
Nicole Jones: You've got it. Yeah, and if you're having trouble seeing it, there is a tab. For some people, it should pop up. There should be a pop up. Otherwise, there is a tab that says surveys in your platform, but let's go ahead. We've got some responses in. So, the question again is do you think your remote workers are working more or less? We've had 40% say more, almost 20% say less and 40% saying the same.
Adam Walker: All right. Well, that leads into a great quote here. I did a little research. I found a research study and that research study found that on average, remote
employees worked 1.4 more days every month, or 16.8 more days ever year than those who worked in an office. Now clearly that may not be true for everybody. I see somebody mentioned in the audience chat, "It depends on role." It absolutely depends on the role, but I can tell you from my own personal experience where I've been in an office. I've been remote. I do tend to get a lot more ... Not only do I get more work time in remote, I actually get a lot more done remote, which is one of the things that I really love about remote. There are less distractions. There's less bouncing around in between meetings. There's just a lot of less side things that happen and I'm really able to focus, and I really love that.
Plus honestly, the lack of a commute and being able to pour that into what I'm doing is pretty fantastic. So, I can't complain. Next let's talk about levels of communication. This may be something that when you have a physical office, you really don't have to worry too much about but when you are virtual, communication becomes a lot more important and honestly a lot more
dangerous. I think a lot about communication and a few things that I've come to realize, first is that good communication actually rarely takes place. We think it takes place constantly, and really very, very good communication really is somewhat rare.
Not only that, but just because we say something doesn't mean that
communication has happened. From a text perspective, from a video call or an audio perspective, we need to recognize that. So looking at the different levels of communication, there's group versus one-on-one. Group calls are important. We're going to talk about the different types of group calls we can do in a minute, and the different types of interaction. But don't mistake a group
meeting for work being done. It's very easy to assume that because we met that work has now been accomplished and productivity has happened. I find that that is actually very rarely true. So be careful not to fall into the trap of meetings in order to feel like things are getting done.
Next are calls versus video chats. Calls are better than text, but face-to-face is always best. I think we all know that, but it's easy to fall into old habits and easy to fall into the trap of not thinking about this sort of things. And then, email and text. Text communication is the easiest to misinterpret. It's the most likely
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communication to fail. Most of the time, text and email is read a degree more negative than it's intended. There's some interesting books out there. I forget the book that I read about this but basically it was claiming that if you send an email and your email is just on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of hostility, it's a five. It's perfectly neutral. It's not hostile in any way. It gets read as though it's a six, it's just a little bit hostile.
In our text communication, we really need to be careful that we're
communication a little bit more positively than we necessarily intend so that when someone reads it a little bit more negatively, they actually read it right at the right level and we're able to communicate with them well. That's levels of communication.
Next, and this one I'm pretty passionate about. I've actually spent a lot of time thinking about meeting rhythms and implementing meeting rhythms. This is one of the best things that I did with both my digital agency, with my non-profit and now with the new non-profit that I'm at is creating steady meeting rhythms. I want to talk through each of those things, and then we'll actually have a lot of time left for questions here in just a minute so it's going to be pretty great.
One-on-one's. One-on-one's are really important. I think we all know this, that one-on-ones are important. There's a lot of different ways to do a one-on-one meeting with a person that you lead. The way that I personally have found most successful is to let the person that I'm leading lead the one-on-one and make it their meeting. It becomes their meeting and they can choose what their going to talk about. For me personally, this is how our CEO at TechBridge runs our one-on-ones which I personally love, so what I do throughout the week is I make a list of all of the things that I need to talk to her about. I'll talk to my team and I'll say, "Okay, I'll go back and I'll talk to our CEO about it," and I put that on my "Talk to the CEO" list.
The great thing about that is I know during our one-on-ones either later that week or the next week that I'll have dedicated time, I'll have her full attention and I can just run through my list of things that are important for her to know or her to give feedback on and then I don't have to bother her any other time during the week. I don't have to take away from her productivity by interrupting her workflow during another day. I don't have to bother her while she's in another meeting or anything like that, don't have to have a special phone call. I just know I've got a list, I'm going to go to my one-on-one and be able to go through that list and walk through all those things with her, which are pretty fantastic. I've found it really effective. It's a really great way to lead team member meetings.
The next are stand-ups. Stands ups started in the software industry as a thing. They're stand-ups, stand-up meetings. It's a meeting that is so short that you can stand-up the entire time. The purpose of the meeting is just a really simple quick check in. What did you do yesterday, in terms of what meaningful big thing did you do yesterday that matters? What are you going to do today?
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What's the big thing you're going to do to move the ball forward today for the organization and do you have anything blockers or anything that is blocking you, anything that's standing in your way that's going to be a problem? Stand-ups are great. I'm at TechBridge now and we have our team meeting, which I'm going to talk about in just a moment.
We have a team meeting on Mondays and it's 45 minutes and then we have a stand-up meeting on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Just check in, "How you doing?". They're 10 minutes long. Team of five is a 10 minute long meeting. Everybody knows that, and then they're done and we don't have a meeting on Friday because sometimes team members don't want to work on Friday and maybe they put in all their hours Monday through Thursday, or whatever else. Maybe they just want a little bit more freedom. I'm happy to give them that. It's a really effective to all stay on the same page and it's just been fantastic for our communication.
And then of course, the weekly team meeting. This is a longer meeting with the entire team. The goal of this meeting is to solve problems or plan for something in the future. I like to have a goal for a meeting. I like to have an agenda for a meeting, and if at all possible in any way, I like to have a pre-read for a meeting. That way we can jump to the meeting. Everybody knows what we're going to talk about. Everybody has the full context and background and full
understanding of what's going on, and now from that point forward, we can begin to have intelligent and meaningful and helpful conversation for that meeting without having to play the whole catch up in context game that you tend to play in meetings.
So, it's really, really great. My recommendation and one of the things that I'm very likely to implement in my team is that we really might start doing a one paragraph pre-read before a meeting so that everybody is already on the same page. Everybody's ready to go. We can start the meeting quickly, and I try to limit those meetings to 45 minutes because the idea that every meeting needs to be an hour is silly. In fact, I think most meetings should be 15 to 30 minutes and longer problem-solving meetings should be 45 minutes, and really pretty rarely do you need to go much beyond that. That buys back a lot of time for my team. It buys back a lot of time for me and really just gives some breathing room in my schedule so that I can catch up on email and I can catch up on communications and Slack and text, and I can get the things done that are important for me to get done.
So that's the flyover, that's the overview. That's the how we think, that's the levels of communications, that's the meeting rhythms. That's the really important stuff. I'm going to throw this slide up for how to contact me. It's got my email address also, if you have any questions or want to chat. Obviously, it has my website and now we'll take questions. And the first one I see is, "Can you expand on the pre-read?" Sure, I can expand on the pre-read. I'll jump into that. This idea actually came from Amazon, and I don't know how many people are aware and I don't know that Amazon still does it ... I think they do. But the
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Amazon practice for a big meeting is that Bezos required that a six-page memo be written in narrative form for the meeting giving all of the background information, all of the context, all of ... I mean, everything you would ever need to know about the meeting.
And the first 20 minutes of the meeting ... 20 minutes dedicated ... you walk into an Amazon meeting, you sit down. There's a brief sitting on the table. No one speaks. You read the brief, the six-page brief for 20 minutes and then you start your meeting, and that gives all the background, all the context. Now, I
personally think that maybe six pages is a little bit much for me to ask from my team but it's probably worth asking them to have a paragraph or two because what that does is it forces them to put some thought into the meeting. Because what happens in our organizations is we go, "Oh, I have a problem. Let me hold a meeting," and you book a meeting with five people but you really don't give much thought to what you're going to do in that meeting.
So the first 10 minutes of the meeting is spitball and heehawing around and trying to figure out what you're actually talking about and then you start to get into the real stuff. So, if you can circumvent that by having a pre-read where the meeting organizer has really been thoughtful in the lead up to the meeting, then everybody can start on the same page and we can get a lot more stuff done a lot more quickly.
All right, so let's start looking at the other ones. Here we go. Is that you, Nicole?
Nicole Jones: Yeah, I can lob these your way.
Adam Walker: Let's do it.
Nicole Jones: Okay, so I've seen this question pop up in multiple forms, but I'll read this one from Sharon. "What if you have to track time for grant compliance and reimbursement?" If you can't get pass the time tracking, what do you recommend?
Adam Walker: Well, so I would recommend thinking about it in broad strokes. Full disclosure, we do that. My non-profit does that. I track my own time, and that's fine. I guess what I'm getting at about time tracking is be careful that you're not saying to your team members, "Track every minute of every day. I want to know every single thing you're working on." I think you can track in categories. I think you can think about things in buckets and in terms of clocking in and clocking out, but it just becomes very cumbersome for your team members if they feel like they're being overly watched and overly managed. That's really all I mean.
Nicole Jones: Great. Let's see here. We've got a lot of great questions coming in. Keep them coming. Using the Q&A panel in your webinar is the best bet to make sure that we see it and can triage it rather than audience chat, but let's go ... I'm seeing lots of conversations around tools. Adam, could you speak to some particular
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tool software that you use to help with communications? Maybe aside from Slack-
Adam Walker: Oh my gosh, that's a whole nother ... Do we have another 40 minutes?
Nicole Jones: I know.
Adam Walker: No, no, no. That's great. A couple things, a couple things. Yeah, absolutely. The first is you mentioned it Nicole, Slack, right? Internal team communications happens on Slack. My team knows better than to email me when it's an internal team communication thing. Do not email me. I don't like email. Email gets lost. There is lots of problems with email. I want it on Slack. Not only that, but documents. My team, I've taught them do not send me a document in an email. It gets lost. It gets buried. I don't know where to find it. You've got to have a good resource, or a good repository of where your documents should be stored and there's got to be organization to them so that you know where they go.
For example, Google Drive is great, SharePoint is great. Even Dropbox and Dropbox Paper are great, but you've got to have one single source of truth you can go to with documents, so what my team does is they know if they've got to send me a document, it better be on SharePoint and they better Slack it to me because that's the only way it's going to work. Other tools and resources, let's see. For communication, I think several people asked about Trello. We use Trello. Trello is great. I love Trello. It's a great free option for organizing. Obviously, Zoom. Everybody uses Zoom, which is fantastic. I'm a big fan of Zoom. I do almost all Zoom calls. It's just the best user experience all around.
We use Asana for our team project management and communication about specific projects in particular, so that's been really great. I'll have to think if there's any other tools that we use that could be helpful but those are the big ones. CRM's are great like Active Campaign and MailChimp, things like that, but that's really more for outbound communication than it is for internal
communication.
Nicole Jones: Yeah, that's great. There is a huge list, and really yeah, it depends on your team size, on certainly budget. There are some great free ones, but of course to have more features, you often have to opt-in to a paid account. There's all kinds of things out there. I'll share with what we have at TechSoup for tools supporting remote work. It's not all the tools that are listed here, but there are some really good ones. Asana, for example. Obviously, Zoom, G-Suite. If you go to our resource page, I just added it to the chat, you can see some of those and you can see some of the really great discounts and offerings for non-profits.
Great, all right. Well, let's move along here. I just want to read a couple comments that we had come in. This one's from Victoria. She says, "I think we're communicating differently and from that, our production has moved up.
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Also, we have another staff that was not working in our communication as a team, and showing that staff is doing less." So, that's a cool little insight there.
Let's see. What else? From Marge, "We're a call center so our performance is very measurable and we have measurable positive improvements like more calls handled, less wait times, things like that." Yeah, back to the time tracking and needing to measure that. Great, so let's move on. Adam, if you see any
questions that are really standing out to you, feel free to jump in. Well, here's a good one. What do you mean by steady meeting rhythms? What is a normal week look like?
Adam Walker: A couple things on that. The first is your team needs to be able to anticipate when the meetings are and specifically if you're the leader, when they're going to have your attention. They need to actively know when that is. I would think the best teams are really going to have three meeting types that are going to happen pretty regularly. So, the one-on-one, that's you and each of your team members are going to meet at the same time of day, the same day of each week every single week, and they know they have your undivided attention for that time.
The next are the up meetings. I recommend between two and four stand-up meetings per week. Again like I mentioned before at TechBridge, we do our stand-up meetings on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Friday we don't do one, even though most of us are still working. I let them have that time to themselves. So, I think two to four stand-up meetings a week is really important for a team to all stay on the same page. And then last, one team meeting per week where you're actually solving a problem. Not an update meeting because the meetings tend to fall into these update meetings where you're in there with 10 people and the entire meeting are people giving updates that really only matter to two of the 10 people in the room.
It's really not a good use of time at all because it ends up spending a lot of people's time inefficiently. So instead, the team meetings really should be about solving some kind of problem or planning for something in the future.
Nicole Jones: Great. Thanks, Adam. Let's go to this question here from [inaudible]. The question is that we have had trust issues before shelter in place happened, so how do we clear that out of the way and move forward in this new remote setting? That's a good one.
Adam Walker: Man, that is a good one. I tend to be pretty blunt. If it were me, I would call it out and say, "Hey look, we have trust issues and we got to talk through that right now." Because honestly, that's the only way you're ever going to get past it is to call it what it is, to recognize that it's there, to identify why those trust issues exist, and to create a pathway to move out of that collaboratively so that you can work well together because the options are either you fix that problem and you fix that trust issue, or the team falls apart, or that team member goes somewhere else. Really those are your only three options. So, of those options,
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you just got to fix the trust issue. Bite the bullet and have the uncomfortable conversation, unfortunately.
Nicole Jones: Yep, get to the point. Love that. Thanks, Adam. Here's another question from Jennifer. "We use technology to help our remote team stay organized. However, we've had some older volunteers who hate technology and are unwilling to adapt to tech platforms as they prefer phone calls or email threads instead. When it comes to volunteers, how can you get them excited about using new tech?" I've seen a couple other questions about this, and just even employees who are having a hard time adapting to all the new tools that they have to use to work together in this situation.
Adam Walker: Yeah, I think there's a couple of things I would start with on that. Number one is first of all, you need to identify what the value of that volunteer or that
employee is. If this is a very high value person, that's one scenario. As terrible as it sounds to say, if this is not a high value person that's a different scenario. And then it depends on how uniform you want to be with your approach. Are you willing to make adjustments for certain team members or not? If it were me personally, and I had a team member that I really valued being on the team, whether it's just a personal value or a value to the organization, I would probably think about making some accommodations for that person.
And, I've done that many times in the past where I recognized that I
communicate this way and the reality is that I recognize that this person does not communicate well that way, and so as the leader, I'll take a step back and I'll recognize that I need to be flexible for my team and I'll communicate the way they need to communicate. That's not always easy to do, but it is important and is necessary, I think. So you got to decide what your boundaries are, how far you're willing to flex, and then flex as much as you can to help your team.
Nicole Jones: Great, thanks. This is a question I've also seen come up in multiple ways. This one is particularly from Sunrise, and Sunrise is saying, "Our employees have addressed that they miss the socialization of being in the office. What's the best way to help support employees who are feeling isolated?"
Adam Walker: I love that. That's a great question. A couple things. The first is if you don't already have Slack, get Slack and create a channel on there that is completely dedicated to something silly. At one office, we had a Slack channel where we talked about the latest TV show, The Good Place, and what happened and what we were excited about. I've had channels for memes and posting funny memes and things like that. You do have to monitor those channels just to be sure that nothing gets said that's unkind or unthoughtful ... Unthoughtful, I don't think that's a word, but you know what I mean. Thoughtless ... but nonetheless it's a fun way to engage with one another and create some community.
Obviously Zoom parties are great. I've done a lot of cocktails parties over Zoom with different groups that I'm a part of and that's been really fantastic. One of the groups ended up doing a Hamilton watch party via Zoom ... I think tonight.
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I'm going to try to drop in on that a little bit and see what's going on there, so that'll be fun. I think there are lots of innovative and fun ways to do things like that. There's a lot of live concerts happening now so you could even consider attending ... Not necessarily live concerts. I mean live virtual concerts. You might consider attending a live virtual concert together and experiencing that together and you can talk about it on Slack the next day or whatever else.
Nicole Jones: There you have it. Yes, so many ways to slice and dice it and still get together. Love those watch party ideas. Yeah, just having a party. Slack is great. And a lot of people have been asking about Slack, different ways to use it. Certainly using it as a virtual water cooler is one really popular use case in addition to of course staying up-to-date and on track with projects and collaborations. So if you would like to see how your non-profit can use it, we did do a webinar on it about a little over a month ago, and I did include it in the chat. So please check that out. You can look at the slides and you can also watch the replay from that.
Okay, moving on here. Here's a question from Mary about how do you do stand-ups and not be considered micromanaging someone?
Adam Walker: That's a great question. The stand-up is really about the team member's opportunity to report, not so much about your opportunity to manage. It really becomes more about them, so I say to my team, we hop on a stand-up at 10:00 so I say, "Okay, what's the big thing you did yesterday? What's the big thing for today? Do you have any blockers or any problems?" They get to choose
whatever they want to talk about, and maybe they don't talk about what I want them to talk about and that's fine and I can follow up later and ask questions, but it just gives me a good barometer for where they're at, what they're doing, where their head is at, what they're working on and I'm able to begin to at least give some guidance on those things without necessarily seeming like I'm micromanaging them.
Nicole Jones: There you have it. Great, and here's a question, I think it'd be great if people can chime in what they're doing in the audience chat. Michael would like to know if there are any organizations who are providing a stipend to help their workers have a good at-home set up, so things like having a second monitor, docking station, comfortable chairs, things like that. Adam, if you want to chime in on this, please do, but it'd also be great to get people to chime in in audience chat if their organization is providing a stipend to help with their at-home set up.
Adam Walker: While the audience is chiming in, I will say a couple things. Number one, I'm not aware of any organizations specifically providing a stipend for that. However, I think it's smart to make sure that your team has a good set up and that could be ... There's a couple of things that would play into the most important set up in my mind. One is good lighting, so if you're going to be doing video calls, doing video calls with somebody's super dark face in the corner of a dark room is probably not that great for anybody and lights are pretty cheap. So, good lighting is really important. Good headphones and microphone are important. There's actually a headphone and microphone produced by a company called
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MPow, M-P-O-W, on Amazon for $19.00 that does a really great job. So, a good headset is important. Second monitor is always a good idea, but honestly to me, audio and visual are going to be your best bets.
Nicole Jones: Yeah, and it sounds like ... Let's see here. Yes, several people are saying they are getting a stipend for things like office supplies, even sound machines for focus and privacy. That's great. I have my sound machine going on all the time. that's an important one. Let's see. Brittany is saying, "We don't have it in our budget. The majority of our team members are volunteers and are team is already remote, or has been remote." Let's see, what else? Oh, someone received a grant from a funder for technology and staff support so that could be [crosstalk] even writing a grant for. That's a really good idea if there isn't budget allocated for this.
And then we'll just read one more here. Allison says, "We provided a budget for each team member to purchase what they needed for at-home work for at least six months. Everyone spent between $100 and $200, which was less than the budget, and that includes phone, computer monitor. People were already at home and were fairly portable to get home in March." Got it. Cool. Yeah, and there's lots more people who are chiming in on that, so if you'd like to see what others are doing, please look at the audience chat.
I will share this transcript as well, too, because we've got some other really good sharing of different activities that people are doing to bring people together. There are some fun games. I think I saw a Jeopardy somewhere in here-
Adam Walker: Yeah, somebody mentioned Marco Polo for water cooler chat, too. A Marco Polo group, which is pretty great.
Nicole Jones: I love that. I have to say a favorite of mine recently has been scavenger hunts of find something blue, and the first person back to the screen or the first couple people back, they win. They get to share something about that object. And, also it's a humanizing factor. We're all at home. You're getting to see people's personal lives and it's really up to people's comfortability and how much they want to share and reveal, but there's also something that just allows you to just connect deeper with your volunteers, with your employees, with your
coworkers by bringing them into your space.
Again, as comfortable but like, "What's on your desk right now?", and sharing a story about that. That can be a cool way to start a meeting, or if you're just having a dedicated social hour. I have to share, too, at TechSoup our Director of Global Communities, Susan Tenby, has been doing a fabulous job of having a virtual happy hour every Thursday. People bring fun hats, or just fun costumes, and we've done home tours before or garden tours. Again, sharing something that's special to you. And, it's been really, really, really nice. There's so many different ways to go about it, and again, I'll share this chat so you guys can get inspired by what other people are saying here.
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Adam Walker: I'll also mention the headphones that I mentioned, I put a link to the Amazon headphones I was talking about in the chat just so everybody has them. I've used those ... Actually, it looks like they're a little more expensive now than they used to be but I've used those for a lot of different things.
Nicole Jones: That's awesome. Thank you. Good headset, so important. Okay, so we have some time for questions and there's so many good ones. Should we keep going at it, Adam?
Adam Walker: Yeah, let's do it.
Nicole Jones: Okay. All right, so let's see here. Let's take ... Okay, how can we encourage working smarter rather than more? I find that many members of our team are feeling burned out during increased work during COVID. Yeah, that's real.
Adam Walker: A couple of thoughts here. The first thing is that I would argue that you're going to be more productive on average with 40-45 hours a week than you are with 50-60 hours a week. I think there's certainly people that would argue the other side of that, but I think there have been studies to support my argument on that. There's got to be a work-life balance and the hard part for people that have not spent a lot of time working from home is learning how to navigate that work-life balance. Fortunately, I've been able to work from home for a long time so I learned how to do that.
Just a couple of tips there. One is have a set start time that you're choosing, not a time that your boss is choosing or you as the boss are choosing. Have your team members set their own start time. Have them set a set end time to their work no matter what because work will always, always, always, always be more than the time they have. So, I think once team members recognize that there will always be more work and they're willing to set a drop dead end time to their work, their lives improve significantly. Fortunately, I have family dinner time with my million kids so it pretty much forces me to stop work, which is great because I would keep working. I really would. My wife, she's learned, "Hey, just call me for dinner," and then I've got to stop, which is great.
I think just setting those boundaries is really, really helpful and then letting people know it's okay if you're not on email at night. It's okay if you're not on email on the weekend. With all the teams that I've ever led, I have never in any way expected them to respond to me at night or on the weekend, and I've told them that many times over. If they do, that's fine. If I happen to be there at nights or weekends, that's fine but typically I do not check email on the weekends unless there's something going on that requires it for some reason. But otherwise, everything can wait til Monday and that's okay.
I think just setting those boundaries, setting those expectations as a team really helps the teams manage a lot better.
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Nicole Jones: Love that. Thanks, Adam. Here's a question from Emily. She asked, "Who sets the agenda for your weekly team meetings focused on problem solving and planning?"
Adam Walker: I set that agenda for my team meetings but I set it with the input of the rest of my team. There will be times where maybe we don't have anything that we need to talk about from a problem solving or a future planning standpoint. I still do want to have that meeting and in those cases, I do have a generic meeting schedule that I will talk through. I just pulled that up for the sake of this
conversation. So the generic agenda is, "What are the big things that we need to accomplish this week? What are the big things that we need to accomplish this month? What are the events or initiatives that are at risk?", because how often do we not ask ourselves that question, and, "What do we need to do to be wildly successful six months from now?"
If for some reason there's not a problem that we have to work through, I always want to ask those four questions because that's going to give us a really good indication of where we're at, where we're going, where our head is at and how well we're doing.
Nicole Jones: Great. Thanks, Adam. We've also had a lot of questions about cybersecurity and some best practices there since we're working at home, and yes it is a hacker's paradise unfortunately in this situation that we're in. We covered a lot of concerns around cybersecurity in a webinar about almost two months ago so I'm just going to include the link here for work at home, so here it is. It's a YouTube video, so it's a replay of the webinar that we did. You can look back at that.
Awesome. Okay, let's see. Oh good, and someone asked for the four questions, Adam, and I see that you put the generic agenda there. That's awesome. Great. That's super helpful. Okay, so let's see. Let's move along here, and Adam if you see any questions jumping out at you, do feel free to jump on in.
Adam Walker: Yeah, well I'll speak to one thing. I think somebody mentioned that we didn't really talk too much about a plan. I think we brushed over broadly about the general plan, so if I was going to outline a communications plan, let me do that and say this. The first thing I would do is I would determine what your norms are going to be. Are you going to expect people to email and communicate on weekends and nights or not? Determine all your communication norms. Are you going to do always Zoom calls? Are you going to do phone calls? Are you going to do chats? What channels are you going to do? Determine all those norms. Step number two if you're going to create a communications plan is then determine what your meeting schedule is going to look like. Again, I mentioned mine. Mondays are the longer problem solving meetings, 45 minutes. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are stand-up meetings, check in and then throughout the week, I'll have just a one-on-one check in with each team member.
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So, set that plan up so that your team can always rely on and know that's coming and can feel comforted by that. And then, just determine really what's working and what's not. Be ready to flex. Start the plan, start the
communications, use the tools, obey the guidelines that you set yourself and then check in with your team and ask if it's working or not. I ask my team that this morning. I said, "Look, hey, are these stand-up meetings working for you?" And they're like, "Yeah, this is great. We get a quick check in. We're solving problems. It's good to see everybody's face. I love it." But just check in from time to time and make sure it's working out for them.
Nicole Jones: Yeah, things change. Things are evolving and it's good to just constantly have a pulse on, exactly, is this working? I think that's so important to check in on that, so thanks for sharing that, Adam. Okay, let's see. What about this question here. Do you have suggestions for rating performance for employees now that we're working from home? Would anything change in your mind, Adam?
Adam Walker: Yeah, you've really got to focus on outcomes and on deliverables. For example ... Well, and expectations, right? So a great example is theoretically or
hypothetically if I have a team member and I say, "Hey, do this," and it's done on time and it's way better than I expected, then that's one thing. If it's done on time and it's exactly what I expected, that's another thing, and if it's done on time and it's a little less than I expected and they didn't really put a lot of thought into it, that's something different. And if it's done late, then it's a completely different scenario. I think you have to look at it in terms of how the performance is. I've managed people remotely for years and years, and there are some people where I know if I give them A, B and C, they're going to come back with something that will just knock my socks off and be unbelievable and it's going to be a great performance, and honestly, I don't care how long it took them to do that.
If it took them an hour or it took them 10 hours, it doesn't matter to me. All I care about is that it's done, it's done on time and it's done well. I think that's how you have to shift your perception to that and be expecting that, and then you can begin to manage your expectations based around those things.
Nicole Jones: Great. Here's another question, and this actually made me think a lot about onboarding new employees or even new volunteers. It's from Jolene and she's saying that, "I work for a school and remote work is new for us due to the current world situation. Working remotely, I feel out of loop and can't figure out my role and the best way to be helpful. Do you have any suggestions?" So, maybe suggestions from someone who's new as an employee and maybe someone who is a manager in onboarding someone in this new remote world.
Adam Walker: I'll just say it's hard. It's harder to get your bearings remotely because you're not as immersed so I think to me that actually is the solve is to have the team member or have yourself be immersed as much as possible, whether that's joining meetings that they don't necessarily have anything to do with or whatever it is, just immerse themselves and give time. Give time. I talked to a
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friend recently who started at a new agency, and I said, "How's it going?" He said, "You know, it's great. They brought me in and they basically said, 'Sit here and listen and take notes and be a part of all these meetings for three months, and then we're going to start throwing you stuff to work on and we're going to figure out how to use you.'" He had the time to just digest and learn and grow and become a part and understand the culture, and then he was able to contribute.
I think you just have to give a little bit more time to people that are willing to do that. There's one other question I saw in the chat I wanted to mention real quick, which was, "Are your stand-up calls for full-time staff or full-time and part-time staff?" And my answer to that is they're with all of the staff that are essential, whether they're full-time or part-time or not. For mine personally on my calls, I've actually got full-time, I've got part-time, I've even got interns on it because the interns are doing essential and critical work. So for me, that's always been beneficial. I think it really just depends on who they are and what role they play on the team.
Nicole Jones: Great. Thanks, Adam, and I know there's lots more questions here but we will share this chat transcript, and I think this was a sign to us that we need to do more webinars like this. So, I hope you found this valuable. I know I did and just by the looks of the chat, a lot of folks did as well. Thank you so much, Adam, for sharing all those insights and your experience with remote work over the last decade.
Adam Walker: Thanks. It's been a lot of fun and like I said, I've got my email on the slides. I've got all my links on there. Reach out if I can be helpful. I'm happy to be if I can.
Nicole Jones: Right on. Thanks, Adam. Yeah, and we'll share these slides, which will include links in the post-event email so do look out for that within the next couple days, and we'll also have the recording. Real quick before you guys all go ... Oh, it looks like my link didn't pop up in here. Well, I'm going to include it in the chat, but I want to invite you to take a survey to help TechSoup better understand how we can support some of the challenges that you as non-profits are facing right now. The survey should take about 15 to 20 minutes to complete and your feedback really makes a difference, so I'm going to drop the link into the audience chat. It's right there for the survey. It's that tiny URL, so if you can please take it, that would really help us know where to invest resources so thank you.
And just another announcement here about some upcoming virtual events. On the 14th, we have a webinar on Expanding your Online Community with Web Accessibility, and then we have a TechSoup tour on the 21st about How to Access Donations, Discounts, and Services, and then on the 23rd, we have one on Better Collaboration, Bigger Impacts: How to Manage Work from Anywhere with Asana. That's a really nice tie in to the content from today's webinar.
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Okay, with that, thank you so much for attending everyone. It's great to see so many of your names here, and I'm imagining seeing your faces. Yeah, just really feeling all of your energy. So, thanks for being with us and you will get a post-event survey unrelated to the tiny URL that I just sent you but it's just about this webinar. With that, thanks again, Adam. Everyone, stay safe, take care and we'll see you next time. All right, bye-bye.
