PES_Jason Morwick: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

PES_Jason Morwick: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Jason Morwick:
There's a lot of foundational stuff that has to be, has to be published first, right? Like what is remote first even mean? We have to level-set everybody on what that definition was, could you be required to come into the office? Under what circumstances? Would you get reimbursed for certain things such as your Internet? So all these things had to be decided on, prior, really to moving forward to solving for those other big key pain points. So there's a lot of upfront work just making those initial decisions before you can get into the other longer-term solutions.

Andy Kitson:
Hi everyone. Welcome to The People Everywhere show. I'm Andy Kitson. My co-host is Nico Skievaski. In this episode we get to hear a story of transformation. We're exploring how Cactus, a 1,200-person globally-distributed technology company transformed from a heavily office-based culture pre-pandemic into a leading remote first company today. In fact, Cactus recently named them one of the 20 best companies for remote workers. Our guest is Jason Morwick. Jason is head of remote first at Cactus. In this conversation, Jason helps us get into the details of Cactus transformation. We talk about crafting policies, working with budgets, experimenting with tools, organizing retreats. This conversation is packed with useful information. We also zoom out, and Jason shares insights about leading cultural change and leading from a place of trust. And although we talk mostly about Jason's experience at Cactus, I should mention that he's also an author, most recently of a book called well, appropriately enough, Remote Leadership, and that was published just last year. And finally, before we begin, I want to note just a couple of things about Cactus to set the scene. So first, Cactus has over 1200 employees, most of those folks are based in India, but they also have offices in China, Japan, Korea, the US, the UK, and Denmark. They have multiple product lines and business units. This is a complex organization and I think that makes the story all the more interesting and inspiring. And lastly, I just want to note what Cactus does, because it's well, it's really cool. So their mission is to make scientific knowledge more accessible and useful. The company was founded in 2001, they started out by helping researchers who did not speak English as their first language, translate their work into English so that it could be published in top international journals, hence making scientific knowledge more accessible and useful. And today they've expanded to a host of other products and services that improve how research gets funded, published, communicated, and discovered. Okay, so that's enough for me, let's get to the conversation. Here is Jason.

Andy Kitson:
Jason, welcome to the show!

Jason Morwick:
Thank you for having me!

Andy Kitson:
Tell us about how Cactus decided to commit to being a remote-first company.

Jason Morwick:
Prior to the pandemic, Cactus was a very office-based, meeting-centric culture. People liked going into the office and meeting with each other, and then the pandemic hits. And of course, we are all forced to do this two-year remote work experiment. But our CEO, Abhishek Goel, six months into the pandemic, he recognized that remote work was going to be the way of the future, even post-pandemic. And he had the foresight to think about using remote work as a competitive advantage because now we would have access to talent where otherwise we were geographically restricted too. So he decided at that point, six months into the pandemic, to transition the company from this office-based culture to a remote-first company. And remote first just means that we, we kept our offices around the globe, but we make no requirement that people go into the office or even live near the office. We think of the office as another resource, just like you have other company resources. You can use it as you need to or want to, but otherwise we don't require people to come into the office. So we made this transition, prior to the pandemic, probably only about 15% of the company was working remotely at any given time. Now we see maybe less than 10% of our employees actually going into one of our company offices on any given day. So we've made a complete transition, we kind of flipped it. So now that we are remote-first, we are working well when everybody's apart.

Niko Skievaski:
And is that because of the culture around working really shifting, or did you really just hire people outside of areas where there were offices? Like what? What drove that transition mostly?

Jason Morwick:
It was actually a bit of both because now when we hire people, they're predominantly in areas that we would not have considered pre-pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, you would have seen in India at least everybody being hired in Mumbai where the company headquarters is. Nowadays, we see less than 30% of our new hires are coming from the Mumbai area, everybody else is scattered around the country or around the globe in that case. So, we have that component and then everybody else has really adapted well to living without the office. And part of that is, I think because commutes are so bad, if you're, if you've ever been to Mumbai or Bangalore or one of these Indian cities, I mean, an hour and a half commute is a daily occurrence and that's one way. So when you total that up 3 hours a day, you're going to spend on the road and some heavy traffic, you can imagine that a lot of people were glad to ditch the commute and be able to work remotely.

Andy Kitson:
So six months into the pandemic, your CEO made this decision to, we're just going to go all-in remote-first. I'm curious, why did they go looking for you for a head of remote to do that? What was the problems from their perspective that they were really looking for, for you to solve in this role?

Jason Morwick:
I think initially they were following the lead of some other software companies that had hired heads of remote such as Duis, GitLab, etc., and they saw the success that they were having. But the problem I think that they were trying to solve was that if you take a major transformational initiative and just dump it onto somebody's desk as their side job, right, they do this in addition to everything else that you're responsible for, then it just doesn't get done. You need to put someone that is fully dedicated to something like this in order to make sure it gets the attention that it deserves.

Andy Kitson:
And as you're stepping in, like, what are you looking for to figure out how you can help them make this transition?

Jason Morwick:
Well, you know, it's funny. The first 30 days when I started, I think mostly what I did was just talk to people. I had some access to a survey they had done at the beginning of the year. So I knew some of the challenges that people were having. I knew some of the employees sentiment around working from home. Now I had the opportunity to actually dive a little bit deeper. I think I did about 50 interviews with people in the first 30 days, just talking to people at all levels from the CEO, CTO, CFO, all the way down to just managers and just employees within the business units. And from there getting a real idea of what were the pain points, what things did they like, what did they see as the vision for the future, etc. And then from all of that, just trying to craft out a way forward.

Andy Kitson:
And like what were some of those themes that you were seeing emerge in those early conversations?

Jason Morwick:
I think some of the big pain points and I put them into four buckets because you're getting all this feedback and I'm trying to find the general themes of what people are saying. And number one was around communication and collaboration. They wanted to find better ways to work together while working remote, even though they have been doing it for over a year. During the pandemic, a lot of people were still stuck in the old ways of doing things, how they would do things in the office. So they were looking for different ways to do things. Another concern around maintaining culture. This came from a lot of leaders and leaders at different levels. They were afraid of things becoming too transactional. And if the relationships disappeared, if this was just a transactional environment, why would people even stay versus just go down the street for a couple of dollars more an hour? And then thirdly, boundary management, which is all about avoiding burnout, creating that separation between your work life and your personal and home life. And lastly, we had something that was very India-specific, which was around space constraints. If you have a home in India because they more likely live in congested cities, you probably have a much smaller place than say here in the US you have a lot of multigenerational living. So if you're a young family, you might have your kids at home, you might also have your parents or in-laws living with you. So it's a very, very busy home environment for some people. And it's more difficult sometimes to work from home versus here in the US where you might have a dedicated home office or something like that. So there were some space constraints that we had to try to work with as well.

Andy Kitson:
Those are all really, really big, big themes and.

Jason Morwick:
Big buckets.

Andy Kitson:
And ones that like when you look at a traditional like, or it feels like it crosses into domains that might be more kind of like HR people focused, some more Ops focused, others that are more just kind of like things say executive leadership cares about. Can you talk a little bit about just like where do you sit in the org and how do you think about, maybe like how ownership is laid out for these different constraints. What's your role in that?

Jason Morwick:
So my role directly reports into the Chief Human Resources Officer. So technically I'm within HR, but my job role spans not just people matters, but also technology. So I work a lot with the IT folks, I work a lot with the finance teams because everything kind of crosses over and we need money and budget of course to do the things we want to do. And it also crosses over into the various business units and their operational work as well.

Niko Skievaski:
How do you measure success in your role? Like what are you held accountable to?

Jason Morwick:
A lot of the projects that we run, so for example, I mentioned the four pain points that we had initially. So we launched various initiatives around each one of those and we had very specific metrics to measure the success in each one of the areas. Sometimes it's done through qualitative metrics such as surveying employees and trying to find out how do they feel about certain things. In other cases, it was more just implementing certain solutions, whether we could execute on time, on budget, etc..

Andy Kitson:
For each of those four areas. How much upfront work did you have to do to, say, align leadership around like. The direction that you want to head, do any sort of vision setting for it.

Jason Morwick:
So like I said, the first 30 days, I spent mostly just interviewing, talking to various people, identifying what their pain points were, and then after consolidating this and coming up with those general themes that we were hearing over and over again, we presented that to the senior leadership team, so the CEO and the rest of the executives to get them on board. And then we actually, once we had feedback from them and incorporated that in, we presented that to the manager group at large. So we had a couple hundred managers actually participate and actually provide their feedback as well. We did that through a series of workshops and actually gave them a voice in the process so they could actually either put out what they thought would be a potential solution or they could identify more specifically some of the pain that they were feeling. So you'd have a better sense of what we needed to do. So once we did that, then we kind of refined our approach and our project plans to doing that. So this whole process took the first couple of months from when I joined the company.

Andy Kitson:
I would love to hear a bit more about those workshops and just everything. Like how many people were in them. Were they over Zoom? Are you doing any sort of like written write-ups ahead of time? How were you gathering feedback? How much alignment was there going in? Just kind of all of that.

Jason Morwick:
Yeah, it was funny because we went through kind of the layers of the organization, so we started, like I said, with the CEO and then the top executives. Then we went a level down and talked to other senior leaders. And then when we held these workshops, I forget how many we did, I think we did about nine in total, and because we wanted to do about 30 at a time, we didn't want to do anything more than that. So we could only do a max of 20 to 30 at a time to make sure that we're getting the feedback. And then after each one, we were consolidating the information, putting it back out there to managers, and of course letting them have a chance to refine things and put more things forward after they've had a chance to process and digest the information. So once we had all that and that took about a month to get through all those workshops, to get through all the feedback, and to kind of circle back with everyone to say this is what the general findings were and this is how it's going to refine our plan going forward. We then had the basis to create our remote first policy and other subsequent policies that would impact remote working because there's a lot of foundational stuff that has to be, has to be published first, right? Like what does remote first even mean? We had to level-set everybody on what that definition was. Could you be required to come into the office? Under what circumstances? Would you get reimbursed for certain things such as your internet or items that you needed for your home office? So all these things had to be decided on, prior, really to moving forward to solving for those other big key pain points that I mentioned. So there's a lot of upfront work just making those initial decisions before you can get into the other longer-term solutions.

Andy Kitson:
And all of those decisions were kind of like coming out of these, like really this kind of cascade out of here's the pain points and refining that sounds like more into a plan going forward. And it's kind of like as you're shopping this, not just shopping it around, like going through, getting feedback, refining it and all of that. You then have your policy, but you also have people familiar with it and aligned around it and having had a chance to offer input.

Jason Morwick:
Exactly. So if you think about it, I joined the company the last week of July in 2021. I spent August learning more about the company, interviewing people. We started this socialization process with the senior execs at the beginning of September, I think the end of August, beginning of September. We held the manager workshops all the way into October. I think it was the beginning of October or so. And then early November of 2021, we officially released our policy. So by the time we released the policy, we've already done all these workshops and we also did a couple of webinars for all employees at large. So none of this was a surprise when we presented it to them of, hey, we've been talking to your managers and your leaders, and here's what we found and here's our plan. So by the time we announced the policy in November of 2021, it was really surprising how, how well it was adopted, like, there was no pushback. There was no people questioning, saying, no, this doesn't make sense, we don't want to do this. We didn't get really any pushback from employees or leaders at large because we had socialized so much of it over the previous months that by that point people felt like they had a stake in it, they had their voice heard, and now they were just ready to execute at that point.

Niko Skievaski:
And to be specific, the policy that you're putting out at that time, was that the first time that the company was saying like we are going remote first, or was that really just refining the definitions of it? Or like, what was that policy?

Jason Morwick:
I would say it was more of a refinement of the CEO's vision because I think he had mentioned it prior to me ever joining the company. But I don't know if that vision had cascaded all the way down through the company. I think a lot of senior leaders understood the vision where the company was going forward, but there were many questions in the minds of employees about what does this really mean to me? You know, is this just something that we're going to be remote, but yet I'm going to have to come into the office every now and then? What does that look like, what does that mean in the future post-pandemic? So to me, the policy was to put in black and white what this means, how to define it, what it should be going forward, and to help answer questions that we knew were going to be in the minds of employees.

Niko Skievaski:
Gotcha. Yeah. As you talk through that, I could just feel a weight lifting off my shoulders of if I'd been working remotely for, what is this, 18 months now or so probably, and not knowing kind of what that future holds, I think it's so important to have that policy clearly stating like, what does this mean for your life as an employee going forward?

Andy Kitson:
Just going to pause and say, that sounds like really cool to just ..., to just kind of hear the story and I can feel emotionally just like myself, like having been in situations like this where you're trying to manage like this communication and cascade like it's hard.

Niko Skievaski:
The other thing that I was struck by was, you described I don't know, you're four or five months into the job and you've done all this already like you've been busy. That's a lot of work and change that.

Jason Morwick:
Yeah, it is. But, you know, it's funny because I had a friend of mine who was a head of remote for another company, and he was about a month or two behind me in terms of when he joined his company, what he was doing. So we were sharing a lot of information and he confided in me. He says, you know, I've been here for three months and I felt like I haven't done anything yet. And I started laughing, I said, you know, I kind of feel the same way, too, because there's so much lead up to getting some of the foundational elements out there, getting the policy, because after the remote first policy went out, we had a reimbursement policy that also went out. We also had refinements to our travel policy. So there are all these different things that we had to put into place. And like I said, those were foundational elements that had to go into place first before we could do all these other things that we really wanted to do. But it felt like at the time, like, oh my gosh, I don't have anything tangible to show other than this policy that I've written because you spent a couple of months just socializing, communicating, getting feedback, just trying to understand the business and where people want to go. And that just consumes a lot of time and effort. And at the time when you're going through it, you think, Oh my God, I need to move faster, I constantly need to go faster and faster. When you look back, you realized, well, that is in fact a lot of effort. And companies need to spend that time and effort upfront if they want to be successful down the road.

Niko Skievaski:
Yeah, that's, that's a great perspective. Something along these lines, as I've been working more on on cultural issues that take longer in my mind than rolling out a new sales strategy or something like that. So what I've forced myself to do is every so often I'll write down what is really hard for me right now. So then a month later I can look at that and be like, oh, it's not as hard anymore. Like I've actually made progress because otherwise it can feel slow. So I really appreciate that perspective.

Jason Morwick:
I like that idea. I may start doing that.

Niko Skievaski:
Yeah. It's just been a little journaling exercise that, that's proved nice for me. One thing I'd love to ask you about is, you mentioned this remote policy as well as reimbursement and travel and things like that, there's so many companies out there trying to figure out like what's market kind of, what's the market sort of benefit on these things. Could you just share it like the high level on what those are? And I'm happy to share what we do at Redox too, and we can kind of see how the same or different they are.

Jason Morwick:
In the remote first policy, it spells out the definition of remote-first, it spells out conditions on when you might have to come into the office because even though we are remote, we're not remote only meaning that we'd like to do team building events. Or maybe there's a very critical business problem where we want people to actually come in and work together. So there are certain situations where people may be required to actually come into the office, which would require travel and accommodation and that sort of thing, so we had to spell that out in the policy. There were reimbursements per region, like if you like you said, if you wanted to buy a computer monitor, is that covered? Could you get reimbursed for that? So what could you get reimbursed for? What would you not get reimbursed for? So there were things like that as well as relocation. Like if I want to move, I know I've been located close to, say, the company headquarters, but now I want to move across the country, can I do that? Or I want to move across the globe, can I do that? So those are those types of questions that we wanted to answer and put out there. And all of that is in our remote-first policy.

Niko Skievaski:
Gotcha. And so on reimbursement, for instance, you have a list of items that are reimbursable. And is there like a like a dollar, like you can't buy a $10,000 monitor, but you can buy like a $500 monitor, ... Sort of thing or?

Jason Morwick:
We have a list, but then a total limit that says, yeah, you can buy these things, but once you hit this ceiling, you're done, that's going to be it. And we've even further refined that for our new hires. We want them to use reimbursements within their first 90 days of employment, for example, and.

Niko Skievaski:
Set yourself up.

Jason Morwick:
Yeah, that way it just doesn't drag on forever. We want people to get set up quickly and we want to kind of encourage that. And a reimbursement, a reimbursement policy is different country by country. So this is kind of a nuance, right? Because we found that in India, where most of our employees are, they didn't have the infrastructure like a lot of Western companies have. So we gave them the ability to get reimbursed for certain things versus in the US, we just baked that all into someone's compensation. So the expectation when we hire somebody in the US is that you are going to be a remote worker if you need anything that makes sure that it's covered within your compensation package, that you have enough to cover that.

Niko Skievaski:
Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. At Redox, we reimburse up to $1,000 a year, so every year. And basically what that means is every January everyone gets new headphones, but it's, it's much more of a we'll reimburse you for whatever type policy rather than specific things, mostly because we don't want the operational overhead of actually trying to validate if people are using it for the things that we need. And I think at our scale, we're just 250 people, US-based only, it's, there's a different considerations when thinking about that. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you also mentioned relocation. Do you actually, what are your policies around that?

Jason Morwick:
Our policy on relocation is that you can move anywhere in your home country, the country that you're hired from, right? So in India, if you want to move across the country, you can go ahead and do that, there's nothing barring you from do that. In the US, you can do that. It's a little bit more challenging in the US because of state tax laws and that sort of stuff. So we do have to make sure that certain things are set up before your move, but we still allow people to move in the US wherever they want to go and your compensation does not change. So in this is for the US, for India, for any other parts of world, so if you want to move, if you're living in Boulder, Colorado, and you're getting paid a certain rate and you decide, well, I'd really like to live in New York City, but New York City is a much higher cost of living. We're not going to adjust based upon that. Your salary is your salary, that's what it is. If you decide to move to a lower cost area of the country, hey, good for you. You're still going to get the same salary. So that is the only stipulation that you can move about in your home country wherever you want to go, your compensation stays the same. If you want to move outside of your country, now we're starting to see people that want to be digital nomads and that sort of thing, so we're still trying to work through that, right? Because if you're doing something for short term, it's usually okay. It's when people start staying in countries for long periods, that's when you run into visa requirements, into country tax laws and other employment laws that you have to be wary of. So that's where it gets a little bit more complicated, and we're trying to work through some of those issues.

Niko Skievaski:
I love these tactical things because like this is the stuff people are, I feel like people are actively trying to figure out. I just have one more that I wanted to dive in on, especially being a worldwide company. How do you deal with synchronous meetings and time zones? You know, I can imagine you just being up at all hours of the night. Is there any policy around that or is it just kind of like deal with it?

Jason Morwick:
It's funny that you mentioned that because we are trying right now to move the company to a more asynchronous way of working, right? We'll never be 100% asynchronous, but we don't want to be so meeting centric. I think at the beginning of the pandemic, many people complained that the number of meetings increased exponentially, and that's because as people went remote, they didn't know how to really work with each other virtually. So the fallback became, well, I just call a meeting, you know, I just pick up the phone, I'll call somebody, jump on the call. And over time, what people found is that they were spending all day long in Zoom or Teams meetings and they weren't really getting any work done. So we had to figure out a way to try to reduce that in. Our rule of thumb is that you shouldn't be in meetings more than 50% of your time, right? You should be able to do deep work, as they say, or focus work for that other half of the time. Now we do have teams that span US, Denmark in India and sometimes other parts of Asia. So it becomes really hard, if not impossible, to hold a synchronous meeting where at least one team member is not going to be put outside their normal working hours. So we're trying to work around that. Like, say, for example, do you really need to, hold that meeting? Can you do it completely asynchronously or could you do the meeting and report it so that one team member can listen to a recording during their work hours versus having to jump on a call late at night? Say, for example. So we're working through those issues. For myself, if I look at my team, my boss is in Mumbai and I'm on the East Coast, United States, that's nine and one half hours difference. So that is quite a difference, right? So what I do is I get up early and I get up early anyways and people always ask, Oh my gosh, you're getting up at 5 a.m. I get up at 5 a.m. before I work for Cactus, so it's no different to me. Now that I don't have a commute, I can actually get on a call at about 6 a.m. my time, which is mid-afternoon over in India, so there's a couple hours of overlap. If I really want to talk to somebody and really want to do a synchronous meeting with someone in India, I can do that, I have a few hours in the morning. Otherwise I just work asynchronously the rest of the day, do my work, send it to them. By the time I get up in the morning, the following day, I have responses and we just cycle through that way.

Niko Skievaski:
Nice. I, I'm interested in this, you mentioned some of the challenges earlier around holding on to culture and relationships and not being so transactional. How do you think about the balance of that compared to moving more work asynchronously? Like what are, I feel like that's a delicate balance that you need to strike. What are your thoughts on that?

Jason Morwick:
And that's why we say we're never going to be 100% asynchronous, right? We, we want to have a culture where people interact with one another, that people just don't feel that someone else has a name on an email thread, right? They're a living, breathing human being that they actually know a little bit about, other than just the fact that they can do this specific job. So we spend a lot of effort to try to get people to interact with one another, either virtually or even in person. So we do in person get togethers. We try to bring people in, budget permitting, so that they can spend some time face to face. Now, if people are in a, say, for example, the same city, we do encourage them to get together, whether it's at a WeWork site or whether we do some sort of lunch or something like that and actually get people together physically. But we're also using different tools to try to figure out what's the best virtual watercooler, right? How can we get people to interact in the virtual space and still feel like they're running into each other at a physical office place.

Andy Kitson:
Jason, earlier you mentioned kind of like having for kind of like big pain points or needs or something that came out. And I think they were communication and collaboration, maintaining culture, boundary management, which is an excellent name and space constraints. And we'd love to just kind of like walk through those and maybe if you could talk about like what were the, or the points of leverage that you found or maybe some of the things that you thought would be like really impactful that turned out not to be what were some of the things that yeah, it really helped move the needle on some of those.

Jason Morwick:
You know, when each one of those was probably low hanging fruit and then there were some longer term projects. So within each one of those buckets, there's a collection of projects that we have either done or are currently working on. So to take it in reverse order, the space constraints, because that's the easiest, because that was just really India-specific. We did a pilot with a coworking vendor and from that we actually, when we ended the pilot, we, a tie up with WeWork, and WeWork covers our major cities in India where we have folks. So we have available to our employees in India, a co-working space for them, paid for by the company should they choose to use it. And we monitor that usage every month. That one was interesting only because we heard so much feedback initially about needing a space to work and that sort of stuff. And on any given day, only about 1% of the employee population is using a co-working space. So it was one of those learning points that sometimes people say things of what they want and then when you offer it to them, they're like, yeah, I don't think I need that right now. So that was kind of an interesting learning point there. In our other big buckets were a lot more projects, so communication and collaboration, we've launched into different things, such as just producing communication guidelines. Here's how people should hold meetings, how they should use various tools like email, instant messaging, etc. within the company as well as offering, we looked at about a dozen different whiteboard applications. We settled on one, which was Miro, introducing that to the company and providing training for people that wanted to do virtual collaboration, and then more recently having this big shift to asynchronous work, which involved training leaders on how to properly make a decision whether something should be synchronous versus asynchronous and what's the best use of some of these tools that we currently have available. And we're actually still in the process of that of shifting the company in that direction.

Andy Kitson:
So you've mentioned like We a number of times. Who are you working with in all this?

Jason Morwick:
You know, even though, so obviously this is my full time focus, I have a lot of allies within the business. So within the HR team, I work very closely with the employee experience team because almost everything I do touches their area. I also work a lot with the learning and development team because a lot of what I do involves training. So I talk to them as well, as well as the HR business partners because they have their finger on the pulse of various areas within the business. So by working together with them, I can better understand what the current challenges are versus the legacy stuff. And then of course I'm working closely with IT because there's a lot of technology solutions obviously that we're talking about, as well as operational folks within the business always looking for allies out there, those people that are early adopters that are unafraid to experiment with new ideas and experiment with a new tool that I can dump something on them and say, hey, try this for 30 days and let's collect some feedback. And they will happily do that because they like trying out new things. And then we can figure out from there whether to extend that, go forward with it, or just dump it and move on to something else.

Niko Skievaski:
I'd love to dive in on. You mentioned you published communication guidelines around how to use these different tools. I feel like that's a lot of cultural change, you know, asking people to take notes differently potentially, and document differently and run meetings differently so they can be accessible to people who are watching recordings. How, beyond writing down best practices, how do you actually get that that stuff implemented in the wild and adopted? And I imagine that's where a lot of the collaboration with your learning and development team happens. But yeah, talk us through one of those projects and how it actually came to life.

Jason Morwick:
And that's probably one of the most difficult challenges that I have is just changing the small behaviors, right? So say for example, something as running a meeting, how do you get people to do little things such as always have an agenda or at least an outcome statement in the meeting invite, make sure that people actually respond to the meeting organizer so they know. And then when people hold the meeting, how they're doing it effectively and then documenting and sending out notes and actions and that sort of stuff, where it's, usually the case where people just say, oh, just jump on a call, call a meeting, and there's no agenda, no documentation of the decisions that were made or what was discussed, and then it's on to the next next meeting. So to change those types of behaviors, we first put out meeting guidelines, but when you put out just guidelines, it's hit or miss whether people will actually follow that or not. So we follow that up with training, which is some of what we're doing right now, and a lot of internal selling. And again, publishing success stories where people are doing it right and what the results that they're having so that hopefully others will see what other leaders on their left or right are doing, so that will encourage them to adopt the same behaviors. But honestly, that is always a challenge and it's something that we're constantly working through, it's just changing those behaviors. I try to get people early, so in the onboarding process, I usually give people within their first 30 days, they attend a mandatory class on working effectively in a remote first environment, and that's a class that I lead and it's a 90 minute session, it's a synchronous training where I get people and I try to pound this into them so that, because they don't know any different, hopefully they'll adopt it from the beginning and won't learn any bad habits once they go into the business.

Niko Skievaski:
Nice. I love that. I wish we could take that class. Maybe we could do a webinar. You could, you could teach us and our audience just the Cactus way of working remotely.

Jason Morwick:
There you go.

Andy Kitson:
So, Jason, you mentioned a few times kind of like having allies in the organization and pointing at people who are really leading the way and doing it well. We'd love to hear you talk a bit about like, what is it that the leaders who are really succeeding with this transition? Like, what is it that they're doing and how, how do you engage and empower them?

Jason Morwick:
What I think successful leaders do differently than others is, number one, be willing to try something new, being open to experiment, because this is all kind of uncharted territory for a lot of folks, right? So if you're an early adopter or at least you're willing to listen and to try something, then that increases a chance of success. I find that many leaders, they're not really resistant to change per se, but they just feel like they don't have time to look at something new. It's like I'm so busy, I'm so trying to keep up with what is on my plate, I don't want to have to try this new tool, I don't want to have to try this new practice, I'm just going to keep doing the things that I'm used to doing in the way that I'm used to doing it, because that's, that's easier. And is perceived that you're coming in from the outside and you're just adding additional work onto their plate. But I find that many leaders who are successful, they're willing to try something. Even if it doesn't work, they learn from it and they say, okay, well, that didn't work and it didn't work because of this, maybe I need to do it this way instead, so that's number one. And number two is to trust and empower their employees, right? Because a lot of successful remote work is just based on trust, right? And I think in the industry, that's why we're seeing a lot of companies calling their people back into the office, because I think there's a lot of distrust in those companies at the senior leadership level. They think people have to be in the office to work effectively and they just want to make sure that people are showing up so they're managing through attendance versus any sort of real metrics of productivity or any sort of real tangible goals.

Andy Kitson:
What are some of the things that enable a leader to operate on, kind of like more of a trust-based relationship? You mentioned like some metrics of, metrics goals, yeah, I would like to kind of hear you go a bit deeper on that.

Jason Morwick:
Yeah, you know, it's funny, years ago and I used to do consulting and trying to get companies to transition to remote work. The number one question I get from managers was how do I know what people are working when they're working remotely? And I'd always answer the same way, how do you know they're working right now? You know just because they're coming into the office, well, I can see them coming in at 8:0 in the morning. It's like, great, you know, their attendance, but you don't know anything what they're doing between 8:30 and, say, 5:30. So it requires leaders to really get involved to understand the work that their employees do. Some managers have come up through the ranks and they have held that job before. So they know very clearly what needs to be done, how long something takes, etc.. But other managers, they don't get their hands dirty with the operations, so they don't understand clearly what their employees are doing all day. So they fall back on, well, I need to make sure that they're in front of me and therefore at least I know they're here all the time. So if you understand the job role, if you take the time to really understand what's required in that job, what's required in that project, etc., then you will feel more comfortable letting that person work remotely and report back on what milestones are achieving, what key metrics they're achieving or not achieving.

Andy Kitson:
Yes, this is a lot more clarity on understanding the role, what the outcomes are.

Jason Morwick:
Absolutely.

Andy Kitson:
And then you can shift your attention there instead of, instead of focusing on presence.

Jason Morwick:
Right.

Andy Kitson:
We'd love to hear you talk about what's unique about the version of remote that you're building on Cactus.

Jason Morwick:
I find that remote working is kind of the spectrum, right? You have these companies that are fully remote, no company offices, 100% a sync. Then of course, now you have these hybrid, which is really like remote tolerant. We'll let you work two days a week from your home office and not have to actually commute into our office. What we're doing is not quite fully remote, but it has a lot of elements of that. So like I said, we're keeping our corporate offices around the globe. We're not going to get rid of those. But there are just a resource that people can use as they need to. We're not going to go 100% asynchronous, but we want to move in that direction so people don't feel stressed trying to work across the global time zones and people will have the time needed to do their jobs. So those are kind of the elements that, that make us a little bit different. We encourage people to move about their country, to relocate as they needed if they want to be closer to family or if they just want a new experience or that type of thing.

Andy Kitson:
And how does your job change now that you've got momentum really over the last year and a half?

Jason Morwick:
There's still a lot we can do in terms of getting certain behaviors to change, to make it more of what we want to see going forward. But also what we're starting to focus on now are some digital transformation and automation projects. So now the role is kind of evolving a bit. How can we make our processes better and more streamlined now that everybody is remote?

Niko Skievaski:
What are examples of those processes you're trying to make better now?

Jason Morwick:
We're looking at our onboarding processes for certain business units. We're also looking at how we communicate internally, such as intranet, also looking at other systems such as how we manage our goals and that sort of thing. So we've moved to the OKRs, which a lot of people are familiar with. So we're using that right now. So we have implemented a system to track that across the company.

Niko Skievaski:
Gotcha.

Andy Kitson:
What does a typical week look like for you right now?

Jason Morwick:
You know, I don't know if there is a typical week. I probably spend about 10% of my time just on operational issues, that's employees asking questions. What can I get reimbursed for? I can't find a policy, I'm having issues with a co-working space, that, that type of thing. So I spend 10% of my time, just operational issues, another 10% of time probably doing some sort of training, whether it's with new joiners or whether it's on a specific tool or helping to develop some sort of training content. Another 10 to 15% is probably dealing with vendors or researching tools out there. I'm constantly, because of my title, bombarded by vendors trying to sell various products or services to make remote working better. And I'm always willing to investigate those things, to see if there's something out there that we could use leverage internally that would make remote working even more effective. And then the majority of the remainder is project-based work trying to solve for some of these problems that we still have, some of these pain points that are still ongoing.

Andy Kitson:
Are there like maybe one or two tools that have made a huge difference at Cactus that you want to call out?

Jason Morwick:
We just recently, over the past six months implemented Miro, which people really seem to enjoy. The other thing is that we are a heavy Microsoft teams shop, right? We do, we have used Slack. We do have some teams using Slack, but we use teams and we're actually trying to expand how we use teams and various plug ins. We've worked with a few startup vendors that have various plug ins and we're kind of the testbed for that. So using some of those tools, we'll see over time if it really helps us out.

Andy Kitson:
Is there a tool that you wish someone would invent that they haven't yet?

Jason Morwick:
I don't know. That's a good question. What I see a lot are tools that I really like that I can afford, right? Because we do have budgets. And when I talk to my finance team, they can laugh at me because I'm always asking for money. And I know a lot of times I'm not going to get a yes, so I have to prioritize what tools do we need right now. But there are certain things that I've seen that I've played around with that long term. I would like to get my hands on to make remote work even better.

Niko Skievaski:
Sure! I would love to dig in to that finance question, like just to justify the expense on a tool like Miro, for instance. Yeah, it's fuzzy. You're not saying we're going to buy this and sales are going to increase by X amount.

Jason Morwick:
Exactly.

Niko Skievaski:
So to help all the people who are trying to sell you something, how do you need to go and talk to your CFO? Like, how are you justifying the cost of these things?

Jason Morwick:
You know, it's hard sometimes because I have to build a business case around it, and most of these tools you kind of pay by the user, you can experiment with a small team. Usually we run pilots internally to see how people are adapting to them. Now it's interesting, with Miro, we knew when I walked into the position that we wanted some sort of collaboration tool because the number one complaint from employees at the time was that they didn't have a way to replicate what they used to do in the office in terms of getting into a conference room and working on that big white dry erase board. So we knew, we knew we needed something in place of that. So that's why we started researching all these tools and we did a little bit of these cost analysis. We presented that to our finance team and they were open only because we knew this was an issue. We knew the volume of employees that were asking for it. So at least we had some basis to make it make a decision. But with some other tools, it's becoming harder and harder because then I'm trying to show the impact on productivity to say, if we get this tool, this is what we should see in terms of productivity, in terms of less time to meet. Because if I can cut down on the volume of synchronous meetings, there is probably a soft cost in there that I can show or the speed in which somebody will be able to, say, do their job or learn something. So you try to look at different ways you can you can measure the benefit other than just saying, hey, this is really cool and a lot of people would really like to use it.

Andy Kitson:
Yeah, that's tough. Do you do retreats?

Jason Morwick:
No, we don't do retreats. We did something called because our main headquarters in Mumbai, India, is called Gazebo, that's the name of the building. We called it the Gazebo get-together over the past year. So we actually brought teams together globally. So people were flying in from around the world into Mumbai to have a chance to meet with people. I did it back in May with the rest of the HR team, and that was my first time since joining the company the previous July, actually getting to meet people face to face.

Andy Kitson:
And it's the rest of your team coming in at the same time then or?

Jason Morwick:
Yes, yes. Yeah, they were all coming in at the same time. So we wanted people from around the globe to be able to sync up and meet with their teams face to face. So it's not really a retreat. It's kind of like the onsite is the new offsite. So people are getting together in the office because they don't use it otherwise, or at least globally they don't use it otherwise. So it was just a chance for us to get together.

Niko Skievaski:
What sort of things are you doing at that? I imagine a lot of trust building and ... like ...

Jason Morwick:
We do a lot of team building. There's a lot of strategy and planning sessions, so we get some business work done, but a lot of it is just around ensuring that people have an opportunity to meet with one another, to interact with senior leaders because people don't get an opportunity to mingle with them, to meet them face to face otherwise. So it's really just a chance to increase the bonds between the team members, that's the primary focus. And of course, we do get a little bit of work done as well.

Andy Kitson:
And do kind of most teams end up, did, have they gone through kind of this, the gathering Gazebo kind of first year?

Jason Morwick:
Yes, we have done that. We have actually only a couple of teams left to do it before the end of the calendar year. But I think by that point, just about every team in the company has had an opportunity to meet.

Andy Kitson:
I can see how if you have a larger company where organizing like a full retreat is, it would be hard. Something like this makes it much more accessible, much easier to plan and gives teams a lot more autonomy, I'm sure, in how they go about it.

Jason Morwick:
Our intent is to do this at least annually, perhaps biannually. Now on a smaller scale within a particular country, we also do other types of face to face meetings just to get people together. And we can do that on a more regular basis because obviously the cost is decreased.

Niko Skievaski:
Gotcha. I was going to ask a little bit about how planning actually happens. Is it on the teams to plan it or does the employee experience team help out? Like how, who actually, because we do full company gatherings and it is like planning a conference every time we do it. So who takes on that burden?

Jason Morwick:
You know, it's interesting because we put out a policy. This is another foundational element that we had to put in place early on. So we within the HR team put out a policy, gave some parameters, involve finance so they could allocate some budget for these types of events. And then it was on the team to actually set the date and they worked closely with the employee experience team because if we're doing things on site, we can only bring so many people together at once before we exceed capacity. And some people may want to do things offsite, so that has to be coordinated as well. But we have the employee experience team that works hand in hand with the actual leaders of that team to help plan out those types of events.

Niko Skievaski:
That makes a lot of sense. So i imagine that the HR gathering was the best one because that team learned from everybody.

Jason Morwick:
And we did ours, I think not early on, but in the middle of everybody else. So, you know, and of course, we're trying to lead by example and not exceed any of our budgets.

Niko Skievaski:
So, yeah.

Jason Morwick:
Awesome.

Andy Kitson:
So maybe just a couple of questions, then we'll switch to rapid fire?

Jason Morwick:
Sure.

Andy Kitson:
So when do companies need a head of remote?

Jason Morwick:
I think a company needs a head of remote when they really get serious about making a full scale company transition. In certain companies that I used to work with in the past, in my consulting days, they weren't interested in going remote from a company perspective, it was just for a certain segment, it was basically a project. I want to move my call center, which I can no longer fit in the building, I want to move them remote to save on my corporate real estate. So in that case, do you need a head of remote? Probably not. You just need a strong project manager for that. But if your company is serious about doing a full scale transition from an office-based environment to a remote working environment, then you definitely need somebody dedicated to making that happen.

Niko Skievaski:
So you've been doing this for a year and a half now in this role. What advice would you give your previous self just starting out?

Jason Morwick:
That is a great question because like I said earlier this past year and a half, I wasn't sure what it was going to entail, what it was going to look like when I first stepped into the role. And I think we made great progress up to this point. So going into the role, I guess I wish I would have known what things would have been easy, what things would have been hard, because there are certain things that I expected to be hard, like, oh, will people adopt this whole concept of remote working very easily or really going to have to get in there and sell it to people and have to really push hard? And that was relatively easy, a lot of it, because the groundwork had been laid even before I joined the company with the CEO's vision. And then we had done so much socializing up until releasing the policy. But then there are other things that I thought would be easier, which were harder, such as just changing the little behaviors, like how people interact in synchronous meetings. I thought that would be a lot easier to get people to change a document things a little bit more, and that has been really difficult to get that change on a massive scale. So I wish I knew which areas I guess we're going to be harder versus easier.

Andy Kitson:
Me, too. All right, let's do some rapid fire. Okay, so I'll kick us off here. What's a story that illustrates what culture means to you personally in your own career?

Jason Morwick:
You know, it's funny. Early on after college, I was in the Army, and as a young Army officer, I was eating lunch one day in the dining facility. And there was this old Sergeant major that's a senior non-commissioned officer who had been in the Army for like 20 plus years, a veteran of multiple engagements, this guy was like an oracle. He knew all this information that we all wanted to know because we were new and we didn't know anything. And somebody asked him in so many words like, how do you create a highly cohesive team? How do you create a high performing culture? And we all kind of leaned in because we wanted to know what the response was from this older veteran. And he thought for a moment and he said, I don't know, you know, I don't know. But in all the great units I've been in, from the Rangers to the 82nd Airborne, I knew that they were high performing, not because necessarily of their culture, I think they had a great culture because they were high performing. And that stuck with me for over 20 years because I thought, you know, if you want to create a great culture, it's not about providing employees with all these sort of amenities or different perks, like employees may ask for. Focus on performance first, focus on the metrics and get really good at what your team does or what your organization does, and that in turn, will help create the foundation for a great culture.

Niko Skievaski:
Oh, I love that. I got, I got goose bumps as you were going through that, because just thinking about if you're on an underperforming team, you can't have a good culture. It's absolutely a prerequisite to having a great culture is performance.

Jason Morwick:
Yeah, right. And if you're not performing, you're throwing out amenities, like they used to do when we're all in the office, it's jeans Friday or casual Friday. I mean, that stuff is not going to make one bit of difference.

Niko Skievaski:
Yeah, well, I think I think this might lead into the next rapid fire question a bit in that what do leaders often under emphasize or overemphasize when it comes to creating a great remote company culture?

Jason Morwick:
I think one thing that's undervalued is the impact of leaders at the lowest level of the organization. So your front line supervisors, your managers, too often we think of the executive team and they are important, don't get me wrong, they set the vision, but on a day to day basis, who is running things, right? It's managers and supervisors at the lowest level they have actually the most impact on whether remote work goes well or it does not go well because they're the ones enforcing those basics every single day. So I think your focus has to be a lot on them and what they do in order for the whole organization to kind of move in the right direction.

Andy Kitson:
What book do you want everyone you work with to have read?

Jason Morwick:
Well, obviously one of mine and I would love, no, I put out promoting myself.

Andy Kitson:
Feel free to make a plug!

Jason Morwick:
You can get them on Amazon. No, the books that I have read recently that I like are like Cal Newport's Deep Work, and that has made an impact at us because we are trying to, again, move to a more asynchronous environment, let people have some more focused time and be able to do these deep work type activities. So that is a book we've kind of spread in the company for people to get to know and hopefully adopt some of those practices.

Andy Kitson:
So with teleportation, like in Star Trek or you can just like instantly be beamed and be next to somebody. Would that make remote work better or worse on net?

Jason Morwick:
I think it would make remote work better because what people would use that for is to beam themselves to a location where they want to work from. So they would been themselves to the beach or to the mountains or someplace where they want to be. I don't think, even if you had that technology available right now, I don't think people would use it to beam themselves to be side by side with their coworker. And I say that because we have offered co-working spaces. We do have our office locations open and we have a minimal amount of actual usage right now. So yes, they can beam themselves, I wouldn't have to commute yet I don't believe that people would, would use that for that purpose all the time.

Andy Kitson:
They could go to the same beach.

Jason Morwick:
They could go the same beach together, yeah.

Niko Skievaski:
Hopefully they can beam in some Wifi, too.

Jason Morwick:
There you go.

Niko Skievaski:
Well, this is an amazing conversation we had on a lot of really great topics that I think are going to be super useful to our audience. I took a bunch of notes for myself because I have work to do going back into my own organization. So I just wanted to acknowledge that and thank you for taking the time to hang out with us and our listeners and share what you've learned.

Jason Morwick:
Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Andy Kitson:
Thanks, Jason!

Andy Kitson:
All right. That's the show! Thank you for listening. And, well, just hanging out with us. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a rating, leave us a review wherever you're listening to your podcast, that helps other people find the show. If you have feedback or you want to suggest a guest, you can email us at Hi@PeopleEverywhereShow.com. You can also go to our website, PeopleEverywhereShow.com, to sign up to our mailing list and get updates on new episodes and events that we host. All right, talk to you next time. Bye!

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