By Alex Yohn
Jul 3, 2018
Working remotely affords a lot of flexibility in the non-work part of our lives: we travel, move, and have more time for our personal life without worrying about our job security. That doesn’t come at the cost of purpose, productivity, or cohesion though. If anything, the fact that we’re all somewhere else, as we put it, means we have to double down on the upkeep of our company’s mission and organization. Strangely enough, that’s disappointing for some job candidates.
Some people look for remote work as a way to, what seems to me, work but not be a part of a company. They seek the security of a full time job with the flexibility of being a freelancer. They want work into the cracks in their life, with none of the risk. That may work for some companies, but we’ve learned to avoid hiring people who view remote work as their most important job criteria.
So how does a remote workplace like ours feel like day to day? How do we ensure there’s cohesion in a void of colocation? And what, in turn, are the core tenets of a team member who will be both fulfilled and successful with our company?
What we strive for as a remote team
As a remote workplace, we need to be accessible for each team member wherever they are. For us, that manifests itself in the following ways operationally:
- Our workplace operations need to be digital in every form: communication, documentation, paperwork, and productivity.
- The technology platform which drives #1 above needs to have near perfect uptime, but downtime does happen (as demonstrated by Slack recently) and there needs to be a fallback plan for how the team works and communicates when our virtual office disappears for a bit.
- Building on #2 above, job and project expectations need to be explicit. We have fewer meetings, but that means there are fewer chances to catch signals about someone or something being amiss. Being ultra-clear with role and project-level objectives is mission critical. When we fail to do that, we lose good people.
- Remote work is not to be confused with flex work: we require our team to be present for a majority of our six core business hours each day, regardless of time-zone. This helps avoid too much asynchronous decision making and the feeling that the company is nothing more than a loose network of freelancers.
- A rock-solid mission, vision, and business objectives written down, shared, understood, and bought into. It’s too hard to lean on oratory-style visionary leadership.
What to strive for as a remote team member
Working remotely requires every team member to work harder to contribute to the team’s culture than they might otherwise need to in a physical workplace. Because of our lack of physical center, each individual’s contribution truly is an important piece of our company’s personality.
- Be present, don’t be an island. Your communication, be it written, audio or video, is your lifeline to our community. If you aren’t proactive with communication, you’re on an island. If you’re on an island we can’t see you, hear you, or know what shape you’re in.
- Be disciplined about work and family separation. This is a hard one for a lot of people. The allure of working for a remote company is big for parents who want to be present with their new family. That’s great. In fact, it’s the biggest perk. But, there is no way to be a full time new parent and a full time team member at our company unless you’re a seriously organized person with your private life. Note the use of “new parent.” Once kids are older and in school, this gets more manageable.
- We want to know you beyond work. There are no team lunches or after-work drinks at a remote workplace and, while we get together as a team once in a while, it’s the daily stories and anecdotes we share about our remote lives that bonds us all together. If you think your non-work life has no business in a remote workplace, think again.
- Working remotely affords us more time – via less commute time, fewer meetings, and more efficient business operations (generally). What will you do with that extra time? It’s important to create a non-arbitrary divider between work and life, lest work follows you around wherever you go.
Working remotely is a two way street
Remote work enables us to live our non-work lives more purposefully, but that only happens when we run our remote workplace with equal purpose. As Lisa recently wrote in a post, work is a constant in our lives regardless of where we do it – when times are tough, work can be there for us. The opposite is true as well, which is perhaps the biggest benefit of working remotely – we become workplace that blends more seamlessly into the canvas of our lives, rather than being the geographic anchor of it.
By Alex Yohn
Jun 27, 2018
What if I told you that the last time you took an extended break from work, your coworkers didn’t miss you as much as you think? Likewise, what if I told you that your contributions at work are important but, generally speaking, you’re replaceable within a couple of weeks? Would that make it easier for you to take some paid time off? It should.
“YOU WOULDN’T WORRY WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK OF YOU IF YOU KNEW HOW SELDOM THEY DO” – Eleanor Roosevelt
Here’s a dirty little secret employers use to keep you in your seat, sometimes without even realizing it: Humans are social creatures and we feel validated when we’re needed by our clan. If I’m needed, I’m not replaceable. By virtue of being non-replaceable, I’m important. Because I’m important, others depend on me. Since others depend on me, I can’t leave work.
I’m not the first employer to break this code of silence, and I won’t be the last: Take your time off. You need it, and so does your employer and, while you’re an important part of your team, the company doesn’t revolve around your presence. You don’t have to drop five grand on a trip to Tahiti, but you owe it to yourself to get some distance from your work. Please, go live your life.
We’ll be fine, trust us.
When I leave work for a couple of weeks, the founder of the company is gone. When I return, I get a good idea for how well the company operates in my absence. The answer is, most times, really well. While there may be decisions only I can make, they can usually wait for my return and, perchance there’s something absolutely business critical to discuss, my team can get in touch with me. In twelve years, I’ve been dragged out of vacation exactly once.
Before you leave work for a week or two, let your coworkers know about your current workload and dependencies. If you return to a shambles, well, it’s likely you didn’t do enough to set them up for your absence. Personally, I have no qualms dropping off the radar for a couple of weeks – I know, through and through, that the company has its mission and measurable objectives, and those are enough to carry them forward in my absence. Every one at every level of most any organization can describe their duties in the same way. Your coworkers will cover for you, but you gotta set them up to succeed. Build trust with your coworkers and in yourself, and make a break for it.
Get perspective, and get a raise?
People who take their time off are statistically more likely to get a raise or promotion, according to Project Time Off. This implies a few things. People who use their paid time off are better planners and have the will to seek balance. They’re good self-managers and train others to do their work while they’re out. Perhaps most important is perspective – leaving work is a professional palette cleanser in that our distance from work doesn’t immediately go away when we return to work. Rather, because we’ve been gone, we see our workplace as an outsider might which helps us identify the good, bad, and ugly that wasn’t so obvious to us before. Maybe that helps us dig into a fresh challenge that nobody else sees. Maybe it means other people adopted the more routine work you didn’t like anyways which will give you more time to focus on more fulfilling work. Put simply, time away from work likely makes you more valuable to your employer.
It’s your time, so what’s holding you back?
Your time is money. If you’re a software developer making one hundred thousand dollars a year and your employer gives you four weeks of paid time off, that’s a big percentage of your compensation you’re leaving on the table by martyring yourself for your work. You’re literally paying your boss to exhaust yourself. In all likelihood, your employer isn’t going to hound you to take your time off, so it’s on you. Go. Work will be here when you return stronger, refreshed, and ready to dig into whatever is next.
By Alex Yohn
Jun 22, 2018
My grandfather passed away recently. He meant the world to me and I could write an entire post on how he helped me become the woman I am. However, today’s not that day. As the fog lifts that we all experience when losing a loved one, I’ve realized a few things about grieving and the workplace that need to have a spotlight shone on them.
Within seconds of finding out, I immediately called Kin’s founder, Craig. I’m not quite sure what I said, but somehow I relayed the information to him coherently (maybe). Then, I just sat there silently on the phone. Saying anything else or making any other decision seemed far beyond my reach.
Craig responded with, “Go. I’ve got you covered, you’re fine. I’m so sorry. Just go and do what you need to do.”
And so I did.
The week I was out due to my grandfather’s death was a blur. But what I distinctly remember is how rawly human I could be because work was 100% removed. While I don’t wish for anyone to feel the pain I’ve felt, I know that we will all go through this experience many times as our loved ones pass. I’m assuming if you read this you’re likely in charge of shaping a workplace. I want to share what helped me get through it in hopes it’ll influence how you treat grieving in your workplace.
Remove Work Without Repercussion.
There’s so much we have to do when a loved one passes. While I wasn’t directly in charge of my grandfather’s arrangements, there was a lot to do. I still felt responsible to get my husband and I there, make sure that our pets were taken care of while we were gone, make sure my younger brother was all set to arrive on time, write the obituary for my grandfather, prepare the eulogy that honored him as best I could, prepare myself to see people who have taken care of me all of my life grieving, etc. The list went on and on.
We had such little time to get it all together and I needed it to be right. I was honored to do it. Knowing that work was handled helped me to make the right decisions without any paralysis due to other things on my mind. We should help all of our employees that freedom.
As plans began to settle and I knew what my next 48 hours would look like, I made the realization that I had scheduled a week-long vacation months ago to happen the following week. An unbelievable amount of guilt set in once I saw that on the calendar. I would be out this week for my grandfather, then out again next week for vacation. My work had been so great to me so far, but I worried that leaving for this long with such short notice was letting everyone down.
I called Craig to explain my position and he did the best thing he could possibly do. He said this: “Lisa, no. Work will be here when you get back. You go. I want you to spend time with your family. That is more important. We will see you when you get back. I’ll let the team know, and if they need anything critical from you, I’ll let them know they can reach out.”
The response Craig gave me was perfectly crafted for the situation. If you are facing the same situation as a leader, here are how his words impacted me most as a grieving employee:
- Giving Freedom To Stop Working: He was letting me know I didn’t need to do the work of reaching out to my direct reports to inform them. I didn’t feel on the hook for any next steps. I was free after this call.
- Providing Reassurance That All Is Okay: He reassured me that my job right now wasn’t to take care of our company, but to take care of my family. I immediately released all guilt from not being focused on work.
- Reassuring The Employee’s Value To The Company: He wasn’t cutting me out from the normalcy of being relied upon (which he knows I take pride in) by saying he wouldn’t block anyone from reaching out to me if something big came up. While dealing with a great loss, I knew my job would be something I could rely on. I still felt in the loop and valued.
No amount of culture will remind an employee of these things when a loss hits. Many people freeze and even the smallest decision, such as what to eat for lunch, can be daunting for a few days. You have to actively remind them of the above, sometimes multiple times, until it sinks in enough for them to process it.
Relationships shouldn’t determine shorter grieving periods.
It has always been a gripe of mine that some workplaces have bereavement policies in place that have structures for what relationships you can and cannot use them for. Since it wasn’t my mother, father, brother or husband who passed, I would likely receive less time and less sympathy based on certain policies.
We need to get past that. We understand now how impactful relationships can be outside of next of kin, and we should be honoring that in the workplace. Regardless of the title of the relationship to the employee, grieving will happen. As we work to build better workplaces around the globe together, shouldn’t we give our employees the dignity and the relief to have the time they need to do so?
The (sad) state of workplace bereavement policies.
Looking at the average bereavement policy in the United States leaves much to be desired. First, bereavement policies are not mandatory. You may be able to use personal time or if you have a company that is large enough, you can tap into an FMLA (family medical leave act) policy.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 60% of all US workers and 71% of full-time workers do get paid funeral leave due to a death in the family. If you fall into those majorities, SHRM reports you are likely to get about an average of three to four days off through a bereavement policy for an immediate family member and as little as one day for extended family or friends.
Let me break down my four days after finding out. My grandfather died on a Wednesday. I spent most of that day in a tear-filled haze contacting family, trying to figure out what I was going to do and waiting on the services to be arranged so I would know when to be there. The next day, I planned for my trip, did laundry, packed, cried and wrote an obituary. On Friday, I traveled with my husband to Connecticut and finished writing my eulogy on the plane. I touched down around dinner time to see my little brother waiting for me and tried to see as much of my family as I could to have some semblance of normalcy that day. Saturday were the services – I remember very little from that day. Sunday, my husband returned home while I stayed with my family to help my mother with the loss of her father and to just be as close to her as possible. Over the next 3-4 days my mother and I worked to make sure my grandmother was okay, constantly checking in and not thinking about much else until my husband and children returned to visit family. It was a vacation we had planned months ago.
How could I be expected to return back to work on Monday with zero time to process my loss and be a productive, able employee? There would have been no way I could have done that and been proud of the outcome. In fact, I would be hurting the company by processing the event on their time when I should be responsible for driving Kin forward. By taking the time off to grieve (a full six days, to be exact), I was able to calibrate myself and not feel as though I had to choose between my family and my job.
I am there for my company when it needs me. In return, I need my company to be there for me, too. By having policies in place that allowed me to walk away, grieve and find balance, it was. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sung the praises of my employer over the past two weeks to anyone who would listen.
I’m not alone when it comes to this view point. Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg announced in 2017 that the company now offers 20 days of time for employees mourning the death of an immediate family member, and 10 days off for a member of their extended family. The change came after Sandberg lost her husband suddenly the year before.
Family-friendly policies like this show that employers are recognizing how important it is to provide policies and procedures that put work/life balance in the spotlight. Doing something like extending bereavement policies acknowledges that an employee needs time to not only plan and attend a family member’s services, but recover and regroup afterward.
I now look forward to returning to work full-force. I know that I will feel useful and engaged with the company that looked after me so well during this sad period in my life.
By Alex Yohn
Jun 15, 2018
Understanding what we want from work as employees is as important as knowing what our workplace expects from us.
Some people want structure and direction, while others thrive without it. If a manager knows, for example, that someone not only performs 3-4x better w/ rigorous delegation but that they’re also much happier being delegated to, they’ve uncovered a powerful alignment that’s good for both business and employee. Likewise, some people are wired to roam where they’re needed most, so the style of management they need is more akin to opening doors than explicit direction.
The challenge for employers is finding the right alignment for each employee without grinding the business to a laborious halt doing so. The challenge for employees is to to figure out how we’re wired to work, and working candidly with employers to make our jobs as fulfilling as possible.
Moving beyond job descriptions
A simple, effective tool that’s helped us figure out how people are wired is a short character assessment called Thinking Wavelengths. The assessment places people on a spectrum ranging from task master (the assessment actually calls them “Grinders”) to conceiver and, with the entire company plotted, we can get a full picture of how to tailor management style on both the individual and team level.
Task masters, for example, get fulfillment working on clearly defined assignments and bringing closure. Conceivers like blank canvases and high-stakes decision making. There’s a range of archetypes between the extremes as well and every company requires a unique mix of people and corresponding management tactics.
We use other tools as well (DiSC, Strengthsfinder), but just as important is good old fashioned conversation and, ultimately, a document (we’ve begun referring to ours as canvases) for each person that speaks to their unique strengths, missions, and objectives at work.
Explicit insights make explicit work
Once we understand how an individual is wired (at Kin, we share these insights across the company) and what their unique mission is with us, we can get more explicit in communicating and managing one another, which saves time in a few ways.
When something just isn’t working well with a team member, we first look to whether they’re well aligned with type of management and work they’ve been receiving. Are we being too vague with our expectations? Likewise, are we delegating too much detail to someone who finds fulfillment in connecting the dots?
We also can cut to the chase in one-on-one employee reviews. A helpful side effect of knowing what people want from their employer lays the runway for meaningful work objectives and troubleshooting challenges together.
Intra-team communication thrives too – knowing who will work well in which types of situations (think quick fire problem solving, or long term design planning) helps keep meetings short and people focused.
Exhibit A: me
I’m a conceiver (I’m a Di in DiSC, another assessment we use) and I’m also the company founder – it means my words carry a lot of weight with the company but that I tend to speak in broad, sweeping terms. At times, that’s led to our company being full on strategy and ideas (the what and why of a company’s mission), but short on operational clarity (the how) which is frustrating for the task masters on our team.
So, in our case, knowing how I’m wired has taught me to be mindful of how other’s perceive my ideas and broad visions, as a lot of people on our team will understand it, but spin their wheels figuring out how to operationalize it all, which leads me to the second insight. In terms of what I want to get out of work, I’m happiest when I’m helping my team see big challenges, creating futures for our product and business and, naturally, optimizing our team’s culture.
All of the work that’s gone into learning how I’m wired and letting others know about it has shined a light on our need to staff people wired to operationalize strategies plans and schedules which, in turn, keep our task masters productive and fulfilled. I’m happier, they’re happier, and work gets easier.
Finding baselines for humans working with humans
There’s no fail-proof recipe for getting a team resonating perfectly. What we reach for at Kin though is a baseline to describe each individual’s strengths, challenges, and needs in relation to everybody else. It’s made us quicker to the punch in figuring out what works and what doesn’t on a per-employee, team, and organizational level. In a company wholly dependent on the quality of the people we have building our business, any extra time it takes to individually tailor each employee’s role and contributions is time more than well spent – it’s critical to our business succeeding.
By Alex Yohn
Jun 11, 2018
We recently released an update to Kin called, perhaps pragmatically, “Task Reminder Email.”
As you may surmise, it’s a weekly email reminding you of the tasks your team members are waiting on you to complete, such as time-off requests and paperwork. The email gets sent every Wednesday, which gives you a couple of days to take care of business before the weekend.
We’ve decided to disable this reminder email by default, but you can enable it at any time via your profile page in Kin.
Why might you need a reminder?
Between a third to one half of all tasks in Kin go a full work week without being completed – that means some coworkers aren’t getting time-off requests approved or, likewise, feedback isn’t being given while it’s top of mind. We know that an email is just one of many you receive each day, but we’ll be keeping an eye on how this helps get more workplace work done in a shorter period of time.
If you have any questions about this new feature, we can be reached at TheTeam@KinHR.com.
Happy tasking!
By Alex Yohn
May 23, 2018
Over my eleven years of being a business owner, I’ve moved around quite a bit. I’ve been an engineer, a project manager, a business developer, a coffee maker, and everything in between. Lisa has worked as our marketing director, moved to the COO role, and now serves as Kin’s CEO, all inside of two years. We’ve also hired people for one job whom eventually moved on to do something else – project managers have turned into ops directors and, as recently as a month ago, an engineer moved into a data sciences role.
Just as numerous however are the team members who find long term fulfillment performing the same duties they originally came on board for. My former business partner, Ka Wai, remains enamored with rolling into work each day ready to program after almost twenty years! Tom Stanley, a long time team member of ours, also remains devoted to the craft of programming (though he’s thrown in a splash of support engineering recently).
So what makes people, to borrow a phrase from Lisa, “fire themselves and, in turn, rehire themselves for something new” within the same company? Likewise, what keeps some people drawn to the craft they fell in love with so many years ago?
The answer in my experience lies somewhere in the unique mix of mission, personality, and opportunity each individual finds in their work.
What’s your mission?
People who move between roles tend to view their professional mission in broader terms than their craft. For example, a former team member of ours, Lindsay, originally came on board as a project manager, but soon found her alignment running our company’s operations. From there, she played a crucial role in Kin’s early days helping new customers build better workplaces. The mission she discovered over time wasn’t to be the best project manager she could be, rather it was to help make work better for the people around her.
On the flip side, a software engineer whose mission is a mastery of low-level programming languages will stay incredibly close to the code, as it were, dwelling in the boundless nuances and semantics of each technology. A great example of this is Paul Kizior who, over his five years with us, has excelled as an engineer and, while his specialties have developed, he continues to thrive in the core craft he was hired for.
There’s no right or wrong professional mission, mind you, rather whatever someone’s mission is gives insight in how to view and even fulfill, someone’s trajectory at work.
Instincts at work
Instincts play a critical role in our work, and we’ve used assessments like Thinking Wavelengths to support observations we make of how we all instinctively deal with ambiguity, risk, and delegation. On one end of the spectrum are people who thrive in the undefined realms of a business. At the other end are those who relish routine and knocking out assignments. The way that translates to a software company like ours is, generally, people who love the risk will tend to the strategy and leadership end of the business, while the procedural work where mastery of one’s craft (design, engineering, etc.) is the pursuit will complement on the other end.
The original company I co-founded, We Are Mammoth, is a consulting company that requires a steady hand from our production team – the work is overwhelmingly routine, but it requires focus and attention to detail due to its sensitivity and timeliness. As such we’ve biased our team’s DNA toward predictable and steady over the years.
On the flip side, our product roles at Kin require more open-ended discovery and risk taking and, as such, we’re trying to bias the team’s DNA toward those traits. While there’s a business need for the routine-minded team members, we’ve biased our expectations
Sparks and opportunities
Sometimes there’s a spark that can take hold of someone that shoots them them out of their regular professional orbit. A great example of this is Ameer Mansur, our network administrator of six years. Ameer is a good example of someone in between the extremes I describe above – he’s tactical when he needs to be, yet his broader mission has been to ensure the integrity of our company’s IT and security infrastructure.
Well, along came an opportunity a couple of months ago to get Kin aligned with the European Union’s new data privacy regulations (GDPR). It was new to Ameer, but just the spark he needed to bring clarity to not just his role at Kin but to his career moving forward. Ameer leapt off his historically routine role, head first into a regulation that would push him to lead product, legal, and business overhauls within Kin.
As serendipity would have it, our company needed Ameer to grab this spark and pursue it with all he had. You might say he was the right guy at the right time, but you also might say we were the right company at the right time for him. It’s fun to be a party to this kind of transformation.
Which road should you take?
In his book Raising the Bar, Clif Bar founder Gary Erickson writes about a cycling trip in Europe where he chose to follow his map’s white roads rather than those marked in red. The red roads were the thoroughfares used to get from point A to B and the white roads, by contrast, often would meander up the side of a mountain only to dead-end quietly, or maybe take him through a series of small villages he’d otherwise have missed. Gary realized, of course, that he was drawn more to the journey than the destination. He enjoyed the unknowns; what couldn’t be planned.
Small workplaces like Kin often can’t offer the typical corporate ladder that larger organizations cling to out of organizational necessity. For some, that’s a deal breaker, as they have their destination and stop-offs planned out in advance of setting sail on their careers. My opinion, however, is that smaller companies offer much more in the way of finding true alignment of passion and career mission and while it doesn’t always have to be the meandering journey that I’ve come to prefer, it does offer just the right mix of opportunities and structure that are good for anyone looking for a little adventure in their work.