Daniel Pupius & Nicholas Walsh – Stronger remote cultures: Rethink Your Work Week

It's a delight to welcome Daniel Pupius, CEO and Co-Founder at Range. His session is entitled A Stronger Remote Cultures: Rethinking the Work Week. Understanding the phases of this transition and how it impacts the culture of an organization is critical to developing a successful remote workforce.

Daniel, thank you for sharing your genius with us. Take it away. Hi, my name's Dan.

I'm CEO and co-founder of Range, really excited to be part of GitLab Commit. When I worked at companies like Google and Medium, I started to focus on the question of why the more humans you add to a company, the less human they become. This led me on a journey to start Range.

We make team effect of the software that keeps remote teams productive, focused and connected. And I'm Nick. I'm CMO of Range, and our pursuit is more of a conversation about how rethinking your work week can help your remote team work better, especially during this uniquely challenging time.

And in the age of covid, we at Range and I think everybody I've been talking to has really had to step back and understand how we can better work together. And we're really started also re-evaluating the work we could solve. And I know you have done a lot of thinking about this and a good place to start maybe exactly how do the nine to five work week amount of work, we're all kind of used to come about.

It started about one hundred years ago. Yeah, the work, as we know it was designed by Henry Ford in the 20s and working hours it really ballooned during the Industrial Revolution and he identified that reducing the amount of hours and the days that people work actually increased efficiency. So prior to industrialization, it was pretty common for half a day to be considered a full workday.

And people worked around fifteen hundred hours a year. And then with the Industrial Revolution, it was all about efficiency and repeatable small units of work and work. The workweek doubled, almost doubled to thirty five hundred hours, which is around 60 hours a week.

So even with Ford's reduced work week, it was still about industrial processes. They were building cars and it's predominately manual labor. So it's strange to me that we consider such a standard when so much has changed.

Yeah, I think if you look at the workweek as just as a technology, it's incredibly anachronistic. Right. I mean, we're essentially do we do it that way because we've been always doing it that way.

It's outdated. It's it's not optimized. And we're not working in factories anymore.

And I think many of the things that made us made sense back then, I think no longer makes sense. Yeah, right. The people at this conference are knowledge workers, that the work is novel and creative.

And from a management perspective, the idea that employees are working because they're at work, it might be comforting, but it's very short sighted. So organizations that limit flexibility and of creating these low trust working environments and it just plainly isn't the best way to get the most out of people. It's not the best way to get the best work, the the highest quality work and the highest output.

And we talk a lot about high cost working environment and what are some ways in which knowledge workers is different, especially when you think of a healthy, balanced environment where you can balance well-being and performance. Yeah, so creative work is really about focus, attention. And when you look at the studies, people really have a really hard time focusing for more than two hours.

Really the optimal time is one hour on with 15 minutes off. So thinking that you can plow through a nine to five at the effectiveness is really, you know, it's not a great idea and will actually leave you feeling depleted. So so that's one aspect.

The other aspect is that natural energy levels, some people might have heard of, the idea of lights and hours are good morning person and evening person. So different people actually have melatonin levels that fluctuate at different rates and different and different sequences. This is your circadian rhythm.

And these these rhythms affect how you can focus and how to problem solve. so large peak in the morning hours, peak in the evening. And for those of you listening, you can figure out what you are by where do you naturally want to wake up in the morning and when do you actually want to go to sleep?

At night. And if you find the midpoint, that might help you determine if you're like right now, just before 3:30, you're in luck because after 5:30, you're an owl. And there's a, I guess the third bird name, but the middle area is called the third bird.

m. meeting, you'd really like to be the top of your game. It's got to be pretty tough.

You really you're going to be wanting to do creative brainstorming work in the late afternoon. And what the study shows that during the trough period, which for most people is of the early afternoon, more accidents happen. Doctors forget to wash their hands, for instance, and people are less creative.

If you ask people to spot a fake coin, they're less likely to spot the fake coin during during that time. Yeah, I remember reading, actually, how judges will make different decisions on the same type of cases in the morning versus the afternoon, even in the best of times 9 to 5 can be really tough. Obviously Dolly Parton pointed that out and enter Covid, it's untenable.

What are the key shifts that we're seeing in the modern world and this kind of strange new normal? Yeah, so I mean, a lot of people talk about this new normal being an explosion of remote work. So it's first off, stop that and acknowledge that this isn't normal remote work.

This is work from home during a global pandemic and things are very different. Many of us are working from home with kids. I'm kind of half expecting mine to jump in the background at some point or the baby crying.

And there's a lot of tumult in society. So this is really, you know, it's a cliche now, these unprecedented times. But at the same time, this period has really accelerated trends that are already under way and obviously get knows better than most remote workers are becoming increasingly common.

And even for organizations that weren't really acknowledging a hybrid situation, hybrid was the new normal. People weren't always in the office at the same time, they were traveling, looking for working for the coffee shop. So so a lot has changed.

And I think what what the last few months have done is they've shone a light on how we work and how we communicate. And it's really a microscope. And it's kind of funny to me because fringy off design topics that, you know, were once in random start groups and our common conversations on Twitter or even on NPR, I had I had like asynchronous communications on NPR yesterday morning when I took my daughter to the dentist.

Yeah, it is amazing how limited the vocabulary that no one obviously is fluent in this and everybody else is gaining fluency. I mean, we were remote first to begin with. We have one day we'd all work from the road.

We would have remote commute. So we had kind of the practice down. But I remember when we shifted to continue and we were all really trying to figure out with other changes the kids at school.

And I had kids at home as well. And you and I were talking a lot about how much this is going to really struggle with this. You know, putting this into this work week scenario.

I mean, you propose these remote team handbooks and the concept of winter work. Can you talk us through those both? Yeah, sure.

I mean, generally, the idea of windows work is that you break up your weeks into multiple disjointed blocks. And there are two sides to that. One is planning a week to figure out what works best for you.

And then the second is communicating with our team so you can set expectations. And the idea here is that you're supposed to be schedule has to be at the moment, things are so difficult for the others, but it also has to be coordinated. It can be flexible and chaotic.

So you look at the responsibilities you have in the week. When do you have to, you know, help your daughter on the Zoom call when you have to cover other responsibilities, when can you be available? Looking at energy blocks further, I can allow a lock of an owl and then sketch out work blocks that align with those requirements.

We also have this key insight that I think of work has been bimodal. If you think of work as being on or off ends of feeling, you're always feeling tired. So we try and encourage people to think of three states and we color code this red, yellow, green.

So green is focused like for deep work, for meetings and colors we can be completely on. Yellow is when you're kind of working, but maybe distracted. So my daughter might be on a visual art class and I might have to help her.

I'm mostly working. And that red is obviously you're not working and you're focused on your family time. And then, per the nomenklatura point, you know, we share as we share that with the team and people get to practice it, knowing green means we all means what red means.

It becomes our own shared vocabulary. And we were very clear, like, OK, that's when this person is this type of availability. And we update those regularly every week.

Yeah, we we we encourage people to create these personal handbooks, which they update. It has this information, but also other stuff like contact information, priorities, development goals. And then, yeah, I can see on the Monday that someone's updates, they have to go and have a look and see what their availability is for the week.

It's really useful to know, for instance, that, you know, you're going to be on two to four in the afternoon. Yeah, I think when we first did the workbooks, it really helped me personally. But I think all of us step back and really reflect on how things have changed and then communicate that out because things have been changing almost weekly.

It seemed it for a second. We're going to do this once on that set. But actually, you're really recognizing that you're processing so much information.

Everybody's adapting in different ways. And it really requires you to to think each word about each week, not as a work week, but just how you're going to manage this current stage, if you will. And I think it really helped me also just manage the guilt, that feeling guilty when I'm working for not being with the kids and helping them out.

I mean, feeling guilty because I'm not with the kids. And then the team really got a better sense of what our new workspace is and work environments were like and what it was like. Yeah, I honestly think you tapped into the key magic of it really is that we're so conditioned to feel shame and guilt at not being at your desk the whole workday for leaving early and slacking off.

So by asking people to tell the team what works for them and then the documents that you're implicitly giving them permission to figure out what works best for them and then and then allowing that. And that comes a lot of stress. m.

in the afternoon. It's like it's so silly. It's so deeply ingrained.

But it does it is something it also really takes practice once we roll this out. We then tested, reiterated, just like you would any kind of product and any type of process and really refine it. So it felt like a good process that people were collaborating on.

And then you get the hang of it. I mean, when you actually communicate to the kids, my my kids will check it in like, are you red right now? Are you green?

And they start to talk about it. And that's all for you. Yeah, it's now it's really that here that shared vocabulary.

I think that's all the time we have. But for anybody interested on rethinking their work, we have a link to Rangers' Free Guide to Window Work. co/blog/windowedwork.

co/blog/windowedwork. You can download that. And thanks so much for hosting us.

Thank you for having us here and looking forward to watching the other sessions. And if anyone wants to try Range referring attendee's three months free just use the referral code: Commit. Enjoy the conference.