Momentum Episode 2:
Working From Home

Maintaining momentum for over a year now, more of us have been working from home than ever before; it's just one of the many status quos the pandemic has shifted for millions of people.

It may have set an important precedent for a future as many companies are staying fully remote or at least embracing a hybrid work from home policy moving forward.

So in the last year, what have we learned from our shift to remote culture? What are the strategies for success, tools for collaboration, and pitfalls to avoid in a work from home environment? Well, let's talk about it.

Hey everyone, welcome to Momentum, a podcast by Jotform where we talk about technology, productivity tips, best practices, and strategic insights that help us move forward in business and in life.

I'm your host Elliot and today I'm here once again with Jotform's VP of Marketing and Communications, Chad Read.

Chad, it's great to have you back. I take this to mean that our first episode didn't scare you off, which is hopefully a good sign.

It almost did. I slept on it but yeah, happy to be back.

Okay, well we're here and so we'll get straight to it. I figured today's topic is a timely one, truly defining the intersection of technology in our daily lives that can really feel like both a blessing and a curse at times, something many of us are still dealing with in fact.

Of course, I'm talking about working remotely.

Now there's a lot we could discuss here, probably enough to fill multiple podcasts but I love to focus mostly on the technology aspect, how that empowers us to do our job and stay connected both with our immediate teams and in some cases even our co-workers literal continents apart in Turkey for instance.

But also how it brings an equally important sense of responsibility to set boundaries with it given how accessible we are at all times of day with technology.

When it comes to working from home in that respect, it can certainly be a double-edged sword as I think we all know.

So why don't we start and just talk a little bit about the various tools we all use here at Jotform to stay connected when working from home? What are a few that come to mind for you?

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, it's amazing that we're recording this on what is it, March 12th today I think. I think it marks just about one year ago that we ventured into working remotely, 366 days since March 11.

Yeah, it was first and that's just first of all that's mind-blowing that we've made it a full year of working remotely.

You've survived.

Yeah, I feel really disconnected from the office at this point which is such a weird thing. I've only been in the office once to collect my computer so right, yeah, I never had a connection to begin with.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so yeah I always keep forgetting that you're among the wave of hires that we've brought on since we've been fully remote which maybe goes to the bigger question of, you know, we can actually make this happen remote and still find great talent and be productive.

But of course, that's all possible with the right technology. So it's like the mindset going into it is so different than the mindset we have now a year later.

I think when we looked at it as this temporary, hopefully we're only going to do this for a few weeks. I remember the first stay at home order was what, three weeks or something like that.

Yeah, it was kind of like, oh this will be a stopgap. Let's just find some processes that'll make sense like, you know, work from home but don't be a fool about it and we'll see you in less than a month.

But of course that wasn't the case and we're doing this indefinitely now, I mean who knows right.

But yeah, I mean I think we benefited from being a technology company, a productivity technology company and we kind of already had a mind for using software that makes our lives easier even when we're in the office.

Fortunately a lot of that translates really nicely to working remotely so you know we were already pretty set up on Slack which is really everyone knows Slack obviously at this point but it's a great chat tool.

I like it because it also integrates or Jotform integrates nicely with Slack too if we want to use it for certain use cases or set up notifications based off of form responses.

That's always kind of been my preference. Our team in Turkey prefers Discord and kind of for different reasons.

I think Discord is great because they like it because you have like a chat function basically or like an actual speaking function where all of the designers can talk to each other as if they were in the same room at the same time.

Well, it's interesting Discord started out as like a gaming streaming type app from what I know so it's interesting that's been repurposed as sort of an office collaboration tool.

I know, I'm probably a great pivot for them. I like it but I think functionally it doesn't work as well for different types of teams.

You know on the marketing team we have a lot of writers and we don't have a lot of utility for something that encourages people to speak to one another because if you go into our physical office it was a lot of it was very quiet.

I think we're in a very, very quiet office, right? So yeah, they don't necessarily need a way to facilitate speaking but yeah, I mean you know of course like all the other no surprises here on great tools.

But we use both Asana and Trello depending on the board, depending on the team and that's really invaluable. You need a way to be able to manage your work and track your progress and have some sort of touch point and be able to show what you're doing when people can't watch what you're doing.

Sort of interesting they serve somewhat similar functions Asana and Trello as far as project management platforms and showing collaboration.

It's interesting that we use both kind of for different reasons but I think we use them for good cause. It's honestly just a preference thing.

I couldn't even really speak to which one I like more. I like them both for different reasons but I think we started on Trello at first and I think Trello has been great too because we use that very collaboratively with our team in Turkey.

So we're working asynchronously like that and they're adding requests into our Trello board. They can add comments and we can move it along on our end and it doesn't have to be, you know, we don't have to be in the same meeting at the same time to move work forward basically with Trello.

Same thing with Asana and once again of course Jotform, I give a preference to tools that we can integrate with and both with both of those cases, a simple work request form, the work requests that get filled through a form automatically populate those boards.

So yeah, it's really important. Again, it's important when we're in the office but working remotely we need that.

I think the asynchronous communication is so important as well because when you're working remotely you might be online at different times a day but also just given the fact we have colleagues in Turkey that have an 11 hour time difference, it's great that they can populate your requests or move things along the funnel and then we wake up and see it.

That's the Kanban view I think they call it. You can see where a project is in its status.

Speaking of that, I think Jotform was set up fortuitously in that we obviously have had colleagues in Turkey and we've had to communicate with them remotely way before the pandemic.

I think we were used to having sort of that system in place and then it's just a matter of transplanting that to our local marketing team.

Yeah, so for me coming on in last June, I never had to make the transition from working in the Jotform office to working remotely because I just always started working remotely which in some cases might even be an advantage in some ways.

It wasn't difficult for me because that's just how I started, that's what I know but it'll be great to go back into the office in some sort of like maybe hybrid model because San Francisco, you know.

In any case, yeah, that's sort of an overview of a lot of the tools obviously. I'm jumping in here now for the question I asked you but obviously Zoom and Google Meets, videos.

We'll get to the video cadence and how we sort of conduct video meetings in a little bit but both those technologies, no big surprise there I think.

How we choose Zoom or Google Meet I think is kind of interesting though. I think Zoom is the most popular one but in the marketing team we usually use Google Meets I think just because it's so easy.

Yeah, I think I prefer when I'm actually in the call I think Zoom is probably the better one but yeah, just when I'm setting up all of our calendar invites or when I'm creating a calendar invite, just the one click dropdown to create it's so easy.

Dang you Google, I know what they're doing apparently.

I think that's a good segue into sort of our next topic which is meeting cadence, so basically how often, especially in a remote culture, like how often do you want to try to schedule meetings versus just settling things via email or slacking when you're working from home?

I think it's something taking consideration because we've all heard of Zoom fatigue especially since remote first became kind of a thing.

In an office especially a small office like we had, it's different, you just raise your hand, you can swivel around and touch base with somebody but you can't do that so it's a bigger deal to bring something up to someone when it's a remote first culture as opposed to just turning around and talking to them.

So how do you sort of establish the cadence of a meeting as a manager when you decide to settle something over email versus have an all hands on deck meeting?

If anything, I would say we probably have more meetings as we've been working from home and we just have to be more deliberate about them kind of like what you're saying but you know we can't just tap someone on the shoulder and say hey do you have a second to do whatever.

You create an invite, you create a video link, you add the people who you think need to be added to it and yeah, you have to be more conscious of being able to connect with people and like connecting people for the sake of connecting people with people.

Realize that some people are going a full day without interacting with colleagues other than the periodic Slack hello or something like that.

From a manager's perspective, that has probably encouraged me to create more meetings and more touch points just to take back what we lost by going fully remote.

We've set up more meetings probably throughout COVID just for that very reason. We want to be able to communicate and understand what's going on with everyone on our team and facilitate people connecting with one another and being more collaborative.

More meetings the better, it's probably a counter-intuitive stance on that but I do think it's probably for the best.

There's obviously a balance but I think you touched on a point like someone in your role or even my role, we're pretty often on calls communicating with either people on team or external vendors but there are other people on the team who just in general don't get that too much in their day to day.

A content writer might only have a couple calls a week and for them they'll start to feel pretty disconnected potentially if they're just not talking to anyone.

It's for sure a balance because obviously you can tip it the other way and even coming to Jotform we don't have nearly as many meetings here as like my last job for three months of working remote where it was almost an overwhelming amount of meetings because there's so many touch points.

It got to the point where you can't get work done because almost half of my day was taken up with meetings.

I think it's a matter of making sure you keep the touch points but also make sure everyone has their space as with all things a balance.

At first there was a lot of talk about Zoom fatigue. I think that's sort of framing it negatively because it's making you have to jump on Zoom, show your face and all that but I don't think at Jotform at least from what I've experienced our meetings aren't needless.

Usually everyone is contributing positively and voluntarily in every meeting that we have which I think is an important component of that, have the meetings but make sure they're intentional which I think we do well.

Going well of this too, turning on video or not for calls. We were talking before this and I think you were somewhat surprised I was saying you know kind of my last job people didn't turn on their video for calls.

I think this is kind of an interesting somewhat controversial topic of do you actually turn on your camera or do you just sit there with the blank screen? Some companies care about it, some maybe don't.

Before this, I really didn't have my camera on but then started Jotform and everyone had their camera on so I'm like okay I need to fix my hair today.

I just need to start rocking the cap at home but I think it's sort of an important almost philosophical mindset of you're going to have camera on interacting that way or not.

What are your thoughts on it?

It's funny we don't have an official rule at least that I'm aware that you have to have the camera on but you would be the oddball out if you suddenly didn't. It is an unofficial rule when everyone has their camera on.

Yeah, you should have your camera on. I feel pretty strong about that. That kind of goes back to what I was mentioning earlier on like trying to recreate the office interaction as best you can.

If you're in a meeting in an in-person office and you're in a big spacious room, you're not going to hide under the table and just listen and not show your face.

You want to be there and I think you can pick up so many non-verbal cues just by looking at someone's face that I think it's pretty important.

If you don't have the camera on and you're on mute, I just assume you're not working, like you're just somewhere else. I hate to assume that but I do.

Probably not to go off on a tangent but when I work at home, my wife works at home too but she doesn't have to have her camera on and sometimes if she's not the focal point in the meeting she'll walk in and ask me a question and she's like no, no I'm not in a meeting. I'm like you're in a meeting.

I wouldn't realize that. My sister teaches college at the University of Arkansas and she's teaching six classes this semester and she says pretty frequently everyone just logs on, says hi, turns off the camera, mutes and then she just knows they're gone because she'll get emails asking about stuff she blatantly covered two or three times and she's like I know you're not there.

That's the unfortunate part. It's also a bit of an accountability thing. I think it can be abused if you don't have your camera on and yeah, sometimes it needs to be framed that way.

Meetings have intentionality anyway. Almost every regular meeting we have someone talks. If you never have to engage, maybe that meeting could have been handled via email.

As long as you're engaging, I don't think there's a reason to hide. It's a comfortability thing. Some people might feel more comfortable with it or not but we've been in this for a year now and if you've had to have these in-person meetings, I feel like it's not too much to ask for.

If you're in a meeting and you didn't say anything, you shouldn't be in that meeting. That's as simple as that.

That's where the whole question about Zoom fatigue came in because a lot of companies overcompensated and with my last company half the calls I didn't need to be on.

So at that point, of course, I'm going to mute and turn off my camera because I have work to do or kind of thing.

I just think it's a balance.

Not work related but Zoom and camera related, when gyms closed and I was trying to do some online workout classes, a lot of people had their camera off. I just assumed to turn mine on because the instructor was thankful because they want to see what you're doing and see if you're doing the work.

The whole point is they're emulating you and you need to be able to gauge their form as an instructor.

If you're just seeing an entire screen of empty blank screens, that'd be pretty unfulfilling but probably a greater spotlight was drawn on you so people were probably watching you work out too which must have felt good.

So the next thing I have queued up is setting boundaries because this is an important thing to consider in a work from home environment because technology makes us so accessible.

We can always be pinged on Slack, get notifications, see emails come through and it's not like a work environment in the office where you can say okay I'm out and leave for the day and leave it behind you.

You wake up, you're in your office, you go to lunch, you're in your office, you're never not in your office.

So it's an equally important responsibility to have the discussion and mindset about framing boundaries and what it means to be online during a work day and how we communicate that.

How would you say we do that as a team?

This is an example of do what I say not as I do probably but I think we try to create structure around recreating the office dynamic as much as you can.

You're starting the workday when you announce to the team on Slack that you're online, you can be bugged with requests, you're there.

Similarly, when you're taking any significant break or stepping away for lunch, just letting your colleagues know and to close out the day you put an ending on it and tell everyone you're signing off and see everyone tomorrow.

Same three things you would say to everyone when you're walking into an office or leaving an office, just try to use that as a common courtesy and it also sets a boundary and lets everyone know you're not expected to work into the evening.

That's counterproductive. You don't want to burn yourself out doing that so it's important to set that up.

It's a really simple step that any company or manager can take to make sure they care for their employees' well-being and not try to burn anyone out.

It's framing expectations because like you said, you come into the office in the morning and you're there and available, you might step out for lunch then you're there and available again until you leave and then you're not.

It's like reflecting out of Slack and I've heard some hate towards Slack like oh man I'm glad I don't have Slack because you're always available, always reachable and like you would be in the office.

That's the whole point. You work from home shouldn't be an excuse to escape not being available.

The great thing about Slack is that you can toggle if you're online or not with that little green thing and you can put it to not online or online.

It's all about how the company frames expectations on that and of course you can break it up how you want like taking lunch breaks.

Normally over my lunch break I go to the gym, get in a quick 45 minute workout and that does a great job of splitting up my day, helping me feel refreshed.

As long as you have that break midday and you can communicate it and the expectations that when you're out you're out, when you're in you're in and you hold yourself accountable to that.

Having a point at which you shut down, log off for the night and then it's known you're not going to be reachable and nor should you be.

Once you log off on Slack it's like you stepped out of the office totally. Reflecting the office environment is key there.

Otherwise it's easy to slip into a trap of using the same computer for leisure and work at the same time and the lines blur and all of a sudden it's 9 p.m. and you're online shopping but responding to work emails and then a request comes through.

That becomes doubly tricky working for a global company like this where 9, 10, 11 p.m. at night suddenly we start to get all the emails and notifications from colleagues in Turkey who are just waking up.

It's important to double down on that, maybe set it so you don't get notifications after you log down but as with all workman things, it falls in self-accountability and making sure you're in charge of this yourself and give yourself that time off.

It's funny, this has been talked about a lot and at the beginning of COVID it felt a little like a vacation or relaxing. I remember wearing sweatpants more during calls and then it really shifted to treating work like work.

Wearing clothes you would wear, like jeans, not a big deal but months without wearing jeans was a big deal.

It's a mindset and investing in the right equipment for your office space, clearing your space and creating a schedule really helps.

There were a lot of guides and advisory articles about having a workspace, not working in your bedroom, dressing up like you're getting ready to go in for the day, not putting on a suit and tie but jeans and a nicer shirt, not loafing around in sweats all day.

There's validation behind that because it correlates with boundaries and getting in and out of the mind frame.

I say this as a chronic underdresser too so you're set, you're not faking anything.

For those not watching on YouTube, this is how I normally dress for this, beanie, t-shirt and some Jotform swag.

It's important that a lot of people weren't used to what it takes to become disciplined in a work from home environment because for many it was a big transition.

I consider myself fortunate or not, I was homeschooled growing up which explains a lot about myself but I was used to being disciplined on my own timeline and able to sit down, set my mind and finish something regardless of location.

I even finished college remotely when I started working here so for me the transition to work was easier.

Next week Elliot is starting an MBA program so it'll be busy but it goes back to self-dedication and discipline that some people have been more curated to have and others who have always been in an office environment suddenly have to set their own rules and boundaries.

I think that's a bigger learning curve for some than others so principles like getting dressed, treating it like a regular work day, carving out your space are especially helpful for those people.

The next thing to address is meeting cadence but also when to email versus Slack versus set up a face-to-face meeting.

I remember asking you in my first weeks on the job, what's the priority level, when do I just chat you, when do I provide an email, and when do I ask to hop on a call? What are your thoughts on prioritizing those methods of communication?

I think Slack is for urgent but not necessarily important. Email lives forever and is still a great default for communication.

You're not going to get a quick response but if you want to mull over something, bullet it out, attach files, or have a long thought out conversation that may take several days, email is the way to go.

Email is sensible and often the default for a global company. It creates good email habits. I've become a much better email writer and I look for that when hiring people.

Email is more formal and a record, Slack is more informal and for quicker responses but Slack messages disappear in a week so email is for important information and formalized records.

Slack is easier to bug someone for a quick response but you should be mindful not to overuse it because it can be distracting.

It's a matter of balance and being cognizant of attention especially managing many people. If I bug you 10 times a day, imagine how many others do.

You need to be responsive but also manage your availability.

People love to Slack me when I'm in a meeting and I try to spare you when I can but often don't.

One of the tougher things as a manager in a work from home environment is that suddenly you're the go-to guy and everyone is pinging you indirectly because in the office if I'm talking to you, it's less likely someone else interrupts.

But you can get six Slacks while you're on a meeting and no one really knows.

That still happened in the office too but it's part of the job you can't escape.

Let's talk about some lighter things we do with technology to facilitate a positive work from home culture like team camaraderie and virtual get togethers.

Everyone got a little fatigued sometimes of the virtual happy hours but there are ways to spice that up with what we do for team get togethers.

We did a lot of team challenges over the past year to varying degrees of success to build camaraderie and give people distraction in a positive way.

We did a reading challenge where we split into teams and logged pages read with prizes for the winning team.

We did workout challenges where you can do work from home workouts in your living room and log them toward a team goal.

Shameless product plug but Jotform was great for that because everyone has the Jotform mobile app and can log their workouts which populates the table to track progress.

Honestly a lot of fun. I did it selfishly because I want to read more but it's self-motivation and validation to log your workout or reading and see it populate the table.

We try to do a monthly game night or at least a happy hour but usually a game night.

I'm always surprised that not everyone has a chance to talk to each other. I have the luxury of bouncing around and having one-on-ones or group meetings with every single person in marketing but very few people have that kind of interaction.

Sometimes people just have one or two meetings a week and then they get a group of interactions and there's always a catch up like how have you been, I haven't seen you since last month.

That's the hardest thing about working from home, we don't have that so it's really important to have a monthly game night to give people the opportunity to connect.

We can't do in-person happy hours or lunches like before so virtual meetups are really important.

We can use Jotform for remote trivia which has been a wonderful use case we never thought about before with conditional logic to show different questions based on submissions.

One of the coolest uses of Jotform I've seen is facilitating trivia games with conditional logic and tallying responses.

I thought that was super cool and one of my favorite Jotform use cases.

You should try setting up a trivia night using Jotform. There'll be a blog coming out on that.

We've also done Jackbox TV which is just sharing a screen with prompts and everyone on their phone.

Simple investment to get the game and it's great for an hour to an hour and a half of fun.

The key takeaway is use the technology and tools at your disposal to keep camaraderie going and maintain a positive culture and mindset until people are vaccinated and can go back to the office.

A CNBC article projected that even at the end of 2021, 40% of people will still be working from home.

Currently 57% of people are working from home and that number is not expected to dip down soon.

Major companies have announced fully remote, optional, or hybrid models.

We can't predict exactly what Jotform will look like but might adopt some hybrid model.

Even if working from home part of the time, it's good to have best practices in place to do it to the best of your abilities.

The pandemic was a proof of concept that a lot of companies could work from home and it shows the value of in-person interaction.

It showed the pluses and minuses of both because you don't have in-person culture but technology helps.

Some roles might not take as much value from coming in every day as others who have multiple touch bases and collaboration.

Different approaches for everything and many companies are going remote, hybrid, or remote first.

It's an important proof of concept that companies can work remote who maybe didn't think they could at first.

It'll be interesting to see how it all unravels but that's the end of the topic list.

Is there anything we left out?

I don't think so. It's a great topic and we could go on and on about it.

Hopefully we'll be in the office at some point and you'll get to meet some of your colleagues.

I have not met most of the people on my marketing team which is interesting just virtually but hopefully be able to meet up soon and have a beer in real life which would be nice.

Until then we still have virtual meetups and our podcast. Speaking of which, our next episode will be on hiring remotely which Chad I know you are extremely excited about because you love hiring and especially doing so remotely.

So be sure to listen on that one and thank you for tuning in to Momentum.