This episode features an interview with Chase Warrington, Head of Remote at Doist, a leading remote-first company. Having worked remotely since 2009, Chase has managed teams across all timezones and is passionate about the future of work. He has been named a LinkedIn Top Voice for Remote Work, a Global Top 50 Remote Enabler by Remote.com, and is a frequent contributor to the world’s top remote-work outlets such as Forbes, BBC, and AP. In this episode, Amanda and Chase dive into remote work; discussing challenges, experience, and what companies get wrong.
This episode features an interview with Chase Warrington, Head of Remote at Doist, a leading remote-first company. Having worked remotely since 2009, Chase has managed teams across all timezones and is passionate about the future of work. He has been named a LinkedIn Top Voice for Remote Work, a Global Top 50 Remote Enabler by Remote.com, and is a frequent contributor to the world’s top remote-work outlets such as Forbes, BBC, and AP.
In this episode, Amanda and Chase dive into remote work; discussing challenges, experience, and what companies get wrong.
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“What I would love to see those same leaders do though, is to stop saying you can't build team culture in a remote environment, or you can't collaborate, or we can't do good brainstorming sessions, or have good relationships with our employees, or mentor our team because that is not true. And you're seeing it being done at scale now. Companies with tens of thousands of employees going remote. We're a team of 100 and in 35 different countries, and at one time, we were seen to be one of the big ones that were doing fully remote work. And so, it is being done. And I do think those companies will continue to see an exodus of talent if they don't invest in at least trying to make it work on some level.” – Chase Warrington
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Episode Timestamps:
*(02:13): Chase’s background
*(06:20): Segment: Story Time
*(09:43): Chase explains the nuances of remote work
*(17:53): Segment: Getting Tactical
*(18:17): Problems that Chase is solving in remote work
*(22:18): Things companies get wrong about remote work
*(27:46): Breaking remote experience into subsets
*(30:02): Segment: Ripped From The Headlines
*(30:22): Chase’s thoughts on back to office mandates
*(33:05): Segment: Asking For a Friend
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Links:
Connect with Chase on LinkedIn
Do You Need a Head of Remote? White Paper
Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn
Amanda Berry: Chase, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me today. How are you?
Chase Warrington: I am doing great. Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to it.
Amanda Berry: I've been super excited to talk to you. Uh, This idea of remote work culture has really been invading. I know my life and the life of our listeners for quite a while. So it's really great to have an expert like you on to sort of help us understand and how to do it really well.
But I wanna first start off and understand just a little bit more about you. So when you talk about your career journey and how you got to where you are today.
Chase Warrington: So I, I think I'm one of those people that has finally arrived to a point in their career where they feel like they're doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing, which is a, a great thing to be able to say, and I'm very thankful for that.
I was always very passionate for, I, I guess lack of a better word, about the movement towards remote work and have always worked remotely, but I've seen the full spectrum of remote work. Afar as a spectator. And then in my entire career since 2009, I've, I've been working remotely in different environments, hybrid, remote, first, all forms of distributed work.
So I've seen the good and the bad and, and different types of roles. You know, as someone who was sort of an outsider being, being one of those people in a hybrid organization that wasn't in the main office and getting to experience what that was. Somebody who's been working for a remote first company and seeing what that looks like and really optimizing for remote work.
And so I've arrived at this point now where I'm, I'm really excited about making it work for the long term and at a really, really high level. And, and so, you know, over 13 or 14 years of working remotely on five or so different continents with people around the world, I, I guess I've, I've learned a few things about what works and what doesn't, and it's, it's fun to be able to share that with our team and, and with other teams as.
Amanda Berry: I just wanna let everyone know how I came across your name. We, I saw an article where you were interviewed about being Head of Remote at Doist, and it just sort of struck me like we're moving towards a really great space where we have people like you who are helping focus on that remote culture and the remote employee experience.
Can you just tell us a a little bit about what you do at Doist as Head of Remote?
Chase Warrington: Yeah, sure. I mean, it is definitely a, a new-ish role. You know, there's. A ton of people out there with this title or, or you know, there's variations of it. There's Head of Remote and VP of remote and remote lead and all sorts of things.
So there are people out there and you're seeing more and more companies invest in this type of role. And so really what we do, Is it, it varies a lot company to company. I've, I've talked to a lot of these people at different organizations who have a similar role, and it really does vary so much depending on where the organization is and their movement towards distributed work and, and how big they are and how distributed they are and where they're coming from, the types of products they build.
So it varies quite a bit, but in, in my case, dus is a little bit of a, an odd. Within this, that we were already remote first. We've been a, a remote first company for 15 years, since, since we began to exist, and so we weren't coming through some hardcore transition from an office-based environment to a remote environment or anything like that.
What it was for us is that remote is, is so core to our DNA as a company that we decided, you know, the landscape has changed quite a bit through the pandemic. I mean, When we were pre pandemic, we were operating an environment where it was so rare to be a distributed team, to be a fully remote team, that there weren't products that served us.
There weren't, you know, special services there. There weren't a lot of consultants helping those companies figure it out. We were just kind of like wild west, just figuring it out as we. And, and that's changed now. It was just awesome. There's tons of new products emerging. There's lots of companies sharing best practices and ideas about how to do this at a better level.
There's whole new product segments existing now that didn't exist before. So what we said was, let's have somebody lead that charge for us. We wanna be the very best in the world at doing remote work. And so let's have somebody. Take that charge and, and carry it forward and, and make sure that we're doing that.
And so that's, you know, broad stroke, that's what we wanted to do. And then there's a lot of nuance wi within in the details.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, I, I definitely wanna dig in on those nuances. I know I have a million questions cuz as someone who's experienced remote work and have, you know, it's one of those things where I feel like I can see.
I don't know what it means to do it well, but I know that this isn't it. That's kind of what I've seen, you know, some places how, how it's been done. So I'm really, I'm looking forward to digging into the details. But let's move into our first segment story time. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Story Time, story Time Let You Story.
Amanda Berry: So with that title, Head of Remote, I'm just curious if there was a moment or something you've seen across your life, a moment where you go, I'm interested in really digging into remote work and helping make this better. And it could have been something pandemics, you know, that started, or something that you've seen of, of course, your career or childhood.
Just curious if you have something you can point to.
Chase Warrington: Actually that's, that's pretty cool. You asked that question because I don't often get to mention this, but the first person that I knew that was a remote worker was my mom actually. And she's kind of like a little superhero in this world for me because she turned her nursing career into a remote job.
She really wanted to work from home. She wanted the whole like flexibility of her schedule. She hated the commute. . So she managed to turn a nursing career into a work from home job like 25 years ago or something, which from today's vantage point is like insane that, that she was able to do
Amanda Berry: that. Yeah.
They, I'm using dialogue to, to, to log in all that.
Chase Warrington: Yeah. Yeah. I like, I don't know how she did it, but she, she made it work and beyond that, she ended up getting a four day work week, which is a whole nother thing. But anyway, but it was a horrible experience, to be honest. Like she, I saw it took a terrible toll on her.
It was one of those toxic environments where, One of the outsiders trying to just prove that she was working, had to ask to go to the bathroom, had to be online at all times, day and night, answer things immediately. And so I think it just planted this seed in my mind like, you know, the very worst of remote is really, really bad.
And I hear people complaining about remote work and I, and I feel for them cuz I, I understand, I'm lucky that I work at a. That invests in it and wants to make it work. So we, we do all the things to make that happen, but a lot of companies don't. And a lot of people have experienced that version of remote that does kind of suck.
Like, let's just be honest, it's not really pleasant. You know, I didn't know it at the time, of course, and I probably didn't even know it until recently, but I think that's always stuck with me and, and been something that I, that I looked for even in my very first. Coming out of college, like I'm gonna find a company that's not just gonna allow me to work remote, which was a big filter at the time in 2009 anyway, or 2008 anyway, but then someone who's gonna let me do this and also let me thrive.
And so that, that came with a lot of sacrifice. And I think one of the things that really motivates me now is that I don't want people to have to make those sacrifices. It seems ridiculous for knowledge workers to have to sacrifice career, money, family, whatever the case may be, where they wanna. Just for their job, when their job can be done from anywhere.
So that, that kind of motivates me to today, I think. Did you talk to your mom
Amanda Berry: about what you do and, and get advice from her as you're designing software or whatever you're doing? Yeah. .
Chase Warrington: She thinks it's so cool. Yeah. She's like, oh, I wish we would've had this. You know, I mean, it, it really was a, a long chapter and her life.
But that's the thing is, you know, for her, for her, she persevered through it. She made one of those massive sacrifices just to have that flexibility, just to eliminate the commute essentially. And it was horrible, but that's what you did. You know, and I've seen other people, myself included, you know, take big pay cuts to for, for more flexibility and, and things like that.
So yeah, I just, I think it's nice to see those shackles kind of being removed and saying, no, you can actually do this from anywhere and, and we're gonna all not just do it, but we're gonna make it a really great experience for you too. . Yeah.
Amanda Berry: Something you said just now. I, I was reading something you wrote, I think it was for Forbes.
I believe that's what it was for. And it really stood out to me. It's a quote that says, quote, there are companies that offer remote work and there are companies that make sure remote employees thrive. And I think those are such an interesting nuance and it really got me thinking, you know, when I think about my friends now who are looking for jobs and they want remote and they just type in hybrid industry and then remote and, and.
Struck me that that's almost that next level of when you're interviewing for a job to, to talk about that. But I was wondering if you would just help us understand the nuance behind that statement, because it was a real aha moment for me. Just, just forward thinking and I thought it was a really, really smart quote and I really liked it.
Chase Warrington: Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I, I think that's the, the next step that a lot of companies, this is what's really exciting about this whole movement. You, you had these knee-jerk reactions to the pandemic, right? Where tens of millions, hundreds of millions of companies suddenly had to go to some form of remote work and just figure it out.
And, and that's, you know, like we mentioned, Something that a lot of people have experienced to this point, which probably wasn't very great. And then there was this like second chapter that came sort of towards the, a year or two later, which was like, Hey, this actually works, you know, a fair percentage of those companies, so this actually works on some level or another.
We're gonna invest in doing this for the long-term, not just this knee jerk reaction. And so that was, that was one step. And. We're getting to this stage where a big percentage of those companies are saying, let's really optimize this. Like, let's not just push through it because our employees demand it or because we're afraid we're gonna lose people.
We're kind of doing it begrudgingly. They're doing it with a lot of intention and enthusiasm and, and really a high level of investment. When I see companies doing that, what they're doing is they're optimizing their tool set. For example, you know, they're not just. Copying and pasting what they were doing in the office and trying to throw it on Zoom or throw it in Slack and just see what happens.
They're thinking about how do we want to work day to day? You know, what does our version of the one-on-one look like right now? Or what does the brainstorming session look like? Or how do we build social capital as a team and connection and hu you know, human connection and things like that, like beyond just the work.
And so those are those little tweaks that are happening now and those, those levers being pulled that I think. Are paying a lot of dividends for the people on the ground that are, you know, now getting into that next phase of what remote can be like.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. It's funny you mentioned, you just mentioned about like throwing in a, in a Zoom.
I know my past experience, I worked at a company a few companies ago. They had remote workers, but it was a real sort of afterthought, unfortunately, because most of us were in the office. So we'd be like, oh no, we forgot to add a. Virtual meeting for so-and-so. Oh. And we forgot to send them the handouts.
They haven't even looked at it yet. So that sort afterthought. And then it wasn't a good experience cuz we weren't interacting with, with those folks that are on the phone. It was like a conversation in the room and then they would like be able to chime and you, you could just feel that it wasn't done well.
And, and then you point out this, like a lot of people went remote for, you know, the pandemic and what my experience was is, . Okay, well we'll just do employee onboarding now and add a zoom. We'll just put it over Zoom now, and not really any thought. And, you know, reading your stuff, one of the things that stuck out to me, as you mentioned, that asynchronous time or you know, the employee's not having the ability just to go up to someone's desk and be like, especially as a new employee, hey, how do I use the copier code?
Or, you know, where do I get to this? You know, where's, where's the office supplies? So you miss a lot of stuff. Just those interactions and then, , the thought that they can just add a zoom to meetings and make it better, like, like an employee onboarding experience. And I don't know. Have you talked to a lot of people?
Have they talked about like something like an employee onboarding where it has to be more than just adding Zoom or, or what are your thoughts on that?
Chase Warrington: Yeah, so a, a couple things like you, you nailed it with a, a few points here in particular. So one is that the leading remote companies, like if you study the ones that are doing this at a really high level and, and doing it at scale, you know, with hundreds and thousands of of employees, they're very focused on asynchronous communication.
So with asynchronous communication, you're talking about non-instant communication. The being in the conference room together physically is the most synchronous thing you can do. And sending a, a message on a chat and not getting anything back for 72 hours is the most asynchronous thing you can do. And so there are companies on different ends of that spectrum and, and you know, all different places in between and how they handle their business every day.
But the ones that are doing it at a really high level tend to be on the side of the spectrum that's more asynchronous. So that's really great for. But it really does help people focus. It keeps people from being addicted to their chat tools and just trying to quote unquote show up to work and allows them to get into like a deep work state of mind where they can get a lot done, be very productive.
It also forces some things like, you know, forces you to stop focusing on whether or not someone's present, but more so what are they producing. And so it creates this whole environment that's focused on outputs instead of inputs. And there's, there's other things with that, but the downside is that you miss a lot of that serendipitous conversation.
That you would have. You know that we like mentioning the word, the phrase social capital. Again, you miss those just like connections that would happen, those little aha moments or little interactions that might happen, the proverbial like water cooler that a lot of people refer to. And so that's where you have to come in and you have to intentionally create that.
Like that doesn't just ignite and just happen with without some, some purpose and intention there. And that's, that is something that a lot of remote companies that are, that are trying to do this. Invest a lot in the other thing they invest in to prevent you from having to. Tap on someone's virtual shoulder to figure out how to use the copier is a system of a lot of documentation.
Most really well done. Remote companies are very document oriented and they have a lot of documentation stored in a transparent place where everybody can be a documentarian. Everybody can edit and adjust those files and access those files. They're not locked behind some wall and everything is very wide open and public.
And so all those things kind of working. Make it work. , you asked about onboarding too, and I just wanna say at DUIs we actually went, we're a fully remote company, very, very asynchronous, and we actually incorporated a very human element. We pair our new hires up with a mentor, and then we actually fly them to go meet their mentor and do a mentorship trip wherever they are in the world, and they go spend a week together in person.
So there's two things associated with that is one, you have to. Really nail your onboarding and, and we've worked very, very hard at that to make it work with a combination of asynchronous and then the most synchronous thing you can do by putting people together. And then also just understand that remote first doesn't mean remote only you can have that, that human element involved and, and we sprinkle that in throughout our culture, just with the mentorship trip during onboarding being the first interac.
Yeah,
Amanda Berry: lemme follow up on that cause I'm curious what your relationship's like for people. I'm assuming you work with hr, it, all these different departments, probably leaders, maybe people managers. Can you talk about what that looks like for you and how, how you build these relationships and how often you work with some of these folks?
Like who are your, who are your main counterparts and other departments?
Chase Warrington: Yeah, this is so interesting and one of the only things that I've noticed with the other people in a similar position at at other companies is that we're very cross-functional by nature. So it's like you're not gonna work in a silo.
I'm a team of one, which is a little bit weird for me at at this point. I'm used to having like a team around me, but I don't feel like a team of one at all. I'm. Attached to the people ops team and the finance team and the marketing team, and even the product teams and, and such to an extent. So I sit on the, under our COO on the operations comp side of the company and, and I'm connected to, to that side.
So I work a lot with, with those teams, but I really feel like I work across the, the whole company mean the idea is to make a very central part of our company DNA operate at a really high rate. And so it just involves touching every, every area of the.
Amanda Berry: And I'm gonna move us into our next segment, getting tactical.
Chase Warrington: I'm trying to figure out tactics and to be perfectly honest, and I didn't have to worry about tactics too much, here I am in charge of trying to say, why did you sleep through tactics, tactics.
Amanda Berry: So you clearly have a very strong understanding of remote culture. What are some of the big problems you find you're solving for when it comes to remote first ?
Chase Warrington: One of the, the challenges that we have to face at Doist is that we have been built as a very asynchronous company from the very beginning and.
Super unique compared to people that I talk to at other companies who are trying to infuse, trying to pull people out of the, the sync world where you're, you're used to being in an office and now you're trying to put them in this virtual world and teach them how to do asynchronous work. We've been so indoctrinated in the async world and now there's some really great.
Collaboration tools and practices being shared, that that showcase how you can have a, a balance of the two, a little bit more synchronicity on top of the, the asynchronous foundation, I guess might be a way to phrase it. And so that's one of the challenges that's, that's odd and kind of unique to do is, is that we're trying to actually infuse a little bit more human connection.
More, more time for people to, to connect both around their work and, you know, for personal reasons and give them a chance to collaborate in a more synchronous environment. So that, that's something I, I think, connected to that is, you know, last year we, we brought people back together again in person for the first time since pre pandemic.
Prior to that, we were doing company retreats every. And we had just started doing what we called mini retreats, which were like little individual team meetings twice a year. So every six months you, you could look forward to spending a week with your teammates. And then we'd gone many years because of the pandemic without being able to do that.
And so that was really hard. I mean, we had like 30% of our company had never met another teammate before, never spent any time together in person. And I mentioned that, you know, remote first doesn't mean remote only thing that's really important to us. We see it as a core. Of the kind of remote infrastructure and doing it in a sustainable way.
So we, we had to figure out how to do that, you know, in the pandemic still kind of going on and figure out, you know, this is something that's important to our, to our company, so how do we make this happen? And, and I think that just kind of speaks to what I hear a lot from other remote leaders that is, that they're, they're investing a lot in building team camaraderie and connection and, you know, we've, we've got a lot of the tools in place.
We've got a lot of. The practice is in place. There's lots of things to tweak within that, but that connection bit is what's being kind of tagged as the big challenge that people are trying to overcome, and that's what the detractors of remote work are kind of attacking. So you're trying to figure out how to do that really well.
Now these days.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. It's funny you mentioned like you, you get folks together still first for team meetings and retreats or you know, you did at least pre pandemic. Cause I know when I, when I've met my coworkers, and I'm sure you know, our listeners can identify with us when you meet a coworker in person, even if we've done this, you know this almost like what we're doing this face-to-face, but through a video when you meet someone, it's like a whole different experience.
You know, oh my gosh, I didn't know you were so tall. Or things like that, you know, come up or just the joy of. Excitement of seeing someone in person. So I I I love that you have that sort of core principle that even though you're remote first, you still get people together, cuz It does, it does change your relationship with folks.
Chase Warrington: It does, yeah. And that, and that really does help. I mean, there's a tangible effect to that, like on the bottom line in the company's health. You know, it doesn't just sound nice, , it's, it's like, oh, who's gonna say, who's gonna say anything bad about that? Like, of course we want people to get together and to like their teammates, but it comes at a significant cost.
You know, a lot of people will say, oh, you, you're remote so you don't have office leases and bills, utility bills, and things like that. We probably. You know, spend all the money that we would spend on that in bringing people from 35 different countries to, to one place twice a year. And so we want to be remote because we want to be remote, not because of the cost savings.
And then any cost savings that we do incur, we probably reinvest in, in these things. So it's important for people to recognize that. I think cuz it does come, especially as you get more and more distributed, it, it becomes quite costly. But we think it's worth every penny. .
Amanda Berry: Absolutely. What are some of the top things that you see companies getting wrong when it comes to remote work?
I mean, we've talked about a couple, but there are some, some quick ones we can just pinpoint and maybe talk, maybe even talk about how doist or thoughts that you have on how to start solving for some of those.
Chase Warrington: One of the first ones that I always see the, the knee-jerk reaction to doing is taking everything that you were doing in the office and then just throwing it into the digital world.
And we, we kind of touched on this already, but I think it's worth reiterating. I've heard somebody else say that you have to pressure test every single aspect of your business to make sure that it's built for the new world that you're. and not the old world. And, and I think that's true. You know, the, the tools you use and the, and the way in which you're, you're gonna do every little thing has probably shifted.
And if you just try to recycle old ways of doing things, you're probably not gonna get a, a great result. So if you're getting a mediocre result, ask yourself, have you by chance just fall into the trap of saying, oh, we're just gonna throw everything in a Zoom account or a Slack account, or whatever. Have you have.
Thought how you're gonna work day to day. That that's one. I think another one is, is going very, I've, I've used this word a lot already, but very synchronous. You, you hear horror stories about people spending eight hours on Zoom calls and just feeling like they can't. Get out of Zoom and they never really get any real work done meetings.
I think I've seen some st statistics recently that showed like meetings have surged like 40% since pre pandemic, and much of that is, is happening because everybody's armed with a Zoom account now. So fighting that inclination to, to go very synchronous and to jump into Zoom calls and to put everything in a.
It. It's something else that you see quite a bit. I think the third thing is, is connected to that, but it's expecting immediate responses. So you see people that are just, they never get to their work because they're constantly being pulled into chat conversations. There's some statistic that shows, like every time you're distracted from what you're doing, it takes you 23 minutes to reverse that and to get back into the flow of whatever you're doing.
So if you're writing a blog post and then you keep getting pulled, Chat conversations, it's costing you hours every day to get back into the flow, and this is detrimental on the, when you extrapolate that out across, you know, tens or hundreds or thousands of employees, it's pretty brutal. So, aside from just being, you know, personally a sad way to work every day, it's, it's hard on the company's bottom line as well.
Yeah,
Amanda Berry: I, I know I can, I've, I've experienced that as well. You wrote an article, I think it was just, it was about how to do remote work really well, and one of those, you have like a clip of an email, I'm assuming from like a people manager to their employees or to their employee where they outline these like very strict, rigid rules.
Like you need to respond to Slack within 10 minutes and you need to turn your phone ringer on and answer. This is not the time to screen your phone calls. And it, it really took me back. . I've worked for people like that and just how it does affect your work because you're so worried about missing a, a message that you're not able to just to stop, cut yourself off and like you still like write a blog post, right.
Or build a presentation, or whatever it is you do. That really reminded me of how final I've come. But then I wondered maybe for me like a fourth one for your list is, should we be training people, managers on how to do this stuff better? Because it really. At that I would call like a grassroots level. If your manager's not good and doesn't know how to do a remote work, but the company still promotes remote first, there's still gonna be a huge disconnect.
Chase Warrington: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's worth investing in and at Doist, I don't think this is so necessary for, you know, my role isn't to train other managers because we've raised those managers up that have kind of grown up in this environment. But I think if you're, if you're making that transition, Then it's worth investing in someone that can help lead your leaders on how to do this remotely.
And if nothing else, there's, there's some amazing consultants out there that specialize in exactly this. There's some incredible. Workshop leaders and people who can just give you some basic skills to, to tweak the way that you're gonna approach leadership, workshop facilitation, meeting facilitation, collaboration in the virtual space.
All these things are just a bit different and, and not always. Better either. I think that's like, okay to admit, you know, we just got back from a leadership retreat where we brought all our leaders together into one place and we got so much done in like four or five days. And, and there were some things that just wouldn't have come out of the virtual world in the same amount of time.
But because we were there, because we were jamming on ideas and using tools and the, you know, physical space together, certain things came out of that. , we, we can compensate for that in the virtual world. There are ways to come around and, and do that, but it takes some, some effort and some, I guess intentionality again, is the word.
Yeah.
Amanda Berry: You know, as I'm listening to you, it just strikes me that, and I'd love to have your perspective on this, we spend a lot of time talking about the employee experience and work culture. There needs to be a big understanding or agreement. , there's remote culture, there's in-person culture, there's remote experience, employee experience, there's in-person employee experience, and I don't feel like there's a lot being talked about.
Just that topic, folks like you who work in that space, Head of Remote and really champion remote work. I'm sure you have to have opinions about this, but I feel like we're talking so broadly with this idea of employee experience and work culture. We almost have to start breaking it down. These sort of subsets.
Chase Warrington: Yeah. I wasn't sure if we'd, if we'd get to this somewhere along the way, but I, so I'm happy you ask about it. We mentioned a few points before that you, what do you see companies struggling with in this area? And I think I, I thought about mentioning it then is like the, the fourth point that I might have made was this idea that you have to.
Different experiences for different groups. And I think what you should be striving for is a location agnostic approach where people, if I show up and I work at the main office, my experience should almost feel exactly as if I worked from home or if I was working from a cafe in Paris or whatever it might be.
You're not gonna achieve that necessarily, but striving for that is the key. And so if you're trying to do that, then you're giving everybody a, a very similar experience. You're also serving the company really well because, Investing in creating different types of experiences. Just use like the tool sets that the, you know, the, the different apps that you're gonna use to run your business on.
If you have one that's really optimized for in-person collaboration, and then you have to have a whole nother one that's optimized for the virtual hybrid space. It gets very messy. Really quick. When do we use which one? Oh, we have one remote worker joining this meeting. What is the process for this now and, and is this ideal anymore?
It raises a lot of questions and so, you know, I, I think striving for that location agnostic experience is the best case scenario. It's like the North star that you should be working towards, even if it seems almost impossible. It's, it's getting more possible every day. .
Amanda Berry: Let me see if I can come that example.
I, I love that you said that cuz as you're talking, it reminded me of, I was talking to a, a friend of mine who is the only remote person, and so when they go into, even like now when they go into a, like a team meeting, everyone's in the room and they're on Zoom, but they're on the big screen, but they're still pretty much ignored.
And I, I had mentioned to this to my friend, I said, why don't you tell 'em that they should do team meetings where everyone isn't in the room together and everyone stays on Zoom. Is that sort of what the, that agnostic experience you're, you're speaking.
Chase Warrington: Exactly. Yeah, that's, that's a, the stereotypical perfect example of like, let's just work towards a case where that's normalized and, and in every sense of the way that we work.
Amanda Berry: I'm gonna move on to the next segment. Ripped from the headlines. You hear the news Xray, xray read all about it.
Chase Warrington: Our stories ripped from the headlines, ripped from the headlines, ripped
Amanda Berry: from the. So we're not quite on the other side of the pandemic. We're just sort of living in it, and it's gonna be this way for probably forever.
But we're hearing leaders talk about the importance of returning to work, and that was really big multiple times during the pandemic. You know, we're bringing everyone back in April. Oh, not April. because it's still bad. And, and so now then, then I feel like there was just a cutoff point where they said, we're gonna start bringing people back because pro productivity's hurt, collaboration's hurt our work culture isn't what we hoped it would be.
So I just wonder what your thoughts are about companies that are bringing people back for those reasons, especially since employees were saying, I'll quit. I'll quit my job if you bring me back. And I'm just wondering, what are your thoughts on that?
Chase Warrington: I think it's really hard to change. Like change is really tough if you imagine yourself, you know, if you've.
Leader, a manager for, for 30 years, 40 years. You've built your career doing something a certain way. It's a lot to expect that person to suddenly see a totally different way of working. I mean, we have to put this shift in the context of like industrial revolution and agricultural revolution, but like not happening over like a decade.
Two decades or three decades, like happening almost overnight. While I don't necessarily agree with it all the time, I think there's sides to the coin where it's, it's a little bit unfair to be so hyperbolic and say, you know, it's ridiculous that you would issue a back to office mandate. People have the reasons, in some cases, they're actually valid and, and in some cases it's just gotta be imagined that that's, it's really health.
Tough to change. There's, there's a lot of money on the line. There's a lot of, often a lot of real estate leases and, and costs that are, that are already on the balance sheets that people have to deal with. And so there's, and, and then there's a lot of legal stuff as well that's, that's a little bit risky for them to, to just dive in and just accept.
So while we wanna believe that, you know, everybody should just accept the, the new status quo and move on, I do understand the friction there. And, and I. It makes a lot of sense. What I would love to see those same leaders do though, is to stop saying you can't build team culture in a remote environment, or you can't collaborate, or we can't do good brainstorming sessions or have good relationships with our employees or mentor our team because that is not true.
And and so you're, you're seeing it being done at scale now. I mean, companies. You know, tens of thousands of employees going remote. I mean, we're a team of a hundred and and 35 different countries, and at one time we were, we were, you know, seen to be one of the big ones that were doing fully remote work.
And so it, it is being done and I do. Think those companies will continue to see an exodus of talent if they don't invest in at least trying to make it work on some level. That would be my, my bet. There's a lot of really smart people out there running really successful businesses that know better than me perhaps, but that would be my bet.
Amanda Berry: Let's move into our last segment, asking for a friend who's
Chase Warrington: Destin for a friend. Hey. Asking for a friend. Asking for a friend.
Amanda Berry: What do you think the future of remote work or remote first work looks like
Chase Warrington: in, in like near immediate future? I mean, it's, it's very clear like 75% of companies are gonna identify as hybrid. Hybrid is a very broad term. Like you could have 10,000 employees at an office and one person working remotely.
Are you hybrid? So I, I think we need some better terminology to define exactly what it, what these different states of remote look like, but I think for sure you're gonna. See a continued move towards more distribution, more flexibility in the workspace, more control over how you control your workday. Not just where you work, but when you work as you embrace more asynchronous communication and a focus on outputs and documentation and things like this, like sort of the core principles of remote work.
you, you find that it's very easy to make the next sleep, which is to something called the non-linear workday, where you're basically able to choose when you work, not just where you work. And, and as long as you're delivering, then you're, you know, then, then you're accepted as as having done your work well.
So that is the next phase. And I think where you'll see a lot of people go, I think. The genie outta the bottle in a way around around flexibility. Every statistic you seek shows people crave this and, and Gen Z coming behind is, is gonna crave it even more than than millennials did. So I think it involves a lot more flexibility, a lot more distribution, and the future's really bright for collaboration and creativity and, and team camaraderie because there's just a whole lot being developed in that space as well to make this even a much more pleasant experience.
Amanda Berry: Well, I hope you're right, chase. I, I, I agree with you. I, I think it looks really bright and, and the changes will be for the best. So I'm, I'm excited about what's ahead, since you're aHead of Remote, if I have people out there listening who are HR or leaders in companies, is there a point, a certain point in a company's sort of life cycle where they should be looking into hiring aHead of Remote now, maybe that's the number of remote employees or.
how long they've been having room employees. Is there something that you can start help people checklists to say, now's the time for you to hire someone who's focused on that remote employee or remote first experience.
Chase Warrington: I, I do wish I had like a very clear answer. It's, it's so nuanced depending on where the company is, what their goals are, how they're distributed, and to what degree they want to, you know, move down one end of the spectrum or the other.
In that sense, there's, there's a really great article. Out there. It's more of a white paper, actually. It's by remote.com and Distribute Consulting, which is a remote work consulting firm. And, and they put together this amazing white paper that really goes deep on this. So my first suggestion would be to go read that, find that white paper and read it and, and it talks a lot about the different spaces your company might be in and when it would make sense to bring somebody in and lead your remote work charge.
But I, I think it's worth considering, particularly for companies making the transition to, if you've made the commitment, we're gonna move to some sort of a distributed model, which is a huge percentage of companies now. Like we're, we're talking, you know, probably 85% of companies are distributed in some way or another.
If you're gonna go in that direct, , it's probably worth it to invest in having somebody make sure that you're doing it at a really high level. Even if on a, you know, a contract basis, having a consultant come in and look at your, at your tech stack and look at your processes and the infrastructure and think about how you're doing this very critically.
I think it, it just, it just makes so much sense and I see it over and over again. So I would encourage you to, to consider.
Amanda Berry: Chase, this has been amazing. I've learned so much today and I'm sure our listeners have too. Before I let you go, I do wanna ask you, cuz I know you're, you're an expat, you live in Spain, I think you're in Germany right now.
And I'm just wondering if you, you can talk to or speak to the difference in, in remote first culture between like US and Spain or Germany or where, you know, wherever you, you've been and done work. I wonder if you could speak to that a little
Chase Warrington: bit. Yeah, absolutely. One, one thing that's really interesting is like I, I mentioned this earlier, doist is we're a hundred people from 35 countries and only a couple people in the US so I, a lot of people just tend to hear tech company probably from San Francisco, US-based US-centric, especially you hear another American guy talking, but in fact I'm like the, I'm I.
One of a couple Americans, and pretty much we have no concentration of people in any one country. At du We're every third person's from a different country, so we're, we're very distributed and, and in fact, the CEO and the COO who I report to are from Denmark. So it's, you know, got more European roots than it does American roots.
But I, I. Will say, you know, I talk to a lot of people in the remote industry, we'll call it, and, and there does seem to be this mindset, you know, painting a broad stroke here that the US is moving quicker in the remote space. I hear this from other Europeans that I talk to who, who are kind of have this ambition to follow in the footsteps of what they're seeing happen in the us And so I think there's something to be said there.
I mean, there's a, there's a lot of innovation, there's a lot of pressure to. Really well and to operate at a very high efficiency rate. And so I think that comes with acquiring talent, retaining talent, and, and making sure that everything works smoothly. And so I think that's why we're seeing that there.
It's part of the competitive nature of of the us and so that's what it's producing.
Amanda Berry: Great. Well Chase, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm looking forward to continue to follow you. Read, read the blogs and the thought leadership you put out there. Cause I think it's really insightful and it's really needed at this point.
So thank you so much. Let us know where they can find you.
Chase Warrington: The, the best place to connect with me directly is on LinkedIn. I, I talk a good bit about remote work and what we're seeing in the industry and what we're doing at Doist internally and trying to share that and build in public on LinkedIn. So please connect with me there.
I do a little bit of the same on Twitter. I'm trying, not succeeding, but trying. So Twitter's your thing, you find me there at DCWarrington. If any of the things I mentioned about asynchronous communication really resonated with you. We have this asynchronous communication newsletter that's also a community of thousands of people that are really passionate about making async work.
And, and so you can find that it's the Twist Async newsletter if you wanna, uh, type that into your search bar.
Amanda Berry: This has been fantastic, and thank you for joining me.
Chase Warrington: Thank you, Amanda. It was great.