Wayne Turmel engages in a captivating discussion with Jeanna Barrett, the founder and Chief Remote Officer of First Page Strategy. This episode delves into the intricacies of building a successful, fully distributed company. Jeanna shares her journey from the early days of remote work, pre-pandemic, to the current global landscape, offering invaluable insights into effective remote work strategies, the importance of tech-savviness, and the transformational role of project management platforms in remote operations.
Key Takeaways
1. Prioritize Project Management Platforms: Emphasize using project management tools over traditional communication methods like email for better transparency and organization in remote work settings.
2. Adopt a Remote-First Mindset: Understand that remote work is not just working from home; it requires a shift in operations, prioritizing asynchronous communication and reducing unnecessary meetings.
3. Tech Savviness in Remote Teams: Recognize the importance of being comfortable with technology. Successful remote work depends on the team's ability to adapt to and efficiently use various digital tools.
4. Effective Hiring for Remote Culture: Focus on hiring individuals who are not only skilled in their field but also comfortable with remote work and technology. This ensures a smoother integration into remote-first operations.
5. Rethink Meetings and Asynchronous Work: Challenge the norm of scheduling meetings for every discussion. Utilize asynchronous communication methods to enhance productivity and reduce meeting fatigue, allowing for more focused and deep work.
00;00;08;28 - 00;00;40;15
Wayne Turmel
Hello, everybody. Welcome once again to the Long-Distance Work Life podcast, the show where we aim to help you work, thrive, survive, get through, keep the weasels at bay in the constantly changing world of remote and hybrid work. My name is Wayne Turmel. Marissa is not with us today, which means that we are joined by a very, very smart person who's going to talk to us about some factor of their business.
00;00;40;18 - 00;01;00;12
Wayne Turmel
And I am particularly happy today to welcome. Here she comes. Jan Barrett, who is the founder and chief remote officer of a company called First Paid Strategy. All her information will be on the show notes, as you would expect. Jana. How are you?
00;01;00;14 - 00;01;03;06
Jeanna Barrett
I'm great, Wayne. Thanks for having me.
00;01;03;09 - 00;01;12;15
Wayne Turmel
Thank you for being had. What what should people know about you and first page before we jump into.
00;01;12;18 - 00;01;33;10
Jeanna Barrett
Yeah. So I started first page eight years ago, 2016, before the pandemic, because I wanted to travel and work and build a company that fit how I wanted to work. And I wasn't finding those companies any more when I was living in San Francisco. So I left. I've been building this growth marketing agency for the last eight years.
00;01;33;10 - 00;01;44;12
Jeanna Barrett
We are fully distributed. We had 30 to 40 teammates across the globe and we're constantly perfecting being a remote first company.
00;01;44;15 - 00;01;51;13
Wayne Turmel
And I know you walk it like you talk it because you are in Yucatan today.
00;01;51;15 - 00;01;53;03
Jeanna Barrett
Yeah.
00;01;53;06 - 00;01;57;07
Wayne Turmel
And yet you live on a little island in Honduras.
00;01;57;10 - 00;01;57;21
Jeanna Barrett
Yes.
00;01;57;21 - 00;01;59;23
Wayne Turmel
And I am insanely jealous.
00;01;59;25 - 00;02;28;13
Jeanna Barrett
Yeah. I actually started my company right when I left San Francisco. I moved to build these islands in Ambergris Quay, an island in Belize for six years. And then the last two years, I relocated to Roatan, Honduras, which is another Caribbean island on the west coast of the Caribbean. And yeah, and I often travel. I mean, I've shared with people that I've worked remote from a sailboat, from an RV, from a golf cart, like we drove golf carts on Fergus Quay.
00;02;28;15 - 00;02;36;02
Jeanna Barrett
So I definitely walk the walk and am a big proponent of like how you do remote work, right?
00;02;36;04 - 00;03;07;17
Wayne Turmel
Well, that's what I want to talk about, because as we talked about before, the cameras started rolling. I mean, companies have to thrive and they have to work. And, you know, people have to make money in order to be employed. But what I'm really fascinated by is you started creating your company intending to be fully remote pre-pandemic. And I'm curious as to let's start with what you knew had to happen and what you set up.
00;03;07;19 - 00;03;10;15
Wayne Turmel
Right. In order for that to.
00;03;10;17 - 00;03;11;05
Jeanna Barrett
You.
00;03;11;10 - 00;03;12;05
Wayne Turmel
Start.
00;03;12;07 - 00;03;35;11
Jeanna Barrett
So the biggest thing that for a company is I don't have offices. You still have to have an office and that is your tech stock. So how people come together, how people communicate, how you get jobs done, all happen now in tech, in technology, instead of in an office. So it was really important for us to really choose the right tech sector.
00;03;35;11 - 00;03;59;00
Jeanna Barrett
You want to have all the right tools, not too many tools, and that is was also like an interesting experience for me as a founder, because it's not so easy as just like setting up these remote tools. It now has become a full time job. You have to have an operations person running these tools to keep up with renewals and access and training.
00;03;59;00 - 00;04;07;23
Jeanna Barrett
And it's basically it's not the price of an office, but it does require some investment to make sure that you're getting your tech stack right as a remote company.
00;04;07;25 - 00;04;27;05
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. And so what was your what did you need like in your head? Okay, you need an email and you got to have some kind of chat function and some kind of web meeting function like. How did you go about? Let's start with what you started with and then we'll figure out where you are now. Right.
00;04;27;08 - 00;04;54;04
Jeanna Barrett
Yeah. Actually, the most important thing is a project management platform. So we actually believe that like email is dead in some ways, like not in a marketing way. People still read their emails, but in terms of collaborating, email is not a good tool for that. There's siloed conversations. You can't find anything they live in die only in the inbox that whoever was copied on the email, people get to forget to copy people in the email.
00;04;54;07 - 00;05;20;15
Jeanna Barrett
So a lot of companies now are working in these massive project management tools. Are this click up. We first started out in a sauna, there's a sauna click up Monday kind of tend to be the three that most companies are deciding between and that we we implemented that, I believe, in year two or three. And that really transformed our business because that is like one place where every conversation can be searched and seen.
00;05;20;15 - 00;05;44;03
Jeanna Barrett
There's transparency across all projects and people. You can search for conversations no matter who you are. It really breaks down silos and barriers, which is what you need in remote work, right for it, really, in any work, you don't have to be remote to need to get rid of barriers. But yeah, so project management platform access and collaboration is the big key pillars of remote work, right?
00;05;44;03 - 00;06;04;16
Jeanna Barrett
So you got to make sure everybody has access in a versioning control place. So like Google Docs is usually what everybody uses. Google Drive, making sure you have shared drives, everybody can open and access them at the right time. You can see different versions. There's not like old school versions of an old Excel that someone emailed each other and then chat function.
00;06;04;17 - 00;06;21;03
Jeanna Barrett
Slack is like the best in class choice at this point. So and then yeah, Zoom. So that's a lot of our core tech stack right there. But then there's just there's a lot there's probably 5 to 10 more tools that we have that are important as well, but those are the core ones.
00;06;21;05 - 00;06;36;12
Wayne Turmel
Where did you bump your nose when you were starting? I mean, we always start with assumptions about this is what this is going to look like and this is how it's going to work. And then, you know, yeah, it's yeah, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. Right?
00;06;36;14 - 00;06;57;28
Jeanna Barrett
Right, exactly. Well, the tech stock has been like a stumble, right? It's it's taken us a long time to perfect it in terms of like what I didn't realize because I've always been tech savvy. I mean, someone that just loves technology, I buy everything that comes out. I was a native working in tech scene in my early twenties in Seattle, in San Francisco.
00;06;58;00 - 00;07;19;11
Jeanna Barrett
So what I didn't realize is like how complicated this way of working actually is. And we hire people that have wonderful resumes, but they come into our company and they just struggle with the tech stock. They're not comfortable. They don't you know, they're not comfortable figuring it out on their own. They're overwhelmed by it. They push it away.
00;07;19;11 - 00;07;39;23
Jeanna Barrett
And those people ultimately are not going to be successful at our company. So it requires a lot of tech savviness to work async and remote first, and you have to really be willing to be an expert in these tools. You have to have someone within your company that's an expert at these tools. And so that was one stumble.
00;07;39;26 - 00;08;01;08
Wayne Turmel
Let me ask again, let me ask you a question about that before you go any further, because as somebody who knows technology but doesn't particularly love it, my problem is less which button do I push and why should I bother? So when people are coming in and they don't have your tech background, is it just they don't know which button to push?
00;08;01;12 - 00;08;10;07
Wayne Turmel
Or is it a mindset that you need to either inculcate or hire for?
00;08;10;10 - 00;08;27;14
Jeanna Barrett
It's both. It requires you to like take ownership in terms of how are you training your team, or if you're a manager or a founder, like what are the tool sets and how are you setting people up for success? So that's a lot of stuff we didn't have in place at first because I kind of just always had figured things out on my own.
00;08;27;14 - 00;09;00;04
Jeanna Barrett
So I didn't realize that we needed to have really in-depth video training and modules and stuff for our tech stock that can close some gaps. But ultimately, like if you don't hire the right person, that's going to be comfortable really digging in. We've had people that have avoided it. They're really uncomfortable. These tools can be super complicated and then speaking to that, how you specifically work in these tools is very prescribed, like how you tag each other, exactly What you do when a task is over, do like how you figure out what your start date and and dates are like.
00;09;00;04 - 00;09;29;13
Jeanna Barrett
There's an ecosystem to it. And so if you're not willing to teach your self something new, then you're not going to succeed no matter how many trainings we give you. Right? So it's also how do we hire the right people? So we've spent a lot of time figuring out like what are the right questions or project tasks or what are we doing to really get to the crux of like if people are able to figure out a new complex technology, if they're comfortable?
00;09;29;21 - 00;09;43;09
Wayne Turmel
And right now, ears perked up just all over the pod versus So talk to us about what some of those tests are like just nuts and bolts. What are how would you test for that?
00;09;43;11 - 00;10;05;06
Jeanna Barrett
Yeah, we actually have like we have core values at our company. And one of our core values is being tech savvy and remote first. So we've just started to just put in place like questions like spit, prescribe questions, and what we're asking people about our core values to get to the crux of if they're going to fit in our core values.
00;10;05;06 - 00;10;26;15
Jeanna Barrett
So we do have a set of questions that we ask, and every candidate is going to get them in the in the hiring round and the and the tech savvy questions are part of that. We are we haven't implemented this yet, but I'm just now in the middle of conversations of taking it one step further. We do a project round because we're remote.
00;10;26;15 - 00;10;54;01
Jeanna Barrett
We want to see how people work. We also want to see how you present. We want to see how you show up to a video call. So we do a project test run. We pay people for this, but we ask people to put together strategies and all that. And we're now talking about, well, how do we take this one step further and like have them do a test that is going to also figure out if they can work with any clip And working with and click upward requires you to be your own project manager.
00;10;54;01 - 00;11;13;15
Jeanna Barrett
We do not hire project managers. You need to know how to scope your entire project from start to finish all the steps you need to put those steps in, click up. And so we're starting to think about how we build a test for our candidates there, because that's where we see people fail. The most really is understanding that.
00;11;13;17 - 00;11;46;26
Wayne Turmel
You said something a minute ago that I don't want to let go by, and that is this notion of people needing to kind of take ownership of their own tech stuff. Right. And I know that I have gotten lost in the weeds. I tend to do that right. And where I get lost in the weeds in particular is not which button do I push, it's how do I name files remembering to tag things.
00;11;46;27 - 00;11;48;04
Jeanna Barrett
Yeah.
00;11;48;06 - 00;12;12;21
Wayne Turmel
Right. Because I just cause chaos. I don't intend to. I mean, well, but I am a chaos agent when it comes to things like and I know it's gumming up the works. So how, you know, how do you prescribe and kind of manage the tagging and the language in the internal logic?
00;12;12;24 - 00;12;36;06
Jeanna Barrett
Yeah, So that's exactly what I'm talking about in terms of like it is a wild, wild West and can be very chaotic and actually the antithesis of productivity and efficiency. If everybody is working within these tools and whatever way they think is best for them, because you need everybody working together all in the same way for it really to be efficient and not slow people down.
00;12;36;09 - 00;13;02;14
Jeanna Barrett
And so ourselves and some other companies I've talked to have taken the approach of like documentation really is like a simple step and it's a big thing in teams as well. But just having us, this is how we work, document a very specific communication guidelines and guidelines for how, what, how and what you do everything in a text and have that be in a central location that people can always go back to.
00;13;02;16 - 00;13;29;28
Jeanna Barrett
So we have a documentation center. You might think of it as like the old school employee handbook that might have been paper like binder that you got when you got hired forever ago. But now it's like all remote documentation and a place that we do it inside a click of a lot of teams use notion. It's a very popular tool right now where you can search any topic and you can find the document that you needed.
00;13;30;00 - 00;13;49;13
Jeanna Barrett
And so we just spend a lot of time making sure that all of our processes, all of our communication guidelines and everything is documented in that one place for anybody to access at any time to kind of go back and figure out if you were at our company way, you would need to go back and figure out how use to be tagging things like what's the guideline that we've set.
00;13;49;13 - 00;13;59;20
Jeanna Barrett
But like setting those guidelines is the first step in thinking through all those specific guidelines. As a company, obviously.
00;13;59;22 - 00;14;14;15
Wayne Turmel
You know, and you've mentioned async a couple of times, like it's just, well, yeah, of course, duh. But, but there are a lot of organizations and a lot of people who have fled those organizations, But we live the way we were raised, right?
00;14;14;20 - 00;14;15;19
Jeanna Barrett
Yeah, right.
00;14;15;21 - 00;14;29;10
Wayne Turmel
What is the key to winning people off of everything needs to be a meeting and still meeting their need for access and contact and that kind of stuff.
00;14;29;12 - 00;14;47;13
Jeanna Barrett
So this is the biggest problem going on in remote work right now. And I think this is why companies are failing and saying like remote work isn't working. And so like, well, you can't just take everybody working in your office and stick them at home and then expect that emailing everybody all day and getting on Zoom for 8 hours a day is what remote work is.
00;14;47;13 - 00;15;08;06
Jeanna Barrett
That's truly not like remote first operations and remote first operations is really thinking about how do you peel back meetings from your calendar? Like I myself have had moments in my business where I was doing six or seven zooms a day. It absolutely makes you feel like your brain is melted. I was so exhausted. It's just a terrible experience, right?
00;15;08;06 - 00;15;26;22
Jeanna Barrett
So like we put in a lot of guidelines about how and when to use Zoom calls and not to use Zoom calls, when to put like we have to put video at the end of every call that's going to be a video. Otherwise, we don't need to show up on video because defaulting to video can be really exhausting for people too.
00;15;26;24 - 00;15;49;15
Jeanna Barrett
So we have like three zooms maximum a day. We have no meeting Fridays. We're constantly probably every quarter looking at our meeting calendar and talking about like what can be reduced, what can be a sync. We think a lot about like team meetings, regular meetings, how do we run those async, How do we do part of that? Like we do biweekly sync meetings and async meetings.
00;15;49;15 - 00;15;57;21
Jeanna Barrett
So every other week you'll meet with your manager. But then the other week that you're not meeting with the manager, you do an async update and click ups kind of saying, Okay.
00;15;57;21 - 00;16;02;11
Wayne Turmel
So let me just let me put a thing in that because async.
00;16;02;11 - 00;16;02;27
Jeanna Barrett
Wrangling.
00;16;03;03 - 00;16;22;19
Wayne Turmel
Is, you know, kind of freaks people out. What I'm hearing is, okay, we need every week, we need to check in and see what you're doing. But if we do a zoom call, whatever, this week. Yeah, next week, a clear, honest report will suffice.
00;16;22;21 - 00;16;48;24
Jeanna Barrett
Yeah. Yeah. And I do want to say, like, you know, I think we need to all kind of get rid of this feeling Native baby sitting right Like remote work does come with a lot of trust that we're all adults and we're going to do our work. And if you flip the switch to looking at like, what the deliverables are like, if you're doing your work, why does it and getting the deliverables done, like why does it matter how, where, when you're doing your work?
00;16;48;24 - 00;17;13;27
Jeanna Barrett
So that's one thing. So it's less about like, you know, needing to check in as a manager, but we think of one on one more like as a person, that's your access to your team lead. If you need support, there's something you're blocked on. And yeah, you don't need to meet every week on those things. Like there's other ways to get a hold of each other.
00;17;13;29 - 00;17;37;25
Jeanna Barrett
You know, we put everything in click up, so I still read it in it. And the beauty of this, right, and this is where like if you're an operations or business founder, but I don't know if this matters to many on the call, but if I read the async meeting and respond and they read it and respond and we solve something that usually takes ten or 15 minutes, now a meeting on your calendar is going to be 50 minutes, right?
00;17;38;02 - 00;17;59;03
Jeanna Barrett
Two people, 50 minutes of their time, like that's a lot of wasted time. And so there's a lot of conversation around my productivity in remote work, but you're working async. There's more time for you to spend actually doing your work, right? Like we call it deep work where you're uninterrupted because you're not on a call or you're not.
00;17;59;06 - 00;18;19;19
Jeanna Barrett
People aren't talking to you, so you have more time and you're more efficient and more productive when you have more deep work, right? And like, you can just get a meeting done in 15 minutes over a chat, kind of a situation, or you can send video clips, right? Like I'm going to send you a five minute video clip and we don't need to sit on a phone and talk for 50, 60 minutes about something.
00;18;19;19 - 00;18;22;00
Jeanna Barrett
So, yeah.
00;18;22;03 - 00;18;44;09
Wayne Turmel
That's great stuff. One week, just because we are as I knew, we were running out of time. Yeah, so much so much to talk about. What is the one async best practice that you have learned along the way that you kind of didn't know going in?
00;18;44;12 - 00;19;12;14
Jeanna Barrett
But yeah, it's really relearning your work habits and it takes a long time and I'm guilty of it too. But you can't default to just sending people Slack chats all day because that's a sink tool, right? You can't default to setting up a meeting because that's a sync tool. So you have to constantly be working with yourself to always default to your async tool, which is like a project management platform.
00;19;12;14 - 00;19;25;27
Jeanna Barrett
So I need somebody do something, put it in, click up, I need to ask somebody something, put it and click that. Don't set up a meeting, don't go on Slack and check them. So it's just like reworking what your what your habits are basically.
00;19;25;29 - 00;19;53;20
Wayne Turmel
That's great. That's really, really good stuff. Thank you so much. Jana Barrett. We will have links to all your good stuff on the long distance work life dot com on the page. Those of you who listen to podcasts, you know the drill. Like subscribe, smash that button, whatever you're supposed to say in these circumstances. You can reach out to Marissa and I at any time.
00;19;53;24 - 00;20;19;00
Wayne Turmel
We are available by email or available by LinkedIn comments, questions, vicious personal attacks, anything that you would like to share with us. Topics. Cool people like Jana that we want to talk to and if you are interested in rethinking how your team comes together. Kevin In my new book, Long Distance Team Designing Your Team for everyone's success is out in the world.
00;20;19;00 - 00;20;27;17
Wayne Turmel
You can find that and some special resources at long distance Team Booking.com. Jana, thank you so much for being us.
00;20;27;17 - 00;20;29;26
Jeanna Barrett
I appreciate you taking your time.
00;20;29;29 - 00;20;36;17
Wayne Turmel
And for the rest of you, thanks for listening. Come visit again and don't let the weasels get you down.
Featured Guest
Name: Jeanna Barrett
Bio: Founder of First Page Strategy, a growth agency for product-led brands. Host of the Remotely Cultured podcast.
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
01:12 The Genesis of First Page Strategy
03:12 Building a Remote-First Company
04:27 Key Tools for Remote Work
06:36 Overcoming Tech Stumbles
09:43 Hiring for a Remote Culture
14:29 Streamlining Remote Operations
18:22 Best Practices for Async Work
Related Episodes
Additional Resources
Order The Long-Distance Team
Remote leadership experts, Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel, help leaders navigate the new world of remote and hybrid teams to design the culture they desire for their teams and organizations in their new book!
