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A podcast about fascinating professionals, how they got to where they are and where they’re going from the lens HR, Recruitment and People Operations hosted by Martin Hauck.
Martin (00:00)
Hey people, people, before we dive into today's episode, I want to thank our latest partner, Swag Up. For the uninitiated, Swag Up takes what everyone loves, swag, and makes all the behind the scenes work of getting swag into the hands of your employees and clients insanely easy. Their slogan is literally swag made simple. Anytime anyone in the people people group asks where to go for swag, swag up is always being recommended. And now after using swag up myself to send out some batches of swag kits to members of the people people group, I can say firsthand that they're truly next level.
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Martin (00:42)
All right. That's it. Let's dive into today's conversation. Today I have the good fortune of speaking with Ali green, Ali. Welcome to the podcast.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (00:53)
Hi, thanks so much for having me
Martin (00:55)
No, thank you. Yeah. Um, I'm, I'm looking at your LinkedIn profile as I do. And today we've got someone, uh, you know, I kind of like going to like the first thing on your experience list. So we've got like from Nike to duck, go to oyster to becoming an author. There's an interesting story there. I want to dive into it.
I'm so excited to learn more all about it, but we gotta get to know each other a little bit first. So, LinkedIn says that you started your career at Nike, but is that truly your first like paid gig? Like is that, it feels like maybe Nike wasn't the first place you might've like gotten money so you could buy candy at the corner store.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (01:46)
I think my technical first gig ever was being a soccer referee until all the parents were very opinionated about the calls that I was making and I quit that job to work at an ice cream store, which was a lot more of my vibe. So my teenage self started my career in a very customer oriented role from.
roughing soccer and trying to teach kids the rules of the game to making ice cream sundaes and learning how to decorate ice cream cakes.
Martin (02:22)
Okay, okay. That's a good segue for one of my other icebreakers.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (02:25)
Hahaha
Martin (02:28)
You've got a zero calorie pass for the day. Maybe you work at an ice cream store still. I don't know, but like you've got a zero calorie pass for the day. What what do you do? Where are you going?
Ali Greene - Remote Works (02:31)
Thank you.
I am eating my way through all of the places I love to travel. So it has to start with a brunch dim sum and as many dumplings as I can possibly fit on one table, complete with all of the hot sauces, and hopefully people to share all of these amazing foods with me. After.
Martin (02:58)
Mm-hmm.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (03:10)
dumplings, I would love to get some Indian food or some like interesting noodles or stir fry. And of course, you need a really amazing dessert. And so definitely some sort of like rich chocolate goodness. Molten lava cake and ice cream. Yeah, all of the things.
Martin (03:34)
Nice, nice, nice. All of the things. That's a, that's a, and that's not a help. That's a good, that's a good list. I'm excited about that list. You have a dim someplace that's your go-to.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (03:49)
I don't, I need recommendations for dim sum around the world. I've been a digital nomad for a huge chunk of my career and I'm always traveling. And in every country I visit, I try to have their version of some sort of Asian food that's available, whether it's Thai food or Szechuan or dim sum and pizza from around the world. Just as like, you know, some places do like...
what is the cost of milk in certain countries, I do how good is their approach to dumplings and pizza. So I need recommendations from all of the listeners today.
Martin (04:30)
There you go, yeah, no. Chime in, connect with Ali on LinkedIn, and send her your Dim Sum records for wherever you're listening in on. I've got Toronto ones, hopefully next time you make it up to Toronto, if and when we can connect in person. And yeah, we'll go for Dim Sum. I've got a few places in mind. Okay.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (04:52)
amazing.
Martin (04:56)
You can only ever listen to one album for the rest of time for whatever crazy reason, which one is it and why.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (05:03)
Um, the soundtrack to Guardians of the Galaxy.
Martin (05:07)
Yes! Oh my goodness! Okay.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (05:10)
Because then in your brain, you get to like watch a movie through the songs, plus just the nostalgia of the era of throwback tunes that are on there are just so like karaoke worthy that I think it's a great album.
Martin (05:25)
Yeah, no, all. Okay, so do you have a specific Guardians one, two or three or the whole collection?
Ali Greene - Remote Works (05:33)
If I can have the whole collection that feels like cheating. It feels like a good loophole in this question. But if I had to pick one, I would go with the classic and choose number one. But if I could if I could own a loophole, I love owning a loophole.
Martin (05:37)
That, that, I agree, I agree. Ha ha ha.
That makes sense.
Yeah, no, I mean, for sure. So I'm super excited about that answer because the Guardians in the Galaxy soundtrack, specifically, like A is awesome in the first place, but specifically the third one, I'm a pretty big nerd, and so I play Dungeons and Dragons in person with friends, and I just got into it over the pandemic, and...
I've gotten even nerdier and like, so now my basement lights like all change colors. So if we're in a cave, I turn down the lights or if we're in like a bar, I'll change them yellow. So it's kind of got like a taverny feel and like I try to like cue up scenes with music. And so I think about this way too much. And so why I'm so excited about the Guardians thing is like I don't know if you remember the trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy 3 but there's the remixed version or re...
revisited version of maybe in the meantime by Space Hog. Do you, am I going too deep here or do you recall it?
Ali Greene - Remote Works (07:01)
I feel like you're going a little deep in a way that now I feel pressure to go back and re-listen to the third soundtrack because I only have number one and two in my rotation. And now I'm ready.
Martin (07:13)
Okay. That is a must. That is a must. I will send you the link. What shows up on Spotify, um, doesn't actually like the one to listen to is the one on YouTube, which is ridiculous. It's the only one I can find, but I was just like randomly watching the trailer at like a hockey rink waiting to get like on the ice with my daughter. And there's this like scene in the session that we're doing.
or that we did where like my wife's character, she plays with me and my buddies, like she'd been gone for a long time. She basically, we had to like find a way to write her out of the campaign because she was like eight, nine months pregnant. She's like, I'm just exhausted. And I'm like, by all means, like fully entitled. So we figured out a way to like get her written out of the campaign temporarily. And so I was looking for like a song.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (08:03)
I'm going to go to bed.
Martin (08:12)
that would be the song that the rest of the characters, when they realized they saw her coming back, would play. And that was the song. I was listening to it and I got shivers in the ice rink, not because it was cold, like we were in the warm part, but like shivers or frisson or whatever you call it, like the tingly stuff going down your spine or whatever. I was just like, I had to re-listen to it a bunch of times. I'm like, this is it. This is the song I'm gonna play.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (08:41)
That's amazing. I love the clarification that it also was not the chilliness of the ice rink, it was in fact the song.
Martin (08:42)
It was.
Yeah, no, I mean, it could have been, I guess, right? So yeah, way too deep there, but thanks for indulging. Now you know kind of who's on the other side of the camera and the microphone here. But this is about you. This is about your history. Would love to kind of get a sense of how you went from refereeing and an ice cream store to Nike to...
Ali Greene - Remote Works (09:12)
Hahaha.
Martin (09:16)
Duck Go to where you are today. Yeah, what's the, help us out here.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (09:22)
Yeah, so I'm going to get really nuanced just because we're doing the throwback all the way to my high school jobs and And and share a little story that kind of propels me forward into my people operations career Um, so I was extremely shy as a teenager. Um, and Myself then couldn't believe how much I love talking on podcasts. So it's really funny to see life arcs
But one of the things that I did to try to overcome my shyness was my high school had a business and marketing competition club. And I thought that was really cool. I knew I probably wanted to go into business school eventually. And so I joined the club to get over my fear of public speaking. And then the projects and the competitions themselves...
didn't necessarily have to do with marketing as much as they had to do with just general people ops topics, which I didn't know was an area of study or something you could do with your life at the time. But I remember one of my first competitions that I entered was to analyze the ice cream store that I was working in and figure out if we were to hire new staff members, like how could we set up onboarding and like do training and like, how would I?
document the things that I learned being in the ice cream store. So this is a really cool experience opening my eyes to things like learning and development, how to build company culture, what it means to be onboarded, which is not something that you like normally get in your life that uniquely years later when I had another odd
hospitality restaurant job in university. It was the first time the restaurant was opening. And so they had like their people from corporate come and do onboarding with us as waitresses and like these kind of case studies of how would you handle this complaint from someone. So I always found this kind of stuff around just, you know, creating a really amazing experience for others and this business mindset of how do you create culture and like, how do you make people feel part of a team? Really cool. It helped me get over.
being afraid of public speaking. I didn't know it was a thing. I went to study, and I'm just kind of putting these pieces together for myself for the first time too, to be honest. But what that did lead me to was, in high school I was really good at math. And so it seems that if I was gonna go into business, I would do something related to like numbers and spreadsheets and this and that. And then through these experiences, I realized I just loved.
working with people instead. And so I studied organizational behavior. I did these really amazing internships at Nike, working on their learning and development team. And I sat back and had this moment of clarity of if I wanna help people be really great leaders in a business, I need to experience working in a business. I can't just go in from this academic standpoint. And so it really propelled me to want to work for tech startups
Martin (12:26)
Hmm
Ali Greene - Remote Works (12:30)
There's a saying that I've heard related to tech startups, which maybe some of your listeners have heard as well, which is like one year in a tech startup is like dog years. It's really like the equivalent of four years of work experience. So I was like, all right, like I want to get in there. I want to like do stuff. So I worked in some tech startups. I did lots of different jobs. I did sales operations. I worked in Salesforce. I did research and analytics.
Martin (12:39)
Yeah.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (12:56)
My favorite part of all of these jobs is when we grew our team and we had like the new people join and I got to help them feel comfortable and be part of the team and learn how things worked and how to push things forward in the intricacies of the business. And I realized that so much of this was building culture, was making people feel engaged, making them feel included on boarding, learning and development.
and that, you know, why postpone this desire to work in people ops just because of my age or my experience. And so after getting that startup experience, I really wanted to dive back in wholly to people operations. But at this point in my career, I was also quite jaded on work in general, because I went to a university where they put a lot of trust and autonomy in us as students. There were really high expectations.
But we had a lot of freedom and flexibility on how to meet those expectations. And I thought it was preparing me for the real world. And then I moved to New York City and it wasn't the real world. I was very much told that my butt needed to be in a chair in a cubicle at 8 a.m. and that I was supposed to stay there until the boss left and that I was allowed to leave too. And I got really disenchanted by...
Martin (14:00)
Right.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (14:21)
climbing the corporate ladder, I got really disenchanted by nine to five trying to be creative in an office. And so I was at this intersection where I was like, I really want to help companies and people feel good in their job. I feel that if people are motivated, if they're engaged, if a culture is strong, it makes business sense because the business will have better outputs, they'll have better products or services, they'll make more money. But
How can people be creative and be happy if they're sitting in these really ugly offices for most of their life, and then they can't even like go to the gym or go grocery shopping? So like what's broken here with work? And it was around that time before it entered most people's vocabulary that concepts of remote work, flexible schedules, results only work environments, being a digital nomad started to like,
Martin (15:01)
Hmm.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (15:17)
top up in my ecosystem. And I made the transition to working remotely and found myself leading up the people operations team at a fully distributed company DuckDuckGo. And I was there for a really incredible four years while I watched and helped and supported the company grow from around 30 people to...
you know, nearly 100 people and I traveled, I lived in Asia, I went to South America, Africa, Europe, worked from home in the US and realized that I was working among some of like the smartest people that I've ever worked with. And it was really cool to see and learn about all these different cultures as well.
And then we all kind of know what happened in this part of the story. I think I'm sick of talking about it, but it just plays so nicely. It was the end of February, 2020, and I decided that I wanted to take some personal time off and that I was gonna have a little bit of a sabbatical. And I stepped down from my role and I wanted to learn how to ski. So I went to the Alps and I had just quit my job and I signed up to get a ski instructor.
And within 24 hours, the ski resort closed. We had to leave the property because I was in France and France was going into a lockdown. And my friends from the US were calling me and they were saying, hey, our company's making us work from home and we don't even have laptops. I don't even know how to work from home. That thing you've been doing now for all these years, how did we do that? And I had this moment of like...
Martin (17:00)
Wild. Hahaha.
Yeah.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (17:09)
I really hope the world is gonna be okay, of course, health-wise, but work-wise. And I don't want remote work to become a scapegoat and people to blame this mindset of working as a reason to remove even more personal autonomy from people because I think it's so strong in creating a great work culture. And so ever since 2020, I've really dedicated.
my time professionally helping educate people on how remote work is a skill set, but it's also a mindset. And you have to think about it at an individual level, a team level and a company level to be successful. And really trying to advocate so much for the personal and the professional benefits that come with this intermixing of
true remote work fluency and a strong people operations like passion and knowledge and how those two go hand in hand. And so that passion came out through my journey as an author and I published a book with a good friend of mine, Tam, earlier this year to help educate managers and teams on how to unlock some of these behaviors and skillsets.
Martin (18:30)
I have so many questions. The first, the most recent one that came to my mind. But first, thank you for sharing that. That was really succinct. And to your point, it sounds like you had some mini revelations on like the early stages of like, oh, this is, this makes sense. When you're writing a book with someone.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (18:48)
Nothing.
Martin (18:57)
And I'm just like more excited about the irony of it. Like, did you do that mostly remote or were you like, we gotta do this in person? And I know that doesn't necessarily mean you have to be in an office to do it, but I'm just curious, like how did you collaborate on writing the book?
Ali Greene - Remote Works (19:11)
No, I love that question. So, so I met my friend Tam in person. But by the time we had decided to write a book together, we hadn't seen each other in person, I want to say for maybe a year. I can't say for sure. And we were catching up on a zoom call. And we were complaining about the state of the world and decided to do something about it. And we were joking like, hey, let's write a book.
And the early days of writing the book started off as having these catch-up calls and just, you know, friends in two different time zones in two different countries catching up about what work was like and what life was like in the pandemic era. And these conversations were so engaging and they really just made us think differently about something we took for granted, which was that we were good at remote work.
And we didn't realize it was something you could be good at. And I think that was a pivotal moment where we decided, okay, let's operate the book in a way that we would operate our remote teams as well. There's a term in tech, I don't always love to say it, but it feels appropriate here, which is like, let's eat our own dog food, I think is the saying. So.
Martin (20:21)
Mm-hmm.
Hehehehe
Yep.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (20:33)
It worked really well for us because there's concepts in the book we use. One of my favorites is energy tracking. And it talks about if you give people time flexibility, they can work when they have more energy to get things done. If people work in their peak performance hours, they're more effective and more efficient. Well, hacking different time zones worked really well for us because Tam is like a classic night owl. And I was six hours ahead of her in a time zone.
And so she would, you know, write down these thoughts, kind of stream of consciousness, amazing stuff in our collaboration tool. And I would wake up and like sit down and have my coffee and I'm a really structured thinker and I would go through it and chunk it up and add my comments and my thoughts to it. And so it was this really organic process of asynchronous communication.
working when we felt like we had flow and collaborating using software. And we wrote the first draft of the book without seeing each other in person. And then like good remote companies, we decided to have an offsite and meet up with each other again, and go through the edits and really take the book to the next level.
Martin (21:43)
Okay.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (21:51)
as it was nearing publication date, seeing each other in person and reconnecting and building the team and the trust in that way. So it goes to show lots of things that I like to stand on my soapbox about is like the tactical work can get done if you create the processes and you play to your strengths. And it's really fun and really amazing to meet up in person and dig a level deeper into the work and into the work relationships. And
brainstorm and be creative and see what comes up from that innovation as well.
Martin (22:26)
Is it fair to say because the... Is it fair to say that because of the...
Is it fair to, I'm trying to get my thought here. Is it fair to say that because people have, not even people, but companies are just like, gotta go back to work, back to the office. We've sorted things out. We've got masks, we've got the shots and whatnot. I wouldn't say it's over because there's still cases and whatnot, but the...
The companies are like, okay, well back to work. And then doing that really without much intention seems like that's just missing kind of like the point and missing the opportunity. I understand why they might want to because they're paying these massive bills for office space and not using it seems kind of wasteful and on the other side of things.
there's this, there is a magic or certain types of magic that happen when you're in person with the right people. And I think you know what I'm trying to get at here, but I'm just curious on your thoughts on sort of that dynamic.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (23:51)
Yeah, I think this is a really interesting topic with so many different nuances and layers because you're thinking about people still, I think, haven't accepted that the period of time that they were propelled into testing out remote work for the first time was not life as normal. And so if it wasn't life as normal, there's no way.
it's fair to expect that it was work as normal. And so people, they had a lot of stress, there was a lot of collective trauma in the world in the time period over the past couple of years. People were working and throwing themselves, I think, into work in a way that we haven't seen before because...
It was a form of escapism in a way. Like you're at home, you're in your computer. This one little technical tool is your outlet for socialization, for work, for productivity, for feeling like you're developing learning and mastery towards a subject or a functional area that you're an expert at. There is a lot to unpack.
there that I still think we haven't begun to talk about. And I think there's a natural reaction for some managers and some leaders to say, okay, now that we can go back and not have this be true anymore, we have two choices. We can try to go back to how things were before. And from their perspective, I see successful leaders at companies that
have worked their way up in their career in a certain way and they wanna go back to how they know how to be successful. Like it's really scary to change. Change management is hard. Like we as people, people know that. Change management within yourself, that's even harder. You know, like you have to sit there and say, what got me here is no longer gonna get me there. I was successful based on certain principles, certain...
Martin (25:46)
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Ali Greene - Remote Works (26:08)
ideas and values and beliefs that was shared in my society around work and those things are changing and that Already is very hard and very scary and very emotional Um, so let's just forget all about that and go back to like what feels safe and easy and that's working in office But on the other hand you have this group of people and these people even before the pandemic I've heard stories from folks that said
Martin (26:25)
Yeah.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (26:34)
I want more flexibility. I want to choose when and how I show up to work. I want to spend more time with my children, my family. I have aging parents and I want to care for them. Or I immigrated to a country so that I could work for this job or I moved to a new city so I could work for this job. And I miss my home, my family, my culture. Or I'm dealing with my own, you know, whether it's.
emotional or physical issues and it's easier for me to work in an environment that's comfortable and safe and not commute and deal with the challenges of commuting to go into an office. There's so many reasons why people want to have this freedom and autonomy and flexibility over where, when, how they get their work done. Historically these people have been told, no that's not possible and then we proved it was possible.
Martin (27:29)
Mm-hmm.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (27:29)
And I think now what's really hard is there's a certain group of people that realize this is possible. There's a certain group of people that realized it's really hard to make it possible and it's scary and it's challenging. And now we need to find a way forward that addresses the concerns for all of these people, realizing that truly, unless a company was working remotely before the pandemic, they have not leaned in to what remote work can
bully offer. They haven't leaned into having people work in different locations and meet up with their colleagues outside of the office and go on like brainstorming field trips to get like design inspiration for a new product release. That's like an example. They haven't really witnessed what it feels like if someone can have lunch once a week in person with a really good friend of theirs that works in a different industry and work with them.
Martin (28:17)
Mm-hmm.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (28:28)
and realize that, hey, maybe like the pricing issues that you have with like trying to decide how much to charge for a yoga class and the value of like a new employee benefits program, actually you can learn a lot from each other if you just sit and have coffee and like chat about your struggles at work with someone who sees it from a different perspective and can ask you new questions. And having these opportunities to shake up your world.
to have human connection outside of your colleagues and coworkers, to also connect with your colleagues and coworkers intentionally when it can help build relationships or help take innovation to the next level. And then trusting that people wanna be productive because they want to do a good job at their job and productivity feels different to everybody. I'm super productive in a coffee shop because I like to pretend that I'm like on vacation when I'm working and like I love having fun and beautiful spaces.
Martin (29:22)
Hehehe
Ali Greene - Remote Works (29:25)
my partner needs like complete silence and like wants to go into the work cave. Like we can't be productive in the same way and neither could me and my colleagues. Like everybody's unique and it's now time where we lean into people's strengths as their own unique workers. We don't force people to work in the same environment in the same hours of the day. And I think this is really where the power struggle comes into play, the culture clash comes into play and companies realizing that it's
Martin (29:33)
Yeah.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (29:56)
systemic issues in their processes, in how they're communicating, how they're dealing with information, what tools they're using. It's not as simple as a policy of like, hey, come to the office two days a week. That feels a little, at this point, just not intentional enough.
Martin (30:15)
100%. A lot of areas to double click there. The part that I'm kind of curious about and by trade, I suppose, for the last 10 years, I've been a recruiter. And so I think the only remote work question that I've seen commonly asked in recent...
The last six months is like, how often are you willing to come into the office? Right? It's very much of the like, we just tactically data point wise need to know because we wanna confirm if your personal preference to working in office versus working remotely or from home aligns with ours.
And so I, you know, like most things in business, I think we're getting a lot of things wrong or we're just tugging at, you know, old frameworks and methodologies of getting work done as an organization. And the thing that came to mind as you were saying some of these things was,
We don't assess talent and individuals from the perspective of like what they believe their own like if you asked me at any given point like Martin what's your what's your preferred working style I'm going to be the work cave person right I'm
I don't want an office from a status perspective. I want an office so that like I can signal to people when I'm, you know, available to be interrupted and when I'm not, I have ADHD and you know, an interruption just not only derails anyone, it derails me like entirely, like how long did it take for me to get started on a task, let alone now, you know, five minutes into it, like the-
You know, somebody's like, hey, you know, how was your weekend? Like, cool, I've had this conversation, you know, like, don't get me wrong. I enjoy socializing. Uh, and I enjoy that aspect of working in person, but the, the point I'm trying to make, or like the question I'm, I'm trying to get a sense of is like what.
Given your expertise and your focus towards remote work, if I was an employer, if I was a recruiter, because change management is hard, if I'm a recruiter and like, you know what? I'm just gonna try to make sure that we're hiring folks that are aligned with our working style as a business and where we'd like to go, not getting too crazy in terms of anything.
What are some of the questions you, if you put on like a recruiter hat would start asking people and kind of double clicking on to kind of make the hiring more robust be like, okay, like we know we've got a person while aligned to like our working stuff.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (33:55)
Yeah, I think this is a great question. I would challenge that recruiter first to put the responsibility. And I think that you implied this in your question on the company first. And so the questions that I would have for, you know, senior leadership at the company would be What is your remote work policy to the point of is there an expected amount of days?
Martin (34:09)
Hmm
Ali Greene - Remote Works (34:24)
per week that someone needs to come into the office? What are the activities that are expected of them when they are coming into the office? Are there designated days per team or do they get to choose? If they choose, like is there a system in place to make sure that they're coming in when other people are gonna be there? Like kind of what is the purpose of the office in that?
flexible hybrid schedule and get really a good understanding of, you know, all of those things I'm describing allude to what is your company culture around the use of the office. Outside of that, I would go as far as also being aware of what are your synchronous core hours as a company where you expect people to be available for ad hoc communication and meetings versus how much do you lean async?
as a company, because regardless of if you need to sometimes visit an office or not, I've seen fully remote employees that have very little ownership over their time because they work in a culture that's completely synchronous and they're on Zoom calls all day. So I think knowing core hours, core work hours, degree of asynchronous versus synchronous work, and knowing how
documentation and outputs get measured already at the recruiter stage of like writing a job spec and looking for the types of competencies you would need to hire someone to be successful in your environment is important because if you are a company, for example, this is a common trait I see in some of the like OG fully remote companies.
they're really big on self-reporting transparency. And so what I mean by that is normally there's some sort of software tool. You might've heard of things like Asana or Notion and people build in public in the way that they're like sharing project updates in these public spaces to their teammates. Maybe they self-report what their top priorities are on a given week. And in this case, from a recruiter standpoint, all of a sudden like,
Martin (36:25)
Mm-hmm.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (36:43)
having some sort of at least awareness around project management becomes a must have competency for everyone in your company, regardless of if they're a software developer, a user experience designer or working in HR. Being comfortable communicating in, you know, written communication in the language that your business operates is going to become increasingly important. And if it's not something you're willing to train on, you need to make sure that you're
recruiting against that, like, hey, do you feel comfortable writing like weekly updates about your work? And maybe including that in the interview process, for example, where instead of doing a video interview, at some point, there is some sort of like, give me a written recap of, you know, x, y, z thing that you've accomplished. Making sure if there are going to be time zone core hours that it like fits for someone's
schedule and they're made aware of it so that they can commit to the expectations at hand. And so I think at a bare minimum, companies need to get clear on what their stance and what their values are around those topics from a company culture standpoint, because it bleeds into employer branding, it bleeds into your recruitment strategy, who and how you're going to hire people. And
once they're hired, how you're gonna analyze their performance management. If someone is, you know, if you say that you're a flexible company and you have an office, but it's not required to come into an office, and then you're only promoting people that come into an office, then you have a performance management and a culture problem that needs to be looked at and re-imagined. So these things really do impact every aspect of a people.
person's job.
Martin (38:40)
Also what you're saying is that it ain't easy.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (38:44)
Not easy, but possible.
Martin (38:46)
Not easy, but possible. And that's the whole thing about business in general, especially in tech, right? Like if you're choosing easy problems, the return isn't always gonna be as fruitful. And I guess one thing that, like you're absolutely right. I think my mind goes to very like hyper-specific solutioning of like, well, as a recruiter, how can you...
be the change you want to see within an organization. And what I heard was, yes, you can do that. However, it's going to fall relatively flat if the rest of the organization isn't bought into this, which is very difficult. And this definitely feels like I'm propping your book up as a, um, you know, a solution, but like.
And it probably is and that's not intentional but it's my if you're an organization That hasn't really done anything towards Kind of rethinking how you operate it's just these changes were thrust upon the business You did what everybody else was gonna do it kind of worked You're probably not happy with how things are like overall and you probably just want to go back
how things were and because things have settled down to a degree, that's what you're doing. But if there's still this like, we're never going to go back to how things were for any organization because lots of people moved and so you have to accommodate that aspect and they're very talented and you're not gonna, you know, oh you're within, you're not within the like work from home, you know, kilometer miles radius thing.
So, you know, you're no longer with the organization. That's not how companies have changed. We're forever changed. So I guess the question here is, is the, and I didn't get a chance to read it and kind of glad that I didn't cause I'm going into this like from like a place of curiosity, but is it fair to say that like, and I know you're probably biased, but like the book, is it, is it a-
Is it a playbook? Is it a story? Is it a bit of both? Like if I'm a company that's like trying or if I'm a leader, who should read the book? What am I going to get from it? I guess. That's the question I have.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (41:20)
Yeah, so before I get there, I do want to just close out one final thought on your earlier question of, as a recruiter, what can I do to make a difference? And I will say one final thing there is looking at the market these days, recruiters are so overwhelmed by the amount and the sheer velocity of resumes of job applications that are coming in their doors.
Martin (41:30)
Hmm
Ali Greene - Remote Works (41:50)
There's so many people searching for their next role and companies are uniquely positioned to get the best person for their culture and their job than ever before because the global talent pool, depending on your level of remote flexibility, can be massive.
What this means for a recruiter and what this means for a company is not that recruiter should spend more time and get more burnt out looking at more resumes because that's bad for the business. That's bad for the recruiter. It's that the recruiter needs ways to help facilitate making sure that they get the right people applying for the right role. And the way that the recruiter can do that is making sure that they're facilitating the proper information from the company to the candidate.
And so reframing it that way in terms of if the recruiter has answers to these questions from the company, they can be proactive in filtering in and out candidates that make sense, given the constraints of the culture of the job. If you're trying to get too many applicants in the door that are then going to have unrealistic expectations, it's.
creating a lot of noise for everybody that's bad for the business, bad for the candidate experience, bad for the recruiter. So let's just make it easier for everybody involved. So that's my final sort of like rant and soapbox on that regard, because I think that level of transparency makes sense. But in order to get to that level of transparency, and this leads me to talk about the book.
Martin (43:17)
Hehehe
Ali Greene - Remote Works (43:27)
is companies need to start asking themselves the right questions. And I think they don't know the questions to ask themselves. And so what's really cool about the book is it's actually designed mostly for the management layer of an organization. Because what I was seeing during the early days of the pandemic is that, you know, individual contributors, they can find ways to like be
Martin (43:30)
Yep.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (43:50)
productive enough remotely, there's tons of information out there, but they're only in control as much as they have the flexibility and freedom to cultivate and create their work life based off of what's being directed down towards them by the company and the manager. So the managers specifically in this book will have stories and case studies.
From me and Tam, our combined 20 years of remote work experience and what we wish we knew when we first got started, plus other people in our peer group that we really look to for advice and inspiration and stories of how things work in their organization, plus activities you can do as a team as if I was facilitating a workshop for you, you can facilitate it on your own.
and a lot of reflection questions to start asking yourself, how does this work in my organization? And what I love for this book for managers specifically is if they feel that they are not the proper decision maker of these questions or they don't have the answers to these questions, it sends a really strong signal up the chain to the director level, the senior executive level, the CEO or the C-suite level that like systemically there's things in the company where decisions need to get made. And that's why
This book is also really powerful for the People Ops team to read and understand and influence the C-suite group of people in terms of, hey, do we have a remote work policy? What does it look like? Because our managers can't answer these building block questions of how to make this work at the team level because we don't understand it at the company level. And so while the book doesn't address concerns for CEOs.
it leads to a lot of inspiration for tactically what can be changed at the team level. And then if the, you know, people have questions of how to change it at the company level, they can always hit me up on LinkedIn.
Martin (45:43)
Mm-hmm.
Is, is that, and that was, that was actually a question is like, is that a thing? Like, do you do sort of remote work transformation consulting or remote work improvement? Is that a.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (46:05)
On a very limited basis, I'm available for fractional work on, you know, how to create the remote work company culture and the structures and processes. There are some things that are out of scope for me, and then I'm happy to introduce people to other people in my network regarding that. But that's definitely something that I'm able to work with companies on.
Martin (46:25)
Mm-hmm.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (46:31)
The core piece of the book in my work is really around these building blocks of the remote work skillset. So things like asynchronous communication, understanding productivity for yourself and your team, um, and what project management can look like in this remote world, but I love and get very excited to work with companies and teams around how to create an engaging culture.
how to bring your values to life in a remote work world, thinking through intentional ways of gathering in person versus what can be done remotely. So that's kind of the what's next.
Martin (47:10)
No, for sure.
One of the things that came across my mind as we're chatting is this idea of
remote work, being this tug of war between management, ICs, leadership, senior leadership, executives. And at varying levels, for varying reasons, the appetite, interest, and belief in it working is at different levels. And so the thing that my
Where my mind goes in terms of, it's almost as though, if you think of sort of old school manufacturing terms, right, you've got a production line, widgets are whizzing by, everybody's got their task, and because the industrial revolution led to like some highly operationalized like methodologies like.
Kaizen and 5s or 6s or 6 sigma and all that fun stuff if you recognize those terms great You know, we have a shared history if you don't you can Google them. They're fascinating and interesting in terms of like methodologies, but the question I guess is you know in that example of the you know the production line like it really feels like you have to Take a pause
on work collectively as an organization. And this is my assumption. So if I'm completely wrong on this, but it's sort of like, okay, everybody, we've acknowledged that we're doing okay. We transitioned to a hybrid or mostly remote workforce, but we didn't do it intentionally. And if we're going to see any improvement, we've adapted, great. Humans are great at that.
But if we're going to see any improvement, we have to be really intentional about it. And so if there's this like. Change management piece of, you know, having to get, get buy-in from executives and leadership and whatnot that may or may not be aligned, I guess the question is like, how do you convince someone to say, Hey, we're just going to stop manufacturing our widgets for a few weeks or months. Everything's going to, you know, let's, how do you convince someone to say, you know what?
We're going to take five steps back so we can take 10 steps forward, I guess.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (49:57)
Yeah, I think that's really interesting and depending on the complexities of the organization, I would challenge the assumption that it needs to be brought to a complete halt to make some of these changes. I think that regardless of where people are physically located, the ideology behind a lot of the most important remote work concepts are also just concepts that are vital in
2023 going into 2024. We have had at our fingertips for a long time, technology that makes work processes easier if we lean into using them properly, but we haven't necessarily as an organization fully in person needed to think about how to use them properly because we were able to fill the gaps and you know,
kind of hide our shortcomings with things that could happen not intentionally in person. And I think about like when someone's trying to start working out for the first time, your body naturally wants to make working out easier for you. And so you might change your form and not be doing the workout properly. So like when you start doing squats for the first time, for example.
Martin (51:17)
Hmm
Ali Greene - Remote Works (51:19)
Like you might be like leaning too far forward or not be, you know, going down to the ground low enough and you really need to build the muscle and be focused on your form before all of a sudden you can do a squat while also holding weights. But it doesn't mean you have to stop doing those squats. You just need to be more intentional about your form. And so I mean that to say really specific things.
Martin (51:39)
Yeah.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (51:48)
that companies can work on without stopping their work to make remote work better is think through their digital house. People do not have, I don't think, like if you're a company doing it this way, reach out to me because I wanna like interview you for a case study, like massive amounts of like paper and pen work anymore. People communicate using what we call a digital house. There's software, there's resources that are saved
a cloud, there's information that's being transferred from one person's shared drive to another person's shared drive. We already have these tools. Are you using these tools to make things easier for people to access information they need to get their job done? Or are these tools confusing, disorganized, with levels of privilege that don't make sense?
for what people are doing. So immediately you can do an audit around your digital house and how you're using tools. Do you have too many tools? Do you have the right ones? Another thing that I think you can immediately do is thinking through how you're asking people to spend their time. So many people are distracted about work around work and admin, they have meetings to talk about the future of a different meeting.
then they don't take proper notes so they forget what they had to commit to in that meeting. So they schedule another meeting and those meetings become forcing functions to doing the work instead of people just having systems in place to hold them accountable for doing the work. Already, you can start making those small changes without stopping the work that you're doing as an organization by having activities such as a meeting audit, which of your meetings are adding value and which of your meetings are acting too much as a cost center.
Are there templates in place so that people have agendas? Is our next steps being captured in some sort of project management tool? How do you hold people accountable for project management? Those things already can be implemented in terms of your management training, your learning and development training, a focus on things like accountability, prioritization, goal setting. What does that look like? Do people have those skills at work?
Um, so I think you can start on all those small things and then the bigger things need to happen around, you know, the larger conversations. Do we want to be a global remote company? Do we want to be a remote company in one time zone? Do we want to be coming into the office? Um, those do require a high level strategic conversation that is worthy of a pause, but already these things around.
creating team norms, already these things around asynchronous communication, already these things around how you use your tools, they can happen right away and in parallel to getting the work done.
Martin (54:46)
I'm equally angry and glad that, uh, we a finally got a chance to chat, but also just frustrated that it took us so long to connect and that's a thousand percent my fault. So I am. Yeah. This was a super interesting conversation and really felt like we were only scratching the surface. Thankfully there's a book that lets you dive.
underwater and see the rest of the iceberg that is doing remote work properly. And that book's called Remote Works by you, Ali Green. Where can people pick it up? I feel like I know the answer, but just for the sake of it.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (55:33)
Yeah, so of course it's available on Amazon, so feel free regardless of where you're listening in from to go ahead and order there. And if you're more of a bookstore person, I know throughout Canada it should be in a few chapters locations, and if it's not feel free to request it. And in certain Barnes & Nobles locations throughout the the U.S. But you know, you can never go wrong with an Amazon order. So.
Martin (56:04)
No, no, that's fair. Now, I guess any final thoughts, curiosities, statements?
Ali Greene - Remote Works (56:15)
I'm really happy we finally got to talk as well. It was a really great conversation. So thank you so much for your time. I will say like when people start to listen to conversations like this, I think it can be incredibly overwhelming for them. Regardless of where you're at in your remote work journey, I think that the desire for more flexibility and freedom and choosing how you focus on your work are critical.
things for humanity moving forward. And if you can incorporate that into your workforce by just simply doing one new thing different at a time, that's really all it's going to take. And sometimes it's unlearning as much as it is learning. And so we have a lot of beliefs around work. And I really just encourage people to start questioning those beliefs and experimenting with them and seeing if they...
Martin (57:00)
Hmm.
Ali Greene - Remote Works (57:12)
holds true in the end because work can be fun and inspirational and, you know, motivating and fulfilling. And I'm really tired of seeing conversations about companies and employers versus employees when there's a shared goal and vision about how to make work with life better for everybody. And that's really why I was inspired to write the book and share more information about.
all of these things.
Martin (57:43)
Well, it's very important work and thank you for writing it to you and Tam. Um, thanks for spending time with me on, on this podcast. I think that's, that's it for, for today. Uh, until next time, may all your candidates be awesome and all your emails be read thoroughly. Cheers.