Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation, JLD here, and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like this old marketing. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives, and we'll be breaking down why working remote is more toxic than in person, lessons for leaders in the hybrid workforce.
And to drop these vibons, I brought Chris Savage in the EO Fire Studios. Chris is the co-founder and CEO of Wistia, a leading video hosting platform that gives marketers everything they need to get bigger results from their videos and podcasts. In Fire Nation, in a world where work and life are so blended, it is really important that people will come to wherever they are working and feel like they're doing work that matters. And oh, so much more. And the big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Chris and our sponsors.
The next wave, your chief AI officer hosted by Matt Wolf in Nathan Lance is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The next wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to the next wave wherever you get your podcasts.
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Chris, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What up, Fire Nation? Super excited to be here. I think a lot of the predicting the future is actually not that hard. I think we see the future around us often. We see people doing things that make sense that everyone's going to do. I think one of the hardest things
Um, to get right though is actually just timing. And so people, the mistake that people make is having too short of a time horizon. And so if you can have a long enough time horizon and you can be pretty sure about what's going to happen in the future, then the secret is like, how do you actually stay motivated and keep going? Um, and that's a lot of like what fulfills you, what makes work fun, uh, what makes the challenge fun. And if you can, if you can stay focused on
the right problem for a long time. You might not be able to predict when the market's going to turn, when everyone's going to adopt a new behavior. But you don't have to if you're still present and focused and working on that. And that that has been something I've learned that lesson. I've been doing this for 15 years and I've learned that lesson a few times. Wow, this is going to happen. Oh, we're completely wrong on timing. Ah, we're still doing it. And then the market came. And so.
Yeah, I think it's we like to think that this stuff happens really quickly and sometimes it does but that the timing is usually the actually the hardest part to protect.
I love this concept and Seth Goughton actually talks about this a lot in his book, The Dip, where he just goes over example after example, where just these companies and businesses and just even solo entrepreneurs, they just go into this dip and they have the right concept. They have the right ideas. They're even passionate about this, but they just don't get through the debt. They don't give it enough time and they give up that three feet from gold mentality and then
They look back and they're like, oh, if I just held on. So it's a really interesting concept. I mean, I tell everybody that joins our community podcast is paradise. I say, listen, entrepreneurs on fire launched in 2012 that I launched in 2012. If I launched that in 2021,
It fails at that iteration. This would be the wrong timing for it. But in 2012, it was the right timing. So I had some luck there. I stuck with it. And the market grew with what I launched. So so much to think about there, Fire Nation, when you are going through your process, what are you going to be able to be passionate about long enough to keep interested in continuing to do the thing?
until the market turns in your favor. Now, as I mentioned in the intro, we're talking about why working remote is actually more toxic than in person. I love this concept with Chris because he is the CEO and co-founder of Wistia. It's really interesting that a video individual guy that has
Such an experience in the online video world here is so such a believer in this topic. So I want to be honest with Fire Nation right off the back because there are some major and I mean major challenges when it comes to managing a business remotely. So share some of the biggest that you've experienced. First of all, it's funny me even saying this because, you know, I've built a company that was predominantly in person.
And we just started to have remote working become like remote for us is the thing that we used to kind of retain folks who are going to move and we're like, Oh, you're great. We want to keep you. This is a pre pandemic. And then we just started to hire people remote. We're like, Oh, we're figuring this out. Like we can do the hybrid thing. And then obviously thrown into fully remote due to COVID as everyone was. And I think like,
The chat like communication is a lot of communication that happens in person. There's a lot of understanding of how people are doing of whether or not a message is resonating. Really simple things that just get unbelievably hard when remote, if you don't have systems for them. And this was not obvious, I think in the first three months of being remote, because we're all just like trying to survive. But over time, I've seen
that there are a lot of things that are way harder to get right remote that they are in person and getting them wrong can create a situation where you can have, you know, things like way more toxic toxicity in the workplace, which doesn't even seem possible because what's the workplace here in your house, right? Like so it doesn't, it doesn't feel like a thing that could happen, but it's something that, yeah, that just gets really hard when communication gets harder and these like subtle, all these subtle,
things get removed. Well, what would you say is maybe the biggest challenge of managing a business remotely? Like what did you experience? You're just like, wow, this is way harder than I expected. Staying on the same plan, not that hard. Like if you're, if you have a really well laid plans and you get those well laid in person and you communicate those in person and people discuss them and push back, whatever,
That's you can stay on a plan. That's not hard. What gets really hard is when you're going through big changes, which we've all been going through, all the systems of feedback that exist in person do not exist in the same way remotely.
Um, if you're having a zoom meeting instead of an in person meeting in person, you can literally hear someone grown or someone can interject mid sentence or, um, people or gets dead silent. If you're saying something that does, right? I've definitely said things that don't resonate here. You can hear a pin drop, right? Um, well, a lot of remote working in meetings in particular, everyone's on mute. It's nothing but the pin drop. You can't tell.
what's working versus what's not. And I'm sure you've been in these meetings where you see people like doing the head nod. Oh yeah. They're really big head nod and they're trying to show, I agree with you. And it's like, why are they doing that? And they're doing it because in person, you could just feel the energy and you can't feel it remotely. And so when you're going through change, it gets a lot harder to tell. Are people on board? Are they not? Are they excited? Are they pissed? Are they confused? Are they bought in?
And you have to have different systems to understand that. And I think it's a stake to assume, you know, that silence is agreement when. Right.
when you're managing business remotely. And people have just gotten really good at holding their phone just under the camera view so you can't see it and then just going to TikTok and then just obsessing with TikTok for the entire meeting and just not catching anything. And then maybe the recording gets sent out and they watch it at 4X speed and they pick up on the important things and they go about their day.
Let's be honest. Remote culture has actually been praised for decades now, especially in the digital Nomad community. I mean, Tim Ferriss, with his book like 15 years ago, made the four-hour work week such a big deal for so many people. But let's talk about the other side of the coin.
Why can remote culture be actually more toxic than in person? I mean, we've been talking about this subject thus far already in our last little share, but let's really get detailed now about the toxicity of this remote culture. If you're walking around an office and you see someone who's upset, you wonder yourself, why are they upset? It's a very simple, simple thing.
Um, or if you hear a meeting in a conference room and it gets a little rowdy or people walk out of it and their heads are like hanging low, you just ask obvious questions, which is like, what are those people meeting about? And, um, why is everyone upset? And over time you could build like a really strong muscle around sensing our team's happy. Are they not? And I just took for granted that that was happening in person and I took for granted.
that it was so easy to get an answer on what was up or dig in, right? Like you see people, they walk by you, they look upset, you ping their manager, hey, what's going on? You're like, oh, someone's quitting or, you know, we just got some really bad news on some project we were trying, something. You have a sense. When things are remote, like you don't have that sense at all. Meetings can happen where everyone comes out of them like dejected or everyone comes out of them upset
and nobody knows. Like it's just someone sitting in their home alone and they walk away from the computer and they don't necessarily think I should tell everyone about this problem or whatever. And so if you have interactions that are really going poorly between folks, where in person you would kind of hear about it, it can just go completely silent when things are remote. And it becomes a
Um, you know, he said she said situation like I had because people start reporting on things that no one else witnessed and no one else was around. Um, and that can create a really tough environment.
So Fire Nation, we talked about some really interesting things that I hope you're going to be able to implement into your remote workforce to the level that you have on right now. We're going to be talking about some really interesting things after the break, out of sight, out of mind, some best practices for you managing a remote workforce and so much more when we get back from thinking those sponsors.
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that out of sight, out of mind mentality that some managers do have. So let's just be honest, it's going to happen. So how do we combat it? Yeah, the answer is intention and over communication is not really a word anymore. Like it's like, I think we have to have much more intention as leaders. We have to ask yourself the question, you know, if you were, we used to hear a lot about walk around management,
And are you just like getting a sense of how people are doing and what's happening? And that helps solve a lot of problems. Like you have to ask yourself the question, how do you do that when you're remote? But you know, Chris, what kind of comes in behind when you say that is office space with that guy just walking around with a cup of coffee, going up to the cubicle, sipping and saying, so how about those TPS reports? So I mean, what, what is like a good way to do kind of walk around management that doesn't, you know, kind of put you in that tool category?
I think it's being present and putting yourself in a place where people can feel comfortable saying hello and just like having quick conversations. And yes, the TPS report over someone's shoulder is not going to be, that's not going to work. Although there is some truth, right? Like they're making fun of a real thing, which is like, if you are just available, there's all these people who are always on the fence of telling you something. And I think this is even more true. The bigger company gets,
Um, the more true people are actually more on the fence because they assume you already know what's happening. They assume you know there's a problem. They don't want to be a tattle tale. They don't want to, um, create it, create an issue where there shouldn't be one. And so, um, just being present helps people feel comfortable of like, Hey, actually, maybe I should tell Chris this thing. And, um, I learned over the years that that was like as simple as like, I would sit on a couch on the first floor of our building.
and worked there for a few hours, and people would pop by and say hello, and some people would sit down, and it was that simple. But to do that remotely, there isn't a couch. There's no lobby. There's no random walkbys that are happening organically.
I think that's definitely one thing that a lot of people really found that they missed during the pandemic was just being around people. Of course, we all love our alone time. Whether you're an extrovert to the max or an introvert to the max, we all love our alone time to some level. But then when we got it forced upon us 24 hours a day and basically solitary confinement in some ways,
we started realizing like, wow, like I actually really missed just kind of being in a room with people, the energy. Because what are we, when it comes down to like the core of our atoms? Like we're just energy. And when our energy is combined, there's some really fascinating things that happen to Fire Nation. And it's so true that that's like synergistic energy is just there and it's present. And so many people, myself included, really missed that so much more.
than even I expected. And I consider myself an extrovert. So I expected to miss it, but I hadn't missed it even more than even I expected. So some really interesting things about everything that Chris is talking about here. And let's get kind of detailed for a second about the best practices that you've seen that you've implemented for managers to manage a remote workforce to kind of minimize this damage we're talking about.
I think you have to be intentional and you have to have lines of communication that are formal and more formal and you also need more informal. And so that looks like, you know, being crystal clear with the meetings that you have that people should go to and always recording them and transcribing them, previewing messages. One of the things we've learned to do is cascade communication. So we won't just go to an all company meeting and surprise everybody with something.
We will, if we're doing something big and something that's new, the first thing we'll do is go to the senior management team and make sure they all understand and they're bought in and they've had a chance to push back. And then we go to all the managers and do the exact same thing. So by the time we're introducing something that's new and big to the company, you can go to your manager directly after that meeting and ask a question and they will have an answer. We do Q&A by team every month. And the goal of that is to have a smaller group
for 30 minutes and people know that they're always going to have a chance to ask questions. They can do it via themselves, like say it out loud or they can do it anonymously, but we're trying to build that culture to make sure that people feel comfortable asking questions. And then you have to do a lot of more informal things. And so I would suggest like scheduling
very short, like 15 minute meetings with different folks around the company with no agenda. And I think that's actually the key. It's like the in-person run-ins and stuff had no agenda. You were just covering whatever came up. And I think that's super important. And I would say like, you know, it's important to use video for meetings. And it's also important to do meetings where there's no video. You have to actually do both because it turns out some people self-conscious, it is tiring to be on camera all day.
Um, but it also, you can get different cues and ask people things about people in their life and in their home and all that kind of stuff. And then the other thing you can do is like, you can do just calls and the amazing thing about a call is like you can go on a walk and talk to somebody else and your brain works in a different way and you have a different level of like comfort and informality. Um, and I find that it's like a mix of these different things that you need to do. Um, and then the, the probably the biggest, most important thing that I haven't even mentioned yet is like you can't manage.
a business that was fully in person the same way that you manage a business that's hybrid or remote. Like you must have way more asynchronous communication and you have to get people comfortable with like pushing back in written form and writing up things so that meetings can be shorter and everyone's more aligned going into them. I mean, similar to the Amazon style, like you don't have to have the
the, you know, their crazy level of detail in your notes, but like I think making sure that people are all aware and people are on the same page walking into a meeting. So a meeting can be more about discussion around whether isn't alignment versus like trying to gain massive alignment in the first place.
So a couple things that I love their Fire Nation, the Q&A by team, like I love that concept. So everybody always knows and feels like they have a voice that matters and they're going to be heard. And this kind of goes back to a concept of, you know, when you're just part of these companies where there's more than like 150 people, you know, some companies that are
500, 1000s, tens of 1000s. That's tough for like an individual because we had this like tribal 150 person limit that goes way, way back to like 50,000 years ago. And we have a hard time coping with things bigger than that just because that's kind of how we have always been like that's been the tribal unit.
And then once you kind of get up to like couple three, four hundred, boom, one tribe breaks off and now you have two tribes that are off doing some other things. And there you have the world that's been populated. So having the smaller team concept really makes you heard and makes you feel just at your core. This is right. I'm being heard.
And I also loved how you even brought that audio only thing because Chris, I mean, I think that's one of the bigger reasons why clubhouse became so big because a lot of people were just like, I just love the fact that I can just go on there and I don't have to have good lighting. I don't have to have my good face on. I don't have to sit there and be nodding my head, you know, the head nod and pretend like I'm listening. Like I can be on walks, I can be on a treadmill and I can be consuming great content. And again, so I mix them both.
I want to end with a bang and talk about morale and culture. There's two things that you've done exceptionally well in Wistia over the years. I know we've talked around these a lot, so we've mentioned a lot about what would make good morale and what would make good culture within a company with things
that we chatted about, but let's get specific with one or two really actionable things that maybe you've done or seen that could really keep companies on fire with a remote workforce in that morale and culture sector. So this one is simple. Everyone wants to know how their work ladders up to the company. And I think one of the most important things is being crystal clear, actually, like in the goals that you set, like what are the goals to the company
Um, what are the goals of the team and what are the goals for an individual so that you can ladder up and you can see if I'm successful with my goal, it's helping my team, if I'm helping my team, I'm helping the company, if I'm helping the company, I'm having an impact and like, um, in a world where work and life are so blended, I think it is really important that people can come to wherever they're working, their couch or their kitchen or their office or what have you. Um, and they can feel like what they're doing at work matters and what they're doing at work like really is
impacting the business and that's obviously where growth comes from and that's where opportunity comes from. So I always think like you want to try to get focused on that and that comes through like really good communication down, really good communication up and really good communication sideways and you know everything we've been talking about. And then I think the other thing is there's a lot of stuff
that seems so silly. Like, I don't know if you've watched the office recently, but at some point during the pandemic, I'm watching the office and I feel like nostalgia can sad, like watching all these people together. And sometimes like things that they're making fun of, like, you know, the party planning committees, which seems so ridiculous. And they're so easy to like laugh about to make fun of. Like, but there is truth that it's nice to have.
Nice to have things with your coworkers that show you that you are not just like working machines, right? That like we actually are human beings. And I think you have to give permission for folks to experiment and be themselves and have fun and like things that we've done are, we've done hackathons fully remotely. An example of something that came out of it was like a team made a radio station and called Wistia FM. And so employees get on there and they spin different like,
Music tracks and they are the, the DJ hosting it. And it's on everyone's calendar and you can like listen throughout the week and feel like this connection to other people in the business. And so I just, I think it is actually really important to plan things that are appropriate to a remote world, right? Like you shouldn't go and do like the cake cutting thing where everyone's remote and they can't have a slice, but like you probably should consider
um, the gaming with folks and, you know, the VR, uh, mini golf is a favorite. And like, what are the things you can do that give people that space to see that it's not just like you're coming to work and you're in and out and you don't feel that extra connection to the people you're working around you. Um, last thing I would say, this is so simple, but like all my friends who have run remote first businesses before the pandemic always tell me like,
In a remote first business, you still need to connect with people in person. And I would encourage folks, like it's don't underestimate just how valuable a small amount of in-person time can be for making remote connections much stronger. And there are ways to do that safely and do it outside and do it testing and do it in mass, but I'm a big believer that just a little bit of that goes a very long way towards
keeping people connected and keeping them excited. Love everything we talked about here today. I hope you now understand why working remote can be more toxic than in person. If you're not taking the right steps and that you really got some great lessons for your business in this hybrid workforce, that's probably going to be a part of our future forever. So Chris,
Give us the one major takeaway. You really want to make sure a fire nation gets from everything that we chatted about here today. Anything you want to share about how we can connect with you and Wistia and everything you have going on and then we'll say goodbye. The biggest takeaway I would say is you have to remember that all of us are like complex human beings sitting at home and
Just because we're not necessarily in person with each other at all every day or at all anymore doesn't mean that we don't care about who we're working with or how the work is done. And you have to build systems that allow you to really hear from your people, to hear from your team and to know what's really up.
Um, and I think that's the difference is like when you know there are issues, you can deal with them. Um, if you have the feedback loop, you can iterate, like, but you just, you have to be more intentional. And I think when you do that, you can build, you know, I think hybrid working is actually incredible, like to give people the flexibility to live where they want, um, and have a connection to work and do great things, but like in many cases have a better quality of life by living closer to family or living in different locations. So I'm, I'm a huge fan of hybrid working.
Um, but I think you just have to be much more intentional with all of the communication to make it happen. And as for me, uh, my, my own podcast talking too loud where I, I talk to folks about, um, the things that get them excited and me excited, which is, you know, the intersection of creativity and entrepreneurship and investing. Um, and you can find me on Twitter at sea savage or if you can learn more about Wistia at wistia.com. So yes, thank you for having me. Also this was, this is really fun. I love.
I love this format and I love what you guys are doing.
The shown us page will pop up with links to everything that we talked about here today. Of course, check out his podcast, Talking to Loud. Check them out at Sea Savage on social. And of course, Wistia is a fantastic company and video platform and more. Check it out to learn all about that awesome missing. Chris, thank you for sharing your truth, knowledge, value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side.
The next wave, your chief AI officer hosted by Matt Wolf in Nathan Lance is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The next wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to the next wave wherever you get your podcasts.
Have you ever said to yourself one day I will write a book? If yes, then I have an opportunity for you. Author 100 is a 100 day program where I will personally guide you one on one to create, write, publish and market your book. I will provide daily guidance and mentorship every step of the way. Head over to author100.com to sign up for a free call with me to chat about the details. Author100.com.
