Let's Talk, People: Episode 39

CAN REMOTE TEAMS MAKE YOU A STRONGER LEADER?

HOW INTENTIONAL STRUCTURE REPLACES PROXIMITY AND UNLOCKS BETTER PERFORMANCE

[00:00:00] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Hi, I'm Emily Frieze-Kemeny, host of Let's Talk, People, where leaders come to bridge humanity and profitability. Informed by a couple decades of work as a Head of Talent and Leadership Development, I'm here to amplify leaders so they can exalt everyone and everything they touch. Are you ready? 'Cause it's about to get real.

[00:00:28] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Let's talk, people.

[00:00:36] Emily Frieze-Kemeny:  If you, like me, are here because of your passion for talking leadership and growing your impact and those around you, I want to invite you to check out our new leadership model, Pivot Player. Pivot Player is informed by our research working with thousands of global leaders over the last two decades.

[00:00:53] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: You can learn more about Pivot Player by heading to PivotPlayer.com, where you can also take our free leadership survey and find out which leadership suit or suits you've likely been wearing. Okay. Let's get into the episode.

[00:01:09] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: I am excited to be digging into our topic today, something that you might be a bit surprised about.

[00:01:15] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: What if leading virtual first, meaning having a team that is remote or hybrid actually forces us to be stronger people managers and leaders?

[00:01:25] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: From the work that Dropbox has done as being a virtual-first company, they have discovered that the discipline that comes with leading virtual teams may make us even stronger leaders.

[00:01:42] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Allison Vent, who's the VP of People Operations and the Global Head of Virtual First at Dropbox, will be joining us. 

[00:01:49] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: For those of you who don't know Dropbox, which I don't think is many, but just for context, it's one of the pioneering cloud storage and collaboration companies. It was founded in 2007, it boasts a $2.5 billion annual revenue, and seven hundred million users across a hundred and eighty countries rely on Dropbox. It has been recognized as a workplace innovator in Fortune Magazine, Time, Fast Company, and The Wall Street Journal.

[00:02:18] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Over the last eight years at Dropbox, Allison has held roles of increasing responsibility in learning, organizational development, driving strategy around employee and workplace experience while leading global teams herself. 

[00:02:33] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: In 2020, she spearheaded an initiative that was named Virtual First. It was Dropbox's forward-looking remote work model, and it was by all means ahead of their time. It has continued to be a leading differentiator of how they work. 

[00:02:50] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Prior to Dropbox, Allison built executive education programs at Stanford and spent several years in advertising for clients including Coca-Cola, Marriott, and Clorox. 

[00:03:02] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: So let's jump in.

[00:03:06] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Allison, I'm really excited to welcome you to Let's Talk, People.

[00:03:10] Allison Vendt: Hi Emily. I am so excited to be here. 

[00:03:13] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: I'm gonna take us back in time for a moment. I know it feels now amazing, like ages ago that we were in the pandemic, March, 2020, and work life came to a halt overnight. That was a moment in time that we thought would pass, and we'd go back to normal and return to the office.

[00:03:32] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: While it has changed how we think about work for most organizations, I believe Dropbox did something pretty remarkable and went from this really curated, high-end, in-office experience to being a leader in virtual first work. 

[00:03:48] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: I'd love to hear, Allison, what that moment in time was like and how you and the team navigated it. 

[00:03:57] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Can you take us on that journey?

[00:03:59] Allison Vendt: Yeah. So I actually started working at Dropbox back in 2018. It's my eighth year, as we call it, 'dropversary' next month. So I joined Dropbox shortly after we IPO'd. It was a really exciting time, I think, to join Dropbox, and it was just a really energizing place to work.

[00:04:21] Allison Vendt: Our offices were viewed as these culture hubs, and that was I think, really what added to the energy. I think we had about 13 offices across the globe, and they were really viewed as these incredible culture centers. And in fact, 97% of our employees were actually aligned to an office location. We only had 3% remote employees. 

[00:04:40] Allison Vendt: When we embarked on this project about six years ago, that was something we really kept front and center, we were like, how do we do this and still preserve this culture, but knowing it's gonna look really, really different. 

[00:04:52] Allison Vendt: I had just moved into actually a new role, leading our People Strategy and Operations as well as our People Analytics team. Really, I was operating as Chief of Staff, our Chief People Officer and so this came up as that first strategic project that I was doing in this new role. What an incredible opportunity. 

[00:05:07] Allison Vendt: We had already started kind of looking at some more flexible types of work, just in terms of more remote work, right? We knew we needed to consider unlocking new talent pools, so we'd already started considering it a bit, but certainly the pandemic really accelerated the conversation and it really began, I would say, as a people team led effort. But I think when we really started diving into it, we really realized this is a huge paradigm shift that we're going through at Dropbox, actually, our mission is to design a more enlightened way of working. And so we're like, we really have to take this opportunity and seize this opportunity.

[00:05:41] Allison Vendt: We did a ton of research. We looked at what had worked for companies that had gone remote and reversed it, how could we mitigate that? For companies that were thriving remotely, what could we learn from them? And we started to realize if we're gonna do this right, we actually have to reinvent everything that we're doing end to end and it was actually a multi-month design process. 

[00:06:01] Allison Vendt: We really designed this like a product. We had a deep partnership with our design team. There were a hundred of us or more working on this across the company. 

[00:06:11] Allison Vendt: We announced in October, which in retrospect was not that much time, but so many companies came out during that time and announced their approach and certainly our employees were asking, "What are we doing? What's our approach?" 

[00:06:23] Allison Vendt: But we did really try to take that really intentional design approach to how we built the model. And again, really tried to think about the employee experience in a really holistic way, which I think has been a huge part of our ongoing success and commitment to the model here six years later.

[00:06:40] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Yeah, there's so many things you said that I think are really important. 

[00:06:43] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: One is, there's that intentionality that I don't always see of here's who we are as a business, like here's the value we bring in the market, and then how does the way we operate and the way we define culture and ways of working align to who we are as a business.

[00:07:01] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: I think that connection is such an important point that you made that this wasn't just about preference, it was about who is Dropbox as a company. So I love that and I think that's really important to call out. 

[00:07:17] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: And then the other part of this is just the lack of reactivity. Sometimes it does feel like you either need to follow the trend or you need to make a quick decision because you're getting pressure and the fact that not only was it people led, which is not always the case, often these things are dictated, and just the amount of thought and research and input both external inputs as well as input from it sounds like a pretty broad array of people. I have no doubt that that's part of the formula for success.

[00:07:50] Allison Vendt: Yeah, I totally agree with you and I think that company alignment, we have this really great opportunity 'cause we're building products for distributed teams, right? 

[00:07:58] Allison Vendt: Not every company has that, but you certainly have your company values and what really matters to you, and that is something that I think you can look at, even if, again, your company mission doesn't have that kind of alignment. 

[00:08:08] Allison Vendt: And I do think getting engaged with such a cross-functional set of leaders, certainly folks like across our real estate workplace services team, our IT team, but also getting really, really deep alignment with leaders across the business. We obviously worked really closely with folks within our CFO org to understand the financial implications of everything that we were doing. And then that design partnership, too, was something that was really beneficial and unique. 

[00:08:34] Allison Vendt: When I think about our guiding principles that we developed from the research that we had done, those are still guiding principles that really lead our work today.

[00:08:44] Allison Vendt: One of those principles is around flexibility, and that's also built into how we think about evolving the model because we don't stay stagnant with what we're doing. We're using insights from our employees to continue to iterate on the model too, and so there's just some natural agility that I think has been built into the model itself.

[00:09:04] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Yeah, I was curious, from having been through such a robust and profound design experience, how do you think that has changed the way you approach other decisions or design endeavors?

[00:09:20] Allison Vendt: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would say it was an extremely transformative exercise for us as a people team overall. This was our first foray into really thinking about the employee experience as a product and there's a number of ways that that's been really beneficial to us. 

[00:09:37] Allison Vendt: I mentioned some of that agility that's naturally built into the model and the iteration we're always like, build, learn, iterate, right? And I think part of that is also there's a change management piece to it that's really important, because our employees, it took some time, but when they started to really see the insights that I'm providing to you, and I'm giving you feedback, I'm participating in pilots, I'm doing surveys, you're listening and you're evolving things based on this, people are like building it with us, right?

[00:10:04] Allison Vendt: And so there's an engagement that comes, I think, inherently with that. But I think what you're also doing is keeping, like, what are the problems that we're actually trying to solve, and keeping that front and center. 

[00:10:16] Allison Vendt: And so, like I said, this was our first attempt at it, and I think several years in when we really started to see the success of it, our Chief People Officer, Melanie, she was like, let's really think about how we can embody this HR as a product mindset across the entire employee life cycle, how we're thinking about everything.

[00:10:33] Allison Vendt: So we actually kind of launched a really robust initiative around this last year where every single team did at least one, most did many, programs and ran them through this HR as a product framework that we've developed. We've put together this whole toolkit and practices for people to be able to leverage. 

[00:10:50] Allison Vendt: Part of that is also we created these HR minors too, where people can get experience doing other cross-functional work, its also about bringing in really cross-functional and robust insights. 

[00:11:02] Allison Vendt: So yeah, I would say it's had a very transformative effect and now you see it across every single one of our teams and programs, is embodying this mindset across our people team. And I think we've seen some really great results from doing that.

[00:11:15] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: I think for business leaders thinking about how they can evaluate the impact of a people function, this is a way of knowing that, really HR, any of your more service-providing internally facing functions, can bring value. It's a very commercial way of looking at impact, so I think that's great.

[00:11:35] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: The other thing I was curious about that we see as a trend when we're working with leaders is that the gap between leadership and the employee base has gotten wider and there's less listening, more frustration, whether it's complaining about the new generations or not wanting to hear different voices.

[00:11:53] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: I think it's one of the ways organizations are starting to crack. 

[00:11:57] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: How did that work for all of you? Was this very leader led and leader directed? Or were employees even part of some of the design sessions? Like how did you balance, leadership obviously has the authority to make decisions, but you're only as good as what you can bring people along on the journey with.

[00:12:16] Allison Vendt: It's a really great question. 

[00:12:18] Allison Vendt: I would say, initially, from the beginning, us getting leadership buy-in was gonna be super critical, right? So I think when we initially approached, like we didn't actually ask employees "What do you want from this?", and I think we reflected a lot on this, people aren't great at predicting what they need all the time, right? And also what we would've been asking people to weigh in on, for example, would've been something that would've been very hard to conceptualize, because it wasn't a work model that had existed prior. 

[00:12:48] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: That's right. 

[00:12:49] Allison Vendt: So again, I think starting from that first principles approach was very important.

[00:12:52] Allison Vendt: But then when going to get leadership buy-in, number one, we really had an incredible advocate, I think, early on, from our co-founder and CEO Drew, he obviously is very passionate about solving some of these deep issues that have plagued modern work for, you know, many years.

[00:13:09] Allison Vendt: That's why he was inspired, I think, to start Dropbox and how he's continued to evolve the company as well. 

[00:13:14] Allison Vendt: And so definitely that most senior kind of advocacy was very helpful, but we did have to take a really thoughtful approach to change management with our leaders for sure.

[00:13:24] Allison Vendt: We got alignment, but then when we actually began to roll out some of the practices we have as part of virtual first, so things like, if we're gonna really adopt an asynchronous by default mindset, that means we're going to try this practice called Core Collaboration Hours, where you have four hour time blocks for meetings.

[00:13:39] Allison Vendt: And people were like, I don't think I can do that. And we're like, well, purpose is not necessarily trying to jam eight hours of meetings into four hours, it's rethinking how you do these things. So there was a lot of ongoing change management that happened as we were rolling Virtual First and those practices out, where we had to reengage with particular key leadership groups that supported those leaders, like Chiefs of Staff and Executive Business Partners and things like that, and giving them the tools that they needed success around that.

[00:14:07] Allison Vendt: And again, candidly from an employee perspective, there was a lot of skepticism when we rolled out Virtual First, because we also rolled it out in a time when we were under lockdown, people were very hungry to get back into in-office and see other human beings.

[00:14:21] Allison Vendt: But over time, I think we really started to see some of the change, and I think that was another question that you had, was around data and how we show that data, and there's been a lot of research to show that widening gap that has happened between leaders and employees, and I think that's where we've let the data really speak for the efficacy of the model too, because we see these great results. 

[00:14:47] Allison Vendt: And when we started out we had these very lofty goals and success outcomes, and initially that was a lot of surveys and using that type of data, but over time we've gotten a lot more sophisticated with how we look at developer productivity, how we understand collaboration behaviors and operational kinds of impact and whatnot, so we've gotten a lot more sophisticated in those, but we sort of had this philosophy of measure everything and be super transparent about it and do that with leadership too, which I think was really important.

[00:15:15] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: So I loved the one example that you gave about how you defined what those meeting or collaboration type hours were. What's one or two other little nuggets of actual practices that the team put in place that really made a difference?

[00:15:30] Allison Vendt: Yeah, I mean, just to expand on that asynchronous by default kind of mindset too, I think, when we looked at lessons learned from some of those remote companies that were really thriving in remote work, that was very much at the core of how that team operates, or how those companies operate.

[00:15:48] Allison Vendt: Again, those core collaboration hour practices and those are really designed to also enable overlap across regions, so that's definitely one. But it was also about asynchronous communication, and really upskilling our employees on the right kind of communication.

[00:16:04] Allison Vendt: Obviously that's evolved a lot as AI tools have become much more prevalent and actually play a really great role in helping really streamline async communication in a way that's really helpful. But we did a lot of work around that and the kind of practices that exist. 

[00:16:19] Allison Vendt: We also did a lot of work around re-imagining meetings too. 

[00:16:22] Allison Vendt: So meetings should be used for the three Ds, which is debate, discussion and decision making, right? To just give people this broad framework. So if you're doing updates or reading out statuses, that's actually not a great use of time, so shift that. So that was another practice and we've evolved that a ton over time. 

[00:16:39] Allison Vendt: We've been doing a lot of work around meeting optimization and those practices are also really anchored on enabling as much focus time as we can, and so, essentially, how we look at our practices, like outside of those core collaboration hour blocks and giving some flexibility to when you can meet with partners. It's like, use your calendar in a way that's gonna be really communicative to anyone that needs to be in touch during those times. 

[00:17:05] Allison Vendt: And then the other piece, I think, is the in-person connection, which is super critical and core to our model. 

[00:17:11] Allison Vendt: So we generally get together with our teams about once per quarter. We really thought about, okay, what kind of TNE do we need for this? What do we need to put in place to enable this? And so we have evolved that a ton over time and it wasn't even actually something we could do until 2022. But that has been extremely core to our model. Teams are seeing each other every couple of months to really build that trust foundation that's needed to then operate with speed when you're going back into your virtual environment. 

[00:17:41] Allison Vendt: So I'd say those are some of the key practices, we also have a ton of practices on our toolkit, on our virtualfirst.dropbox.com site too. 

[00:17:48] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Amazing. And then I'm gonna ask the question that either, again, is spoken or sometimes not spoken, of how business leaders look at this. 

[00:17:55] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: How have you grappled with the, are people focused, are we getting the most productivity, how do we even watch how people are working to be able to catch where they may need some coaching or support from a capability perspective?

[00:18:09] Allison Vendt: That was a big, guiding focus how we were thinking about designing our approach, because I think our observation, especially after a couple of months of being on our screens, as we were in the design process, was like, I mean, you're just getting inundated with pings and Slack notifications and all kinds of things just at all points, and so that's always been something that I think we've really, really focused on, and again, intentionally design the model around enabling as much deep work time, since we know that's where the really great innovation comes from. 

[00:18:38] Allison Vendt: So in terms of looking at productivity, I would say early on, we looked at a lot of self-reported productivity measures, but over the last year and a half, we've had a really deep partnership with our CTO org, who has a team that's really focused on developer productivity, and so we have been leveraging the DORA framework for our Eng productivity and how we look at that, so it's this really robust framework that looks productivity across a number of different dimensions, including speed and efficiency, quality of work, and through that partnership, we've been able to really, I think, understand, impact of collaboration behaviors, impact of in-person gatherings too, on productivity when they're really intentionally designed around outcomes. 

[00:19:25] Allison Vendt: So we do have that focus, absolutely, but I think with how we really try to look at our metrics, and this is something I think several years ago as we started to get lots of different data sources from things like pilots and then some of those HR metrics that we look at around retention and hiring and all of that, is there's no like one smoking gun metric that we'll look at to really be like, okay, yeah, that's the one signal of how we're doing. Like we really do try to triangulate insights across all these things. 

[00:19:53] Allison Vendt: So, yes, we care definitely about productivity, but we also wanna triangulate it against, how are our people performing, how are they also doing in virtual first? 

[00:20:04] Allison Vendt: We've been able to identify like, what are people who are thriving in virtual first and high performing, and that's the sweet spot. And so we'll look at impact on productivity from all of these things.

[00:20:13] Allison Vendt: So it's definitely something that we care about and we look at, but from 

[00:20:18] Allison Vendt: the lens of really trying to improve the effectiveness of our teams and evolve our practices to support them, and again, it can vary based on role and team and all of that too.

[00:20:28] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Awesome. Okay, Abby, I'm gonna turn it to you 'cause I know we have a lot of questions that came in on this topic.

[00:20:34] Abigail Charlu: Let's do it. The first manager situation that came in, the manager shared, "My organization is pushing return to office, but the day-to-day work still feels distributed. People come in just to sit on teams and frustration is rising. Leaders feel they're losing control, employees feel like flexibility is being taken away and trust is eroding. I'd love advice on how to lead through this without disengaging my team or turning it into a fight with leadership".  

[00:21:06] Allison Vendt: This is just a really common issue that so many organizations are facing right now, and one thing that I think is really hard is there is just this debate that I think gets like a bit binary around, we're in office, we're remote, we're this, we're that.

[00:21:23] Allison Vendt: There is no single model that's gonna work for every single organization. 

[00:21:28] Allison Vendt: I think it really is about, number one, understanding what your organization needs, and try to approach it again from this first principles approach.

[00:21:38] Allison Vendt: What problems are we actually trying to solve? What has worked for our organization in the past, what hasn't? Where are we going? What are our teams going to look like moving forward and how do we wanna design a work model around that? 

[00:21:52] Allison Vendt: What I hear a lot of people asking are things like, "Well, how do I get people into the office?"

[00:21:56] Allison Vendt: And that's actually not the right question to be asking. It's like, what is the right way in which work happens for our teams in the most effective kind of way? 

[00:22:06] Allison Vendt: Yeah, and I think that's very true. I mean, talk to friends all the time who are at companies who are back in office three to five days per week, and they're like, "But I'm going in and all I'm doing is sitting on Zoom calls all day because I have to go into my office in New York, but my whole team is actually in Seattle".

[00:22:21] Allison Vendt: There's just a lack of intention. And I do think there's an opportunity to design a small pilot, that could be very scrappy, it doesn't have to mean I've now lifted and shifted a whole team over somewhere, but you could try something, maybe with a leader who is interested in taking a different approach. Measure that, share the results. See if there's other people who are interested in participating in something.

[00:22:43] Allison Vendt: I think we're in a place right now, especially with leaders, feeling like they're losing control.

[00:22:48] Allison Vendt: You do need to show data and you need to show like the business impact of this to actually influence around this. And I do think then there's a way to then bring up employee trust as part of that to show, "Hey, we're gonna try to experiment around this". 

[00:23:01] Allison Vendt: And again, I think people need to see some data to actually support that. But I do have a lot of empathy, because there's just so many people who are facing this right now, so I hope that's some helpful advice. 

[00:23:11] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Yeah, it really resonates. 

[00:23:14] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: The way that we look at leadership and our leadership model, Pivot Player, is this idea that leadership used to feel very lonely. So what I feel when I listen to this, it's like the leader feels very alone in trying to bridge the expectations of leadership and the frustrations of their team.

[00:23:32] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: And I think that part of the unlock that I was feeling as well, Alison, is how do you make this a design challenge for you and your team? 

[00:23:39] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: So instead of, you're the voice piece for leadership, everyone's either gonna be pissed at you or you're undermining your own leadership, which is never a good strategy, I think it's a matter of, how do we help these leaders to say, "Okay, hey, we're a team. Maybe it's not ideal for everybody, but we do wanna be connected and being together is awesome. How do we make the time when we are in office together, most valuable for us?" 

[00:24:05] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: And it's almost like moving from a place of being a victim to being a co-creator of a new reality, because I agree, I mean, there are times when you're in office where you do have to do calls and it is kind of silly. 

[00:24:20] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: But I do think we wanna be connected, so I think it's strategizing, is it two hours on certain days, and to your point, they're for decision making, for co-creation, for debate, for debriefing a situation, but at least make some of those times meaningful. 

[00:24:38] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Or, like if you're the leader, do your one-to-ones that day. So instead of doing your one-to-ones, virtually do them when you're in person so you can really feel and sense the other person.

[00:24:48] Allison Vendt: I totally agree, yeah. 

[00:24:49] Allison Vendt: So even if there's just no opportunity to experiment, for example, with, "Hey, we're gonna do this pilot around this", I think you can very much be like, okay, well then how do I think about designing my own work week in ways that are going to add a lot of value for people on my team?

[00:25:02] Allison Vendt: And I love that it's like, "We are kicking off a sprint cycle every two weeks or four weeks or whatever, so let's use that week in this way, and then the following week we can use Tuesdays to do X and do my one-on-ones", and that's so much a part of that intentionality of what you bring to your week. And so I agree, I think that's a great suggestion to even just help you as a leader feel like, 'Okay, I have more control, and I know at least my team is feeling engaged'. 

[00:25:29] Allison Vendt: And then as a leader you can share lessons learned, "Hey, this is what I'm doing", and my team engagement, I mean, you could even do like a little mini survey right, with your team to show how much more engaged they felt after a couple weeks of intentional work week design. 

[00:25:41] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Because everybody loves to blame the boss or leadership for their woes. It's hard to blame when you start to become a part of creating a solution.

[00:25:50] Allison Vendt: Absolutely.

[00:25:51] Abigail Charlu: And it goes back to our early conversation, it helps to shrink that bridge between leadership and our employees and helps us shift our mindset from victims to having agency and truly stepping into our leadership and power. 

[00:26:06] Abigail Charlu: Our next manager submitted this situation, "My team is now spread across locations and time zones and I'm finding it harder to build the kind of connection and culture that used to happen naturally in the office. As a manager, what are the most effective ways to intentionally build trust, collaboration and a sense of community on a distributed team?"

[00:26:27] Allison Vendt: These are really, really important questions and I think something that, again, you have to be very intentional about. 

[00:26:34] Allison Vendt: Being a manager, I mean, for me personally, right, this is the first time I've ever managed remote teams. As someone who's been a manager for a long time, it is very different, right? And so, you know, there's core management principles you certainly apply, in terms of what makes a good manager, but you have to do it through a very different kind of lens, and so how you actually think about your team, operating rhythms, and how you design that operating framework for your team is really important. 

[00:27:00] Allison Vendt: So, we have company-wide practices that I think really support this, but it's important that every single manager does this too, right? 

[00:27:08] Allison Vendt: And I do think when you've got people spread across locations and time zones, you are gonna have to be operating in a more async manner, so you're going to be really, really thoughtful about how you spend those synchronous times together and making sure that they're adding value.

[00:27:21] Allison Vendt: And part of that is about developing connection and trust. We have certain kinds of rituals that we've pulled together for teams, right? And I mentioned we have a Virtual First Toolkit. You can check some of those out on our website, virtualfirst. dropbox.com, but we have things like getting to know your team, right? And 'working with me' docs and doing a really light and simple exercise when you have someone new come on your team to share both things about how you work, but also who you are personally and the kind of things that matter to you, right? 

[00:27:50] Allison Vendt: Just in terms of collaboration, teams also want a framework within which to operate that feels consistent, and so I'd recommend looking at practices like, hey, when are we actually available for collaboration across these teams, so that we can actually do this effectively. And I think Dropbox, Atlassian, and there's a lot of other companies out there that are taking these, so you can try to learn from those. We certainly learned from a lot of other companies, so I'd suggest taking a look maybe at some of the practices that exist.

[00:28:19] Allison Vendt: I do think also, again, being really mindful about how you're spending your time together with healthy meeting hygiene. You wanna be making sure you are allowing space to really work through complex problems, but you also wanna allow space for connection and time to really get to know each other.

[00:28:37] Allison Vendt: In person plays a very important role, and so when you can get your team together in person and how you think about leveraging that I think is really, really important, and I think what we've found too is it doesn't have to be three to five days a week or every single month. We actually find there's this sweet spot on gathering that's three to five times per year, anything below or above that actually we found has a statistically significant effect on things like engagement and effectiveness and things like that, so being really intentional about that and making sure that you're carving out space for team building and connection, but also that lightweight and spontaneous connection is important.

[00:29:17] Allison Vendt: And then I even think there's also asynchronous rituals that can be in like these digital tools like in Slack. 

[00:29:23] Allison Vendt: For example, my team, we do these weekly standups where people are sharing what they're working on, but we also include things like recognition for someone on the team that you just wanna call out, or what did you do over the weekend?

[00:29:34] Allison Vendt: And it's only if people feel comfortable sharing, right? But you'll get to see pictures of people's kids, right, or "Hey, I went on this trip". 

[00:29:40] Allison Vendt: And so there's just little ways to interject that humanity where using in-person, your synchronous time together on Zoom, but then even async communication tools too.

[00:29:50] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Yeah, it's these structural elements that you keep describing, Allison, that are just really sitting with me. 

[00:29:55] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: It's like you can't leave things to chance. I think that we used to think that the in-office experience was like, "Oh, it's so easy, I just swing by somebody's desk or somebody just can pop into my office", but again, I think the myth that was there was that that was working. 

[00:30:10] Allison Vendt: Yeah. 

[00:30:11] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: And what I hear when I listen to you is in some ways it might make us work better together because you have to be structured and you have to be thoughtful about, what's a Slack conversation, what's an email, what's a full team meeting, and what should we be doing when we're together?

[00:30:27] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: What's a one to one? What's formal? What's informal? 

[00:30:31] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: That level of thought process feels like you're creating the architecture of what culture is, what high performance is, what human connection is, and so it almost makes me think that it can make you even more effective because there's almost like a laziness that can come with just seeing each other every day that you don't have as a security blanket when you're in a remote work environment.

[00:30:56] Allison Vendt: Yeah, I totally agree with that. You know, it does require more effort and I do think it also can be really easy to fall back into old habits with work, but the benefits that you get from that are so significant that it's absolutely worth it, right, and you just need to do that constant reinforcement. 

[00:31:12] Allison Vendt: Like we just, for example, last week had our global people offsite. We had 150 people in San Francisco and, you know, it was a lot, but it's also so enriching and we get this opportunity and we really encourage and try to design the experiences in such a way that it enables as much connection and opportunity for that relationship building. We've evolved, actually, our offsite framework to really enable that. We've embedded things like these connection moments that exist, three to five throughout the experience, to just be really, really intentional about that. 

[00:31:45] Allison Vendt: I can say firsthand, I've been able to develop very deep and meaningful relationships with colleagues in this model.

[00:31:51] Allison Vendt: You don't have to be working side by side.

[00:31:54] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: To me it didn't feel so different because I always led global teams, so I was used to having every version, hybrid, people I had never, or maybe only once met in person, and you can get really deep and connected. 

[00:32:09] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: It's making the time and it's managing your calendar really strategically.

[00:32:13] Allison Vendt: Absolutely.

[00:32:14] Abigail Charlu: The next situation, a manager shared, "In hybrid meetings, I notice that people who are physically in the room tend to dominate the conversation while remote workers are quieter or get talked over. Over time, it feels like they're less visible and less included. How can leaders create a more equitable experience so everyone has a real voice?"

[00:32:38] Allison Vendt: This is something we spent a lot of time talking about and debating because I think that hybrid meeting experience is one of the most challenging meeting experience to be a part of, obviously, especially if you're the remote person on the tile, on the screen. 

[00:32:53] Allison Vendt: It's actually really interesting 'cause a number of our employees who were remote employees, like pre-virtual first, are still here. They're like, it's such a transformative thing now where everybody joins from this level playing field. And that was a big part of our model was this equitable experience across the board.

[00:33:11] Allison Vendt: But of course it still can happen, where some people can't make it for whatever reason and so we're joining virtually. There are some simple techniques, what we even tell people simply is, "When you're joining a call, for all the people in the room, can everyone please just join from their laptops and everybody mutes except for one person", so at least we're talking and we're approaching this from the same angle and it's not 10 people all chatting with each other and then one person on the screen is like desperately trying to pay attention. 

[00:33:40] Allison Vendt: We've done a lot of work around this with meeting optimization and part of that has actually been really thinking about the phases of the meetings and how you can really approach those different phases and so we've built this meeting taxonomy and what we've really understood is that pre-meeting phase, that is actually the most significant in terms of having a meeting impact. So that's where the facilitator really comes into play where you can think about, okay, who are the people who need to be there? What is actually the purpose of this meeting? Who do we need to voice an opinion? And so you're doing some of that meeting prep and we're doing a lot of work internally. 

[00:34:18] Allison Vendt: Reclaim is this product that we have that will be helping give some nudges around these things, which is gonna be really, really helpful. It's an AI enabled smart scheduling tool that we have. So that pre-meeting phase and the meeting facilitator, I think, has a really important role to play in that, where they can then prompt people in a hybrid meeting like, "Hey everybody, let's join from our tiles and do this". 

[00:34:38] Allison Vendt: But then also being mindful, and I think, again, there's a lot of great AI tools out there that can also surface, like, 'There were 10 people at this meeting. Six people spoke, four people didn't'. So you can see that a little bit more and understand how you can maybe bring those voices to the front a little bit more so. 

[00:34:55] Allison Vendt: Being really, really thoughtful about that pre-meeting phase and giving your employees tools so it's not a super heavy lift to prepare for that effectively.

[00:35:03] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Yeah. I mean, it just keeps coming through so profoundly. I have a feeling that the remote or the hybrid forces you to get even more thoughtful about how you spend time together. So it just feels like it might actually be that we're more productive, more focused, and more connected in a distributed environment because you have to do these things.

[00:35:27] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: And then the only other little technique that I'd add, I love the ones that you shared, was just this idea of simply going around. You know, going around the proverbial table, and that way, even if somebody doesn't have anything to add, they feel included in the dialogue.

[00:35:45] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: I do think sometimes having a little bit more structure of like, okay, we're gonna go around the tiles, as a human connection moment the top of a meeting, before we close a meeting, and then this idea of somebody playing the role of facilitator, again, I think that's a meeting best practice, whether you're remote, hybrid, or in person, but that somebody agrees to wear that hat.

[00:36:06] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: And in all honesty, it doesn't always need to be the boss. 

[00:36:09] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: I actually think from the work we've been doing and what we're seeing, it's one of the skills that I see missing in leadership the most, is being able to facilitate conversations to get to the best thinking and the best outcomes.

[00:36:22] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: So in some ways, being able to have to work that muscle is probably a good thing anyway.

[00:36:26] Allison Vendt:  I totally agree with you, and I think it helps drive better decision making. You're ensuring that every perspective is being heard. Facilitation is just a very difficult skill, period, and I agree that it doesn't have to be the leader of the team. It actually is better if it's not in some ways to learn that skill, because it is incredibly important. 

[00:36:45] Abigail Charlu: Amazing. Our final situation, the manager shared, "I'm trying to motivate and develop people on my team in a hybrid environment, but it's harder to read how people are doing and what they need. Some people thrive with flexibility while others seem disconnected. I'm especially struggling with how to keep my team members engaged and focused on team calls. I'd also love to be able to organize an annual retreat for my team where we can all get together to connect and align on strategy, but I don't know how to pitch it to senior leadership to get the budget for it. What's your recommendations?"

[00:37:24] Allison Vendt: So I think in terms of pitching to senior leadership to get the budget for it, I would just always try to anchor on what is the business impact of this type of gathering?

[00:37:35] Allison Vendt: Also, if you even wanna start to build a business case, I think there's plenty of external research out there. For example, you could start with something small and scrappy, maybe if you have a couple of employees, for example, who might be within closer distance to each other, you could design something. Look at, not just engagement, but also impact on product, and it could be just surveys, right? Not everyone has access to all this quantitative data and whatnot. 

[00:38:01] Allison Vendt: Data matters for something like this and I do think oftentimes you just have to take the action yourself to say, we do this all the time on the people team here at Dropbox, but like, we wanna try something, let's just put something together. What's the scrappiest, easiest way we can try to pull something together, get some results around this, and then share it and pitch it, because I think it's really hard to go and pitch senior leadership to get budget on something when you don't have your own data to support that, can just be really, really tricky and especially I think in the broader operating environment and business environment that we're in right now. 

[00:38:35] Allison Vendt: So that's what I would suggest, and I think honestly, a lot of what this person cited around keeping people engaged and focused and that some people are thriving and disconnected. I actually do think an in-person experience that was also very well designed around these things could help push through or maybe really identify what are the real issues here and how do we really understand what people are struggling with, 'cause some of these things that the lack of engagement might come from, just some tweaks that need to be made with how the team is operating, or that people need to develop a little bit more trust with each other, or you need to be a little bit more transparent, you can do that, right? 

[00:39:10] Allison Vendt: Sometimes we have like internal assessment that we'll send out before we do in-person offsites to get a gauge on what's happening with the team, especially if it's in the middle of when we do our employee engagement surveys and we don't have a good pulse on that. And so you could even do something like that to maybe try to get to some of those root cause and then design some sessions there around it. 

[00:39:28] Allison Vendt: But yeah, I would just say, try to find a really scrappy way of doing something small around this that doesn't require budget or is feasible within your current structure, get some results and then use that to pitch.

[00:39:40] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: I totally agree, Allison. I would just add it may be that you start to initiate some work streams, some design sprints, remote or hybrid, whatever your current model is, and then use that as an opportunity to say, okay, here's the progress we've made. We need to do like a deeper dive, an innovation session, make some decisions so that your leadership can see how this in-person fits into that commercial impact, that productivity, whatever is the metrics you're being evaluated against and how intentional you're being about why you're coming together. 

[00:40:16] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Now, you and I know that when they come together, they're gonna do things at a very human level as well, right? Relational, creating connection, but I think sometimes if you tie it to something that really needs to get done, I don't think a lot of business leaders would argue that coming together in person in a focused period of time can accelerate results, or accelerate thinking and decision making. 

[00:40:38] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: So I think that's part of what I'm thinking is like how would you show that you are optimizing what you're doing when you're not in person so that you can show that you're being really thoughtful about when you do want to justify getting together in person.

[00:40:50] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: So that was one thought that came to mind. 

[00:40:52] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: The other one is, sometimes it's about convincing your boss to do an offsite, because sometimes you have to experience the power of that dedicated, focus time to then realize how useful it is to a team. So, in some ways, what I'm thinking for this leader is to say to their boss, "We have these three objectives, I think we really need to come together to work on it." 

[00:41:19] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: We do a lot of facilitation of these, I agree with what you said, Alison, like being really intentional about how they're designed and structured so that then their boss gets to actually have that recent muscle memory of like, oh wow, that was super productive and useful, so then when you go and ask for it, it's grounded in a recent experience that they saw value in.

[00:41:39] Allison Vendt: Yeah, I totally agree and I love what you said about thinking about what is happening in person versus the kind of work that you're doing virtually, and I think you could really think about, over the course of say that quarter, okay, if we're gonna be doing this in-person get together, how do we time this at the right moment, so it's say, two weeks before we're launching, so we need to do a lot of bug bashing, for example, as a team. And how does this compare to other times in past cycles when we've done this and how can we think about doing that in person and then how does that flow within the rest of our goals and roadmap for the year?

[00:42:13] Allison Vendt: ' You can definitely focus around a lot of team building and trust building and all of that, but you also wanna make sure it feels really, really tied into that business impact and there's absolutely ways to do that, and again, show the differentiation between what you're doing virtually versus what you're doing in person and maybe how that compares to past experiences.

[00:42:30] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Allison, thank you so much. I mean, not only is it so helpful to have a wayshower around different ways of working, but as I said to you, Allison, I actually think if I was a betting person, and I'm sure you have data that backs this up, I bet there's so much more thoughtfulness and intentionality about how people work together because if you're virtual first, then maybe even some of the behaviors that we have around being in office together. 

[00:42:57] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: So I think there's something here that we should really look at seriously. 

[00:43:02] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: And also just for the generosity of creating playbooks and sharing best practices in such an open way. Like, to me, that's what this is all about, is building community, helping each other out, so I think it's really beautiful that you and the team did that.

[00:43:17] Allison Vendt: Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, I think that was something that we really tried to do intentionally from the beginning and, I mean, I definitely had this observation and working through 2020 and 2021 is like, we're all entering these brand new spaces and part of what I found so much is the collaboration with peers and colleagues and learning from what other companies are doing because we're all learning as we're going, and I think what we're going through now is very much the same way with AI transformation too, right? 

[00:43:45] Allison Vendt: And I love learning from other companies that share their results too, so it's always really helpful.

[00:43:49] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: We are better together and it's so true, it's like some of our best learnings come from what's hard.

[00:43:55] Allison Vendt: You get a lot of resilience, I think, through that too which is probably the most important quality all of us can have in this day and age.

[00:44:01] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: So, so true. Lifelong work, for sure.

[00:44:05] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Well, Allison, thank you so much for making the time, for all the nuggets of gold and wisdom, and for you and the team leading the way in a really important space.

[00:44:14] Allison Vendt: Thank you so much for having me, it was really wonderful chatting.

[00:44:20] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: My takeaways were, I love this one: What if we treated our employee experience, so the programs and initiatives that we design, as an actual product experience, starting from first principles, what is the problem we're actually solving for, looking at them in terms of persona work, building around outcomes, not old norms?

[00:44:43] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: We can test, we can learn, we can iterate, and take feedback, especially from the people that we're designing for, and data, to evolve and build trust by showing people that that input that they give us actually shapes the decisions we make. This is not just a best practice for people functions, this is a best practice for business leadership in general.

[00:45:02] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: And then my other takeaway is let's dispel the myth that the old ways of work actually drove connection and performance. I think the myth was that because we were in the office together, that that meant we were more connected or that we were helping to amplify not only our individual performance, but each other's.

[00:45:19] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: The truth was, I think a lot of us know it wasn't really working. 

[00:45:23] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Being in person can be incredibly helpful, and I think it's essential when you are fully remote, but it's not enough. High-performing teams design how work gets done, what they should do asynchronously and how versus when to come together live, how to collaborate most effectively, and to create spaces for feedback, clarity, and real meaningful relationships at work.

[00:45:47] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Structure, not proximity, drives performance, and that is a power leadership skill.

[00:45:54] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Last but not least, we need to make the case for the value and ROI of coming together in person, especially for remote and hybrid teams. And I would say even for teams that are co-located in an office, as we talked about, there's not really always a guarantee of connection and deeper work happening because everyone's busy and on teams calls and the like.

[00:46:15] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: In-person time should be designed intentionally. This is work that we do a lot at Arose Group with our clients. It's reserved for decision-making, for problem-solving together, to innovate, and to build trust across teams and colleagues. Allison shared that at Dropbox, teams gather three to five times per year, and it's a sweet spot their data shows has a statistically significant impact on engagement and team effectiveness. Building that trust foundation we always talk about that lets their teams move with speed in their virtual environment. 

[00:46:49] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: So for you leaders who are seeking to get some budget and concern that this won't be supported, her advice was clear. 

[00:46:56] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Start small, measure the impact, and let the results speak for themselves.

[00:47:01] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: It's an approach we've seen work firsthand with team off-sites and team work sessions. When you can point to real outcomes, the conversation with leadership gets a lot easier. And let me leave you with one question. What if virtual first actually made us stronger, more structured leaders? What if it created better work experiences than what we even had before?

[00:47:26] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: I believe, and Allison and the work that the team has done at Dropbox shows that when we're intentional about the way we design and manage people in a virtual and hybrid environment, it might just be a business differentiator for you and your teams.

[00:47:42] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: I invite you to try it. 

[00:47:49] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: On Let's Talk, People, what we love to do most is help you unpack your toughest people management challenges. So send them in. Send in the situations you're struggling with, the questions that you have about leading your teams, and we will anonymize them and give you answers and our advice on an upcoming episode.

[00:48:08] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: You can write in an email or attach a little audio message with your scenario to abigail@arosegroup.com That's Abigail, A-B-I-G-A-I-L at arose group A-R-O-S-E-G-R-O-U-P.com 

[00:48:29] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Thanks for joining today's episode of Let's Talk, People. For more info and insights, visit arosegroup.com and find me, Emily Frieze-Kemeny, on LinkedIn and Instagram. If you're enjoying the show, please follow, share on social and leave a rating or review in your podcast app- it helps other listeners to discover us.

[00:48:49] Emily Frieze-Kemeny: Well, that's a wrap, friends. Until next time when we come together to talk people.