Tina Ferguson: Managing Distributed Workforces

[Music] so a little bit about myself I have been in the industry for about 20 years working across multiple geographies and various companies of scale and inclusive of that I've been at the firm for eight years which has allowed me truly the opportunity to partner with many first-time founders as well as serial founders as they're thinking and building out their organization many of that disturbs distributed or thinking through what a birth plan can look like so I've really been able to have truly a front row understanding of the common challenges and a lot of those best practices and inner workings for crypto companies with a distributed workforce but also coupled with crypto nomads and how do we think through some of those best practices and it's really been such a great opportunity to work with so many of our founders and helping through those best practices because many of us will acknowledge it's very challenging to build an organization and I really want to be able to share so many of those best practices with you as I was developing this presentation I came across a very interesting stat it was a survey that was conducted by PwC it was inclusive around 10,000 distributed projects inclusive of 200 companies and dirty countries so a great sample size across various industries and what their intent was was to look at from one project from the conception to the completion what was successfully completed and in my mind I was it came around 40 to 50 percent I think you'll also be very surprised by this number only it's 2.5 percent Oh lose 10,000 projects that were serving only 2.5 were successfully completed and that's why it is so important what we're talking today is I really want to give you some best practices to avoid being one of them ninety seven point five percent of companies that didn't have a successful project and that'll dive into some of those strategies and are really building a successful distributed workforce and one of the pieces when we're thinking through this there's really three optimal strategies and it's thinking about your people hiring the right people or right skills I'm going talking about a framework for that as well secondly thinking about what is the infrastructure and I know many of you are probably thinking about decentralization or if you're also building on a network and so a lot of what I'm going to talk about today is you can leverage in either scenario and then processes right one of the things we should be thinking about which is very specifically is decision making how to think about feedback how are we going to disseminate information across the organization and I'm going to do a deeper dive on each of these but I thought to really optimize kind of not just giving you the best practices is to walk me through specifically a case study a company that I had an opportunity to partner with and they had a pretty aggressive timeline the intent was to grow from a team of five to twenty and six months and it was across various functions and multiple geographies and so I'm going to walk you through the next few minutes with that lens in mind and one of the things that I think we can think about when you're building an organization or thinking about building networks your people are your most important resource it is if you think about building an organization it's about hiring the right people at the right time and at the right place it's what I really call truly the 3 R's and I think what's really interesting is when we were looking at an organization [Music] we knew it was so competitive the talent that we were going after it's as you all know in building organizations it is tremendously tough when you think about hiring the right people it has to translate into building the right product and ultimately governing because of the change in the environment right we have to give ourselves that competitive advantage to win and that true is by having white people and so the framework of others mentioned a moment ago was really 3 R's and the first thing that we did was we sat down and really looked at primarily what were those skills and the experiences that we needed because we had to do this across functions and we weren't looking for people with skills right now at six months we were looking at folks that we need being able to durables within 12 months and 18 months and the CEO also had a very strong vision of the culture he wanted to really focus have a culture where there was integrity people were passionate about what they were doing play to win and one of the things is people also that were agile and could adapt very quickly and working cross-functionally and we were able to build very specific and your new questions that would complement the technical skills because with an aggressive timeline we just did not have the opportunity to make a mark hired so we really sat down understood the profile that we were looking for from a candidate perspective but we also wanted to ensure that we were setting people up for success so we really instituted a very robust onboarding program so people knew even before they came into the company on day one what they were going to be working on the teams they were going to be partnering with how those teams operated and we were very clear it's also what successfully and also with failure so we're trying to minimize any ambiguity because we wanted to ensure we had the right people at the right time and then in addition as you're hiring right you've raised a certain amount of capital we have to really think through how are we going to pay folks so we looked at building salary bands activity also in the crypto organizations right here's the allocation token so we really spent some time and thinking through what that compensation philosophy could be and how we could attract talent that was not familiar with crypto or how things operate operated so that was a really great opportunity now that we knew with the right people we had to figure out timing because we had to figure out when we hired our engineers our designers research our community managers and so it really allowed us to understand what the milestones we're going to achieve and to hire the right people at that time and the right framework during this exercise it was very interesting you were able to identify some community managers and engineers that were actually located in Europe and actually ten of the folks we want to hire in New York and this is what I always caution folks on if you're going to be hiring in different countries or even different states it's something to be mindful of you need to be thinking through what are the employment laws any implications that we have to hire a fire there's additional costs associated with statutory benefits and then in conjunction with that we also want to make sure that we want to do a cost-benefit analysis to really determine if we wanted to establish an entity or even possibly if we wanted to do a PEO and I laugh less and just a fancy name for a professional employer organization for HR and what it does is it allows youth you're going to hire in different locations we established a CEO so when we were able to hire somebody we get immediately hired that day and I will just it's kind of funny even before I got on this call I had one of my companies telling me you know we need to hire buddy and pay right now and what we're ever do is drop an email to our contact at the Peugeot and we're gonna be looking at getting an offer out and part of it and being a competitive environment you need that competitive advantage so one of the things after we looked at the right place the right time I really wanted to kind of share with you I talked a little bit about this is how important onboarding is because I know when we're moving very hard in house we just hired people and then we let them hit the ground running I want to talk to you about really the business impact if you have a very strong onboarding that's cohesive and it can increase your productivity by literally seventy percent and just think about these cost savings that you can achieve and just the resources so I want to take an opportunity and just walk you briefly through some best practices in your living truly a functional onboarding and if you think about an onboarding program it really for us when I was working to see you it started as soon as we open a job right it was an opportunity to say here's the 30 day plan here's what the person's going to be working on here are the outcomes here's what success looks like there was also inclusive of a training program so folks that we're going to submit code people knew how to do it it was also very inclusive laws of how we operationalize how we did feedback how are we gonna do our day to day and you've heard me say a couple times and I'm probably gonna hone in on this it's really important than any onboarding program or any building of a company it's helping people understand what other teams are working on not just for them to be you know it's performing well in your job it's really instrumental of the trust that you're building in an organization and if you can do that up front the value when you start to have conflict and issues you'll be able to see the momentum and people being able to navigate to that and I would also say one of the things that we did is we did check-ins and what that is and I don't think you have to be overly prescriptive but we were checking in to see how things were working what were the challenges the person was facing and be able to get in front of those issues up front or if there was a potential issue we could actually address it immediately and I think that's really important is with especially and even then time to learn now how it was checking and understand how your people of performing what are their issues and that really ties in to ultimately creating a culture of social belonging and so if you think about the onboarding process its twofold to get people up and running they understand how an organisation's in the function but also building some of that trust and in technical upfront which was really important to the CEO now you've hired the right people right we've got an onboarding place and plan now let's take an opportunity and really think through what was the organizational structure and that's so important for us is to really understand how people were going to be reporting because and it's a centralized organization you really need to understand how robotic will operate how it will interact with engineering the opportunity how it will even engage with community managers and you've got to establish that equipment whether these are going to be managers one of the things that we also have to decide do we bring any experience matters or do we have folks actually being a lean capability and that was something we were really trying to focus on to them as well and then in addition it was really important to really put some parameters as to here were the job roles of what they were going to be working on and again it was really wanted to understand also what motivated people in their roles so that we can actually embed that as they were working with other teams but also thinking from the development and I think one of the things as you're building out an actual organizational strategy it's really instrumental to make sure that you have the right or zatia structure that will support that so one of the things that we really took an opportunity as we were building out this organization is what did we need to achieve and did the organization support it and so I will be honest we had to make a couple of different adjustments we're originally engineering and product together and then ultimately found that separating them because of their direction the organization's going see if it's something to be mindful as you're thinking about an obvious organization and I would say now that you you have an organizational structure you it's really imperative to actually help people understand how they are actually being function and what are those processes that you really think we're valuable I think in any organization room in the building in network when you have people that are partnering together it's really about establishing feedback and one of the things that we took a very proactive approach is we actually went through and train people how to get you back not to in day to day and it could also one things want to ensure because for the CEO was really imperative for him that he wanted his team to get them feedback as to what was working well what was not working you know and so one of the things if you can establish the people feel comfortable in providing real-time valuable feedback it really well one of things that we had noticed is it really was able to get us through conflict or a lot quicker and a lot of people we were looking at are engineers they were working on day to day issues and when they had a nation's they did go talk to the product team or the community manager without management having to get involved and that was really really important for his routine was driving - which is very and then I think this is what I see in a lot of microcredit companies is really ensuring that you have a decision-maker I know we're hiring a lot of senior people we want them to have certain needs the autonomy and the ability to be a part of decisions but ultimately we have to identify someone who is going to be the key decision-maker whether that is or techno whether it's for product and how to communicate that to the organization and also empower that person in their day to make those decisions and then I would say one of the other pieces that we were thinking about because we were decentralized is how do we think about communication how do we disseminate information right slack is great for giving you know just quick information and feedback but I think one of the things that we really want to say is if you have a technical decision maybe that was a better zooming one of the things is for managers day-to-day if you be in person always great or if you do zoom those are things that you need to be thinking about when you're in different geographies and that was something that we were very instrumental what we thought about upfront of what were the system and tools you want to be able to develop to ensure the company's successful and then lastly I think one of the it's so important is building these processes that are certainly going to support the structure and one of the things that we really did is we were constantly as we were bringing new people into the organization we were testing what was working and what was not so we had this opportunity to constantly reiterate and I would say one of the key pieces as you're building out an organization it's so imperative to think about people infrastructure and process if you can think about these strategies upfront the intent is really to avoid the scenario of being and avoiding that ninety seven point five percent of companies that have not been able to achieve a successful project thank you great day Thank You Tina for the first one is from Sara and she references the case study in your talk and is wondering if you can talk a little bit about how they train very early new hires to take on leadership right away while also making necessary contributions to the product or in this case study how did you balance individual contributors versus leaders and how do you go about thinking about the larger structure of the company when you're growing really quickly from five to twenty people yeah and I think it's a great question I think one of the things that we did up front is when we renew it we're gonna grow to 20 people we actually started to think about what did these roles of fight very specifically in thinking about that infrastructure who are we gonna hire managers or even how it leads and I think secondly to your question which is how do you allow people to be leaders in an organization at the same time one of the things that we did is we paired everybody up with a senior mentor so a senior engineer in the organization or someone who is a product who would actually be able to sit there and mentor and guide them as they were growing in the organization I would say the other piece that was really important for us is we actually had build a training program for both employees as they were coming in to actually how to manage projects how to come in how to work cross-functionally we had actually instituted actually a training program with a third-party vendor to help support them next question is from Paul and Abhishek so for hiring internationally what do you make of products like let's deal that manage compliance for you can you recommend HR tools that you think are good for for hiring remote workers yes I think there's a couple of different peos that you can leverage right or they will in it's a regression they will encompass not only compliance but they're also going to help with you in payroll taxes the employment laws a lot of companies choose apply Google a lot of those who use it zilean cornerstone I think one of the things when we talk to companies about tools there's not always one tool that'll work well one company we really want to understand your business but those are a couple that you see many many folio companies leveraging right now cool great okay next questions from nori and yes are there any best practices for managing remote sales teams effectively particularly when no one on the founding team has a sales background in the past we've had difficulty getting good performance out of remote salespeople so one of the things that we did right where you have a founder we've been building remote sales teams and we just haven't been able to you know grow be able to get the performance we need one of the things that we've done in the past is we've brought in a third-party right where they will actually help you think through how do you you know building out a sales organization we also have folks in the firm who actually partnered with many of our companies on this area as well were they built out sales organization should think about the structural components you also think about what are you trying to sell and then that's where the sales enablement component comes in so it sounds like you you you basically want to bring in sort of like the leadership team that can design this sort of organization at the outset and then you once you have that clear structure and guidance at least then you sort of can build it out from there yeah okay good next one is from Mark and this is this is one we've actually talked about before is yes no you said it feels like a lot of krypton organizations are very flat or at least aspire to be sort of very flat how do you deal with that ethos while making it clear what we're parking lines apart well I think what we've seen as companies grow in scale right initially when it's 20 it's not easier to be a very flat organization however when you think about you road even 50 to 100 you have employees that are looking for employee development they're looking at growth right you need management who is going to be able to build strategy give guidance to their employees and one of the things is it's really hard when you don't have that evolved into your organization so what we'll see is it'll usually kind of be the about 20-25 and then when I started to work in its the eg bringing some level of a lead or a manager who can actually build and actually grow these teams because really if you think about a manager part of the role is to really remove barriers for their organization and so that's where you'll see that from an infrastructure standpoint be hired yeah and one thing I mean there is that you know because because the space for has these organs of decentralization as a driving a ethos um there is you know I think I think that largely informs the flat is sort of aspirational flatness of a lot of these words but there's sort of two dimensions on which you have to assess organizational structure there's there's the you know core team and an organization for example you know and indicates this maker there's the maker of foundation or the etherium foundation right and there's an organizational structure within that foundation and then separately there's the network that they that the foundation sort of spawned and put into the world and I think the Uniting principle for both is that the more complicated the decision making that you're trying to do as a group the more you need sort of a clear management structure because if you don't have a good this is to a point you made it in your presentation you don't have a good clear process for making decisions it's really really hard to scale decision making so I think it's it's both true of the organization but also sometimes in the case of the network's - okay cool Annette next question is from Metta and she asks compared to other fields crypto companies seem to have higher employee turn rates and this could be because various things including you know the fast-paced nature of the space or how entrepreneurial it is so how do you deal with that as a small company how do you incorporate or account for employee turn in your culture and processes so a couple things what we'll do is actually assess attrition data why people are leaving and a couple things we write some of the root causes or the interview process are we interviewing for the right do we we went through weary interviewing for the right skills experience and a lot of it is also the profile can someone work to your to her point be very agile and adaptable you can actually identify that very early and in your process and so it could be attributed to that we're we seeing some of those scenarios or I would also say the first 25 and an organization might not be the same when you're hiring 200 so one of the things that I work with the companies is let's and you have heard my content is really nailing down your interview process because it certainly can eliminate some of those nutrition issues on the back end totally that's that's creative ice next next one is from I'll be Scheck what are your tips for delegation especially two or more levels deep from the CEO and escalation or two or more levels above I guess it's you know a entry level employee in and remote the environment so I think one of things that we coach managers on which is as a manager looking at what your priorities are and then also looking at what motivates your employees and looking at the skills and the experience and where you can actually grow your employees right it's got to be a very mindful situation and that's where we talk to managers which is don't just delegate your delegate purposes but look at something where there's alignment or where it motivates the employee as well OHS where they have that skills and development because what we've seen is when people delegate and they don't have the right skills or experience you can set that person of failure and so one of the things is being really mindful of just even their own manager where what are your priorities and where you can even have that opportunity to develop your employee yeah I think yeah my experience it's it's it is this sorry this goes back to your point really about hiring right which is like when you need to screen for a lot of this stuff in the hiring process and like through that process make sure that the employee is at the right level for the role that you're looking for and if so like then it should be possible to delegate to them right hopefully they have the right maturity to handle it and so I think a lot of this comes back to running a really efficient hiring process that can eliminate so many of the problems with turn and no issues with delegation etc and again it's right it comes back right don't hire the person for right now but how they can grow with you from a business perspective 12 to 18 months yeah totally okay I think so that's that's all the questions and but that will we'll wrap up and let you enjoy the rest of Friday night so thank you very much Tina for and yeah then a strong applause oh thank you guys [Music] you [Music]