Molood Ceccarelli is the founder of Remote Forever. She is a remote work strategist and agile coach often referred to as the queen of remote work in agile. Her work has been published in places such as Forbes, Huffington Post and Inc.com as well as Scrum Alliance and Shiftup.

In this episode, we discuss the differences between remote work during the pandemic, and "normal" remote work.  Molood gives tips on how to make your company, team, or individual work more effecitve, productive, and free using remote-first techniques and principles.

Today's Guest
Molood Ceccarelli
Remote Forever
Social Media: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter

Transcript

Voice Over: Ladies and gentlemen, The Tiny DevOps Guy.

[music]

Jonathan Hall: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Tiny DevOps podcast where we believe you don't need 1,000 engineers to do great DevOps. I'm your host, Jonathan Hall. Today we're going to be talking about working remotely. I have my guest today, Molood Ceccarelli, who is a remote work consultant or advocate. She does a lot of work with helping teams to do remote work more effectively. I'm looking forward to this conversation but before we dive in too much to that, Molood, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining.

Molood Ceccarelli: Thank you so much for having me, Jonathan, and hello everybody out there. My name as Jonathan said is Molood Ceccarelli. I am the founder and CEO of a company called Remote Forever and we've been helping remote organization adopt Agile ways of working including DevOps or plus DevOps if you might. Also helping companies that were in the process of transforming to Agile to become remote. Lately, as the pandemic hit, we've also added a branch to our company helping entrepreneurs with growing and scaling companies to learn, to actually use Agile and remote work best practices to create and scale their companies more smoothly. I do consulting. I develop courses and workshops and I also do a lot of speakings around the world, which used to be through traveling in the past but became from home after the pandemic [chuckles] or during the pandemic.

Jonathan: Molood, what got you interested initially in this work from home or this remote work concept?

Molood: That's a good question and an interesting backstory. I started as a software developer. My education is in security and dependable computer systems, which was odd because I was one of the only two women in the class when I was a student. I started as a software developer and already in my very first job, I realized that a lot of the ways that the company was working was so inefficient. I had to depend on in-person interactions with my colleagues who were in Canada while I was in Sweden. Sometimes I had to wait for like two months to meet someone who was working in Serbia.

I thought, why don't we just make this happen remotely through video conferences, which to me was just so natural, me being a millennial from this generation, having grown with technology. It just seems so natural for me that we should be able to get work done without having to wait to travel. Somehow in the culture of that big corporation, that I was a part of, this was not a part of the work processes. Also, this company was still working waterfall. They did not have automated testing. Part of my job was actually to write automated tests for all the manual tests that existed. From that moment, I got introduced to Scrum ways of working and Agile ways of working.

While I was taking those courses and the company was slowly adopting Agile ways of working, I also found an interest in helping people who were from different cultures and were located in different parts of the world to actually communicate more effectively. Now, this was a very, very beginning of this. Fast forward to the future, I got really into Agile. I became an Agile coach and I realized that the Agile thought leaders of the world, even some of the people that were out and about speaking and propagating the idea of Agile ways of working, we're all against remote work.

I could not possibly understand this because, at that time, I had experienced helping distributed teams adopt Agile and become really effective in their ways of working, and yet there were people that I looked up to, that I read the books up, that I attended the workshops who did not believe that Agile could be done unless the team was colocated.

That's where Remote Forever was born. It was back in 2016. It was a Sunday. I remember that I had my personal retrospective sitting in a cafe, sipping my coffee and I thought, I'm pretty sure there are other people like me out there. I'm going to find them. I started the conference called Remote Forever Summit, which was the first and by far the biggest conference that was completely online for the Agile people to bring the idea of remote working into the Agile world. I did not know that it would be that successful but luckily I actually found my tribe. There were many people like me who were frustrated by this old school thinking that Agile needed to be colocated. It didn't.

Jonathan: That's a great story. It's inspiring. I've been a big advocate of remote work for a long time. You seem to be drawing a relationship between Agile and remote working. Can you talk about that a little bit more? I mean, even the Agile manifesto talks about sitting in the same room together. How do you see that? How do these two concepts work well together?

Molood: That is exactly the basis of my business. Every hero's journey needs an enemy, right?

[laughter]

Molood: My audience's here is journey. My tribe's here is journey is fighting that evil. That is the Agile Manifesto that says you need to be collocated. The way that we look at it is actually this way, the Agile Manifesto says the most effective communication happens face-to-face. You see there is no mandate in that sentence. There is no way that the Agile Manifesto itself is actually communicating that you have to be complicated or else you can't be Agile.

I think that over the years, this has become a little bit manipulated and misunderstood by the Agile community. That's why I approached it, not by actually fighting the enemy but by walking alongside the enemy. [chuckles] I invited some of the authors, some of the co-authors of the Agile Manifesto to my conference first year, second year, third year. They themselves work remotely. They themselves actually said that they never meant for this idea of colocation becoming a prerequisite to agility to exist. Somehow the world went that way and every exercise, every book that was written was emphasizing that and making it bigger than it should have been.

I think by bringing the authors of the manifesto alongside my message, it became a lot easier to show people that we're not really part of a cult of remote work we're simply seeing the world and the reality of the world, which was at the time and it still is, companies are becoming more distributed. Those that are adopting Agile are becoming more distributed, whether it is to access talent, whether it is to open a new office in a different market and access that market. For whatever reason it is, we see every day that companies are growing fast and they are distributed.

How can you bring 10,000 people under the same roof and have them work colocated? It's just not possible. It's not that we're actually fighting this idea of colocation, it's just that we're accepting the reality that his work is being done remotely. How can we respond to that? Isn't that a sense of Agile response to change? All this is a change and we need to respond to it. That's what I've been saying since the beginning of my business back in 2016.

Jonathan: That's, that's really good. That reminds me just a few weeks ago I wrote a blog post. I made a prediction in this blog post and I'd love to hear your take. I hope you'll tell me I'm wrong because I hope my prediction is wrong. [chuckles] My prediction is in light of the many companies like Microsoft and Google and all these big companies that have been saying after pandemic we're going to go to this hybrid work model. My prediction is that a large percentage of these companies within five years, we'll go back to an in-office model because I don't think they understand why remote works.

My thesis is that remote works during the pandemic because everybody was remote and they were forced to work that way. As soon as there's an option and people are no longer being intentional about working in a remote way, it's going to fail. I think in five years, a lot of companies are going to start saying this remote experiment didn't actually work. We don't know why it worked for the pandemic but it doesn't work now. Come back to the office. Can you tell me I'm wrong?

Molood: I partly agree with you and partly I have some clarifications to do there. My take is a little bit different because I'm really am knee-deep into this world of remote work. I'm looking at data every day and what we see from the data is that 90% of the people who work remotely during the pandemic for the very first time, they indicate that they do not want to go back to the office full-time. Don't forget this last part. They say full-time, which means that they want the option of working in an office.

What is being misunderstood or maybe even misinterpreted by the managers, by the leaders who are calling people back to the office not after the pandemic, is that they're changing idea that people want the option of working from the office and turning it into we're mandating people to come back to the office and giving them the option of remote work.

We should be looking at it completely differently, completely from the opposite perspective. Now, I agree with you in the fact that companies are going to go to this hybrid model and then realize that, oh, it's not working for us. Guess what, companies have been hybrid since the '60s? I wasn't around but I've seen movies. I know that an office in New York works with an office in California and they just had phone calls and with those spider phones in the center of the room and they worked through remotely, they collaborated remotely. Right? It's not new. Hybrid is not new. People worked from different offices in different locations in the past as well.

What will happen is that they will not have a strategy for remote work. They will not have the infrastructure. They will not have the security necessary to make it possible for people to work safely and smoothly and quickly from a different network, from a different location, and therefore, they would say remote work failed. We're going to call people back to the office full-time. I think this will happen.

I think it's a calling for our community of remote work advocates to make an effort to show these leaders that there is an actual need for a proper way of adopting remote working, whether you want to call it hybrid or remote work or remote-first or remote-friendly, whatever you want to call it. If you're going to have people who need to collaborate from different locations in this office and that office or some people in an office and some people are satellite and remote workers, you need to have a remote work strategy. You need to have those best practices.

You need to be ready to get rid of some of the tools that you already use and adopt new tools. You need to be okay, but changing your infrastructure, especially if you're an IT company. The way that things are set up right now are not optimal for this collaboration. People are making do during the pandemic because they were forced to and that's the nature of human beings, not to seek any alternative unless you have to. If you don't have to, you're going to go back to the old habits and we haven't been in this.

Maybe I rephrase that sentence. The experience of working remotely during the pandemic is not the real experience of remote work and because of that, it will be much, much harder for leaders and for employees alike to understand that remote work is possible if done correctly.

Jonathan: I liked that you pointed out that the experience of working remotely during the pandemic is different than the 'normal' experience of working remotely. I know this because I work remotely for a decade. Many people, my wife doesn't know this. She'd never worked remotely until the pandemic, and many, many other people that are here in that situation. How can you assure the people for who this is new, especially those-- Let's address the people remote work is new to them, but they didn't like it for some reason?

Molood: Dream with me here, all right? That's maybe my way of showing you that remote work can work for anybody who wants to give it a try. Dream about the idea of being able to open your laptop, connect to the network of the company, not connected and network of the company, but still have tools at your disposal that can help you do your work. Imagine you open a tool, you know exactly what other people are doing and exactly what you need to do to contribute to the work.

Imagine that once you do your work, you communicate with your team and they know exactly where to pick up. Imagine that you don't have to sit in online meeting day in [chuckles] and day out. Imagine that you don't depend on meeting people over the camera e-face to e-face or in an office face to face in order to understand what needs to be done. Imagine that if you want to meet people, it's going to be on your well. It's not going to be something you have to do.

Now imagine that your kid walks by and you just give them a hug, give them a quick kiss and they walk past and you just get back to your work. I imagine that you choose which hours you want to work. One day you wake up and you're like, I really don't want to work this morning. You just tell your team, hey guys, I'm starting four hours later today, but I will make sure that you have the things that you need done by the end of my time.

All of these ideas, all of these options that you could have by working remotely are not necessarily available to you right now because you were forced to sit in your home. That's the first thing. When you work remotely outside of a pandemic, you don't have to sit in your home. I loved traveling. I loved working from hotel lobbies and hotel lounges and get somebody bringing me a cup of coffee sometimes for free. I love doing that, but I have not been able to do that.

I have been confined in the corner of my living room because I live in a small apartment and I have to live with this situation. I'm sure that you have to. Some of you have more responsibilities at home now because the schools were closed and you had to be both a parent and a teacher and a worker, and some of you were also managers for other people. You're like, "How many kids do I need in this world?" You didn't have the infrastructure. You didn't have the processes. You depended on meetings because you didn't know how to communicate asynchronously effectively. You had the idea, you heard the word and you thought it's maybe like email. It's not like email. You didn't know how to do this.

If you learn how to work remotely properly, if the leaders out there listening learn how to lead effectively, remotely, how to empower people, how to help them in their career development, and also the technical people out there, I'm sure that the audience of this podcast, there are a lot of people interested in DevOps, the technical part of their jobs, if the infrastructure and the systems that exist for people to do their job are empowering them to work from any network, any device at any time of the day, just imagine how amazing that world would be, that lifestyle would be. The idea is that the essence of remote work is freedom.

What you've been experiencing has been the exact opposite of that. Your freedoms have been taken away from you during the pandemic and you equate that with remote working. You're just like, "This thing sucks. I do not want this." Guess what, that is not remote work. Remote work is all about having options and having the freedom to choose.

Jonathan: It really sounds like you're saying that remote work is about much more than the physical location where you're sitting.

Molood: I do think that it is a holistic approach to work. It's not about lifestyle versus work style. It's actually the operating system by which a company is run. As I said, it's culture, it's the personal daily routines of individuals and the processes that come with that and it's infrastructure that enables both of these.

There is the need for people who are advocates of culture building and they're able to create culture. Don't get me wrong, culture is not team-building activities sitting over a video camera for one full day and you hate every second of it. It's not what culture means. Culture is what happens in the day-to-day interactions in the company.

Jonathan: You also talked about working in different parts of the world. What is your take on the distribution of time zones? Because that's a big discussion in a lot of companies. We're happy to do a remote, but we don't want everybody within three times zones of us. Is that appropriate in your view or does it depend and on what?

Molood: It's been one of the oldest challenges of distributed work. Especially in the US, distributed work is often understood as offshoring. It's like giving part of the project to a lower-cost country and having them behave like a supplier to the company.

In Europe, the culture is a little bit different. There is still offshoring, but when you say distributed, what people often understand is a central company having offices in different countries of Europe. This also extends when that company, like the European company, opened an office in San Francisco or in Russia or so. When we talk about time zone differences, the main thing that we need to have is time zone overlap in order to be able to have the option to do synchronous communication if need me.

If you have offices in Europe and Australia, it's very, very difficult to have that synchronous timing, that overlapping time during your different time zones. The companies that do remote work really well, what they end up doing is one of the two things. One is that they avoid this altogether. Two is that the employees compromise. That means in one time zone employees start their day later, which means that they get their morning to themselves and their families, or in the other time zone, some people start earlier.

It's also companies approach this from different perspectives too. Sometimes it's all the employees of that time zone who do this, who start later or earlier. Sometimes teams make that decision for themselves. I think the world is going to be more distributed and it applies to how companies are managed as well. I see more and more of this the student being cascaded down to the department level, to the team level, rather than being like a C-suite decision for the entire office or for the entire time zone to do that way.

Unfortunately, time zones have been a bigger challenge during the pandemic because people have been depending. People have been relying on synchronous communication only and they haven't learned how to use asynchronous effectively. They're like, oh, my God, I have three hours overlap with this people in this other time zone and they're always booked. How can I get my message across? Find a different way. There are many ways to communicate. Synchronous is not the only option.

Jonathan: Do you have any experience with regard to rotations regarding time zones. I think of, for example, a company I worked with last year, our headquarters was in Europe, but most of our customers were in Latin America. We were looking for an on-call person or two in the Latin American time zones. but all of our employees were in Europe. It made it a challenge there. How have you seen this addressed successfully if at all?

Molood: I think that exactly what I said, making sure that you have that overlapping time. You have a handover between the people who are on-call. I've only seen this once so it's not a very generic experience. It was actually a DevOps team. I put it in double coats for people out there because it's so funny when companies form DevOps teams to me.

[laughter]

Jonathan: I agree.

Molood: It was a DevOps team and they wanted to have on-call people in different time zones. What was happening was that, if there was an incident during the day in one of the time zones, there was a line service or report and they had created a process to document this so that the next person can take over and continue fixing it if this was like a deeper issue. If it was a smaller issue, there was just a report of what happened and what went on, and then the other person would take it. I remember that there was a junior person who was on call over Christmas and she was not very comfortable taking such a big responsibility. She wanted to have the support of the person in the other time zone for at least an hour. They had this one-hour meeting where the handover happened and she got some coaching for the next night and all of that.

Jonathan: How do you advise teams you're coaching to get the human interaction they need with their colleagues? Do you suggest annual or semi-annual or monthly get-togethers? What's your approach to that general problem?

Molood: Definitely, I am a big fan of how Basecamp used to do this before the pandemic. What they did was that they had an office in Chicago, they still do, and they brought people into that office for working together two weeks, every six months, if I'm not mistaken. I think that's so much more powerful than taking people to an offsite in Guatemala or in Puerto Rico because when you move people away from the work environment, the connections are belts. Yes, people become friends. Yes, people have fun together, but what is really needed for effective communication in working together remotely is the ability to understand each other in the work environment.

I recommend companies when the world is safer and you have the option to travel, especially those of you who are keeping your offices, maybe even downsizing, but still having that physical location, to bring people for an extended period of time, maybe two weeks, maybe a month so they can work together in a similar location. That would give them a lot more insights into each other's working styles, communication styles, what people like and dislike, and that would make it so much easier when they go back to that remote work style.

Also, when people are in a different location for only a couple of weeks, they also want to go out together. You don't necessarily even need to organize those activities. They just happen naturally because people would want to experience what it's like to go out after work for dinner or to have lunch together in the office or outside the office. That's my recommendation at least twice a year, at least two weeks every time and that would do magic for your company and the culture of people.

Jonathan: You suggest to bring the entire company together at the same time or can you do it in shifts may be depending on the size of your office space? How do you approach that?

Molood: I'm going to sound like an Agile coach. It depends. Make the choice yourself, ask your people, ask them what they want, and do what they want.

Jonathan: How about onboarding? Do you do that remotely or do you encourage people to do that in person if it's possible? How do you approach that one?

Molood: Oh, I love that question. I do think that onboarding should be done remotely. I'm going to make a technical segue here to make it understood why I think that way. You see, if the deployment process is not optimized, what do you do to figure out its flaws and its failures? You deploy more often. Onboarding people remotely also exposes the challenges and the problems in your onboarding process. The reality, as I said in the very beginning of this interview, the reality is that the world is remote.

Chances of finding a great talent in your headquarters' city is very, very slim. What if you find a talent on the other side of the world and they really, really don't want to leave their family behind to just be onboarded in your offices? It's important to do this process online and remotely, not only because it exposes the problems and helps you fix those problems, but also it makes sure that the person is able to collaborate and work from wherever they are going to work going on.

Jonathan: I'm going to play the devil's advocate here. How do you respond to somebody who says I don't want to onboard remotely or I don't want my new colleague to onboard them. I think it's important for them to know us personally so we can work together better?

Molood: [unintelligible 00:25:47] that's for sure. You're going to tire a tech person. That tech person is going to use your technology and that technology needs to work from another location. If they are in the office with you, you're going to have to coach them and teach them to actually do the work as if they were in a different location. There's no problem bringing someone and onboarding them person to person. That's not the challenge. The emphasis that I made was to make sure that the parts that we miss, the part that is about the toolset is not forgotten.

Jonathan: Imagine that somebody listening here, they have the power to make the decisions about doing remote work. How can somebody in that position, maybe the CEO of a 20 person company, how do they start making the changes to make remote work as effective as possible?

Molood: Let me start by a principle or principle is borrowed from the Agile Manifesto. This is called the principle of simplicity. The Agile Manifesto describes simplicity as the art of maximizing the number of things not done. The art of maximizing the number of things not done. Think about that. That's beautiful. I'd say, if you're in that position and you want to start this journey, first and foremost, visualize your processes, your toolset, and your technology stack.

Once you have [unintelligible 00:27:10] and be brutally honest, don't hide things under the carpet. Don't swipe them under the carpet, be really honest. What tools are you using for video conferencing? Are you using Skype and Microsoft Teams and sometimes Zoom and sometimes Google Meets? Write all of them down.

I want to introduce you to simplicity of the Remote Forever way. Simplicity as the Remote Forever way is maximizing the number of tools not used. Imagine if you only had one tool that would be your Nirvana, which tool would you pick that would capture all of your planning, all of your prioritization, all of your workflow, visualization, all of your communication, which tool would that be? I know that it's impossible to work with only one tool, but what I want you to see is to see how many duplicates of different tools that you have, tools that do the exact same thing that fulfill the same purpose.

Visualize all of that. Get super clear on what each of these tools are actually getting you to do at the bottom of it. Is it helping you to communicate synchronously with video? Pick one of them and be brutal. Get rid of them, make it a policy in your 20 person company because it's not yet that big. You still have the option to make policies that says this is our standard tool for video conferencing. Please do not use any other tool. This is our standard tool for automated testing. Do not use any other tool. By doing that, I know that sounds a little harsh, but it's important because your company is going to grow in terms of client revenue or maybe number of employees. You need to set those the standards from right now.

By just simplifying your tool stack, you already have taken that very first step to create that ability for people to innovate within the limitation and improve the processes, which brings me to step number two, that is documenting processes and keeping it simple. When I say document process, sometimes people come back to me like 20 pages of process documentation. Like not like that. Keep it like a framework, like a playbook. What needs to happen for, say, the onboarding to happen?

Onboarding is probably a number of steps. Just write that down as a number of steps. You don't need to have two-page introduction and three-page conclusion. It doesn't need to be that hard. If you're a tech company and you're hiring developers, onboarding, for example, could include committing a piece of code, fixing a bug in the system and that could be an acting way of bringing someone into your process, into the work environment without breaking step. Visualize, simplify, document the processes.

The third thing is culture. Working on the culture usually requires an external help. If you don't have the possibility of getting external help, you still can actually manage this. Be honest with your people. Create a culture of psychological safety, which enables people to speak up if something is not working without fearing being ridiculous or getting fired, or losing something in their career.

Having those, what I borrowed from Agile, having retrospectives regularly and giving people the possibility to talk about what is working and what is not working and improving that iteratively, improving that every two weeks, every month, whatever makes sense for your company. Creating that culture with the people that you currently have, creates the basis for the company to grow healthy and smoothly from here on because it gives the people the power, to own the processes, to own the tools, to own the culture that this company actually has.

Jonathan: Let's move down the organizational ladder here. Let's say you're the tech lead or a Scrum master or something like that for a team and the company is remote or distributed. What can you do at that level? Maybe you don't talk about your three pillars again. You don't have the control to dictate policy, but you can suggest tools and you can suggest methods and ways of working. What can somebody in that role do to improve the quality of their distributed team?

Molood: My advice is not really that different from the advice I give to C-suite, simplify. I know that many people in that position in a lower hierarchy in the organization are fixated, are forced to use the certain tools that the company has created. Challenged the idea, especially if your company has the culture of speaking up. If you see that your documentation is being done in Google Docs and in confluence and sometimes in the files in Microsoft Teams is speak up about this problem that information is being scattered around and that it's actually time-consuming to gather all of the information that is required.

One thing that I can tell you that is very concrete, is make better use of your task management system. When I say task management, what do I mean? Tools like JIRA, tools like Asana, tools like Trello, whichever one you use first and foremost pick one of these tools. When you need to plan, don't plan using sticky notes on a wall and showing it to the camera or some digital whiteboard and then translating that into JIRA or Trello. Do your planning in that same task management tool. Do your workflows in that task management tool and in your work agreements, which I hope that if in the position of working in a small team, you have work agreements. If you don't start there, create work agreements.

In your work agreements, this is something I'd recommend you bring in and it is the how of using this task management system. This part brings us full circle in terms of asynchronous communication. If somebody is working with a ticket in the tool, they need to update the ticket with the status of the work so that every single time a person, opens the tool, they see the true status also work. Now, again, this is the Nirvana. This is the ideal. It's practically not possible. You can't interrupt your work every five minutes and update the tool. That's cumbersome, that's extra information.

What you can agree on, however, is that every person at least updates the tickets they worked on a certain day at the end of their day. What this does is that it helps people who wake up later in a different time zone, to have the true status of the work and be able to pick it up from where you left off.

I bring it back to my main concrete advice which is use the task management system more optimally. Have your planning there. Have your retrospectives there. Have your actions there. Have your status updates there. Try to make use of this as best as it can because that tool will be the God of all information in your organization and if you have to do documentation outside of that tool if, for example, you're using that Classin tool suite and you were using JIRA and confluence, and you need to do the documentation in confluence, put the link in the ticket that that work relates to. If two tickets are related lengthened together. Make sure that you have those links and you think about how this information is going to be consumed by another person as you're creating it. It all comes down to empathy, putting ourselves in the shoes of the person who's going to read it, who is going to use this information to their work, and giving them everything they need in one go. Wouldn't that be beautiful if it was also in one tool?

Jonathan: Now, let's focus on the individual contributor. We have a single developer or an operations person and maybe their Scrum master doesn't care or their tech lead doesn't care about this. They're trying to translate physical events to virtual events and it's probably failing. What can an individual do to either just not go crazy or maybe to help influence the changing of the situation?

Molood: First of all, I empathize with you because I have been through this and I have seen this and I have helped people so please know that you're not alone. That's first and foremost. Secondly, let's start with your smallest circle of control, but you probably know this, Jonathan, but some people out there might not know that. Imagine three circles like intertwined circles, the inner one is called control, the one around it is called influence, and the outermost is called concern. You're in the center of this.

Start with your circle of control means, try to see what you can control and try to impact that. If your Scrum master doesn't care, your team leader doesn't care and you're just a developer or an ops person who is sitting there and they are taking away your calendar, and they're sending you meeting, after meeting, after meeting with no agenda, with no purpose, no nothing, is just like one-on-one with Jonathan, let's meet and talk about whatever, start slowly and empathetically, bring up the idea that you're not okay with this if you need the other person to actually respect your time and give you an agenda before they just book you.

Make polite requests like, hey, could you please invite me a week in advance, two days in advance so they don't book you ad hoc and expect you to be there. You can always start with yourself. If you're sending invitations, don't repeat the cultures that you don't like, then repeat the behaviors that you dislike. If you're sending an invitation to someone, make sure that they have all the information in the calendar invite. Maybe you still don't have the culture of reading calendar invites. Use whatever tool that is actually used by people to read stuff. Tell them that you also put it in the calendar invite for their comfort, for their convenience, and give a purpose, give an agenda.

Start with yourself. Mimic the behavior that you want to see and slowly, slowly, slowly change the people that are closest to you and you will then get the opportunity to influence the larger circle, the circle of influence.

Jonathan: I think my last question is the reverse of a question I asked early on. I asked if you're not comfortable working remotely, how do you adapt? What if it's the opposite? What if you really want to work remotely and your team or your company won't allow it?

Molood: This is what I got before the pandemic much more often than I do nowadays. That's a good one. If you want to work remotely but your company expects you to be in an office, obviously, you're going to be in that office because you don't want to lose you lose your paycheck, but you can talk with your boss. Maybe don't use the word remote because they might be allergic to that if they're asking everyone to definitely be in an office. Talk to your boss, talk to your manager and tell them that you'd like to work from home one day a week.

They probably would say no in the beginning. You might occasionally actually tell them that you're going to do that anyway. When you work remotely, there's going to be a lot of responsibility on you in the beginning if the culture of remote work doesn't exist, if the acceptance of a remote worker is not there, if people are completely going to ignore you when have a meeting in a conference room. They may not even add a link to invite you to that meeting.

If you know the meeting is happening, add a link, have a buddy in the company who is going to be there, and have them turn on the video camera in the conference room. Why don't we do that? This is the part of responsibility that is you need to make an effort to include yourself when you're working remotely. The other and the more important part of that is communicating results and communicating progress. Every single day that you work remotely, you need to be in constant communication with people telling them what you're doing because they are not going to trust that you're actually working.

That's what happens in most of the in-office cultures. They don't trust the people who work remotely are actually working. They use the double quotations and they say working from home. Show them that you're actually working, show them the progress, and show them the results. Especially, with your direct manager, communicate results very frequently. Now, I'm not saying spam them. I'm not saying send a million different emails on a day, but at least at the end of the day, tell them that you managed to complete a certain part of the work. If you couldn't, tell them what you did and what you learned and what didn't work. Great communication, constant communication is key.

Now, slowly, when you show that you're actually very productive when you're working remotely, people are not going to have as much resistance to you when you ask next time to work remotely because they have seen that you are a man of your word or in a woman of your word and you're actually able to not only work but also communicate and interact with people from wherever you are.

Very, very slowly, you'd be able to ask for two days away from the office and three days away from the office. Before you know it, you're going to be able to ask for a chunk of time, maybe two months to be away from the office. The slower progression is key. I hope that managers out there are not going to feel like I'm trying to deceive them because that's not my goal at all. My goal is to see that if you see results, you're not going to be able to deny that it's actually working for that person. That they might be even more productive when they work remotely.

Jonathan: Is there anything you would like to add?

Molood: No, I just would like to emphasize on something I said earlier and that is, the essence of remote work is freedom. Do not forget that.

Jonathan: That's great. Thank you so much for coming on today, Molood. Where can people get in touch with you and learn about the services your company offers?

Molood: Oh, absolutely. You can find me on remoteforever.com. Also, on all social media, LinkedIn, Instagram. Twitter, I go by @RemoteForever. On LinkedIn, I usually use my own personal profile which is Molood Ceccarelli. You can find me there and I'm very approachable, to be honest. I usually respond to every single message that I get myself unless the workload is very, very high, which has been the case in 2020, but it's just slowly calming down.

Jonathan: Great. Thank you very much for coming on and answering some questions and giving us all hope for the freedom that might come from the remote work after this pandemic is over.

Molood: Thank you so much for having me, Jonathan. I hope you have a wonderful day too.

Jonathan: Thank you.

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Voice Over: This episode is copyright 2021 by Jonathan Hall, all rights reserved. Find me online @jhall.io. Theme music is performed by Riley Day.