EP047 - Happiness is a metric that builds better teams with Dr. Raúl Antón Cuadrado of Automattic
About the episode
This episode focuses on happiness. I sat down with Dr. Raúl Antón Cuadrado, the people analytics lead to one of the most renowned fully remote companies, Automattic, makers of WordPress, and many other amazing tools. We know when we are happy. But how do we measure happiness since it directly impacts team productivity?
About the guest
Raúl is a People Analytics Lead at Automattic, a Data Engineer & Scientist, and a PhD in Communication in Digital Environments. He has over five years of experience in connecting data sources and implementing predictive models to help Automattic create a great workplace for brilliant people.
His mission is to leverage data to improve hiring and onboarding experiences, build strong leadership for remote and distributed teams, and foster a culture of collaboration and creativity. He enjoys working with cross-functional teams to solve complex problems, communicate complex ideas in simple terms, and empower non-data people to adopt data insights. He is fluent in Python, Scala, and SQL, and is an experienced BI tools practitioner, especially with Looker and LookML.
Raúl is a poet, a husband, and a father of three lovely persons.
Connect with Raúl on LinkedIn, on his website, or on his art project.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the Leadership Anywhere show. Today will be a very special episode for two reasons. A, please forgive my voice and my audio I'm battling with a mild COVID or something, but we didn't want to reschedule the recording because we love to talk with each other. And the second reason is that we have a guest from Automattic also known as WordPress or the company that owns or creates the WordPress. And we'll talk a lot about leadership, people analytics, and and how to manage people in a distributed workplace, so I have my guests here, Dr. Raul Anton Cuadrado, appreciate your time coming here and welcome.
I'm happy to be here with you and you pronounce it in a with a marvelous British accent love it.
Thank you. So tell me more about your journey. How did you end up in front of that beautiful bookshelf, which the audience cannot see now, but you are working remotely, which wasn't the case at the start.
Yeah. It's a long story, but I started like it was 30 years ago, I started a degree in computer science in Madrid, and soon after that, I started working in the internet industry but just to give you a little bit of context, when I started working with. Internet interfaces for AI tools. Internet browsers had no pictures on them, so it was surely a different scenario, right? I started working there and I pretty soon had very good opportunities, mainly because no one was more experienced than me. The thing had just started and yeah, we people like me, we got some cool opportunities, the kind of jobs I guess that your parents can brag about with friends. And I enjoyed what I was doing but at the given moment, I realized that having these jobs also meant that the companies that I work for, a lot of influence about where I needed to leave and I was sent to one place to from one place to another. It was in part of the case of my girlfriend at that moment. My wife right now. And to be honest, what I wanted to do even more than enjoying with people analytics or internet trades at that point was to be with my girlfriend. And yeah, it was a good decision because 27 years later, I'm still with her and hopefully we'll be still together in 27 years, but. Let's say that our jobs didn't put things easy for us because we could be moved from one place to another. We decided to go back to the city where we both were born. To do that, we needed to change our jobs, our career orientation, especially mine. I started working in a factory in logistics, sales, et cetera, but it was not really happy with this job. So it was not the kind of job that I love it. It's not that the work conditions were bad, but let's say that it was not for me. So in parallel, I started working in the university, I taught in a PhD degree about communication and learning in the Internet in remote environments and this university was a open university, a let's say a remote university. The biggest in Spain, it was UNED, the Universidad Nacional de I started to discover that you could be productive and you could do things working remotely.
When was it? When was it in terms of time?
This, I would need to check, but maybe 12, 13, 14 years ago.
Yeah, that's what I wanted to ask, that it was still pretty early in terms of like remote work and stuff. So just FYI, most of the people who are listening to this show or anyone who was actually vested in any kind of remote experience or distributed work experience. They started learning most of the terminology because of the pandemic two to three years ago.
That's true. That's true.
I started in 10 years ago. You've wrote a PhD. 13 12 or even more years ago around that topic. So it was pretty early on. That's what I wanted to just clarify.
Yeah, I'm just checking in the LinkedIn. And I started working as a lecturer in December 28. So yeah, more or less what we said, right? And I started working here and I was talking about new ways to spark communication, spark cooperation, participation in teams, in learning communities, but also in practice communities. And I discovered Automatic and especially the Automatic creed. And I say, wow if just, and I totally recommend people to take a look at that page, it's automaticwithtwoTs. com slash creed and he said if just, it cannot be true, right. But if just half of the things that they say that they're doing are or near to be true, I want to work there because it would solve my situation at that moment. That was again to simplify that it was working in one place for money and in another place to nourish my soul to say that in a poetic way. And I truly enjoy this part of my live having two jobs is not something that you can sustain time, of course. And yeah I made by my best. They tried to learn some new, skills I went through some courses. I learned English to be hired in automatic. That was pretty tough, and I'm still learning. And, in the end I got it seven years ago exactly in a week, it will be accepted. 7 years ago, I first had a trial. This is something really interesting, especially in remote companies. There is something that you have in the hiring process in automatic, that is a trial process. So for a short while or long while, it depends four to six weeks. You basically do more or less what you would be doing if you were hired, of course, getting paid and so on to see not just if the company likes what you are doing, but also if you think that you could fit in these remote environment, in these distributed communication model, it's something really different. So having this trial process is a real opportunity to see if yeah, you're going to enjoy the job because in my opinion, and I'm not the only one to think this the key to be productive is to be happy with what you are doing. And I was telling this about the trial process because I first had a trial process, eight and a half years ago, the people that were working with me, they told me, you're a cool guy. You could be here. You know what you're talking about, but this that you speak is not English. So why don't you improve and retry in a year, a couple of years or so? And I did. So I am very grateful because I got the second opportunity. And this time I got to convince the hiring manager to you. Automaticians. The automatic people are automaticians. That is the way in which we call ourselves. And this is my history. Long one. Sorry.
That was a long journey, by the way. And what are you doing right now at Automattic, just to be clear?
Yeah, I'm working in people analytics. Basically, using people data. Data about hiring, about Related with HR with learning to try to understand how to make people happier at work and therefore more productive because as I said, this goes together.
So you've said that which I think it will be, I wouldn't say the title of this episode, but it will be the key takeaway of this episode. And you've said it pretty early on that being happy at your job ultimately defines your productivity or output or whatever we call it on the job. And my question is can you measure happiness at work?
This is a trap, right?
It's not, it's an honest question.
I'm a data guy, but That's what I'm asking. Sometimes we over Overweight the value of figures of numbers. Of course, we can measure happiness at work. You just need to ask. Everyone knows if they're happy at work. You don't need to have a value from zero to 10. No, I'm nine and a half happy at work. And now this is it would be a little bit silly even right. But the fact is that this brings to my mind another thing like a year ago, yeah, someone asked me to give a talk about the name of the talk was the workplace of the future and they gave me total freedom to elaborate on this and at the very beginning I was enthusiastic about and soon after that I realized that I don't know what is going to be the future workplace. I ended up reconducting this by saying that I hope the future workplace, still have something very particular that is the difference between a good job and it can be explained very easily. Once you get paid over to cover your needs and a little bit of whimsical needs to from time to time the difference between a good job and a bad job, it's not that you get better paid or you have better perks or whatever to me, and this may be a little bit even cheesy but to me, the difference is that in a good job from time to time you feel yourself happy and happy to be doing what you are doing. And in a bad job, you start the day by knowing that no matter what happens today, you're not going to be happy. You're just working for money. Yes. And when you work just for money no matter how much you are making, it's still working for money just for money. We all work for money, right? But this is the big difference.
I think you have to be a little bit more experienced to understand this. Or at least that's what I usually say that when I was like 25, I didn't really care. Let's be honest. I cared because of the money, right? The more money I can make the better but once you are after a certain threshold that, as you said, cover your needs and you have everything you need and pretty much that's it plus a little extra for fun, once you have that, you just arrived to a point when they cannot really motivate you with a salary raise or like just like insane amount of cash. It's a motivation of course, but if the job itself is not making you happy or even more it's toxic workplace. And you are not just not happy, because I think there is a difference between and if I would be measuring happiness at work it would be a, like a free scale thing that you are happy, you are not happy and you're, it's like somewhere in between, right? You can be still somewhere in between and making great money, but if you are making great money, but you're not happy, then that great money doesn't really matter at all.
Yeah, that's it. We don't know. I guess that each one has a different boundary to decide where you start working there for money and sure, sure, sure. But these boundary always exists. Yes and yeah, I guess that there is a lot of social pressure because to some extent for, you can have the temptation to think that your value is how much you are paid for the things that you are doing but this is a trap.
Yes. How much you're worth. Usually that's the question. Mostly from the U S by the way, it's not really a question, I think in the European culture that much for us, but it's still a question. If I will be asking that how happy are you at your job? That sounds a little cheesy, but it's like closer to the actual.
I'm really happy, trust me. I'm so happy that I would not change right now. And this is a value for the company. I would not change to another place where they are offering me two times the money that I'm making here because I don't want to sacrifice this happiness.
And let's investigate the employee happiness term from your Personal story then what makes you happy in your current job as head of people analytics at Automatic?
I think that happiness has to do with ownership.
So you have authority and decision making authority within your job.
And with participation, and this comes from, and I'm sure that we're going to have time to elaborate on this, but from having a transparent and horizontal schema, communication and team schema and this transparency and horizontality that is not the same as flatness because the origin of the world is the same, but it's not about having a flat or chart that, that surely helps, but also about having these willingness to work at the same level for a team lead if we're talking about the team and individual contributors, and this transparency and horizontality can happen not just in remote environments, but there are some things in remote environments that help, in my opinion, so going back, if you allow me to go on talking, sorry about this, but I am, I was a seller everything that starts in the office. The office, to me is not a place. It's a paradigm, a model, and also a fetish. Why a fetish? Because some people think that offices have paranormal powers. Super magical powers. It's the only place the only model the only way to walk outside of these model. Nothing can work. Okay. So what's the office then, as a model, if it is not the place and I think that the answer is that the office is a paradigm where you think that you can control the results by controlling the processes and included in the processes. We have the place where it takes place and also the time. So you're trying to control processes, places the office or even when you allow people to work from home Wednesday a week, they will be doing exactly the same, but with fewer resources and also the time from 8 to 3 from 9 to 4 if we are flexible company, we allow you to work from to start working from eight to nine, then you can make break of one to one hour and a half hours and then go still rules and controlling where and when the processes and even the processes themselves take place. So this is the office model instead of that, where I found myself to be happier is in a healthy place and time. I can't work in a office in a co working space at home. Depending on the day. During the morning, during the afternoon again, depending on when I feel more productive or even depending on where the people I need to work with are, I'm always respecting myself and taking care of myself, and this is where the magic starts, and there are several things that happen when you acknowledge that this can be changed, that the office paradigm is just a fetish, and you can do things in another way you can have a synchronous communication, and it's still work like a charm or even better because you need to keep track of all the decisions because there are no decisions happening in hidden spaces like the coffee machine where some particular person is just with their best friends. We also talk about well, transparency. This is something that happens when communication is driven, loud, asynchronous when you need to put attention to be sure that communication is explicitly served and at hand for anyone.
Also indirect effect. Yeah, everything is, if everything is written indirectly it's transparent as well.
Yes. You force the communication to be transparent and you also respect the pace for anyone. Think about this. With an example, meetings because one of the things about allowing people to or not to decide on their timetable is because there are some important meetings taking place, right? There's some meetings to decide about to launch a project or to decide about a, something that we need to publish. These kind of meetings cannot be held as synchronously with a Google Doc where you elaborate or with a P2 post as we I love P2 posts That is a tool that we use in automatic, by the way, where these discussions happen asynchronously instead of happening during a hour they could take three, four days, where each one contributes when they feel they can, they are more productive. They have read all the context because at the very beginning of this document or P2 post, you can add links to important pieces of context that someone already have and some others not. And each one can decide to read. One piece or another piece of context. And you say, yeah, but this takes four days instead of an hour. But how much does it take to find an hour where all these people can be connected at the same time? And also, what is the level of the quality? Absolutely. And what is the result?
When you don't have any preparer for the meeting, you grab, I don't know, all that five, ten, whatever people into the meeting. And I am so sorry, but half of them will be bluffing. Thank you. about the problem. They are experts, of course, so they will be experts bluffing to each other, which is fine, but the ideas and the level of quality level of those ideas will be less compared to a scenario when they actually have the time to explain why you're saying something, do some research. And so on. Yes, that's it.
And then when you have time to read all the rationale behind a opinion or whatever, and everything is written down, then the final decision tends to be taken, not because of who said something, but because of the reasons behind this decision. Yes, because everything is crystal clear. And this is about transparency, but also horizontality. There are several reasons that make remote environments or distributed environments to be more horizontal. For instance, when you don't have a central workplace, a office where all the decisions are taken, et cetera, et cetera, then all the old fashioned leadership markers fade away.
Yes.
For instance, in a conventional, I remember in my previous job I was the team lead. Not team lead because in those hierarchical structures, it's more a boss than a team lead and to go to my office, you needed to go through the big office where some of my collaborators were. So this is a marker. Everyone knew who was the boss there, and everyone asked me to take a decision, even if I was not the expert about it. In a office model, this is the leadership marker. For instance, in a conversation, leads tend to be those that speak louder. They usually wear a fancier costume, not all the time, but sometimes they, and some of the things that are even worse, like...
they have the parking space closest.
Yes.
That's also one of the things I had. Oh, so hilarious only for leadership and it's there is a table for the leaders on the parking space.
Yeah But by the way that forced you to buy a more expensive car to some extent. In some way you would need more money just to buy maintain that status Not just the car, but also the suit et cetera, et cetera. So these leads asked the very beginning of the conversation where we said, yeah once you have all your needs and something extra, because we all like from time to time, something extra you can be wasting the extra money in showing that you are the something.
Now in the remote. The question comes then okay so the physical status symbols disappear from a remote environment? Because we don't have the office anymore? What are the key characteristics for a leader?
That's it. So in remote environment, then We have a place where horizontality can happen, and this means that every contributor's perspective, point of view, contribution is taken into consideration by itself, with extra value or added and then everyone feels, if we really, because we also can be in a remote environment and have a perfectly hierarchical structure, right? But if you manage to get these horizontal structure, communication model, then everyone feels listened. And then if there is transparency and you feel listened, this ownership magic. Of course. So everyone is that to really feel that he is part of the team, but also the team belongs to them. And then you start to participate, not because you are forced to participate, but because you own the team, the projects that this team is delivering, because you feel that they are part of you, and then you contribute not just to the level that is written in the work, in the job description, but even more, there is something really cool in our creed you, you remember the creed that I read that I thought, wow this is cool. This is amazing. I wanna be there. Okay. There is a part of the cred that says, I want just contribute or take part in the things that they that I have been told to. And that's amazing. And if you bring this transparency and horizontality to the boundaries, then every discussion takes place in a transparent way and you can see I'm a data guy and I can see discussions from marketing people and it may be that marketing people are discussing about how to conquer the Spanish market and by chance or because I'm interested in reading what they are saying I read what they think about the Spanish market that I happen to be a let's say a piece of the Spanish market, I can add some of the point of view that they may or not, include in their project. But at least I know that my contribution is going to be read and it's going to be evaluated by itself because I'm in data or in support on...
and you're not in the marketing team. Specifically, but still you're contributing to another team. That means that silos occur less and less.
And I remember that time ago I said this and someone asked me how you avoid people over communicate or say nonsense or whatever. If you think that the people that are working in your team or with you are not clever enough, then the problem is another one, not transparency.
Yes and I had this question once, when you document everything and anyone can comment on that document, how can you avoid that the document becomes like a hundred pages long and whatever, and everyone is over communicating everything and people are saying twice and whatever. And my response was literally this, so your problem is that your people, A, will be too proactive or maybe too proactive and they are contributing a little even more so than they would contribute or do contribute right now. Because the current problem in most workplaces is that people are only minding their own desk and their own problem. And they are not contributing enough. They are not proactive. They are just barely surviving and collecting the paycheck. That's I don't know. 80, 90 percent of the job market right now but you're still worrying that they might contribute a little bit more. That's not the problem. I would love to work at the workplace where the documentation of one decision making process is 200 pages long because everyone in the company like fricking contributed to that document, that would be wonderful.
Absolutely. And there are two things. First, if you document all the decision taking process, then it's reusable so this doesn't mean that you need to read over and over all the processes and so on. But at the given moment, you can see why you took a given decision.
Yes.
And also you can reduce pieces of the conversation that were not even used in this first occasion. And second thing, this is we use this over communication word. Me too but I always say that this is a fallacy. There is not such a thing. Over communication, come on! The problem we usually have. Is that we call communication to something that is not. Communication is a two ways effort. It requires participation of the two sides because let me explain it. That's interesting. Please explain. I would explain it with an example and then I elaborate on that, but I remember time ago I was working in a place where my boss usually on Friday would tell me at lunchtime to come to his office, the biggest one, of course, and he would tell me, this is something that we're going to do. You call the people in your team and you communicate them what to do. No, this works probably grammatically correct, but it's a fallacy. You don't communicate to someone or you don't communicate someone you communicate with someone. This is spread information, but it's not communication. And again, if you want this magic to happen, you need transparency, horizontality, participation. There is no participation without real two way communication. This is communication. The other thing is not communication. It's just transfer of information, a critical transfer of information, right?
And now people who are listening probably have some faint idea about remote meetings when companies who previously worked in the office, but switched to remote because of the pandemic or just whatever force and you suddenly arrived to a Monday meeting all hands where the leader of the organization gave a speech 45 minutes long, uninterrupted speaking about what is up for this week and what was up last week and what are the goals for the company for this month. And everyone was listening and or not Don't tell to the leader, but 99 percent of the people who were on the call tuned out from the call after the first 10 minutes or something which is doable in a remote setting, but it was hard to do in a meeting room previously. Or I don't know.
Yeah, but we could just write this down and ask people to read it when they have time, right?
Yes. Yes. People are making the same mistakes all over again.
So this is the key point. When we said, yeah, COVID gave us the opportunity to give it a try to remote environments. And we, most of the companies that tried it are just willing to go back to the office setup and so on. And this is a fact, a deniable fact. It's true, but they didn't test the remote environment or the contributed sorry. Yeah, the Distributed environment they were just mimicking what they were making in the office environment. So it was still the office model where they were connected the same hours. They're even you know in some companies where they had Videos to see if the people were in front of the...
oh, Jesus. Yes. Yes. I know. I heard those tools and I never sorry, you got me triggered. I have to state here that I heard five to 10 different tools that actually do this. I literally had no idea what are the companies who are actually installing these tools to their teams. But I always felt so sorry about those people who are working with these companies. That's. That's pretty much a hundred percent invasion on privacy on every...
feel sorry for the companies because yes if these people have the opportunity to go to any other place they will, of course. So that means that you're working with the, probably the worst segment of your potential work force. Yes. Yes. So they weren't testing a remote environment. They were getting the office paradigm and transferring it, mimicking it in a office where you don't have the same, but because they usually were sent home with the laptop, but even not with keyboard or a not even being sure that they had a place where to work from or if some people said that they were working from a coach, listen, this is not remote. This is, I sent you home because I'm forced to send you home and I don't even give you the tools to work properly and in a way that you could be productive. And then I complain because you are not productive. This makes no sense. Luckily, people that tried out a real remote environment with their own tools, their own paradigm, their own workflows, communication models, et cetera, they know that this is a different thing. You could love it or maybe decide that it's not for you, this remote environment, that there are different things. That's for sure.
Can you tell some examples on how you lead teams at Automatic or what do you see as leadership practices at your company, which can be used or mimicked or copied by other companies who are trying to aspire?
Yeah. So the idea is that the good lead is someone that is able to mobilize. Willingness, but again, everything that I'm going to say can happen in a office environment. But the fact is that it never happens or almost never So person when you are a team lead you always want to create a great working environment and you could be tempted to you know for the first time read some books read blogs about how to create well, this is a temptation because it's time that I ask, or I try to read the, about being a good lead. They offer you links, some good books and of them good blog posts, but you never see something written ask the team what they think. That is a great working environment, and this is so simple. I get that. You expected something more ? No, I would edit, but the first thing that I made when I started leading a team of in automatic, I give him point. I started leading a team of 10, 12, and it went to 15 people. And I really wanted them to feel that we're working. Yeah, in a great environment. We team up. We made a synchronous meeting and we put together the bullet points that we're going to use to define what is great for the team. And we come up with a list of things then very simple. We after having this list of things that we wanted to focus on, we made a poll to evaluate where we were on each one of these dimensions. We took, I can't remember if two or three of these dimensions, those where we were we had the worst scores and we discuss together what we can, what we could do to improve with clear actions that we had discussed and as we had discussed them in a transparent way and in a horizontal communication model, everyone felt that they were part of this decision, Everyone appropriated all these actions. So simple.
It's so simple. No one is doing it in the office, by the way. Like I know, and not in more, in most remote companies as well. It's so basic, but it's still because you have to be humble in terms of a leader that you're not telling people what to do, but asking them what they want to do and how they want to work together. And you have to step a little bit back and facilitate the whole thing instead of like facilitation of the whole thing. Because you were the one actually created the poll. The document, the think that the data then only the facilitation was the leadership part.
But you said you need to be humble. No, it's about being clever because all you want. Or you're going to be measured for these team results. So you want a good working environment for the team, including yourself. You are one more in the team. So you don't want to take decisions that you are not sure if the team are going to find useful or not. So it's about being clever. It's about... It's not about being nice, it's about really willing to be sure that what you are doing is going to help the team, because leadership is not, it's not about the lead, it's about the team. Yes. And this is something that we forget from time to time. And when you allow yourself to take a step back and learn from the others. Then again, more magic start to happen because you develop yourself. It's not, sometimes we say, no, it wouldn't lead disabled to coach the other so that everyone grows. Yeah. You too, because. In a few words, you have a team of 10, then there are 10 brains. You don't want to have one brain and 20 hands in your team. It would be better to have 10 brains and 20 hands. Yes. So that's the idea. And if you put the leadership focus in the team, then you can spark some conversations, very simple conversations about how people feel comfortable, confident. simple conversations. For instance there are lots of even books about gratefulness about how you should, I can't remember the word. Sorry about this. Yeah, it's linked with breathfulness, how you would communicate when someone is doing great, et cetera, et cetera, feedback and stuff and recognition recognition. Yes. Why don't we ask people how they want to be recognized? It's so simple. And then in automatic we have, but I am sure that in any company you have any all sorts of different kind of blackboards for the team. In Automattic, we have P2s, that are special kind of blogs that work like a blog where anyone is an admin, so something like a forum. Anyway, and in the sidebar of this central repository of information or blackboard or whatever you have a list of the people in the team and how they want to be recognized for instance say something in public. Some people don't want to be recognized in public. It's simple. Send me kudos, things like this. Spend time with me. Tell me very clearly why you think that I made a great work with something. Then we go to the next step. Leadership tools. The best team building tool is... it's communication, so you, I would not let pass any opportunity to raise conversations.
Of course.
For instance something that I made that was really cool so people in my team, and this thing that I'm talking about in the end it the team had from 12 to 15 people, depending on the moment. And the fact is that everyone had a really interesting experience before joining the company. And we made a serious of posts where anyone, no one was forced, but the fact is that everyone was really willing to explain what they had done before with some picturesque notes, but also everyone was free to share what they had done before in a post where we could answer more questions. And it's at the end of the post, you nominated the next one, of course, after having checked that the other one was okay to be nominated, right? But the fact is that everyone took part. Everyone wanted to tell about their life. It makes sense. Come on, everyone. In a state environment, et cetera, et cetera, right? For instance, these are, we've realized that in this team of 15, we all spoke English, but we have 12 different native languages. We created a series of posts about, yeah, it was so simple. We took a English expression, like for instance, this is a very old fashioned one, but my teacher was very old fashioned, like raining cats and dogs, and it's one answer with the equivalent expression in their language. You're going to tell me this is very simple. How can this affect productivity in the end. It's about feeling included, part of a team. And of course, sometimes it's not that we were posting this kind of post every day, right? This could happen every three weeks. I can't remember even the periodicity. But every three weeks. And you have three weeks to answer with in the case you had one in your native language. With your version of this expression. Or in the case you had time. Or in the case you feel like sharing, right? But even when you didn't share it, you read the others and it was fine. It was like why should you be checking TikTok to win down when you can't do this about your team members? And it worked. And people in the team said that they enjoyed it. At a given moment, it started to be people in the team lost the interest on this. We finished it. No drama, of course, because we have lots of casual communication workflows taking place. We set goals about communication and we follow them publicly. For instance, how often we communicate in these P2s, how how many Slack messages we drop in the week. I know that. The lighter and deeper communication. You cannot make the difference between these. But just having these goals and just following these publicly is passing a message that you value communication, that you value that people are contributing. Even if it is light communication, it's equally important. Yes. So this is... And I think that we of course, communication is two ways we said about this and there is a, I'm talking too much...
no, I'm listening because all of all that, what, all what you say right now are all learnings and information that people can copy and paste.
I'm not inventing the wheel, right?
And it's the best thing is that most of these. are super basic. So yes, I, for example for that culture blog that you explained, it's like when people ask me, okay, how do you build remote work culture? How do you build team bonding? How do you have that chemistry, whatever that means between the team in a remote environment, which you can only have in the office? So they is like with these tools. Just write about yourself and let people read it. And that's simple, or just have a synchronous communication with someone and learn something from the others. People can connect with each other on a personal level through a computer. It's like it's not 1950 anymore, so we never met. We connected immediately. So it can happen.
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry to interrupt you. I'm sorry. I'm very enthusiastic about something that came to my mind and I wanted to share because I think that it summarized all these nice ideas in a clear example. So at a given moment, we were asked to take a look at quality. Everything needed to be sure that they put in place a workflow to assure that we improve quality, this was a support team. So in the interactions with clients, I firmly believe in horizontality, blah, blah, blah. I had a very clear idea of what we needed to do, but I asked a team of three, four people to suggest a workflow to the team so that we discuss it and we approve it and we go with it. Of course we don't really think that it's going to be working perfectly at the very beginning, but iteratively we could develop it and go with it. So we this group of three, four people came up the first check with me with what I think that it was a very dangerous peer review workflow that was about reviewing transparently and publicly interactions, client interactions, because we have been talking about transparency, right? So everything, all the support interactions in automatic are locked. Everyone can read them. Even when the CEO, Matt makes his support rotation, the interactions that he produces are public. We can't read them well. So the idea that they had was about suggesting your bad interactions, those interactions that the clients had evaluated with a red bot, we had green bots, red bots, etc. And then discuss them publicly in one of these P2 post and say, I knew that this was not going to work a hundred percent. So I devoted, I confess the next two weeks trying to convince each one of them individually in one on one conversations to switch it to another workflow that I had in mind, but boy, I couldn't convince them. So at a given point, I said, Okay, we're going to do this and I'm going to support it so that we really dive into this model because I was sure that by doing this. It will fail earlier and we can use my model sooner. You know what? It was amazing. It was incredible. The results were surprised me. I was asked to share this with other teams in the company. Even more, I gave Several talks, one of them in support driven in a conference that was among the most important in support it was good, but even more we evaluated after I can't remember, eight, 10, 10 months, the process in a anonymous survey. Every dimension of this process and so on. But I everything was a stunning, seemingly great. I just remember one out of 10, nine point out of 10 in votes consider that the peer reviews workflow was creating a positive impact on team bonding. I was surprised and we created something that I was sure that it was going to fail. That's cool. Remember when I told about having 10 brains instead of one?
Yes.
It was harsh, but I said I need to be consequent with what I'm always talking about, so I'm going with them and they taught me the best lesson. Is that really 10 brains are better than one?
Of course, this is so interesting.
And it works.
And by the way the audience doesn't know this, but at your company it's a practice, not just at Automattic, I know, but Automattic is really popular. I'm not practicing this that everyone has to do some sort of customer support work time to time. Actually, before we have a support week after before our conversation, you just prepared yourself to jump into the support week. So regardless of where you work within the company, you need to spend some time with the customers. That's super valuable. I think.
Yeah. That's. I think it is important. Yes. And yeah, I'm under the impression that I've talked too much so far. I could be talking for ages. There are a lot of things that come to my mind now.
That's enthusiasm about your work that also when you are happy with what you are doing, it shows that you are willing to talk about what you're doing. Even though I wouldn't degrade, but you understand that it's just a job. So it is your job. You don't own the company. You have no I don't know super financial incentive to talk about this, but because you're happy with the job itself with the tasks and the problems that you're solving you are enthusiastically participating in conversations about that. And that's amazing.
It's about ownership. It's about You own it. Yes. Willing to take part, sharing it. Yes. There is one temptation, and again, iterating on communication and horizontality, et cetera, et cetera, that you may have as a team that I'm failing into this temptation right now is to talk too much. I remember that I had a, in parallel with this communication measurements that was taken and goals. I had a goal for myself. It's very easy with P2 posts, but I measured the percentage of the conversation that was happening that came from myself and I, from month to month, I was always trying to reduce my participation against the total participation of the team members. Yeah, this was also horizontality transparency, etc. You also need to bring space. Yes. To people to contribute.
Yes. And people usually so they organically listen to what the leader have to say. And that's why, again, it's a very super basic rule is to talk less and listen more is just to be there as a supportive agent or facilitator of within the meetings and creating space by listening, for others to contribute. Speaking of meetings, be honest, how many meetings you have per day?
Today, for instance let me check. So today I have one. Tomorrow, I have a coffee meeting with someone just to bond and to, yeah, my previous team lead, we have a coffee meeting every four weeks, I think. On Wednesday, I have two coffee meetings and one meeting with a external company. On Thursday, I have also a meeting with someone because we need to yeah, we're going to make something like a pair coding session. And on Friday I have one too.
So on average, you have one or two meetings per day, and most of those meetings, by the way, are not, are about mostly about team bonding, or more casual ones, shall we say.
Yeah, and they're equally important, because if you need to deal with something that is urgent and important, you cannot wait, in general, right?
Yes but in general like most remote companies and their leaders, they usually have strategy sessions, stand up meetings, I dunno, like people spend on average at least three to four meetings per day, and most companies spend more meetings per day, even though every stat says that you cannot really participate in more than three hours of meetings.
This is a very special week for me, but in general, I don't have a lot of meetings. That means also that if someone asks me for help with the tool for I can at that moment, if it makes sense, jump into a zoom call. Yes, I'm very happy to help them and so so not having so many meetings because we work in documents or for instance, you may have asked how many documents you are working in this asynchronous versions of meetings at this moment, and I could tell you that half a dozen, for instance but not being tied to strict meeting hours, Allow me to release time to help people exactly when they need my help.
This is so important and it should be standardized by more, most companies, by the way. So the leader has the support role not just for the customers, but also for the team. And in order to be a good supporter, you have to have time, allocated space. And energy and resources to support people. I know it's, I know that everything that we say here, by the way, it sounds super freaking basic. But it doesn't work like that for most companies. That's why we are stating the basics here. Anyway. You have kids, right?
Absolutely. I was going to say this. One of the things that makes me terribly happy is to be able to bring my kids to a school. When I'm back, I'm not less productive. I'm happy. I'm rewarded. I'm grateful for working in a company that allows me to bring my kids to a school and enjoy with that. Not every day. Some days it's tough. That's fine. When I'm back, I'm happy.
Yes, is this and this is important. It's super important. And you still work the same hours and the same focus, the same output that everyone else although it's on more like you're on your terms.
That's it. Something, sometimes I need to an eye on the clock, not to work enough hours, but it's more to start working so that the next day I'm not absolutely tired because this is the risk. You should never overwork because overworking is a very short term strategy, right? And I find myself overworking because I'm enjoying it because I don't need to have bringing my kids to a school in the back of my head or whatever because I already did that so I can have these flow. I'm coding right now. And you need the flow. You need a long, time slots to be focused, etc. And it can be focused. So sometimes I need to force myself to stop working.
And how do you have any tips and tricks because I work from home. You work from home, like clearly. So when you are, when you stop working, what do you do? Because I guess you are working from a home office, which is a separate.
Yeah. I work from my home, but one or two times a day I go to a coworking space that, yeah, it keeps my ideas fresh by interacting with different people, not necessarily from my company and the coffee machine, et cetera, et cetera. I wrote a blog post about this that I would love to share with you so that we can go on the conversation there. But I think that the key point is that when you are commuting, Going to the office and going back to the office and you invest an hour or 40 minutes or even more than an hour. Yeah, when I walked in Madrid, it was even more than an hour. Going to the office, you have time, your brain has time to realize that your working time is starting. Yes. And when you go back home.
It's the same. You're, that's it.
Your brain acknowledges that there is a boundary happening there. When you're working from home or even from a co working space that is clustered, you need to set strategies to reificate. I love this word in English, reificate. That is yeah make vivid, to some extent, these boundaries so that you realize you have very clear signals that your spare time. Getting out. Yes. So there are lots of things that you can do. For instance, you can meditation works for some people, for some other people doesn't. Going for a walk or having to do something like At six o'clock bring your kids to a extracurricular activity and stop working having this hard stop. I'm not very fond of hard stops because it should be the last resource. But going for a run, for instance, short one, you don't need to make a marathon every day, 20 minutes or yeah, things like this, very simple things, but you need to be very intentional with this, in my opinion this time that you spent in a, what is called a no place. Because when you talk about the things that you do in your day the places where you don't say you don't even think that you spent two hours in your car. Or in a commuting in a tube that you spend time there, you read a book, for instance, sometimes in the tube, why don't you set a time aside to read the book after, at the end of your journey, or there is something that I did for some time. There is a nice book, the, from Julia Cameron, the artists she suggests a, yeah to write a little bit. She suggests writing a little bit more than a little bit every day, but I adapted this to write freely like five minutes at the end of my day, five minutes is enough to set this boundary to allow yourself this space this realize that you stopped working. And this is important because you need to stop working to be able to rest, to be happy and productive the following day. And also because you have life up to the work and you need a rich working life to be happy outside of work. You need a rich outside of work life to be happy at work. You're a person and everything impacts you. You need to be happy. This is why we are here for, right? Or at least try to be happy.
Yeah, totally. And it requires a great deal of self awareness, I think to understand that what works for you, what works for others. And everything that we discussed today, by the way I think it requires a great deal of self awareness from everyone, from the leadership, from the company, from the team members from the employees. Even on a personal level, how you you just explained how you dial out and do some commuting from your home office, right? And which is two minutes of commute, but still it's important.
Self awareness and being able or being open to learn. Yeah. Because something that works for you today will not work in three months time, and you need to be open to learn and learn. And this is also a source of joy to be able to go on learning things.
I usually think that not everyone is capable of this level of self awareness and therefore not everyone is able to enjoy the fruits of a remote workspace. What do you think about that?
I think that 100 percent of self awareness of being able to learn of horizontality. This is the Nirvana, right? But even if you get to disconnect a little bit today, that means that you find something that worked even a little bit and that tomorrow you will do it better. You just, if you have an open mind to learn. If you allow yourself to be in a position to learn, and this is also about horizontality and so on. If you acknowledge that there are lots of brilliant brains around you were to ask for then you will always be in the path. And sometimes this disconnecting will work better. Sometimes I'm not I told you the techniques that I used, not that they worked. So sometimes they work better. Sometimes they work worse. But you need to allow yourself to learn. And if you give me two more minutes, I will tell you something that was in the back of my mind, but I couldn't find a moment to share them with you, but they are done with this learning.
Don't forget, because I want to reply what you just said quickly. I practice Zen Buddhism in terms of like meditation that actually helps me to unwind from work to private life a lot. And There is no such thing as enlightenment. It's not getting enlightenment, right? It's everyone thinks that's the goal. Now the goal is to go there, the journey itself. If there's one takeaway is that just being a little bit more open and more open to learn to experience remote work, even if you don't work remotely, that, that helps a lot because you will be a little bit more happier in the job. So just that one.
Mic, mic drop. Mic drop. Tell me the two. Sorry, tell me the two minutes things. What you were. I think that you put a wonderful ribbon on top of everything. It's about the path. It's about I love the what you said, and I think that it will work great it's the icing on the cake so thank you very much for that reflection.
Humbly thank you, but I didn't want to be the last person to talk about it.
Oh, no! Ha You left me thinking, and you are so right with that.
Thank you. Then tell the others tell the listeners where people can find you if they have any questions about you, obviously your links will be in the show notes, but still pitch something, what people should read if they want to learn more about open transparent communication.
I have a blog called remote frog. It doesn't make sense. Why remote frog? I wanted to say something remote and this is the only domain name with two real words that I could find and then dot com. So remote frog dot com. I wrote down some ideas about, yeah, horizontality, transparency, remote working environment, remote leadership, things like this. And I would be really happy if someone even comments in the posts and say, yeah I would be happy if they say, I agree with this, right? Because anyone loves that. But if they say, yeah, Raul, there is something that you didn't take into consideration or I don't fully agree because I think that this, that, that is even better golden, yes.
Raul, thank you for your time.
Thank you. I've enjoyed.
Pleasure.
Like a pig in a mud pond. We say that?
Yes. Yes.
So thank you.
Thank you very much.
