Episode #5 Interview with James Dillon

Time Stamps

• 00:32 Can you tell us about your role and the company you work for?
• 06:09 Who is your primary customer at Remote?
• 08:15 What has been your experience joining Remote?
• 11:50 Do you have any tips on building culture and building relationships with your colleagues?
• 16:14 Are there any other takeaways on practical that any company can do to succeed with a distributed workforce?
• 20:24 Where do you see this company growing?
• I'm Andy Howard from remote tech people and joining me today is James Dillon james welcome to the show. Thanks Andy great to be here good to chat mate absolutely can you start with telling us about your role and about the company you work for so you're in the growth team at remote what does remote do and what does your role in the growth team involved yeah sure so uh probably a lot of folks listening uh might not have heard of remote and we haven't been around that long to be fair um but just before uh covert and the pandemic both our founders started working on the business um with the intention to help growth focus businesses compliantly pay and onboard international employees and contractors uh and of course that was right place right time a lot of the factors that uh came about during coburg koberg forced the hand of a lot of organisations to experiment with remote work and push their workers to work from home during the lockdowns so that meant remote was able to grow pretty significantly uh during that period and business has been around for a little over two years now and uh yeah now we've we've grown pretty significantly in quite simply where we're here to give job opportunities to anyone anywhere um everyone that works at remote kind of shares that ethos and mission that we really believe it should be possible for um folks in all corners of the world to have access to um any sort of job that they they want to work in and you know obviously depending on their type of employment we really think that should be possible so yeah specifically our software helps to allow our employers to bring on contractors and employees and stay compliant with international labor laws obviously every country has different legislation what remote does is make sure that we pay and manage benefits and um and taxation requirements in compliance with uh every country's specific labor laws and then my role uh i joined remote around 18 months ago just when we were starting to really hit the growth button we'd raised our series a funding round and um and i joined to help the marketing team scale up so yeah sitting the growth team my role is um senior content production manager and basically i'm in charge of what we call um generating organic growth business so as opposed to paid marketing activities my job is to generate leads and work with the sales team to convert those leads through a bunch of activities like um like blog webinars podcasts you know uh video marketing um and working with our partners and um and helping with our um events and communications programs things like that so yeah it's been uh it's been a fun ride over the last 18 months the business is certainly a different business now to uh when i joined yeah a little over a year ago no doubt no doubt and so if i'm understanding it correctly remote is really about global hr solutions for distributed teams it helps any company to to onboard and to and to pay and provide benefits for employees and contractors that they have working remotely in some cases in in other countries actually we often stress that terminology of distributed teams because we do work with a lot of companies that um that do have on-premise uh workers as well so uh we enable um companies to compliantly employ folks in other countries and the way that legislation works in most countries is um if you want to compliantly pay someone in another country you need to launch or own a legal entity in that new country otherwise you need to go through an employer record service which is something like remote so remote has launched a whole bunch of our own legal entities in all these different countries across the globe and so um we we also help a lot of businesses that might have you know three four ten uh employees in a different country in a different office but they don't have the resources to launch a legal entity or in some cases it's just um much more efficient to run through remote to uh avoid you know all of the um difficulty and complexity setting up a hr function in a new country really easy for us to support remote workers but we also do work with companies that have distributed teams across the globe with offices as well got it got it and the and the primary customer then is so typically a high growth startup and they might be using remote to to say on board and and pay and manage the the legal requirements around as few as a handful of a handful of people it could be it could be three or four people and and it scales up from up from there yes yeah yeah we work I'd say that uh yeah that focus on high growth companies is probably reflective of at least the way the business um launched initially and that's more reflective of the forward thinking sort of innovation focus of the tech sector i think and where the founders saw that initial opportunity before covert so it tended to be that a lot of tech companies were most open to utilising international contractors and employees to kind of scale up their business quickly those businesses already had business models and operational models to enable you know overseas workers to um to find the best talent and to sort of plug in that talent to fast-track growth i think what we're seeing now is a bit of a shift where all sorts of different businesses are now seeing that remote work as possible in a lot of cases more efficient lower cases more affordable so we're starting to see much more of a cross-section of businesses um employing through remote but you're right it's it goes across the scale so we work with a lot of really small businesses and we also work with mid market and enterprise level folks as well so yeah it's kind of a service that can help anyone that wants access to the best talent anywhere got it and and so you've joined remote about 18 months ago it must feel like you've jumped on a rocket ship there's been there's been well-reported metrics of phenomenal growth throughout the pandemic and really riding that wave of of remote work and distributed work and and building on that momentum um that the the shifting nature of work has created can you tell us a bit about what's it been like for the last for the last year and a half just working in this extremely high growth environment yeah it has been a wild ride although it's a it's a really different experience as well to what i imagine this would be like in a normal or like on-premise kind of office based situation so for a little bit of context in terms of what it's like internally remote uh i think when i joined the business there was maybe eight of us in the the growth team fast forward 18 months there's there's more than 50 of us and then in the broader business um i was around 100th employee and now we're um we're up over 900 in that time so for any business to have that kind of scale of of growth is intense we we raised our um serious c funding just recently which was really significant we raised series b just after i i joined a few months after that which which got us up over that billion dollar valuation which is really significant as well so yeah the scale of growth in that shorter period of time is really rare i had previously worked for a fast growth startup in an office environment over in London and um and it felt very different because you're you're in the office you're sort of experiencing that change day-to-day sharing it directly with other people all the time you physically notice when the team gets bigger i think sometimes that remote it passes you by a little bit i mean in in our immediate teams it's easier to see that change day to day but sometimes I mean we have a company all hands that happens um once a week and that's when you really notice it there's so many new faces and yeah it's um it's a wild ride but i think it's also been such a privilege and a pleasure to be a part of this growth i think in any instance it would be really exciting to navigate that phase of a business um and and experience that fast change i think the extra layer of remote is it's been fascinating to understand how to enable a business like this to grow when we have employees in over 70 countries across i think it's 14 time zones so to make that scale of growth happen in a fully remote organisation with no offices is a challenge but so interesting as well to see how that works no doubt so over 14 odd time zones and and over 70 countries that's that's that's how the remote team is distributed globally do you have any tips on building culture and building relationships with your colleagues when there are so many of you building so rapidly and you're distributed so diversely yes i mean where do i start definitely i think uh remote as a business um we need to practice what we preach and we're all pretty proud that we're able to demonstrate not just that this can be done but um that this fully remote globally distributed business model can be super successful and enable that kind of uh incredibly fast-paced growth as well which a lot of businesses even in the tech space find really difficult going back to i guess the foundation of remote we have explicit values that are woven into the fabric of the organisation and unlike any other previous company culture i've been a part of there's a lot of intentionality behind those values and they're operationalised really well and one of those key values is transparency and i guess when folks ask you about tips for remote working that's probably not one of the tenants that comes to mind a lot of times but when you think it through you start to understand how important that is i think transparency um is the bedrock what we do at remote and how that works in practice is um any communication we have as a business unless there's a need for it to be confidential things like um you know related to your own compensation or um issues that you might only feel comfortable talking to a hiring manager or to a people team representative about everything else a remote uh is documented through a public channel and that's kind of the better off of what we do because if you uh if you want to work across 14 time zones and respect people's lifestyle um you need to be able to jump on to work and pick it up and run with it at any time of the day 24 hours a day around around the globe so if we don't document all of our work through public channels it makes it so much harder for the rest of the team to pick that work up and run with it so that's one aspect that yes is really practical the other element of it i think the message it sends to the team and the organisation a lot of the reluctance i think from traditional more traditional employers is around this issue and perhaps instances where remote work and hybrid work runs into trouble is where this transparency is is not respected at remote reward based on our performance uh it's not time-based metrics and i think there's an understanding when you come to work at remote that um you get your work done whenever it suits you to get it done uh as long as you get the work done that's totally that's totally great um and i guess the obvious word that comes to mind is trust there so without trust without transparency uh i think it's really hard to make remote and hybrid work happen effectively yeah so it sounds like you've operationalised these core values really well um and things like a culture of documentation and and having communication in public forums is is key to really living these values and succeeding with remote work are there any other are there any other tips or or takeaways just on practical things that that any company can do to succeed with a distributed workforce yes so if we dive a little deeper into i guess that culture of documentation what that looks like in remote and and what practices we use i think the tools and the software that we use are really important um so we and then further to that having clarity around the intention of your communication so what should be communicated across what channel for what purpose is something that's really important as well so there's a bunch of different software out there that can help remote teams for me in particular within the growth team for example it's a combination of tools that i use in my day-to-day one would be slack which we use to communicate on projects in play when we want feedback uh or we want to ask questions less general to to keep work moving whereas we have a tool called notion which is where a lot of our cross-departmental strategy and process is communicated kind of bigger picture more general um project overviews and then we use asana as a project management tool so that's where we assign tasks with set deadlines and have real clarity about job allocation and responsibilities things like that a tool that's probably not familiar to a lot of folks that we use quite a bit because of the globally distributed nature of our team is a tool called loom and loom allows you to record video and really easily share that so for me in particular working in Australia loom is important so i think less than um less than 10 of our business is on an apac time zone and there's only nine of us in Australia uh so for me a lot of my nine to five is spent with not many folks online so if i want to contribute to a meeting that's not happening in my time zone i can either make the decision to join that meeting or based on remote's culture there always has to be a mechanism for someone who can't join to be able to feed into that agenda before the meeting and to feedback afterwards so loom allows me to record a video and add that to the agenda so it can either be played or consumed by folks who will be on the call beforehand so the feedback collaboration is easier to manage i think what we're seeing within remote is now we're working more and more towards asynchronous work as a default which means not having to have all people working at once to push work forward so instead of having a meeting now we have what we call async meets or rolling agendas where by given universally coordinated time we'll agree to have fed back into a notion meeting agenda to um to abroad the agenda giving feedback on all the points and oftentimes we can progress work forward working with you know 10 plus stakeholders across different teams and functions with it within the business without even having any sort of like face-to-face or even um same time zone uh interactive great share where do you see this going over over the next few years or so how do you see these types of practices and and habits developing what do you see the future of distributed work looking like well i see it becoming normalised and we're seeing that already i think what we're all passionate about at remote is to incentivise and allow folks to to move to and live in their own community and in the past a lot of our work culture has been based on having to live in a place where you you want to do your dream job you know it might be New York it might be London it might be Singapore wherever it is i guess in a lot of cases for professional um white collar folks as it were that tended to be in a city i think what we're trying to do at remote and where i see this trend and change developing is more folks will be able to move back to whatever community is it is that they'd like to um to live and be a part of that community growing that community having the life work balance that they want to have and be able to access globally competitive salaries from wherever it is that they choose to live so I think um we're trying to prove that that's possible and easy and effective in terms of you know these practices in general i think what we need to get better at is um continually finding ways to improve connection and belonging in a fully remote distributed work environment because that is one element where there's a lot of improvement still to go I think and our remote you know we're always intentionally trying to uh improve the way that we do build connections in that environment um and so i expect that we'll start to see better ways to allow teams to meet be that in person you know with with retreats and things like that as the world opens back up but also just in a day-to-day sense so how do we feel like we are really part of a team in the same way that you do in an office environment because there's so many other incredible benefits to working remotely be that working from home or wherever you'd like to work from but um particularly for you know individuals that have worked in an office environment for multiple decades i think the feedback i get from a lot of folks is they feel like they would miss that kind of relationship development and in-person connection and i totally understand that too introverts tend to love remote work and that ability to work work from home but i'd love to see positive change in that sense as well in terms of building connection great shares there's been a lot of really great tips here that that i feel any distributed company or aspiring distributed company could could take on board so james thanks a lot for your time with us today i appreciate you coming on the show no worries Andy great to see you mate.