Tina Ferguson: Managing Distributed Workforces

Transcript

[Music] thank you [Music] so a little bit about myself I have been in the industry for about 20 years working across multiple geographies in various companies of scale and inclusive of that I've been at the firm for eight years which has allowed me truly the opportunity to partner with many first-time Founders as well as serial

Founders as they're thinking and building out their organization many of that to start distributed or thinking through what a growth plan can look like so I really been able to have truly a front row understanding of the common challenges and a lot of those best practices and inner workings for crypto companies with a distributed Workforce but also coupled with crypto Nomads and how do we think through some of those best practices and it's really been such a great opportunity to work with so many of our Founders and helping through

those best practices because many of us will acknowledge it's very challenging to build an organization and I really want to be able to share so many of those best practices with you as I was developing this presentation I came across a very interesting stat it was a survey that was conducted by PWC it was inclusive of around 10 000 distributed projects inclusive of 200 companies and 30 countries so a great sample size across various Industries and what their intent was was to look at from one project from the conception to the

completion what was successfully completed and in my mind I was it came around 40 to 50 percent I think you'll also be very surprised by this number only 2.5 of those 10 000 projects that were surveyed only 2.5 were successfully completed and that's why it is so important what we're talking today is I really want to give you some best practices to avoid being one of the 97.5 of companies that didn't have a successful project and that'll dive into some of those strategies and really building a successful distributive

Workforce and one of the pieces when we're thinking through this there's really three optimal strategies and it's thinking about your people hiring the right people the right skills and I'm talking about a framework for that as well secondly thinking about what is the infrastructure and I know many of you are probably thinking about decentralization or if you're also building out a network and so a lot of what I'm going to talk about today is you can Leverage in either scenario and then processes right one of the things we should be thinking about which is very specifically is decision making how to think about feedback how are we going to

disseminate information across the organization and I'm going to do a deeper dive on each of these but I thought to really optimize kind of not just giving you the best practices is to walk you through specifically a case study a company that I had an opportunity to partner with and they had a pretty aggressive timeline the intent was to grow from a team of five to twenty in six months and it was across various functions in multiple geographies and so I'm going to walk you through the next few minutes with that lens in mind and one of the things that I think we can think about when you're

building an organization or thinking about building Networks your people are your most important resource it is if you think about building an organization it's about hiring the right people at the right time and at the right place it's what I really call truly the three r and I think what's really interesting is when we were looking at the organization of what we needed to build we knew it was so competitive the talent that we were going after it's as you all know in building organizations it is tremendously tough when you think about hiring the right people it has to

translate into building the right product and ultimately Revenue because of the changing environment right we have to give ourselves that competitive advantage to win and that truly is by having the right people and so the framework as I was mentioning a moment ago was really the three R's and the first thing that we did was we sat down and really looked at primarily what were those skills and the experiences that we needed because we had to do this across functions and we weren't looking for people with skills right now it's six months we were looking at folks that were going to be able to go with us within 12 months and 18 months and the

CEO also had very strong vision of the culture he wanted to really focus have a culture where there was Integrity people were passionate about what they were doing play to win and one of the things is people also that were agile and could adapt very quickly and working cross-functionally and we were able to build very specific interview questions that would complement the technical skills because with an aggressive timeline we just did not have the opportunity to make a bad hire so we really sat down understood the profile that we were looking for from a

candidate perspective but we also wanted to ensure that we were setting people up for Success so we really instituted a very very robust onboarding program so people knew even before they came into the company on day one what they were going to be working on the teams they were going to be partnering with how those teams operated and we're very clear is also what success looked like and also the failure so we were trying to minimize any ambiguity where we could because we wanted to ensure we had the right people at the right time and then in addition as you're hiring right you've raised a certain amount of capital we had to really think through how are we going to pay folks so we

looked at building salary bands Equity also in the crypto organizations right there's the allocation of tokens so we really spent some time thinking through what that compensation philosophy could be and how we could attract talent that was not familiar with crypto or how to have been to operate operated so that was a really great opportunity now Now That We Knew we're the right people we had to figure out timing because we had to figure out when we hired our Engineers our designers research our community managers and so it really allowed us to understand what the milestones we were going to achieve and to hire the right people at that time

and the right framework during this exercise it was very interesting you were able to identify some Community managers and Engineers that were actually located in Europe and actually 10 of the folks we wanted to hire were in Europe and this is what I always caution folks on if you're going to be hiring in different countries or even different states it's something to be mindful of you need to be thinking through what are the employment laws any implications that we have to hire or fire there's additional costs associated with statutory benefits and then in conjunction with that we also wanted to make sure

that we want to do a cost benefit analysis to really determine if we wanted to establish an entity or even possibly if we wanted to do a peo and I laugh as kind of just a fancy name for a professional employer Organization for HR and what it does is it allows you if you're going to hire in different locations we established a peo so when we were able to hire somebody we could immediately hire that day and I would just it was kind of funny even before I got on this call I had one of my companies telling me Tina we need to hire somebody in the UK right now and what we're able to do is drop an email to our contact at the pefo and we're going to be looking at getting an offer

out and part of it and being the competitive environment you need that competitive advantage so one of the things after we looked at the right place the right time I really wanted to kind of share with you I talked a little bit about this is how important onboarding is because I know when we're moving very hard and fast we just hire people and then we let them hit the ground running I want to talk to you about really the business impact if you have a very strong onboarding that's cohesive and it can increase your productivity by literally seven percent and just think about the cost savings that you can achieve and just the resources so I want to take an opportunity and just walk you

briefly through some best practices in building truly a functional onboarding and if you think about an onboarding program it really for us when I was working with the CEO it started as soon as we opened a job it was an opportunity to say here's the 30-day plan here's what the person is going to be working on here are the outcomes here's what success looks like there was also inclusive with a training program so folks that we're going to submit code people knew how to do it it was also very inclusive for us of how we operationalize how we give feedback how are we going to do our day-to-day and

you've heard me say a couple times and I'm probably going to hone in on this it's really important in any onboarding program or any building of a company is helping people understand what other teams are working on not just for them to be you know it's performing well in their job it's really instrumental of the trust that you're building in an organization and if you can do that up front the value when you start to have conflict and issues you'll be able to see the momentum and people being able to navigate through that and I would also say one of the things that we did is we did check-ins and what that is and I don't think you have to be overly

prescriptive but we were checking in to see how things were working what were the challenges the person was facing and be able to get in front of those issues up front or if there was a potential issue we could actually address it immediately and I think that's really important is with especially in even the times where I'm now is checking in to understand how your people are performing what are their issues and that really ties in to ultimately creating a culture of social belonging and so if you think about the onboarding process it's twofold to get people up and running they understand how an organization is going to function but also building some of that trust and

integrity upfront which was really important to the CEO now you've hired the right people right we've got an onboarding place and plan now let's take an opportunity and really think through what was the organizational structure and that's was so important for us is to really understand how people were going to be reporting because in a decentralized organization you really need to understand how product will operate how it will interact with engineering the opportunity how it will even engage with Community managers and you've got to establish that quick whether these are going to be managers one of the

things that we also have to decide do we bring you an experience managers or do we have folks actually being a lead capability and that was something we were really trying to focus on with them as well and then in addition it was really important to really put some parameters as to here where the job rolls of what they were going to be working on and again it was really we wanted to understand also what motivated people in their roles so that we could actually embed that as they were working with other teams but also thinking about it from the development and I think one of the things that you're building out in actual organizational strategy it's really instrumental to make sure that

you have the right organizational structure that will support that so one of the things that we really took an opportunity as we were building up his organization is what did we need to achieve and did the organization support it and so I will be honest we had to make a couple of different adjustments where originally engineering and product were together and then ultimately wound up separating them because of the direction the organization's going so it's something to be mindful as you're thinking about building out these organizations and I would say now that you've you have an organizational structure you it's really imperative to actually help people understand how they're actually going to

function and what are those processes that you really think are valuable I think in any organization or even building a network when you have people that are partnering together it's really about establishing feedback and one of the things that we took a very proactive approach is we actually went through and trained people of how to get feedback not to in day to day and it could also win things that we want to ensure because for the CEO it was really imperative for him that he wanted his team to give him feedback as to what was working well what was not working well and so one of the things if you can establish that people feel comfortable in providing real-time valuable feedback

it really well um one of the things that we had noticed is it really was able to get us through conflict a lot quicker and a lot of people when we're looking at our Engineers they were working on day-to-day issues and when they had an issue they could go talk to the product team or the community manager without management having to get involved and that was really really important for his what he was driving to which is a really great adhesive team and then I think this is what I see in a lot of my crypto companies is really ensuring that you have a decision maker I know we're hiring a lot of senior people who want them to have certainly the autonomy and the ability to be a part of decisions

but you ultimately have to identify someone who is going to be the key decision maker whether that is for technical whether it's for product and you have to communicate that to the organization and also Empower that person in their ability to make those decisions and then I would say one of the other pieces that we were thinking about because we were decentralized is how do we think about communication how do we disseminine information right slack is great for doing you know just quick information and feedback but I think one of the things that we really want to say is if you have a technical decision maybe that was a better Zoom meeting one of the things is for managers day to day

if you can be in person always great or if you do Zoom those are things that you need to be thinking about when you're in different geographies and that was something that we were very instrumental of what we thought about up front of what were the system and tools you want to be able to develop to ensure the company is successful and then lastly I think one of the it's so important is building those processes that are certainly going to support the structure and one of the things that we really did is we were constantly as we were bringing new people into the organization we were testing what was working and what was not so we had this opportunity to constantly reiterate

and I would say one of the key pieces as you're building out an organization it's so imperative to think about people infrastructure and process if you can think about these strategies up front the intent is really to avoid the scenario of being and avoiding that 97.5 of companies that have not been able to achieve a successful project thank you cool great thank you Tina the first one is from Sarah and she references the case study in your talk and is wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you train very

early new hires to take on leadership right away while also making Necessary contributions to the product or in this case study how did you balance individual contributors versus leaders and how do you go about thinking about the larger structure of the company when you're growing really quickly from five to twenty people yeah and I think it's a great question I think one of the things that we did up front is when we knew we were going to grow to 20 people we actually started to think about what did these roles look like very specifically in thinking about that infrastructure were we going to hire managers or we were going to hire leads and I think secondly to your question which is how do you allow people to be leaders in an

organization at the same time one of the things that we did is we paired everybody up with a senior Mentor so a senior engineer in the organization or someone who is a product who would actually be able to sit there and mentor and guide them as they were growing in the organization I would say the other piece that was really important for us is we actually had built a training program for both employees as they were coming in to actually how to manage projects how to come in how to work cross-functionally we had actually instituted actually a training program with a third party vendor to help support them next question is from Paul and Abhishek so for hiring

internationally what do you make of products like let's deal that manage compliance for you can you recommend HR tools that you think are good for for hiring remote workers yeah so I think there's a couple of different peos that you can leverage right where they will and it's a great question they will Encompass not only compliance but they're also going to help with you with payroll taxes the employment laws a lot of companies choose apply Global a lot of folks who use exilium Cornerstone I think one of the things when we talk to companies about tools there's not always one tool that'll work well for one company we really want to understand your business but those are a couple that we see many many portfolio

companies leveraging right now cool great okay next questions from Nori and yes are there any best practices for managing remote sales teams effectively particularly when no one on the founding team has a sales background in the past we've had difficulty getting good performance out of remote sales people so one of the things that we did right where you have a Founder where you've been building remote sales teams and we just haven't been able to you know grow and be able to get the performance we need one of the things that we've done in the past is we've brought in a third party right where they will actually help you think through how do you you know building out a sales organization

we also have folks in The Firm who actually partner with many of our companies on this area as well were they built out sales organizations to think about the structural components you also think about what are you trying to sell and then that's where the sales enablement component comes in so it sounds like you you basically want to bring in sort of like a leadership team that can design this sort of organization at the outset and then you once you have that clear structure and guidance in place then then you sort of can build it out from there definitely yeah okay um next one is from Mark and this is one we've actually talked about before it's yes um you know it feels like a lot of crypto organizations are very flat or at

least aspire to be sort of very flat um how do you deal with that ethos while making it clear what reporting lines are well I think what we've seen is companies grow in scale right initially when it's 20 it's a lot easier to be a very flat organization however when you think about you grow to even 50 to 100 you have employees that are looking for employee development they're looking at growth right you need management who is going to be able to build strategy give guidance to their employees and one of the things is it's really hard when you don't have that evolved into your organization so what we'll see is it'll usually kind of be the about 2025 and

then when I started to work in is that you do bring in some level of a lead or a manager who can actually build and actually grow these teams because really if you think about a manager part of their role is to really remove barriers for their organization and so that's where you'll see that from an infrastructure standpoint would be hard yeah and and one thing I might add there is that um you know because because the space sort of has these origins of decentralization as a driving ethos um there's you know I think I think that largely informs the the flatness or the aspirational fatness of a lot of these words

um but there's sort of two dimensions on which you have to assess organizational structure there's there's the you know core team and organization for example you know in the case of maker there's a maker Foundation or the ethereum foundation right and there's the organ organizational structure within that Foundation and then separately there's the network that they um that the foundation sort of spawned and put into the world and um I think the uniting principle for both is that the more complicated the decision making that you're trying to do as a group The more you need sort of a clear management structure because if you don't have a good this is to a point you made in your presentation if you

don't have a good clear process for making decisions it's really hard to scale decision making so I think it's it's both true of the organization but also sometimes in the case of the networks too definitely um okay cool next question is from meta and she asks um compared to other fields crypto companies seem to have higher employee churn rates um and this could be because various things including you know the fast-paced nature of the space or how entrepreneurial it is so how do you deal with that as a as a small company how do you incorporate or account for employees return in your culture and processes sure a couple things what we'll do is

actually assess attrition data why people are leaving and a couple things we write some of the root causes are the interview process are we interviewing for the right do we we went through were we interviewing for the right skills experience and a lot of it is also the profile can someone work to your future to her point be very agile and adaptable you can actually identify that very early and in your process and so it could be attributed to that were we seeing some of those scenarios or I would also say the first 25 in an organization might not be the same when you're hiring 200. so one of the things that I work with the companies is let's and you kind of heard it in my my content is really nailing down your

interview process because it certainly can eliminate some of those attrition issues on the back end totally that's that's great advice um next next one is from Abhishek um what are your tips for delegation especially two or more levels deep from the CEO and escalation um or or two or more levels above um I guess you know a entry level employee in a remote environment so I think one of the things that we coach managers on which is as a manager looking at what your priorities are and then also looking at what motivates your employees and looking at the skills and the experience and where you can actually

grow your employees right it's got to be a very mindful situation and that's where we talk to managers which is don't just Delegate for delegate purposes but look at something where there's alignment for where it motivates the employee as well as where they have that skills and development because what we've seen is when people delegate and they don't have the right skills or experience you can set that person up for failure and so one of the things is being really mindful of just even their own manager of where what are your priorities and where you can even have that opportunity to develop your employee yeah I think um yeah in my experience it's it's um

sorry this goes back to your point really about hiring right which is like you need to screen for a lot of this stuff in the hiring process and and like through that process make sure that the employee is at the right level for the role that you're looking for and if so like then it should be possible to delegate to them right hopefully they have the right maturity to handle it um and so I think a lot of this comes back to running a really it's Mission hiring process that can eliminate so many of the problems um with churn and you know issues with delegation Etc and again it's right it comes back right don't hire the person for right now but how they can grow with you from a business perspective 12 to 18 months yeah totally okay I think so that's

that's all the questions and um with that we'll we'll wrap up and let you enjoy the rest of Friday night so thank you very much Tina for presenting um and yeah thanks Robin pause oh thank you guys [Music] thank you