Darren Murph, Fmr GitLab VP Remote on Remote Operations

Michael Koenig: Hello, and welcome to Between Two COOs, where phenomenal chief operating officers come to share their knowledge, advice, and at the very end, a crazy story. I'm your host, Michael Koenig, and occasionally I like to bring on people in roles other than COOs to bring their perspective, and today we're going to dive Deep into refining the operations of remote companies with Darren Murph, also known as the Oracle of Remote Work by CMBC. He serves as Andela's VP of Workplace Design and Remote Experience. Prior to Andela, Darren led workplace strategy and operations at GitLab, scaling the world's first fully remote company to IPO. And he helped pioneer that head of remote role. So needless to say, He knows his stuff and is expert on remote operations. So Darren, thanks for being here. Yeah, of course.

Darren Murphy: Thanks for the gracious intro. [00:01:00]

Michael Koenig: My pleasure. My pleasure. So as I mentioned, I'd really like to focus this discussion on the operations that lead to success for remote companies versus getting into the discussion of, oh, are we going to go back to the office or, should companies be remote? Does this sound like a plan?

Darren Murphy: That's a great plan. Thanks for setting the

Michael Koenig: stage. The reason is that I think this will be really helpful for the companies that are currently remote and staying remote and the companies that are debating whether to go back into the office. I think we can maybe help them refine and potentially stick with remote. Needless to say, both you and I love remote work, have both been remote for who knows how long, and see a lot of benefits into it. But I think we also acknowledge that it might not always make sense for every company.

Darren Murphy: Yeah, eyes wide [00:02:00] open, open minds, open hearts, you can make healthier decisions.

Michael Koenig: Perfect. Now we've got all of the foundational stuff done. Time for an actual question for you. You once told me that communications and for our listeners, yes, Darren and I do have some familiarity. We are not having our very first meeting right now, but you once told me that communication The secret to successful remote operations. Can you explain that? Yeah,

Darren Murphy: specifically low context communication. Another way I've used that term is saying low context communication is the dark horse resume skill of the next decade. And so there's a couple of questions there. Why is that? But more importantly, what is low context communication? It's a way of thinking and communicating. That assumes that your recipient or audience has low to no context, hence low [00:03:00] context communication. So it's a bit paradoxical. It means that you default to communicating with a high degree of detail or precision assuming that People are starting from scratch. So why do you do this when you can't use a synchronous meeting or the office as a communication bridge, you have to assume that people in different time zones across the ocean may need to loop themselves. into a project or loop themselves into a train of thought. As you're trying to gather input, you have to convey enough information so that there's context there for people to give their perspective or move that piece of work forward. If you lack this, Then the only way to solve it is to have a huddle or a synchronous meeting to bring someone up to speed. In corporate speak, I'm sure we've all heard this, Hey, let's touch base so I can bring you up to speed. In great remote teams, you communicate proactively in a way that allows people to essentially bring [00:04:00] themselves up to

Michael Koenig: speed. Load context communication, which I love the name of, but if I'm understanding this correctly, it means not assuming that someone knows what you're talking about. And so laying that baseline, is that a way to sum that

Darren Murphy: up? For sure. And it also requires that you convey the information in a scalable way. Now, this could be through the spoken word, but it needs to be captured in a tool like Loom so that you can easily share it with the entire organization in one click, or documented in a knowledge base or some sort of tool that would effectively allow you to scale the issue with even low context communication in a small, tight knit group is that even if a few people understand deeply what you're speaking about, it then becomes difficult to scale. And in a remote company, you're almost always working across time zones or with people that are working nonlinear days. And so low context is critical, but also conveying that low context communication in a scalable way. is really, really [00:05:00] important.

Michael Koenig: Part of that scalability, has to do with the detail, length, and breadth of the conversation that you're giving. If you have to assume with every single question that you have that, oh, this person doesn't know what I'm talking about, is that then scalable? Because You have to write so much or you have to have a really long loom video or things of

Darren Murphy: that nature. It builds upon itself. So communication in a remote team really aligns to compounding interest, if you will. So if a company starts, it starts building up a knowledge base. It documents things like values and culture. What do we believe in? How do we do work around here? These are kind of essential pillars that need to be documented at some point. And then every other piece of communication. stacks on top of that. It compounds on top of that. And so there is a baseline level of understanding. When you on board someone into a company, you hopefully on board them into a base level of what is [00:06:00] established in that company and then individual questions on top of that compound. But of course, situational awareness would say The answer to every question is, quote, it depends, and it truly does depend on how long a person has been there, how long they've been in the department, what they may or may not know about a situation. But you cannot go wrong over communicating. There's really not such a thing as too much context. Now, of course, this might take longer for you to convey. But it will hopefully make things more efficient by going slow to go

Michael Koenig: fast. Essentially, don't assume that someone is at where you're at. You have to bring them along to get to where you're at, if that makes sense.

Darren Murphy: There's a clarification that I want to make there. You said, The assumption is you, as in the human, has to bring them along. When done well, systems will bring them along. So here's what I mean by that. Many co located or office centric [00:07:00] organizations optimize for the speed of knowledge transfer. How fast can person A tap person B on the shoulder or get a meeting with person B and articulate things to each other? transfer information from one brain into the other. But that's not scalable, and it doesn't really work well in a distributed workforce. Instead, you have to optimize for the speed of knowledge retrieval. So we're moving from the speed of knowledge transfer to the speed of knowledge retrieval. As in, how fast can person A and person B tap into a knowledge base or some sort of system where they can find enough information to iterate and move work forward? There's a lot to unpack there and prerequisites. When it comes to knowledge management and the power of documentation. But all of that goes back to communication. If you're just rehashing things instead of continuing to add layers and document as new questions and scenarios comes up, then this becomes completely unmanageable.

Michael Koenig: Okay. And I love that you got to knowledge retrieval in the systems, [00:08:00] because that's really what we want to dive into here. And of course, I'm speaking to the guy who probably had a pretty big hand of designing GitLab's extensive remote handbook. That thing goes on for a thousand pages. Who knows what it was? Which over however long GitLab has been around is not surprising that it would grow to that length. What I'd like to ask about now is that type of documentation and giving it the context of where we're at right now. And in terms of being companies that are fully remote, but wanting to learn how to do it better, or companies that are remote right now, maybe it's not working out and they're considering going back into the office. How do we need to think about knowledge bases, documentation, retrieval, and where do we even start at this point?

Darren Murphy: The important [00:09:00] mental framework to embrace here, if you're deciding between models, is to get really deep conviction about this. Are you treating remote work as a perk or a work from home policy, or do you see remote work as a technology? a product, an operating model, because you will engage with those two things very differently. A wellness plan might be a policy. We do these things to ensure wellness throughout our organization, but it is not a full blown operating model that dictates what tools that you use, how people communicate, how teams make decisions. Remote work done well transcends being a perk or a policy and becomes an operating model. And I think too few organizations are recognizing that. And what they're doing is they're putting perk level investment and expecting product [00:10:00] level results. And that misalignment is incredibly frustrating. And if they don't acknowledge that, that's why a lot of organizations will simply snap back into the office because that is the operating model, which is already established. It actually has very little to do with that physical piece of real estate. What it represents is the operating model that they were already used to. So I say all of that to say, you really need to take this framework. to heart because you will look at remote work as something that can be tested, that can be experimented, that can be evolved, that has two way doors where you walk through an experiment, you learn something, maybe you walk back through the door. This is very different than just a one pager. Now, how do you set that up? It really begins with process definition, which then feeds into a rigor around documentation, which then feeds into culture, connection, and belonging. A lot of companies right now are saying we don't feel connected. We don't feel like we belong as a remote team. Why is that? But they're starting from the wrong end of the proverbial nail. [00:11:00] The actual head where they should start is all around process definition. Is it defined how people work together? Do you even have a knowledge base? A tool like Almanac or Guru or Notion? or slight. There are many of these and they all do the same thing in slightly different ways, but you have to have that tool in place because in the absence of a physical office, this digital knowledge base is essentially the shell that houses your company. You mentioned the GitLab handbook. If you google that, it's public. And when you start digging through it, yeah, you may pick up some pointers on how to do this or that, but when you zoom out one level, what you really see is this is the operating manual to the company instead of having to go to a physical office to understand the operating rhythms and the mechanics of how this company actually does business. It's written down. That way it can scale to every household and every office in the [00:12:00] world. This is very daunting for a lot of companies that are thinking, wow, we want to go distributed. So that means we need to write down our operating manual. Where do we start? But I would say that I have seen companies during COVID go from absolutely zero documentation to a basic framework of documentation that they're now building on in as little as six to twelve months. The key is hiring someone to steward that change and putting a team in place so that people are actually there to do the

Michael Koenig: work. That seems a bit daunting, it's challenging macroeconomic climate. We're all looking at how we're spending our money, particularly from an operating point of view. These are roles that aren't necessarily contributing to top line revenue growth. Now we're talking about how do we even expand the operations to operate better? Say someone doesn't want to. Hire a team for this, say someone, doesn't necessarily want to [00:13:00] have a head of remote. Maybe it becomes that in the future, but, short of going out and hiring all of this headcount to do this, how can companies. Approach it moving

Darren Murphy: forward. Let's say use history as the guide. And so although this feels very new, it actually follows a very similar model. So if you would rewind time and imagine yourself in an era where you're running manufacturing, and this is before the invention of the assembly line, you have certain roles, you have certain rhythms, and they're doing certain things that deliver certain results. And then overnight, the assembly line shows up. So if we continue the analogy, remote work shows up. The pandemic forces remote work into existence at scale. You have a decision to make, are you going to embrace the unproven and unknown, which is the assembly line? And are you going to take some of those roles that used to do things in a [00:14:00] much more convoluted way? And are you going to retrain them? You're going to put them in new roles, doing new things with the new system and the new technology. Or are you going to double down on the way that you were doing things, while all of your competitors embrace the new thing and start re skilling and re tooling? Even in the office environment, most offices have an office manager or a lobby manager or an employee experience manager. These roles have existed to ensure that the physical confines of an office are kept up and there's some amount of intentionality around it. So if the office is not in the picture anymore, it should free up revenue and space and reskilling opportunities to ask yourself what is the distributed version of that look like? So even if you don't want to hire a new team to do it, if you are shifting models, my assumption would be there would be some things that you don't need to do anymore. And those would be the ideal targets for retraining for the things that you do [00:15:00] need to do going forward. I would also say that there is a very limited window of time, particularly for digital industries and knowledge work. So of course the caveat being automotive garages will be in person for the foreseeable future. So we're talking about a very specific type of work, but for that very specific type of work where people can commute into an office and then just sit on zoom calls all day to do their work, there's a very short window of time where top talent will tolerate that if you force it back into the office, there may be some companies that are big enough to just force that into existence. For the next 10 or 20 years, but for most companies, the market forces will start to shift in a way that top talent will prioritize workplace flexibility, and they will look at organizations that are investing in remote infrastructure as the more alluring versus those who have decided it's not worth the effort to evolve their workflows.

Michael Koenig: Getting back to [00:16:00] treating remote. At the product level, it sounded like you talked a little bit about iteration of testing, launching new things, iterating on them, getting better gradually. And this happens to be true. At Tucows, where I'm the COO, we are taking a look at how do we do remote? Because we have the belief that the companies that figure out how to nail remote productivity and remote engagement are going to be the ones that succeed 10 years down the line. Now, we've been operating fully remote since the start of the pandemic, but largely, we have some practices that have organically taken shape, but nothing that has been targeted and focused. And we realize that we really need to do that. Where do we start? Is it that we start changing our documentation? Is that where we begin? Or how should I personally [00:17:00] go? I love this interview, by the way, because I have questions that I need answers to, like now, so this is great.

Darren Murphy: I'll give you what I believe to be one of the most basic building blocks to get started on this. And we're pulling this from the actual Andela playbook that we are implementing right now. It is this notion of no agenda, no attend. So what does it ask of people? It's a very simple request. You need to look at all of the meetings that you are the organizer for. In other words, you are the one commandeering time from people. When you go through those. And you check, does this meeting invite have a shared doc agenda attached to it, permanently attached to the invite itself? This could be a Google doc, a Notion doc, take your pick, Teams doc, take your pick. What does this do? This ensures that when someone is choosing whether or not to attend this meeting, they're able to proactively and independently [00:18:00] look at the invite Click on this document and get a download of the context. What is the overview? Who will be invited? What are the expected outcomes? Are there any pre reads? What do I need to do to bring my best self to this meeting? And what questions do I need to ask to make sure this is an efficient use of everyone's time? All of that! comes from the simple action, the simple point of friction of adding the agenda to the invite. And then there are a whole host of things where this begins to rewire your brain. You start to think differently. You start to think about people's time differently. And so if you are asking where to start, I would start with Make a policy for no agenda, no agenda. Start getting agendas in as many work related invites as possible. And if you get to one invite, potentially a recurring meeting that's been on everyone's calendar for the last four years, and you go to add an agenda and you think, I think we've pretty much wrapped this discussion up. Don't just add an agenda. Delete the [00:19:00] meeting and give people that time back. And so it doubles as a nice spring cleaning, if you will, for potentially stale recurring meetings. ,

Michael Koenig: there have been a lot of interesting experiments to get rid of meetings and be more efficient and effective. Shopify was the big one where maybe the start of the year they deleted every single meeting and you would add it back if it was absolutely critical. Let's talk about the productivity aspect of remote work. Yahoo Finance came out with something recently and I can toss a note in the show links, but they posited that around three and a half hours are being wasted a week or it was a day. Nonetheless, that people are not as productive as they are. in the office. How do we measure and improve performance and productivity? I

Darren Murphy: think the first point [00:20:00] here is that it's going to be somewhat different for every company. The second point is, I think it's the wrong metric to ask, are people more or less productive in this office versus In their home. The real question should be which operating model are we set up to enable people to be the most productive in far too much of this conversation is pointed at the individual. There's very little that the individual can do without the organization unlocking A new field for them to play on. This is why knowledge management is so important. This is why the tool stack is so important. This is why changing the organizational ways of working is so important because then it allows the individual to do far more. There's a study by Forrester that I love to cite specific to knowledge management. And. If you go to GetGuru. com and search for ROI knowledge management, you can very easily plug [00:21:00] in the number of employees in your company. And it will tell you how many hours they are wasting searching for information. It will tell you how many hours they are wasting responding to customer questions again and again, should just be documented so they can be scaled, and how many hours they are wasting in meetings. that are primarily FYI's, status updates, or loop ins. Those are just three things. And most people listening to this podcast, who are working in any type of corporate environment, are probably nodding and thinking, Yeah, I can think of quite a few hours that I've wasted. So a lot of this is the ROI comes from a savings. In not wasting time doing things over and over and over again, and I would argue that this has always been true, but at the time we're recording this in June of 2023. It has become [00:22:00] exponentially more important, and here's why. Generative AI is now a very compelling, very real thing that is evolving rapidly. But the key thing that gener about generative AI that very few people are saying out loud is that it is only as good as its underlying data set. And so companies now are imagining this world where they can hop into Teams or Slack and anyone using common language can ask. What is our company's expense reporting policy? How do I think of a new project and get it pitched to executives? These are amazing questions that you would love to be able to ask an AI based service within your company. But here's the thing, if you don't have the answers to that documented in a knowledge base that it can reference, It doesn't work. And so I have long argued that knowledge management is important because it enables people to work more efficiently and live better lives. But now with AI, it is actually a prerequisite for your company to truly become [00:23:00] AI enabled. You first have to invest in creating the data set that it will reference.

Michael Koenig: I love that many of us are looking at generative AI. And saying, okay how does this change how we do certain processes? The majority of the context that I have been in is how do we use ChatGPT to do more faster? But it's really started picking up speed, the conversation in terms of how do we take proprietary data sets and do generative AI with those? So what you're talking about right now is taking a proprietary data set. It just happens to be. the shared language lexicon and operating procedures that a company has in a remote environment, or that's even applicable within an in office environment.

Darren Murphy: Correct. And I think it's worth restating that last sentence, which is if you go far enough down this road, you start to realize that [00:24:00] great remote first principles are simply great business principles. So even for organizations that have decided you want a fully in office culture, that's the culture you want to create. Those are the types of people you want to attract to your organization. It's still going to be useful for you to have a knowledge base that an incoming employee can say, what should I expect the first week of onboarding? Whether you're in office, whether you're remote, whether you're somewhere in between. The more that is searchable, the more accessible and scalable that it becomes.

Michael Koenig: Let's talk about onboarding. Paychex, one of the largest HR and payroll companies out there, they came out with a study on the importance of onboarding and its correlation to new employees quitting within their first year. first year of work. They found that remote employees with a poor onboarding experience are 115 percent more likely to quit in that first year than those in office. Of course, that's a relative figure, right? So we should always take caution with them. But nonetheless, it [00:25:00] highlights the importance of onboarding new employees because that is that first interaction that they have. With the team and with the company, but you have to do it very differently in a remote setting. How should we be thinking about crafting that new employee onboarding experience?

Darren Murphy: It really goes back to putting yourself in the shoes of someone who is enthusiastically joining a new team. With no context, no background information, they don't have the legacy that someone who has been there for 1 to 10 years would have. And so you have to ask yourself, what would I want to know if I were coming in fresh? What about our culture needs to be put forward, front and center? What might people need to unlearn so that they can learn how we're going to go about this? I would argue that remote onboarding may take a bit longer. But the long term benefits of that are you create a [00:26:00] far more retentive type of environment. Now, I've seen great onboarding through knowledge management systems that enables you to point people directly into what is essentially the operating manual that they will continue to operate in. So the more integrated you can make that experience, the better. Think about it from the office standpoint. You don't want to onboard someone. In a side satellite office for the first two weeks, and then actually have them do all of their work in the main office. And so I would port that same mentality over to the virtual space. Whatever onboarding you can do within the knowledge base that people will be working in, the more familiar that they can go ahead and get with that tool. But I think it's also, that, that stat is not surprising at all to me, because what it points out is remote. Talent has more options and it makes you think how many subpar in office onboarding experiences were simply tolerated because the bar to move and relocate and get something new was simply too high. So [00:27:00] people said it's a sunk cost. I'm already here. It's too expensive to think about changing again. I'll just deal with it. Remote removes a lot of that friction. So it demands that organizations are even better because they're switching costs are much, much lower. And I actually love this transfer of power. I said during the pandemic that the pandemic itself has triggered the greatest transfer of institutional power. That I have ever seen in my lifetime, but I think it's very healthy because it puts more accountability on organizations to become more disciplined, less dysfunctional, I would argue that everyone in the organization, even shareholders for public companies would appreciate that. So it's a forcing function. Yes, it's a bit uncomfortable. Yes, it's a lot of change you might not have asked for. But it is moving toward a more disciplined direction.

Michael Koenig: There's another aspect to it. And by the way, I love and agree with everything you just said. I want to push back though, in a remote [00:28:00] environment. There is a real challenge around engagement and in particular, the personal interactions, ? You and I are not in person right now. You've got a really cool base in your background. I've got a couple of cows since I'm with Tucows, big difference, but nonetheless, we're interacting in this 2D environment. And it's for a very set amount of time. We couldn't go, Hey, let's get a drink after work, we could. We would just be in 2D again in front of our screens. , with an onboarding experience, say it's just atrocious. However, You're meeting people, you're meeting colleagues, and that's a big reason, people will stay at a job they don't like because they love their team, they enjoy the people that they get to work with, and that can compensate for that really bad onboarding experience. I bring this up because it's the next path that I want to go down, which is... How do we have the personal connection? [00:29:00] How do we create that camaraderie in that team?

Darren Murphy: Well, we have to say the quiet part out loud, which is it's different. And it's okay that it's different. I look at the field of education as a great example. You can go on campus for two to four years and get an MBA. And you'll meet a lot of great people and a lot of great professors. And that is a very discreet experience. And then at that same university, you can go get an online MBA, same credentials, maybe even the same professors. But at the end of those two to four years, you'll look back and you will have had a very different experience. A lot of it is choosing which experience do you want, because for every perk of the in person on campus MBA experience. There are some trade offs and some downsides. You have to be on site for classes, which limits how often you can travel the world. It limits where you can live. Maybe it's 3, 000 miles away from family. This is going to be a trade off that you have to make. [00:30:00] So I think it's okay to acknowledge that connection belonging looks different remotely. The key to making it work is getting people to fill their social reservoirs outside of work. I think for far too long we have relied on the workplace to Inject fulfillment into a huge part of our life. Now people have permission to question that ratio. Now for some people, at certain seasons of their life or certain seasons of their career, maybe they really do want to be in person around their teammates because that's the thing that's going to be best for them. The good news is, there will always be in person workplaces for them to choose. But there's an entire other subset of people that say family and friends in this specific geography and place in the world. That's actually the most important thing to me. We're prioritizing better air [00:31:00] quality is the most important thing to me or prioritizing being within walking distance to this hospital that is certified to care for. a specific ailment that my child has. That is the most important thing to me. And so I'm willing to sacrifice some of the in person rapport, this very different life that I can design. I think the issue is if you were a company that was built on in person, and so people opted into that culture and got used to that culture, and now you're transitioning to a culture where they are going to be more responsible for their own personal social fulfillment. You may see some cultural misalignment and some shifting of sands as people opt out of that and new people opt into that. And instead of trying to please everyone or trying to get all of the perks of in person to replicate into remote or all of the remote benefits to replicate to in person, I think we just need to acknowledge that we've created new working lanes and new operating models and new work [00:32:00] environments. And some people will be more drawn to others. Some people will be less drawn to others. It's okay. It's healthy. Let's talk about

Michael Koenig: those companies that had the in person. Tucows is a great example. Tucows has been around for 30 years, operating, in person, even though spread across the world, but having offices all over the place where people actually interact, and you get a whole Operating system and you get a whole social

Darren Murphy: bucket

Michael Koenig: from that environment. Now you have switched to remote. What are some of the tools or the tactics that people can do to continue fostering that social engagement one, and then two, we're onboarding new employees. And we're bringing them into this existing environment. How do we help them get involved and become engaged in an [00:33:00] existing

Darren Murphy: culture? I'll say two things. One, virtual experiences are getting way better. You got to remember that five years ago, the total addressable market for virtual experiences was so tiny that there weren't a lot of options out there. Now, COVID has created product market fit on a whole different scale. So you have organizations like Luna Park, L U N A. They allow teams around the world to host their own game shows with actual comedians hosting in studios in New York. It's a phenomenal, phenomenal experience. So if you have not engaged with Luna Park and you're trying to bring your team together, highly recommend looking them up. So start there. Luna Park, you can't go wrong. Every team that I've ever known to try that out is this is amazing. We're doing one once a month. So virtual experiences are getting better, starting with examples like Luna Park. But then there's the other side of it, and I'm really glad that you pushed on this, which is an in person strategy is an essential part of a remote strategy.[00:34:00] Now that you frame it this way, I understand that the last segment I just shared, it may be possible to assume, hey, you're designing an environment where people never have to be together. I would not recommend that. If you're looking for an example of what to do, Dropbox is a phenomenal example of how to do this right. Dropbox was a predominantly in office culture. Prior to COVID they shifted to what they're calling virtual first They're maintaining a few Dropbox studios a few pieces of real estate around the world But virtual first is now their default But some of the real estate savings that they have from shutting down some of these massive offices They're repurposing into budgets to get people together on some sort of cadence And so what they're doing is they're supplementing the day to day virtual With occasional experiential in person, which is very intentional. It's for breaking bread is for building rapport. Yes, some strategy sessions, but mostly just for hanging out. And I would [00:35:00] also say on the topic of onboarding, if you are a company. where you do have one or two offices around the world. Don't dismay. Those are amazing onboarding vessels. It is possible to bring a new hire on, bring them out to an experiential space the first two weeks. It's an in person experience. It will then catalyze a lot of great virtual work after that. And so I'm a big fan of onboarding cohorts. If you can budget for the in person element of that, you will certainly see benefits. from

Michael Koenig: it. That's another thing that we've been looking a lot at. And back when I was at Automatic which is another company that has been remote since remote really started to take off back in 2006. And I'll note that it's a company that was remote from inception. One of the things that we did was each team would just pick a place in the world. Once a quarter, go get together. I love how you said break bread, but yeah, break bread and just bond and [00:36:00] get that going. And then the whole company would get together once a year. It was amazing. I got to meet incredible people, traveled to incredible places. One of the things though, and again, I'm coming back to Tucows because listen, I do this podcast so that I can learn from great people like yourself. At Tucows we're keenly interested in our carbon footprint and making sure that we're being good stewards and doing our part to get to net zero emissions. There are 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases emitted every single year. Around 2 percent comes from air travel alone. That's 1 billion tons of greenhouse gases that come from flying. And it's something that we've measured. There are very cool tools and companies out there that do it. Although we're remote, we have this incredible tug of war right now. We understand the value of getting folks together. But at the same time, air [00:37:00] travel is a massive contributor. How should we think about this? I will go out to Toronto, which is where our headquarters is. Granted, the majority of folks in the company are located in the greater Toronto area. That's great. However, there's a pretty good segment of my team that has not had the benefit getting together like that. How should I be thinking about this?

Darren Murphy: I'm a big fan of boring solutions. So I'll try to find the most boring solution and use it. I think offsets are a great place to start. If you are not familiar with a company called Pachama, P A C H A M A, they are essentially designed to do exactly this, and they give you an amazing ability to choose where you want to invest in carbon credits. Is it the be all end all solution for every company? Perhaps not. But I think it's a very healthy way to start the conversation. And I think this would apply for hybrid in an office [00:38:00] companies as well. Remember for all of these in office companies that were paying for hundreds, maybe thousands of people. to uproot their lives and move to Silicon Valley or Singapore or wherever it may be. They were on planes too. And so to whatever degree you can A, B, the way you used to be versus the way you are now and then do the math with the credits, I think that's a great place to start. I would say that even that industry will probably continue to evolve and help us to have better answers for this question.

Michael Koenig: We've got a lot of great tools here. We've got Luna Park for digital experiences. We've got Pachama for carbon offsets. We've got Notion or Guru for knowledge management. We've talked about productivity. We've talked about engagement. We've really been all over the place. I do like to take some questions from the audience. This one comes from my CEO and [00:39:00] the founder of Tucows, Elliot Noss, and it comes from our one on one that was maybe four hours ago. Elliot is looking at the challenges around how do we gauge people who are new into the workforce, right? With someone who has been there for a couple of decades, and we've talked about this, but this is getting very specific. What would a good system be for those new folks that are coming in, whether they're a new college grad or who's very early in their career? And, how do we get that engagement going?

Darren Murphy: Again, big fan of boring solutions. So I think this can be done at scale or not at all at scale. But the actual mechanism would be roughly the same. Regular office hours. Imagine scheduling a once a month, 60 or 90 minute office hour where maybe you have rotating senior [00:40:00] leaders if you don't want the same bucket of senior leaders on there every single time. And part of onboarding is that for the first six months, people are auto invited to this meeting. Every single instance of it for six months, and then maybe it automatically fades off after that, and they can optionally continue to join if it's it. This is the scalable solution where it's a group session. There's an agenda attached to it. And so anyone who is new to the company can proactively add questions to this agenda. They can show up in the synchronous meeting, and it almost acts as a group mentor type of session. Now, the version of this that doesn't scale is you pair every new hire with a senior leader. But of course, you have to be mindful of bandwidth there. But I have seen some really phenomenal group mentoring sessions, and it really breaks the ice and creates the psychological safety for All of the new cohort or the new higher cohort, because there's this understanding that we're a bit lost and we're a bit, we're learning together. And we appreciate that the [00:41:00] company has a framework, has a system in place to directly connect us with people who have been here longer and have opened the space for us to ask questions to them.

Michael Koenig: I love that. Okay. Noted. I think we'll have to do that. Last question until we get into the real last question, which is the favorite one. But for now, I have a town hall coming up in three weeks. One of the things that I've liked to do in town halls is a breakout room. I generally give people a random question, things like, If you could have a superpower, what would it be? And it can't be the superpower to create whatever superpower I want, even though that's my answer. Before we started, I asked you, which animal is the rudest, if they could talk. So this is a fun way, and we do breakout rooms and people get to chat with each other and meet new people, travel the world, right? What are some other ways to have [00:42:00] effective town halls that are engaging?

Darren Murphy: First, I'll say that the Komodo dragon was the answer to that other question. Komodo dragon would absolutely be the rudest of all animals. If any questions about that, there's a scene in Skyfall that confirms my suspicions about the Komodo dragon. Look, I'm going to give you an answer that might sound like a cop out, but it's really not, which is open it up and ask people. I would actually crowdsource the answer to this. And the reason is every company is so different. On what resonates and reverberates throughout the company and what I've even seen an Andela is as we've open sourced this, we have found people all across the organization, not just in product or engineering or people, but all over the place that are just people, and they've heard of things, or they've seen things, or they. saw a friend share something, and there are so many new tools and ways to do it, like Luna Park, for example, that I think I would be selling you short to say, here's a thing that you should do. Well, [00:43:00] I'll give you a park. That's a good place to start. But just by opening up that conversation to the organization, that in and of itself creates engagement. And then what it also does is if someone in the organization who may feel a bit hidden, maybe they're a junior employee or their work isn't very visible, If their tool or their approach is chosen, it's an amazing way to celebrate them on a big stage. Someone at Andela shared this awesome framework on town halls, which is teach, inspire, and learn. And if you can do all of those three things, then you're doing something right. And so I'd say it's a way to inspire people, and also you'll learn about new tools, and maybe you can teach someone in that. It doesn't have to hit all three, but it's a good framework.

Michael Koenig: Okay, and now the last, last question. Is, my favorite to ask, and I ask every single person here, and it's look, we've all had those moments where, especially in leadership roles, we've come across [00:44:00] something new and just thought, never thought I'd see that. Is there one that comes to mind that you can share with us?

Darren Murphy: Yeah, I'll share an experience I had at the World Economic Forum a few months ago. So there was a growth summit at their headquarters and after two days there, what I realized is that. With C level leaders, heads of academia, heads of state, people that literally run countries. If you boil it all the way down, the only difference between those folks who are making decisions that influence the entire world, and everyone else who's listening to this podcast, is a belief. that anything can happen if you find the right partners. It was such a groundbreaking realization for me that the attitude of believing there is no ceiling, go back to the matrix, there is no spoon, there is no, this can't happen. That attitude propels people. To being [00:45:00] curious and finding other people, whether it's a private partnership or a private public partnership, or just finding the right people to get around the table and galvanize them towards let's solve this thing. They just had an attitude, a dogged determination to find people who were smarter than them or that understood things that they didn't or could open up their blind spots. And they were determined to put the right group of people together to make things happen and make progress. So I don't know if that's the most direct answer to this question you've ever had, but it has been an awesome frame breaker for me. Whenever I run up against something that I feel like is an absolute dead end, I remember that environment and I think, no, it's probably not. There's probably one more thing that I haven't considered. There's probably one more person that I could ask. And so if you're stuck on something, that's what I would encourage you is to open up the net just a little bit wider and see if you can find someone who'll contribute to Whatever issue is stumping you at the moment.

Michael Koenig: That's great. It's really [00:46:00] interesting to think that you can go and see all these heads of state and really tackling these big issues and doing it together and not really looking at something and saying, Oh, there is a ceiling here that can't be done. That's pretty cool. That is a never thought I'd see that moment for sure. I love this conversation. I'm so appreciative of your time and thanks for joining me. Where can people go to stay up to date with you?

Darren Murphy: Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. Find me on LinkedIn. I'm Darren Murph.

Michael Koenig: That was simple. Fantastic. There you have it, everyone. Thanks for listening to Between Two COOs. I'm your host, Michael Koenig, and a very special thank you to Darren Murph for joining us. Tune in next time for our next COO chat on Between Two COOs, and be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts so that you never miss an episode. Just visit BetweenTwoCOOs. com for more. And if you have a minute, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and tell others about the show so they can get great advice from phenomenal COOs. Or in this case, heads of remote. Thanks for [00:47:00] listening to this week's episode. Tune in next time. And until then, so long.