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Hello everyone, welcome to episode number two of the Future of Work podcast.
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My name is Jacob Morgan and today we're going to be talking about creating distributed teams within organizations.
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Now distributed teams are very much a cornerstone when it comes to the future of work.
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But distributed teams aren't the same thing as freelancers or aren't the same thing as telecommuting employees.
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And we're going to talk a little bit more about that when we get to our guests a little bit later in the episode.
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But before we get to that, let's talk about some of the benefits of creating distributed teams.
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There are a couple that organizations are starting to see.
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The first is being able to tap into a global talent pool, right?
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Because if you are no longer dependent on local talent, you can recruit and bring in employees from anywhere you want around the world.
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Another benefit that employees are seeing is saving on costs such as real estate costs because you don't have to pay for employees to be working out of a central office or a central location.
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Employees see tremendous benefits because they don't spend money on gas.
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They don't see costs or they don't see time spent on travel and employees tend to feel more engaged and,
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And most of the research out there actually shows that distributed teams can become more productive than those that are always working from an office.
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So let me throw a couple of stats out there your way.
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Forrester found that 34 million Americans work from home, and this number is going to reach around 63 million or 43% of the U.S. workforce by 2016.
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Okay.
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It doesn't mean that these employees are working full-time from home, but it does mean that they are spending some time working from home.
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A couple other numbers for you.
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At IBM, teleworkers are 50% more productive than their office-bound counterparts, and Cisco in 2009 released a press release saying that they are seeing annual savings of over $277 million a year
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Based on having flexible teams and distributed teams around the world.
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So going forward, distributed teams, as I mentioned, are a cornerstone for the future of work.
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We're able to use collaborative technologies, video conferencing solutions, internal social networks, and all sorts of really amazing platforms out there to stay connected anywhere, anytime, and on any device.
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Okay.
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So that is the focus of today's podcast.
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And to help us learn more about creating and building distributed teams, we're gonna be speaking with Stefan Casriel.
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And he is the SVP of product and engineering at Elance Odesk, where he actually runs and has created a pretty good size distributed team of employees that are based all around the world.
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I actually teamed up with Elance and Odesk and with Stefan
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to create an ebook that we recently released on Amazon called Hire Fast and Build Things, How to Recruit and Manage a Top-Notch Team of Distributed Engineers.
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I highly recommend that you check that out on Amazon.
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The concepts and ideas from that ebook are, of course, applicable not just to engineers, but pretty much any department, any group of employees around the world.
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So again, welcome to episode number two of the Future of Work podcast.
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My guest today is Stefan Casriel, and we're going to be talking about creating and building distributed teams.
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Five, four, three, two, one.
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This is a journey.
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Empty your mind.
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Human intervention is required this time.
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You'll know when it comes.
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We hope it never comes, but get ready.
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Welcome to the Future of Work podcast.
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My guest today is Stefan from Odesk slash Elance, which just merged.
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Stefan, thank you very much for joining the Future of Work podcast today.
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How are you doing?
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Good.
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Thanks for having me.
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Yeah, no, my pleasure.
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So maybe before we get started, we can just give some people background information about you, what you do, the company you work for, just to kind of help set the stage for the conversation.
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Sure.
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So I'm in charge of product management and engineering at Elance ODesk.
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Elance ODesk is the result of the merger between two companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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One was called Elance and the other one was called ODesk.
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And what we do is we build a global marketplace for freelance work.
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And essentially we're helping connect businesses in the US and elsewhere in the world with talent pretty much everywhere in the world.
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And we specialize in building teams of people that can do work remotely.
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So we don't enable you to hire people locally.
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at least that's not what we specialize in, but just just about everything you can do online are things that you can go and do through our two sites.
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So things like hiring engineers, hiring pretty much any kind of consultant that you can think of, building your customer support team, etc.
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Okay, great.
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And so for those of you that aren't familiar, Stefan and I actually contributed to a book that Odesk and Elance recently put out called Hire Fast and Build Things, How to Recruit and Manage a Top-Notch Team of Distributed Engineers.
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So I think that's available on Amazon for people to check out.
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And then I have actually used Odesk or Elance Odesk for a lot of the projects that we've been involved in and for things that we need to get done as well.
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But for people that are listening that maybe aren't familiar with what distributed teams are, can you give people some kind of context or background around, you know, what is a distributed team?
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Like what does that actually look like?
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Sure.
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You know, and specifically the book that we wrote was about distributed engineering teams.
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So, you know, like teams of engineers that are globally distributed throughout the world.
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The same concept applies to, you know, other types of functions.
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But given that, you know, I personally manage a distributed team of engineers, you know, when you and I sat down to decide what to write the book about, we just thought that this was the most relevant topic.
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And, you know, distributed engineering teams is not something that is completely new.
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It's been happening informally in the open source community for a couple of decades now.
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You know, groups of people with similar interests decide to contribute to Linux, to Apache, to, you know, name your favorite open source project.
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What I think is a little bit, you
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newer and a more recent evolution of this is that you now see commercial entities in your regular companies that are adopting a similar model and you know definitely us at Odesk, partly because we I guess take pride in you know what people here call eating your own dog food but partly because of the history of the company we've built a distributed engineering team almost from day one
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and you know we've made mistakes along the way we've learned how to do this well and we've learned about all the amazing benefits that come with it and that was the the idea behind writing the book okay great the goal was to share you know sharing with other people what we've learned so that
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people don't have to go through the same mistakes but they can instead learn the best practices from us and see if it seems to be attractive to them and then decide to you know attempt to do it also.
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So you mentioned that you know you guys have learned a lot and made mistakes along the way so it sounds like a distributed team is
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Yeah, pretty much what it sounds like, actually.
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It's a team or a company or a group of people that are just spread out all over the world, and they get work done through technology and through collaboration platforms and stuff like that.
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But you said that you guys also made some mistakes along the way.
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So maybe you can share what are some of the mistakes that you guys made or some of the mistakes that other companies make?
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What are the big challenges towards being able to create a successful distributed team?
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Sure.
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Yeah, maybe before we start with the challenges, it might be useful to state why you want to do this in the first place.
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You know, obviously if there are challenges, there's going to be a good reason for doing it.
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And, you know, I think there's essentially like,
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you know three reasons why this makes a ton of sense especially in today's environment one is you know you keep hearing people you know I talk to a lot of founders and VPs of engineering here in Silicon Valley and you hear all these people that say I want to attract the best talent in the world and then you ask you know well how is that working for you and they say well it's extremely competitive it's really hard
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you know they are not many really awesome engineers and I'm trying to hire all of them and unfortunately everybody else is trying to hire all of them and then you're trying to figure out guess how do you go about figuring out you know how do you go about hiring these really awesome people and typically what they'll say is you know through my own personal network through LinkedIn but typically they're trying to hire people that are willing to commute and work into the office
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which frankly limits the availability of talents to people that live within you know a 10 mile radius and if you go back to the the example of the open source community if you look at GitHub as an example the vast majority of commits on GitHub are known from outside of the US and definitely from outside of Silicon Valley right so that is something about the fact that talent nowadays is you know globally distributed but the demand for talent is fairly concentrated in a few technology hotspots
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And so that's the goal of building a distributed engineering team, right, is to be able to tap the talent where it is as opposed to tap the talent where you are.
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And that's, you know, a huge advantage when you've nailed it because you are able to scale a team, you're able to really hire amazing people.
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Typically you hire people that are, you know, finding that your company is, you know, dramatically more interesting to them than the local alternatives, you know.
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live in Silicon Valley.
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So this is really mutually beneficial.
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For you, you're accessing talents that you wouldn't have otherwise.
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And for them, typically, they're accessing a job that they wouldn't have access to otherwise.
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So you end up creating extremely long-term, very loyal, high engagement type of relationships with people.
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And then the last thing which I don't want to overstate because people end up making mistakes because of it but clearly there's a cost aspect to this also.
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Because of the really big imbalance between the supply of top talent in Silicon Valley and the demand for top talent in Silicon Valley, you end up having very high cost structures which ultimately you can save money by hiring people outside of the Bay Area.
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now that the capture to this which is one of the mistakes people end up making is you can find people you know working in lower cost countries or lower parts of the US that are willing to work for substantially less money than what you would hire people locally and what I keep reminding people is you know
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on a platform like Elon's on our desk, there's enough liquidity, there's enough scale at this stage that the prices tend to be fairly efficient.
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So if you hire somebody and you feel like, wow, I'm getting a really good deal, it may not be the quality that you want.
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And so what we typically tell people is, look, you now have access to incredible talent.
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Don't try to be cheap on top of it.
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You know, try to hire people that are potentially a little bit less expensive than what you would pay locally, but don't really try to go for something
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money because you're just not going to get what you want.
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So, Stefan, tell me a little bit about how you guys are operating over at Elan's ODesk.
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I know you said that you guys eat your own dog food.
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So how big is your distributed team?
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Where are these guys based?
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I mean, how do you make all this work?
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Sure, yeah.
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So the team has, you know, and I don't know the exact numbers so don't quote me too much on this, but I believe we have about 100 people locally, a combination of you know, designers, product managers, and developers.
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And then we have about 200 or so, maybe 250 people that are working remotely and for the most part they are doing, you know, development, operations, so you know, taking care of the websites and then quality assurance, you know, testing the site.
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And, you know, one of the key ways we make this work, you know, I think with any team of this size, but particularly with a team that is, you know, geographically distributed, you want to, you know, split the big team into smaller chunks and ideally you want those, you know, smaller teams to be operating independently of each other and the goal being that, you
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If everybody depends on everybody, then you spend days in meetings and coordination and planning and doing all sorts of complicated project management type of work.
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Whereas if you've been able to split the work into smaller groups of people that operate independently, then you have a much more distributed decision-making process where I'm not the bottleneck all the time and we don't need to have a central big PMO office that's trying to schedule everybody.
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Yep, that makes sense.
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And typically the way we operate in that environment is using Agile.
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So every team has a product manager, a tech lead who's essentially wearing a lot of hats at the same time, and then somewhere around five to ten developers.
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and those guys typically decide you know more or less on their own destiny you know we we have a quarterly planning process where we agree and highlight like here's what we want to do from a roadmap standpoint you know some of the milestones we're trying to achieve all features which trying to launch but after that the teams typically operating you know bi-weekly sprints where every two weeks they plan on their own and at the end of the two weeks they give a demo to interested parties and that's how most of them operate
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and so it sounds like um because i'll a lot of people are probably to be listening you know aren't necessarily involved with engineering teams are based in you know in silicon valley so is this something that can be extended to go you know past engineering teams and in can marketing teams and sales teams and you know basically any team within a company do this
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And is this something that is specifically, you think, relevant to Silicon Valley?
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Or can this idea of building a distributed team be applicable to any company in any industry for any types of roles that they're looking to fill?
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uh... you know i think that's a potentially an extreme generalization it's up for me to assess you know whether it applies to just about everybody but i would say it applies to a lot more people than what usually comes to their mind you know when i have discussions with you know people in marketing people in sales people in customer support usually after a few i mean it's a discussion where we talk about you know what kind of people they're trying to hire how they're trying to organize their teams uh... how well things are going right now
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almost every single time you identify opportunities to say well you know would you be open to testing something different and you know most of the time people are interested in at least giving it a try because you know when things are not working right now you want to see if something else is going to work
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and we've definitely seen it work for many functions.
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On the ODesk and InLens platform engineering work, technology work in general is about half of the business.
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The other half is everything from doing lead generation for sales to doing user research for marketing to doing customer support for operations.
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I mean just about every role that you can do in front of a
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you know PC or mobile device and where you don't need to be physically present in the office can be done online to our platform and the same benefits that I think we've had internally you know for engineering we also see them in other functions you know just like two-thirds of our engineering team is is remote and made up of freelancers that's true also if you know two-thirds of our operations team and significant portions of our sales and marketing teams as well
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So I think people, you know, it would help to clarify for people because there are a lot of terms that people use in this space.
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You know, they use flexible work.
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They use freelancers.
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They use distributed teams.
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So, you know, is a distributed team made up of freelancers?
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Can you have a distributed team made up of employees?
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And, you know, what's the difference between having a distributed team or being offered, you know, offering flexible work, for example?
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You know, how do all these things kind of, you know, fit in?
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you know I think there are places in which they are aligned.
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At the end of the day you know we're in the 21st century, we're in a place where top talent knows that it is top talent and is going to go work in places where they feel like they're being recognized and they feel like they're getting the flexibility that they want.
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Right and so I think the theme of
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If you're trying to attract really outstanding people, you need to figure out what it is that will attract them and then you need to give it to them.
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And flexibility is definitely a key theme, particularly if you're looking at the millennials, the young generation that is entering the workforce right now.
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Typically when you ask them what is important to you, flexibility comes at the very top of the list.
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So all of these different work arrangements at the end of the day are helping increase flexibility for the workforce.
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I think freelancing is almost the extreme version of this where you get the flexibility not only of the location of where you work but also your engagement model with the company.
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you know as an employee you're typically you know full-time a hundred percent employed by a single employer and typically there's a at least an implied commitment of this happening for the long term.
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Freelancing can be just the flexibility that you want.
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Some people do freelancing
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but still in a quasi-employment type of model where they want to work for the same company for an extended period of time.
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Other people enjoy the idea of working nights and weekends but traveling during the day or working with five different clients on small projects at the same time and that's fine too.
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And as an employer, as a client,
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you might actually not want somebody full time anyway so you might be very happy with you know some big francis in marketing you may need a part-time designer to just create you know creative assets for you and maybe it's completely fine if that person only works on weekends
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Yeah, no, that's true.
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I mean, you know, I can speak from my perspective of Chess Media Group, you know, the company that I work with.
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And we're definitely a distributed team.
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You know, I'm based in the Bay Area.
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My business partner is based in Vancouver.
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We have people that we work with that are based, you know, throughout the United States.
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So...
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I definitely think that it's a huge part of the future of work.
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And I'm always amazed whenever I get on a conference call with somebody and there's a couple people that are part of the team, whether it's a big company or a small company, I'm always amazed at how many people are telling me that they are on the same team, but they're in different parts of the world.
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Sometimes somebody's at a coffee shop.
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Sometimes somebody is in an office.
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Sometimes somebody's at a home office.
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So it's really, really fascinating and amazing.
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Yeah.
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But I think there are also a lot of people that are still skeptical, right?
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So there are a lot of people that say things like, oh, you know, you have to see somebody face-to-face because, you know, that's how collaboration gets done.
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So what do you say to people that are so focused on having everybody come into the office and, you know, work a set amount of time?
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I mean, how do you manage communication and collaboration and stuff like that?
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Yeah, you know, I think that's a very valid, you know, question because this topic comes up all the time.
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And, you know, typically you want to peel the onion a little bit and understand, you know, what is it exactly that you really want people in the office for?
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and typically when you get to you know asking the question what you hear is two different answers both of which are valid by the way one is hey you know if people are not in the office it's hard for me to figure out whether they're working or not and you know the way we solve that problem
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I mean obviously after a while you know if people are working or not because they deliver something for you.
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But if you really want to know what are people doing during the day, the ability to just be able to stand and walk around and see if people are on Facebook or actually doing work is a valid concern that managers have.
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And typically what we've done at Odesk is we allow clients and freelancers to agree to use a tool that we've built that sits on the desktop of the freelancers and which captures screenshots of what is on the screen of the freelancer.
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and it's not mandatory, not everybody uses it.
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But if as a manager you're worried that people are going to be on Facebook all day long, we're giving you a tool that allows you to see whether people are, you know, writing code or editing a document or they're doing something else.
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So what if you're an employee?
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What if you're an employee at a company?
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So let's say you work for Pepsi and we're all on the same team, but we're distributed.
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And you have the executive at the team that says, oh, you know, I want everybody to start coming into the office.
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So what about people that aren't freelancers that work for a distributed team?
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I mean, what do you think some solutions or ideas are around communication and collaboration and stuff like that?
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right so that goes to the second question right so so some people will admit to say hey I want face time because I want to know that people are working and typically that you you know that concern can be dispelled pretty quickly I mean essentially like manage by outcomes don't manage by face time right I mean you find clearly what you need yeah totally agree and then measure them on the output to love the second be
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some people have is it makes collaboration difficult.
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You know, I enjoy being able to just turn around and talk to my coworker and, you know, I feel like I'm losing a little bit of that when people are distributed.
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And, you know, there's some truth to that.
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I mean, clearly, you know, if you could have the same team of amazing people be co-located in the same office as opposed to distributed, everybody would be a little bit more productive.
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The problem is that tends to be a very hypothetical scenario because if you had a group of people locally, they wouldn't be the same people.
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And typically the reason why you decided to build a distributed team is because the best people, the people that you thought were the most qualified to do the job, were not available locally.
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And so, you know, yes, it's a little bit more work, but I think it just takes a little bit of getting used to, like, anything else.
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You know, the thing that has changed over the last, you know, 10 years or so is the number of tools that you have to be able to work within a distributed environment are much better than what they used to be.
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and you know it's a combination of tools that now promoting kind of you know synchronous work where you know you and I are on a video conference call at the same time you know things that used to require very high-end equipment and were extremely expensive now everybody has a webcam on their laptop and everybody has broadband connections yep and Google hangout is free right so if we're both online at the same time and you do want to have you know no matter where the teams are located you do want to have
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a few hours a day of overlap where people can have this, you know, virtual face time together.
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Yeah.
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And then during the times when you're not online at the same time, there are, you know, tons of tools and we use a lot of them to, you know, facilitate the collaboration of remote people that are not necessarily all doing the work at the same time.
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And those again, like, you know, hardly existed 10 years ago and they've become extremely mainstream today.
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And typically they're extremely easy to use.
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And, you know, net-net, like, is it as natural as turning around and talking to your co-worker?
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Not yet.
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You know, maybe it will be, you know, in a few years.
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But at the end of the day, like, you get used to it and the benefits outweigh so much the cost and the overhead that it's, you know, net-net completely worth it.
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yeah and you know a lot of uh... research and statistics and and things like that have come out have actually shown that people that have uh... flexible work environments for those that are part of distributed teams can oftentimes actually be more productive right because they are more engaged in the work that they're doing and you know they're doing it uh... in ways that are more conducive for for their way of life so a lot of people actually finding that they're being more productive with these types of things which i find fascinating
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And then you have the other end of the spectrum where you have companies like Yahoo and HP, which all of a sudden say, you know, everybody has to come into the office from now on.
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And those are typically the common examples I always hear when I talk about distributed work or flexible teams.
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Everybody says, oh, yeah, what about Yahoo?
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What about HP and stuff like that?
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So it's interesting to see kind of the, you know, the two different sides of the coin, so to speak.
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So about distributed teams, I mean, is it something that you think a small company could benefit from, a large company, a medium-sized company?
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Is it something that you think is applicable to, you know, most organizations today that, you know, can benefit from something like this?
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Yeah, you know, I think it makes a huge amount of sense if you're starting from scratch.
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Like, you know, you don't have all of that, you know, baggage of years and years of, well, this is how we do things.
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So, like, and I say this to young entrepreneurs and typically it resonates with them extremely well.
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Like, if you're starting from scratch, you know, from the get go, commit to having the best possible talent no matter where they live.
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and you know back to your point about being people being more productive I'll you hear that a lot and that's true for you know any job where you need to focus a lot you know that you should design earnings to think about the this user experience a young engineer any to focus on the code this notion that in an office you get interrupted all the time
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always breaks you from being in the flow.
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You know, you're finally getting focused and getting ready to get things on.
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Somebody bugs you.
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Somebody touched you on the shoulder and you've lost it all, right?
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Yep.
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It's going to take you an hour to get back in the zone.
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So I think like for, you know, like new companies, it's almost a no-brainer.
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I would almost say, you know, like you're doing yourself a disservice if you're not giving it a fair shot.
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I think for existing organization, the way we've seen it work is, you know, you do it one small pocket at a time.
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You know, there is no such thing as big companies, right?
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The big company is a combination of many, many small teams.
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I like that.
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And you want to find the team that has, you know, that kind of need, that feels the pain, where the management is, you know...
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interested in this and wanting to give it a try and committed to making it work.
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And then it tends to spread within the organization.
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I mean we have several companies that are using Odesk and E-Lens right now that have well over a thousand people full-time working on the platform.
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So you see this, you know, stride internally.
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You see teams that are starting to adopt it, and then, you know, other teams start to realize, oh, my God, this is actually really working.
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Forget what, you know, Yahoo or HP or whoever else might be saying, this is really the way of the future, and we're going to give it a try.
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Yeah.
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But then you would want to say, you know,
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I just don't think you could say, hey, I'm a big Fortune 100 company, I'm the CEO, and I'm going to transform my entire company overnight.
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It needs to be, like change management in general, it needs to be quick wins first and take one bit at a time and then progressively change the way the organization operates.
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Yeah, and I really like the quote that you said about, you know, there's no such thing as big companies.
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It's just, you know, teams that are making up these companies.
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And I think that's a very, very good way to think about, you know, distributed teams and flexible work and, you know, just the future of work in general.
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I think that's a very interesting perspective.
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So what about Elance and Odesk?
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You know, how many total employees do you guys have, and how many of them would you say are working via, you know, a distributed method?
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so I believe the latest numbers we have about 250 employees and I think we have close to 800 freelancers 800?
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I think it's 700 or 800 I think total in the company it's almost a thousand people
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and I think by now it's impacted most functions, you know, like my team is definitely, you know, two-thirds, one-third.
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Operations, I believe, is also two-thirds, one-third.
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You know, marketing has a lot of people doing, you know, creative design, content, editing, all that stuff that is, you know, working either part-time or, you know, on a more extended basis on the platform.
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So I think it's
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In many ways, what I was describing about big companies is also happening to us on a smaller scale, which is, you know, we started doing this within a specific function.
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It's worked extremely well for us and other managers decided that they should give it
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Interesting.
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Do you know of any big companies off the top of your head that are, you know, maybe experimenting with distributed teams or, you know, I know you mentioned GitHub, which I think is a pretty good example.
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But do you have any other, you know, I think Mozilla was doing something as well, but I don't know if you have any other examples.
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So I think like the really big companies sadly, you know, never allow us to talk about them.
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But in the mid-size companies, you know, companies that are, you know, a little bit like us, either a little bit smaller, a little bit bigger, you know, GitHub started, I think part of it is some of these companies started from an open source movement themselves, right?
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Mozilla was an open source company, GitHub was an open source company.
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And so they, you know, started by hiring people that were contributors to the company.
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and they were globally distributed and they realized, you know, this is working for us, so we're going to continue doing it.
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Yeah.
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You know, another company that is pretty well known is the company that builds WordPress, you know, the blogging platform.
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Oh, yeah, automatic, yeah.
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The company is actually not WordPress, it's automatic.
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but I believe I think they now have an office but I think that's brand new I think those guys really took it to an extreme you know we've always been hybrid we've always had an office with employees in it I believe that until recently automatic did not even have an office everybody was working from home from just about everywhere in the world wow and they were always distributed no another company that has actually written a book about this recently is the company that used to be called 37 signal oh that's right
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you know another thing in the company to base camp you guys have always been extremely distributed as well so English you hear that about you know stop that separate created in the last ten years that grew to be coming you know me size companies and have it up to the model early on and have continued to
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work with it.
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What sadly we can't really talk about but it is happening also is very big companies have you know thousands of tens of thousands of employees that are starting to realize that in addition to hiring more employees they can also grow specific functions by hiring freelancers.
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Yeah, and so, you know, and I'm also aware of a lot of companies that, you know, not necessarily are using freelancers but have distributed teams.
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I mean, Cisco has distributed teams, Unilever has distributed teams, you know, Citrix has distributed teams.
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I think it's hard to find a company today, especially, you know, a larger organization that doesn't have some sort of distributed team or some sort of flexibility.
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So I think it's definitely starting to become, you know, a more mainstream and widespread way of work that we're starting to see happen.
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And so I guess the last question before we wrap up, what about issues related to culture or promotion or career paths or stuff like that?
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Do you think any of that is impacted negatively by having a distributed team?
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Yeah.
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You know, I think it's only impacted negatively if you're not careful about doing it.
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You know, as I was saying at the beginning, you know, if you're serious about this, you need to make sure that people that are not working in your headquarters have equal opportunities compared to the people that are in your headquarters.
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and that means you know making sure that they are you know included as part of the big decisions of the company that basically they feel like you know the culture of this company is taking me into account and part of the company and part of the journey if you want and I'm given opportunities to learn and grow my skills and potentially also opportunities to make this a career you know a lot of people will
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choose to do you know freelancing in our case we're talking about freelancing but it's true for distributed people in general some people will just say look I'm here for a couple of years anyway all I want is to learn as much as I can and then go apply my new skills to somewhere else but other people would say no I'm actually here for the long term and I want to know what the carrier path looks like
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and whether that means at some point I need to get moved from you know the remote office back to the local office or whether it means that there's an actual carrier path that sits outside of the core office.
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To give you an example you know that the traditional way ODesk was running the engineering team was that the tech leads you know the people that make the architectural decisions were employees working locally here in the Bay Area
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and that the remote teams were mostly you know developers were working for the stack leads but what's happened over the last few years is you know some of our developers have been with us for a long time they were you know
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you know very high talent they had achieved a lot with us and they were ready for the next challenge and today close to half of our tech leads are actually freelancers and you know they themselves manage other freelancers and this seems to be working extremely well and so we we've been able to build this
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in a way carry a ladder I mean it's a little bit of a you know inappropriate term given that they're not employees they're freelancers but they're being given a way to grow their skills get new challenges increase their earnings just as if they were like you know local employees working here
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I think you need to go out of your way to make this happen.
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If you handle people like they're transactions, they're going to behave like they're transactions.
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If you handle people like they're people and you understand what they really want and you design your organization and your processes and your incentive structure to encourage the behaviors that you want to encourage, then people respond very positively to it.
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yeah not totally agree so last question before we wrap up if you were to look into the future you know a couple years we see is the future distributed teams and you think distributed teams are gonna be sorta you know the standard way of work and we're gonna see you know the end of these large corporate offices where everybody shows up to work at the same time every day or you know where do you think we're heading with all of this
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you know I think there's two things happening at the same time right one is you've got a full generation of people that has aspirations that are frankly pretty different from what you know you and I had when we were graduating from college and at the end of the day you know work is the meeting of minds between people that want to get work and the companies that want to employ people right but like if people have changed their expectations then companies are going to have to adapt and the second thing that's happening at the same time is
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the piece of change in technology because all this is you know power by technologies keeps accelerating and I think the notion that you have to be in an office and be stuck in commute and having to live in one place where potentially your spouse
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can't get a job, you know, or you just don't want to be living in just because that's where your company is really doesn't make sense anymore.
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And so, like, you know, if you had to predict what things would look like in 10 years, I would say, yes, companies are going to be a lot more distributed than they are today, partly because they need to and partly because they want to.
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Got it.
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Well, I think that's a perfect way to wrap up.
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Thank you very much for your time today.
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I really appreciate you coming on and sharing some of your insights.
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And so where should people go to connect with you or learn more about you and find out more about some of the things that you're doing?
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you know I think we are going to be publishing a link to the book that you and I wrote together and that's probably a interesting way of continuing the conversation and after that I would really encourage you know people that are interested to you know get in touch with us through either odesk.com or elance.com you know there's a way for you to help yourself I mean you can just you know
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build your own teams without anybody getting involved and just you and your freelancers.
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And if you need more help, there are tools throughout the website to get in touch with our customer success team that can help you understand your needs, help you craft your strategy and help you hire the right people.
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Great.
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Well, thank you very much.
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I really appreciate your time and have a good rest of the day.
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Thank you.
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Thanks for tuning into the Future of Work podcast.
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If you want to learn more, you can visit my website, thefutureorganization.com, or check out the FOW community.
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That's FOWcommunity.com.
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I'll see you in the future.
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Hello everyone, welcome to episode number two of the Future of Work podcast.
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My name is Jacob Morgan and today we're going to be talking about creating distributed teams within organizations.
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Now distributed teams are very much a cornerstone when it comes to the future of work.
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But distributed teams aren't the same thing as freelancers or aren't the same thing as telecommuting employees.
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And we're going to talk a little bit more about that when we get to our guests a little bit later in the episode.
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But before we get to that, let's talk about some of the benefits of creating distributed teams.
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There are a couple that organizations are starting to see.
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The first is being able to tap into a global talent pool, right?
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Because if you are no longer dependent on local talent, you can recruit and bring in employees from anywhere you want around the world.
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Another benefit that employees are seeing is saving on costs such as real estate costs because you don't have to pay for employees to be working out of a central office or a central location.
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Employees see tremendous benefits because they don't spend money on gas.
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They don't see costs or they don't see time spent on travel and employees tend to feel more engaged and,
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And most of the research out there actually shows that distributed teams can become more productive than those that are always working from an office.
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So let me throw a couple of stats out there your way.
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Forrester found that 34 million Americans work from home, and this number is going to reach around 63 million or 43% of the U.S. workforce by 2016.
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Okay.
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It doesn't mean that these employees are working full-time from home, but it does mean that they are spending some time working from home.
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A couple other numbers for you.
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At IBM, teleworkers are 50% more productive than their office-bound counterparts, and Cisco in 2009 released a press release saying that they are seeing annual savings of over $277 million a year
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Based on having flexible teams and distributed teams around the world.
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So going forward, distributed teams, as I mentioned, are a cornerstone for the future of work.
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We're able to use collaborative technologies, video conferencing solutions, internal social networks, and all sorts of really amazing platforms out there to stay connected anywhere, anytime, and on any device.
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Okay.
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So that is the focus of today's podcast.
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And to help us learn more about creating and building distributed teams, we're gonna be speaking with Stefan Casriel.
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And he is the SVP of product and engineering at Elance Odesk, where he actually runs and has created a pretty good size distributed team of employees that are based all around the world.
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I actually teamed up with Elance and Odesk and with Stefan
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to create an ebook that we recently released on Amazon called Hire Fast and Build Things, How to Recruit and Manage a Top-Notch Team of Distributed Engineers.
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I highly recommend that you check that out on Amazon.
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The concepts and ideas from that ebook are, of course, applicable not just to engineers, but pretty much any department, any group of employees around the world.
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So again, welcome to episode number two of the Future of Work podcast.
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My guest today is Stefan Casriel, and we're going to be talking about creating and building distributed teams.
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Five, four, three, two, one.
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This is a journey.
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Empty your mind.
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Human intervention is required this time.
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You'll know when it comes.
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We hope it never comes, but get ready.
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Welcome to the Future of Work podcast.
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My guest today is Stefan from Odesk slash Elance, which just merged.
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Stefan, thank you very much for joining the Future of Work podcast today.
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How are you doing?
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Good.
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Thanks for having me.
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Yeah, no, my pleasure.
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So maybe before we get started, we can just give some people background information about you, what you do, the company you work for, just to kind of help set the stage for the conversation.
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Sure.
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So I'm in charge of product management and engineering at Elance ODesk.
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Elance ODesk is the result of the merger between two companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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One was called Elance and the other one was called ODesk.
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And what we do is we build a global marketplace for freelance work.
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And essentially we're helping connect businesses in the US and elsewhere in the world with talent pretty much everywhere in the world.
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And we specialize in building teams of people that can do work remotely.
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So we don't enable you to hire people locally.
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at least that's not what we specialize in, but just just about everything you can do online are things that you can go and do through our two sites.
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So things like hiring engineers, hiring pretty much any kind of consultant that you can think of, building your customer support team, etc.
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Okay, great.
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And so for those of you that aren't familiar, Stefan and I actually contributed to a book that Odesk and Elance recently put out called Hire Fast and Build Things, How to Recruit and Manage a Top-Notch Team of Distributed Engineers.
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So I think that's available on Amazon for people to check out.
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And then I have actually used Odesk or Elance Odesk for a lot of the projects that we've been involved in and for things that we need to get done as well.
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But for people that are listening that maybe aren't familiar with what distributed teams are, can you give people some kind of context or background around, you know, what is a distributed team?
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Like what does that actually look like?
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Sure.
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You know, and specifically the book that we wrote was about distributed engineering teams.
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So, you know, like teams of engineers that are globally distributed throughout the world.
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The same concept applies to, you know, other types of functions.
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But given that, you know, I personally manage a distributed team of engineers, you know, when you and I sat down to decide what to write the book about, we just thought that this was the most relevant topic.
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And, you know, distributed engineering teams is not something that is completely new.
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It's been happening informally in the open source community for a couple of decades now.
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You know, groups of people with similar interests decide to contribute to Linux, to Apache, to, you know, name your favorite open source project.
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What I think is a little bit, you
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newer and a more recent evolution of this is that you now see commercial entities in your regular companies that are adopting a similar model and you know definitely us at Odesk, partly because we I guess take pride in you know what people here call eating your own dog food but partly because of the history of the company we've built a distributed engineering team almost from day one
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and you know we've made mistakes along the way we've learned how to do this well and we've learned about all the amazing benefits that come with it and that was the the idea behind writing the book okay great the goal was to share you know sharing with other people what we've learned so that
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people don't have to go through the same mistakes but they can instead learn the best practices from us and see if it seems to be attractive to them and then decide to you know attempt to do it also.
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So you mentioned that you know you guys have learned a lot and made mistakes along the way so it sounds like a distributed team is
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Yeah, pretty much what it sounds like, actually.
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It's a team or a company or a group of people that are just spread out all over the world, and they get work done through technology and through collaboration platforms and stuff like that.
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But you said that you guys also made some mistakes along the way.
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So maybe you can share what are some of the mistakes that you guys made or some of the mistakes that other companies make?
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What are the big challenges towards being able to create a successful distributed team?
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Sure.
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Yeah, maybe before we start with the challenges, it might be useful to state why you want to do this in the first place.
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You know, obviously if there are challenges, there's going to be a good reason for doing it.
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And, you know, I think there's essentially like,
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you know three reasons why this makes a ton of sense especially in today's environment one is you know you keep hearing people you know I talk to a lot of founders and VPs of engineering here in Silicon Valley and you hear all these people that say I want to attract the best talent in the world and then you ask you know well how is that working for you and they say well it's extremely competitive it's really hard
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you know they are not many really awesome engineers and I'm trying to hire all of them and unfortunately everybody else is trying to hire all of them and then you're trying to figure out guess how do you go about figuring out you know how do you go about hiring these really awesome people and typically what they'll say is you know through my own personal network through LinkedIn but typically they're trying to hire people that are willing to commute and work into the office
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which frankly limits the availability of talents to people that live within you know a 10 mile radius and if you go back to the the example of the open source community if you look at GitHub as an example the vast majority of commits on GitHub are known from outside of the US and definitely from outside of Silicon Valley right so that is something about the fact that talent nowadays is you know globally distributed but the demand for talent is fairly concentrated in a few technology hotspots
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And so that's the goal of building a distributed engineering team, right, is to be able to tap the talent where it is as opposed to tap the talent where you are.
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And that's, you know, a huge advantage when you've nailed it because you are able to scale a team, you're able to really hire amazing people.
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Typically you hire people that are, you know, finding that your company is, you know, dramatically more interesting to them than the local alternatives, you know.
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live in Silicon Valley.
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So this is really mutually beneficial.
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For you, you're accessing talents that you wouldn't have otherwise.
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And for them, typically, they're accessing a job that they wouldn't have access to otherwise.
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So you end up creating extremely long-term, very loyal, high engagement type of relationships with people.
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And then the last thing which I don't want to overstate because people end up making mistakes because of it but clearly there's a cost aspect to this also.
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Because of the really big imbalance between the supply of top talent in Silicon Valley and the demand for top talent in Silicon Valley, you end up having very high cost structures which ultimately you can save money by hiring people outside of the Bay Area.
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now that the capture to this which is one of the mistakes people end up making is you can find people you know working in lower cost countries or lower parts of the US that are willing to work for substantially less money than what you would hire people locally and what I keep reminding people is you know
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on a platform like Elon's on our desk, there's enough liquidity, there's enough scale at this stage that the prices tend to be fairly efficient.
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So if you hire somebody and you feel like, wow, I'm getting a really good deal, it may not be the quality that you want.
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And so what we typically tell people is, look, you now have access to incredible talent.
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Don't try to be cheap on top of it.
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You know, try to hire people that are potentially a little bit less expensive than what you would pay locally, but don't really try to go for something
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money because you're just not going to get what you want.
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So, Stefan, tell me a little bit about how you guys are operating over at Elan's ODesk.
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I know you said that you guys eat your own dog food.
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So how big is your distributed team?
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Where are these guys based?
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I mean, how do you make all this work?
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Sure, yeah.
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So the team has, you know, and I don't know the exact numbers so don't quote me too much on this, but I believe we have about 100 people locally, a combination of you know, designers, product managers, and developers.
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And then we have about 200 or so, maybe 250 people that are working remotely and for the most part they are doing, you know, development, operations, so you know, taking care of the websites and then quality assurance, you know, testing the site.
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And, you know, one of the key ways we make this work, you know, I think with any team of this size, but particularly with a team that is, you know, geographically distributed, you want to, you know, split the big team into smaller chunks and ideally you want those, you know, smaller teams to be operating independently of each other and the goal being that, you
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If everybody depends on everybody, then you spend days in meetings and coordination and planning and doing all sorts of complicated project management type of work.
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Whereas if you've been able to split the work into smaller groups of people that operate independently, then you have a much more distributed decision-making process where I'm not the bottleneck all the time and we don't need to have a central big PMO office that's trying to schedule everybody.
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Yep, that makes sense.
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And typically the way we operate in that environment is using Agile.
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So every team has a product manager, a tech lead who's essentially wearing a lot of hats at the same time, and then somewhere around five to ten developers.
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and those guys typically decide you know more or less on their own destiny you know we we have a quarterly planning process where we agree and highlight like here's what we want to do from a roadmap standpoint you know some of the milestones we're trying to achieve all features which trying to launch but after that the teams typically operating you know bi-weekly sprints where every two weeks they plan on their own and at the end of the two weeks they give a demo to interested parties and that's how most of them operate
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and so it sounds like um because i'll a lot of people are probably to be listening you know aren't necessarily involved with engineering teams are based in you know in silicon valley so is this something that can be extended to go you know past engineering teams and in can marketing teams and sales teams and you know basically any team within a company do this
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And is this something that is specifically, you think, relevant to Silicon Valley?
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Or can this idea of building a distributed team be applicable to any company in any industry for any types of roles that they're looking to fill?
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uh... you know i think that's a potentially an extreme generalization it's up for me to assess you know whether it applies to just about everybody but i would say it applies to a lot more people than what usually comes to their mind you know when i have discussions with you know people in marketing people in sales people in customer support usually after a few i mean it's a discussion where we talk about you know what kind of people they're trying to hire how they're trying to organize their teams uh... how well things are going right now
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almost every single time you identify opportunities to say well you know would you be open to testing something different and you know most of the time people are interested in at least giving it a try because you know when things are not working right now you want to see if something else is going to work
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and we've definitely seen it work for many functions.
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On the ODesk and InLens platform engineering work, technology work in general is about half of the business.
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The other half is everything from doing lead generation for sales to doing user research for marketing to doing customer support for operations.
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I mean just about every role that you can do in front of a
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you know PC or mobile device and where you don't need to be physically present in the office can be done online to our platform and the same benefits that I think we've had internally you know for engineering we also see them in other functions you know just like two-thirds of our engineering team is is remote and made up of freelancers that's true also if you know two-thirds of our operations team and significant portions of our sales and marketing teams as well
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So I think people, you know, it would help to clarify for people because there are a lot of terms that people use in this space.
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You know, they use flexible work.
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They use freelancers.
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They use distributed teams.
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So, you know, is a distributed team made up of freelancers?
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Can you have a distributed team made up of employees?
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And, you know, what's the difference between having a distributed team or being offered, you know, offering flexible work, for example?
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You know, how do all these things kind of, you know, fit in?
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you know I think there are places in which they are aligned.
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At the end of the day you know we're in the 21st century, we're in a place where top talent knows that it is top talent and is going to go work in places where they feel like they're being recognized and they feel like they're getting the flexibility that they want.
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Right and so I think the theme of
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If you're trying to attract really outstanding people, you need to figure out what it is that will attract them and then you need to give it to them.
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And flexibility is definitely a key theme, particularly if you're looking at the millennials, the young generation that is entering the workforce right now.
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Typically when you ask them what is important to you, flexibility comes at the very top of the list.
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So all of these different work arrangements at the end of the day are helping increase flexibility for the workforce.
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I think freelancing is almost the extreme version of this where you get the flexibility not only of the location of where you work but also your engagement model with the company.
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you know as an employee you're typically you know full-time a hundred percent employed by a single employer and typically there's a at least an implied commitment of this happening for the long term.
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Freelancing can be just the flexibility that you want.
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Some people do freelancing
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but still in a quasi-employment type of model where they want to work for the same company for an extended period of time.
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Other people enjoy the idea of working nights and weekends but traveling during the day or working with five different clients on small projects at the same time and that's fine too.
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And as an employer, as a client,
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you might actually not want somebody full time anyway so you might be very happy with you know some big francis in marketing you may need a part-time designer to just create you know creative assets for you and maybe it's completely fine if that person only works on weekends
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Yeah, no, that's true.
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I mean, you know, I can speak from my perspective of Chess Media Group, you know, the company that I work with.
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And we're definitely a distributed team.
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You know, I'm based in the Bay Area.
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My business partner is based in Vancouver.
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We have people that we work with that are based, you know, throughout the United States.
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So...
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I definitely think that it's a huge part of the future of work.
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And I'm always amazed whenever I get on a conference call with somebody and there's a couple people that are part of the team, whether it's a big company or a small company, I'm always amazed at how many people are telling me that they are on the same team, but they're in different parts of the world.
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Sometimes somebody's at a coffee shop.
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Sometimes somebody is in an office.
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Sometimes somebody's at a home office.
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So it's really, really fascinating and amazing.
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Yeah.
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But I think there are also a lot of people that are still skeptical, right?
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So there are a lot of people that say things like, oh, you know, you have to see somebody face-to-face because, you know, that's how collaboration gets done.
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So what do you say to people that are so focused on having everybody come into the office and, you know, work a set amount of time?
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I mean, how do you manage communication and collaboration and stuff like that?
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Yeah, you know, I think that's a very valid, you know, question because this topic comes up all the time.
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And, you know, typically you want to peel the onion a little bit and understand, you know, what is it exactly that you really want people in the office for?
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and typically when you get to you know asking the question what you hear is two different answers both of which are valid by the way one is hey you know if people are not in the office it's hard for me to figure out whether they're working or not and you know the way we solve that problem
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I mean obviously after a while you know if people are working or not because they deliver something for you.
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But if you really want to know what are people doing during the day, the ability to just be able to stand and walk around and see if people are on Facebook or actually doing work is a valid concern that managers have.
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And typically what we've done at Odesk is we allow clients and freelancers to agree to use a tool that we've built that sits on the desktop of the freelancers and which captures screenshots of what is on the screen of the freelancer.
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and it's not mandatory, not everybody uses it.
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But if as a manager you're worried that people are going to be on Facebook all day long, we're giving you a tool that allows you to see whether people are, you know, writing code or editing a document or they're doing something else.
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So what if you're an employee?
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What if you're an employee at a company?
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So let's say you work for Pepsi and we're all on the same team, but we're distributed.
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And you have the executive at the team that says, oh, you know, I want everybody to start coming into the office.
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So what about people that aren't freelancers that work for a distributed team?
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I mean, what do you think some solutions or ideas are around communication and collaboration and stuff like that?
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right so that goes to the second question right so so some people will admit to say hey I want face time because I want to know that people are working and typically that you you know that concern can be dispelled pretty quickly I mean essentially like manage by outcomes don't manage by face time right I mean you find clearly what you need yeah totally agree and then measure them on the output to love the second be
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some people have is it makes collaboration difficult.
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You know, I enjoy being able to just turn around and talk to my coworker and, you know, I feel like I'm losing a little bit of that when people are distributed.
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And, you know, there's some truth to that.
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I mean, clearly, you know, if you could have the same team of amazing people be co-located in the same office as opposed to distributed, everybody would be a little bit more productive.
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The problem is that tends to be a very hypothetical scenario because if you had a group of people locally, they wouldn't be the same people.
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And typically the reason why you decided to build a distributed team is because the best people, the people that you thought were the most qualified to do the job, were not available locally.
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And so, you know, yes, it's a little bit more work, but I think it just takes a little bit of getting used to, like, anything else.
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You know, the thing that has changed over the last, you know, 10 years or so is the number of tools that you have to be able to work within a distributed environment are much better than what they used to be.
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and you know it's a combination of tools that now promoting kind of you know synchronous work where you know you and I are on a video conference call at the same time you know things that used to require very high-end equipment and were extremely expensive now everybody has a webcam on their laptop and everybody has broadband connections yep and Google hangout is free right so if we're both online at the same time and you do want to have you know no matter where the teams are located you do want to have
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a few hours a day of overlap where people can have this, you know, virtual face time together.
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Yeah.
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And then during the times when you're not online at the same time, there are, you know, tons of tools and we use a lot of them to, you know, facilitate the collaboration of remote people that are not necessarily all doing the work at the same time.
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And those again, like, you know, hardly existed 10 years ago and they've become extremely mainstream today.
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And typically they're extremely easy to use.
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And, you know, net-net, like, is it as natural as turning around and talking to your co-worker?
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Not yet.
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You know, maybe it will be, you know, in a few years.
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But at the end of the day, like, you get used to it and the benefits outweigh so much the cost and the overhead that it's, you know, net-net completely worth it.
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yeah and you know a lot of uh... research and statistics and and things like that have come out have actually shown that people that have uh... flexible work environments for those that are part of distributed teams can oftentimes actually be more productive right because they are more engaged in the work that they're doing and you know they're doing it uh... in ways that are more conducive for for their way of life so a lot of people actually finding that they're being more productive with these types of things which i find fascinating
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And then you have the other end of the spectrum where you have companies like Yahoo and HP, which all of a sudden say, you know, everybody has to come into the office from now on.
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And those are typically the common examples I always hear when I talk about distributed work or flexible teams.
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Everybody says, oh, yeah, what about Yahoo?
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What about HP and stuff like that?
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So it's interesting to see kind of the, you know, the two different sides of the coin, so to speak.
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So about distributed teams, I mean, is it something that you think a small company could benefit from, a large company, a medium-sized company?
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Is it something that you think is applicable to, you know, most organizations today that, you know, can benefit from something like this?
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Yeah, you know, I think it makes a huge amount of sense if you're starting from scratch.
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Like, you know, you don't have all of that, you know, baggage of years and years of, well, this is how we do things.
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So, like, and I say this to young entrepreneurs and typically it resonates with them extremely well.
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Like, if you're starting from scratch, you know, from the get go, commit to having the best possible talent no matter where they live.
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and you know back to your point about being people being more productive I'll you hear that a lot and that's true for you know any job where you need to focus a lot you know that you should design earnings to think about the this user experience a young engineer any to focus on the code this notion that in an office you get interrupted all the time
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always breaks you from being in the flow.
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You know, you're finally getting focused and getting ready to get things on.
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Somebody bugs you.
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Somebody touched you on the shoulder and you've lost it all, right?
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Yep.
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It's going to take you an hour to get back in the zone.
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So I think like for, you know, like new companies, it's almost a no-brainer.
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I would almost say, you know, like you're doing yourself a disservice if you're not giving it a fair shot.
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I think for existing organization, the way we've seen it work is, you know, you do it one small pocket at a time.
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You know, there is no such thing as big companies, right?
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The big company is a combination of many, many small teams.
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I like that.
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And you want to find the team that has, you know, that kind of need, that feels the pain, where the management is, you know...
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interested in this and wanting to give it a try and committed to making it work.
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And then it tends to spread within the organization.
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I mean we have several companies that are using Odesk and E-Lens right now that have well over a thousand people full-time working on the platform.
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So you see this, you know, stride internally.
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You see teams that are starting to adopt it, and then, you know, other teams start to realize, oh, my God, this is actually really working.
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Forget what, you know, Yahoo or HP or whoever else might be saying, this is really the way of the future, and we're going to give it a try.
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Yeah.
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But then you would want to say, you know,
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I just don't think you could say, hey, I'm a big Fortune 100 company, I'm the CEO, and I'm going to transform my entire company overnight.
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It needs to be, like change management in general, it needs to be quick wins first and take one bit at a time and then progressively change the way the organization operates.
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Yeah, and I really like the quote that you said about, you know, there's no such thing as big companies.
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It's just, you know, teams that are making up these companies.
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And I think that's a very, very good way to think about, you know, distributed teams and flexible work and, you know, just the future of work in general.
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I think that's a very interesting perspective.
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So what about Elance and Odesk?
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You know, how many total employees do you guys have, and how many of them would you say are working via, you know, a distributed method?
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so I believe the latest numbers we have about 250 employees and I think we have close to 800 freelancers 800?
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I think it's 700 or 800 I think total in the company it's almost a thousand people
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and I think by now it's impacted most functions, you know, like my team is definitely, you know, two-thirds, one-third.
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Operations, I believe, is also two-thirds, one-third.
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You know, marketing has a lot of people doing, you know, creative design, content, editing, all that stuff that is, you know, working either part-time or, you know, on a more extended basis on the platform.
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So I think it's
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In many ways, what I was describing about big companies is also happening to us on a smaller scale, which is, you know, we started doing this within a specific function.
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It's worked extremely well for us and other managers decided that they should give it
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Interesting.
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Do you know of any big companies off the top of your head that are, you know, maybe experimenting with distributed teams or, you know, I know you mentioned GitHub, which I think is a pretty good example.
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But do you have any other, you know, I think Mozilla was doing something as well, but I don't know if you have any other examples.
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So I think like the really big companies sadly, you know, never allow us to talk about them.
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But in the mid-size companies, you know, companies that are, you know, a little bit like us, either a little bit smaller, a little bit bigger, you know, GitHub started, I think part of it is some of these companies started from an open source movement themselves, right?
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Mozilla was an open source company, GitHub was an open source company.
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And so they, you know, started by hiring people that were contributors to the company.
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and they were globally distributed and they realized, you know, this is working for us, so we're going to continue doing it.
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Yeah.
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You know, another company that is pretty well known is the company that builds WordPress, you know, the blogging platform.
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Oh, yeah, automatic, yeah.
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The company is actually not WordPress, it's automatic.
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but I believe I think they now have an office but I think that's brand new I think those guys really took it to an extreme you know we've always been hybrid we've always had an office with employees in it I believe that until recently automatic did not even have an office everybody was working from home from just about everywhere in the world wow and they were always distributed no another company that has actually written a book about this recently is the company that used to be called 37 signal oh that's right
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you know another thing in the company to base camp you guys have always been extremely distributed as well so English you hear that about you know stop that separate created in the last ten years that grew to be coming you know me size companies and have it up to the model early on and have continued to
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work with it.
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What sadly we can't really talk about but it is happening also is very big companies have you know thousands of tens of thousands of employees that are starting to realize that in addition to hiring more employees they can also grow specific functions by hiring freelancers.
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Yeah, and so, you know, and I'm also aware of a lot of companies that, you know, not necessarily are using freelancers but have distributed teams.
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I mean, Cisco has distributed teams, Unilever has distributed teams, you know, Citrix has distributed teams.
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I think it's hard to find a company today, especially, you know, a larger organization that doesn't have some sort of distributed team or some sort of flexibility.
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So I think it's definitely starting to become, you know, a more mainstream and widespread way of work that we're starting to see happen.
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And so I guess the last question before we wrap up, what about issues related to culture or promotion or career paths or stuff like that?
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Do you think any of that is impacted negatively by having a distributed team?
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Yeah.
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You know, I think it's only impacted negatively if you're not careful about doing it.
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You know, as I was saying at the beginning, you know, if you're serious about this, you need to make sure that people that are not working in your headquarters have equal opportunities compared to the people that are in your headquarters.
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and that means you know making sure that they are you know included as part of the big decisions of the company that basically they feel like you know the culture of this company is taking me into account and part of the company and part of the journey if you want and I'm given opportunities to learn and grow my skills and potentially also opportunities to make this a career you know a lot of people will
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choose to do you know freelancing in our case we're talking about freelancing but it's true for distributed people in general some people will just say look I'm here for a couple of years anyway all I want is to learn as much as I can and then go apply my new skills to somewhere else but other people would say no I'm actually here for the long term and I want to know what the carrier path looks like
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and whether that means at some point I need to get moved from you know the remote office back to the local office or whether it means that there's an actual carrier path that sits outside of the core office.
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To give you an example you know that the traditional way ODesk was running the engineering team was that the tech leads you know the people that make the architectural decisions were employees working locally here in the Bay Area
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and that the remote teams were mostly you know developers were working for the stack leads but what's happened over the last few years is you know some of our developers have been with us for a long time they were you know
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you know very high talent they had achieved a lot with us and they were ready for the next challenge and today close to half of our tech leads are actually freelancers and you know they themselves manage other freelancers and this seems to be working extremely well and so we we've been able to build this
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in a way carry a ladder I mean it's a little bit of a you know inappropriate term given that they're not employees they're freelancers but they're being given a way to grow their skills get new challenges increase their earnings just as if they were like you know local employees working here
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I think you need to go out of your way to make this happen.
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If you handle people like they're transactions, they're going to behave like they're transactions.
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If you handle people like they're people and you understand what they really want and you design your organization and your processes and your incentive structure to encourage the behaviors that you want to encourage, then people respond very positively to it.
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yeah not totally agree so last question before we wrap up if you were to look into the future you know a couple years we see is the future distributed teams and you think distributed teams are gonna be sorta you know the standard way of work and we're gonna see you know the end of these large corporate offices where everybody shows up to work at the same time every day or you know where do you think we're heading with all of this
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you know I think there's two things happening at the same time right one is you've got a full generation of people that has aspirations that are frankly pretty different from what you know you and I had when we were graduating from college and at the end of the day you know work is the meeting of minds between people that want to get work and the companies that want to employ people right but like if people have changed their expectations then companies are going to have to adapt and the second thing that's happening at the same time is
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the piece of change in technology because all this is you know power by technologies keeps accelerating and I think the notion that you have to be in an office and be stuck in commute and having to live in one place where potentially your spouse
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can't get a job, you know, or you just don't want to be living in just because that's where your company is really doesn't make sense anymore.
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And so, like, you know, if you had to predict what things would look like in 10 years, I would say, yes, companies are going to be a lot more distributed than they are today, partly because they need to and partly because they want to.
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Got it.
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Well, I think that's a perfect way to wrap up.
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Thank you very much for your time today.
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I really appreciate you coming on and sharing some of your insights.
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And so where should people go to connect with you or learn more about you and find out more about some of the things that you're doing?
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you know I think we are going to be publishing a link to the book that you and I wrote together and that's probably a interesting way of continuing the conversation and after that I would really encourage you know people that are interested to you know get in touch with us through either odesk.com or elance.com you know there's a way for you to help yourself I mean you can just you know
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build your own teams without anybody getting involved and just you and your freelancers.
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And if you need more help, there are tools throughout the website to get in touch with our customer success team that can help you understand your needs, help you craft your strategy and help you hire the right people.
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Great.
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Well, thank you very much.
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I really appreciate your time and have a good rest of the day.
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Thank you.
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Thanks for tuning into the Future of Work podcast.
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If you want to learn more, you can visit my website, thefutureorganization.com, or check out the FOW community.
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That's FOWcommunity.com.
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I'll see you in the future.
