>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios and Palo Alto in Boston. Connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studio as kind of our on going leadership coverage of what's happening with the COVID crisis, and really looking out into our community to find experts who can provide tips and tricks, and some guidance as everyone is kind of charting these uncharted waters if you will. And we've got a great cube alarm in our database. He's a fantastic resourcer. We're excited to get him on. Share the information with you. We'd like to welcome once again, Darren Murph. He is the Head of Remote for GitLab. Darren, great to see you. >> Absolutely, great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so thank you and. First off, we had you on earlier this year, back when things were normal, in kind of a regular review. Who knew that you would be at the center of the work-from-home universe just a few short months later. I mean, you've been doing this for ever. So it's kind of a wile old veteran of the work-from-home, or not even from home, just work from some place else. What are some top level things that you can share for people that have never experienced this before? >> Yeah, on the working front. If you're one of the people that are working from home, I think there's a couple of things you can do to help acclimate, make your world a little bit better. The first is to try to create some sort of separation between your work life and your personal life. Now if you have a home big enough that you can dedicate a workspace to being your office, that's going to help a lot. Help from a focus standpoint and just. You don't want those lines between work and life to blur too much, that's where isolation kicks in. That's where burnout kicks in. You want to do whatever you can to avoid. You got to remember, when you're not physically walking out of a office and disconnecting from work. You have to replicate that and recreate that. I actually recommend for people that used to have a commute and now they don't. I would actually black something in your calendar, whether that's cooking, cleaning, spending time with your family. Resting more, anything so that you ramp into your day very deliberately and ramp out of very deliberately. Now on the team leading front. I'm going to say it may feel a little counter intuitive, but the further your team is from you, the more distributed they are. The more you really need to let go and allow them to have mechanism for feeding back to you. Managers job in a remote setting switches from just being a pure director, you're actually being an unblocker. A really active listener. And for people who have gotten to a certain point in their career through command and control, this is going to feel very strange, jarring and counter intuitive, but we've seen it time and time again. You need to trust that your workers are in a new environment. You have to give them a mechanism feeding back to you to help them unblock whatever it is. >> You know that's funny, we had someone on as part of this the other day, talking about leaders need to change their objectives that they're managing to, from kind of activity based, to deliverals based. And it actually floored me that someone is still writing in a blog in 2020, that people have to change their management deliverables from activity to deliverables. And it was so funny, you know, you had Martin Mikos on, we had him on too. My favorite comment was, "It's so easy to fake it in the office and look busy, "but when you're at home all you have is your deliverable." so it really, it seems like there's kind of a forcing function to get people to pay attention to the things they should be managing to anyway. >> You said it, forcing functions. I talk about this all the time, but there are so many forcing functions in remote that help you do remote well. But not only just do remote well, just run your business well. Even if you plan on going back to office. On some level there's a lot of things you can do now to help pave the infrastructure to creating a better and more effective team. And as a manager, if you have it in a writing down. The metrics or expectations for your direct reports in the office, now's the time to do it. Subjectivity is allowed to flourish in the office. You can praise or promote people just kind of how much you like them or how easy they are to work with. That really has nothing to do with metrics and results. I've often been asked, "How do you know if "someone's been working remotely?" And my response is, how do you know if they were working in the office. If you can't clearly answer that in the office, then you're not going to be able to answer it remotely. So frankly, in these times a lot of the burden falls more on the manager to actually take a hard look at what they're clarifying to their team. And if the metrics aren't laid out. It's on the manager to lay that out. It's not the responsibility of the direct report to figure out how to prove their worth. The manager has to be very articulant about what that value looks like. >> Right, and not only do they have to be articulate about what the deliverables are and what their expectations are, but. You guys have a remote play book GitLab has published, which is terrific. People should go online, it's 38 pages of dense, dense, dense material. It's a terrific resource, it's a open source, you got to love the open source, eat those. But one of the slides that jumped out to me, and it's consistent with a lot of these conversations that we're having, is that your frequency of communications when people are not in the same room together. Has to go up dramatically, which is a little counter intuitive, but what I found even more interesting was the variety of types of communication. Not just you kind of standard meeting, or you standard status on a project, or maybe a little bit of a look forward to some strategic stuff. But you outlined a whole variety of types of communication. Objectives or methods, or feel if you will, to help people stay connected and to help kind keep this team building going forward. >> So here's the thing about communication. You've got to be intentional about it in a remote setting. And in fact, you need to have more intentionality across the board in a remote setting. And communications is just a very obvious. So for a lot of companies, they leave a lot of things to spontaneity Inter-personal relationships and communications are two of the biggest ones. Where you may not actually lay out a plan for how work is communicated about, or what opportunities you give people to chat about their weekends, or sports, or anything like that. You just kind of put them in the same building and then people just kind of figure it out. In a remote setting that's unwise. You're going to get a lot of chaos and disfunction when people don't know how to communicate and on what channel. So at GitLab we're very prescriptive that work communication happens in a GitLab issue or a merge request. And then informal communication happens through Zoom calls or Slack. We actually expired our Slack messages after 90 days, specifically to force people not to do work in Slack. We want the work to begin where it needs to end up, and in that case it's a very, it's a tool, GitLab, that's built for asynchronous communication. We want to continue to encourage that bias towards asynchronous communication. So yeah, we write down everything about how we want people to communicate and through what channels. And that may sound like a lot of rules, but actually it's very much appreciated by our global team. We have over 1200 people, in more that 65 countries. And they all just need to know where communication is going to happen. And our team is really cohesive and on the same page because we're articulant about that. >> So I want to double down on that. On 'A secret is peace', 'cause you brought this up, or you and Stu brought it up in your conversation with Stu, and Stu raised an interesting point, right. Unfortunately in the day of email and connected phones, and this and that, there has grown an expectation that used to be business, okay was, "I'll get back to you within 24 hours "if you leave me a voicemail." And lord knows what it was when we were still typing letters and memos, and sticking stuff in the yellow envelop with the string, right, as multiple days. But somehow that all got changed to, "I need to hear back form you now." And often it feels like, if your trying to have just some uninterrupted work time, to get something done. It's like, why is your lack of planning suddenly my emergency. And you talked about, you can't operate that on a global, asynchronous team because everyone's in different timezones. And just by rule, there are going to be a lot of people that are not awake when you need the answer to that question. But that you've developed a culture that that's okay, and that that is kind of the flow and the pacing which A, forces people to ask in advance, not immediately when you need it. But also gives people unfettered time to actually plan to do work versus plan to answer communications. I wonder if you can dig into how did that evolve and how do you enforce that when somebody comes in from the outside world. >> The real key to that is something that might not be immediately apparent to everyone. Which is, at GitLab we try to shift as much burden as we possibly can humans to documentation. And this even starts at onboarding, where to get onboarded at GitLab, you get an onboarding issue within GitLab, with over 200 check boxes of things to read and knowledge assessments to take. And humans are a part of it, but very minimal compared to what most companies would do. And the thing that you just outlined was, we're talking about asking questions. Or tapping someone on the shoulder to fill in a knowledge gap. But at GitLab we want to write everything down in a very formalized structured way. We try to work handbook first. So we need to document all of our processes, protocols and solutions. Basically everything that we've ever seen or done, needs to be documented in the handbook. So it's not that GitLab team members just magically need less information, it's just that instead of having to ask someone on our team, we go ask the handbook. We go consult the documentation. And the more rich that your documentation is, the less you have to bother other people, and the less you need to rely on synchronicity. So for us it all starts with operating handbook first. That allows our humans to reserve their cycles for doing truly creative things, not just answering your question for the thousandth time. >> Right, another thing you covered, which I really enjoyed was getting senior executives to work from home for an extended period of time. Now obviously, before COVID that would probably be a lot harder to do. Well now COVID has forced that. And I think to your point about that is, it really forces the empathy for someone who had no interest in working from home. Didn't like to work from home. Loves going to the office, has their routine. Been doing it for decades, to kind of wake up to A, you need to have more empathy for what this is all about. And B, what's it all about by actually doing it. So I wonder, kind of your take in the movement to more of a work from anywhere future. Now that all the senior executives have been thrown into this work from home situation. >> Look Jeff, you never want to waste a crisis. We can't wish away the crisis that's in front of us, but we can choose how we respond to it. And this does present an opportunity to lay ground work, to lay infrastructure, to build a more remote organization. And I have absolutely advocated for companies to get their leadership teams out of the office for a meaningful amount of time. A month, ideally a quarter. So that they actually understand what the remote life is. They actually have some of those communication gaps and challenges so they can document what's happening. And then help fix it. But to your point, executives love going to the office because they're on a different playing field to begin with. They usually have an executive assistant. Things are just. There's less friction in general. So it behooves them to just kind of keep charging in that direction, but now what we have is a situation where all of those executives are remote. And I'm seeing a lot of them say, "You know what, I'm seeing the myths that I've perpetrated "break down in front of me." And this is even in the most suboptimal time ever to go remote. This isn't remote work, this is crisis induced work from home. We're all dealing with social isolation. Our parents are also doubling as homeschool teachers. We have a lot going on. And even on top of all of that, I'm amazed at how adaptable the human society has been. In just adjusting to this and figuring it out on the fly. And I think the companies that take this opportunity, to ask themselves the right question, and build this into their ongoing talent and operational strategy, will actually come out stronger on the other side. >> Yeah, as you said. This is as challenging as it's ever been. There was no planning ahead, you're spouse or significant other's also working from home. And has the same Zoom schedule as you do, for some strange reason, right. The kids are home as you said, and your homeschooling them. And they also have to get on Zoom to do their classes. So it's really suboptimal. But as you said, it's a forcing function and people are going to learn. One of the other things in your handbook is the kind of definitions. It's not just work from home or work at the office, but there's actually a continuum and a spectrum. And as people are doing this for weeks and months. And behaviors turn into habits. People are not going to want to go back to sitting on 101 for two hours every morning to go work on a laptop in the office. It just doesn't make sense. So as you kind of look forward. How do you see the evolution. How are people taking baby steps, if you will. To incorporate more of this learning as we go forward. And incorporate into more of their regular, everyday procedures. >> I'm really optimistic about the future because what I see happening here is people are unlocking their imaginations. So once they've kind of stabilized, they're starting to realize, "Hey, I'm getting a lot more time with my family. "I'm spending a lot less on gas. "I just feel better as a person because I don't show up "to work everyday with road rage. "So how can I keep this going." And I genuinely think what's going to happen in four or five months, we're going to have millions of people collectively look at each other and they say, "The boss just called me back into the office "but I just did my job from home. "Even in suboptimal conditions. "I saw my family more, I exercised more. "I had more time to cook and clean. "How about no, I'm not going to go back to the office "as my default location." And I think what's going to happen is the 80, 20 rule is going to flip. Right now people work from home only for a special occasion, like the cable company's coming or something like that. Going forward it think the offices are going to be the special occasion. You're only going to commute to the office, or fly to the office when you have a large contingent of people coming in and you need to wine and dine them, or something like that. And the second order of this is, people that are only living in expensive cities because of their location. When their lease comes up for renewal, they're going to cast a glance at places like Wyoming and Idaho, and Ohio. Maybe even Vietnam and Cambodia, or foreign places. Because now you have them thinking of, "What could life look like if I decouple geography at work. "I still want to work really hard "and contribute this knowledge. "But I can go to a place with better air quality, "better schools, better opportunity to actually "invest in a smaller community, "where I can see real impact." And I think that's just going to have massive, massive societal impacts. People are really taking this time to consider how tightly their identity has been woven into work. Now that they're home and they've become something more than just whatever the office life has defined them as. I think that's really healthy. I think a lot of people may have intertwined those two things too tightly in the past. And now it's a forcing function to really ask yourself, you aren't just your work, you're more than your work. And what can that look like when you can do that job from anywhere. >> Right, right. And as you said, there's so many kind of secondary benefits in terms of traffic and infrastructure, and the environment and all kinds of things. And the other thing I think that's interesting what you said, 80, 20 I think that was pretty generous. I wouldn't give it a 20 percent. But if people, even in this hybrid steps, do more once a week, twice a week. Once every two weeks, right. The impact on the infrastructure and peoples lives is going to be huge. But I wanted to drill on something as we go into kind of this hybrid mode at some point in time. And you talked about, and I thought it was fascinating, about the norms and really coming out from a work from home first, or a work from anywhere first. Your very good at specifying anywhere doesn't mean home. Could be the library, could be the coffee shop. Could be an office, could be a WeWork. Could be wherever. Because if you talked about the new norms and the one I thought was really interesting, which probably impacts a lot of teams, is when some of the team's in the office and some of the team isn't. The typical move, right, is to have everyone in the office go into the conference room. We sit around one big screen. So you get like five people sitting around one table and you got a bunch of heads on Zoom. And you said, "You know, no. "Let's all be remote. So if we just be happen to be sitting at our desk. If we happen to be in the office, that's okay. But really normalize. And like we saw the movement from Cloud got to Cloud-e to Cloud first, why not Cloud. And then you know, kind of mobile and does it work in a mobile. No, no, no it has to. It's mobile first. Really the shift to not, can it be done at home, but tell me why it shouldn't be done at home, a really different kind of opening position as to how people deploy resources and think about staffing and assigning teams. It's like turning the whole thing upside down. >> Completely upside down. I think remote first to your point, is going to be the default going forward. I think we're just one or two quarters away from major CEO's sitting on the hot seat on CNBC, when it's their turn for quarterly earnings. And they're going to have to justify why they're spending what they spend on real estate. Is if your spending a billion dollars a year on real estate, you could easily deploy that to more people, more R&D. Once that question is asked in mass, that is when you're going to see the next phase of this. Where you really have to justify, even from a cost stand point, why are you spending so much? Why are you tying so much of your business results to geography. The thing about remote first is that it's not a us versus them. A lot of what we've learned at GitLab, and how we operate so efficiently. They work really well for remote teams, and they are remote first. But they would work just as well in an office. We attach a Google doc agenda to every single business meeting that we have, so that there's always an artifact. There's always a documented thread on what happened in a meeting. Now this would work just as well in a co-located meeting. Who wouldn't want to have a meeting where it's not just in one ear and out the other. You're going to give the time to the meeting, you might as well get something out of it. And so a lot of these remote forced. Remote first forcing functions, they do help remote teams work well. But I think it's especially important for hybrid teams. Offices aren't going to vanish overnight. A lot of these companies are going to have some part of their company return to the office, when travel restrictions are lifted. It think the key here is that its going to be a lot more fluent. You're never going to know on a day to day basis, who is coming into the office, and who is not. So you need to optimize for everyone being out of the office. And if they just so happen to be there, they just so happen to be there. >> Right, right. So before we. I want to get into one little nitty gritty subject, in terms of investment into the home office. You know, we're doing 100% remote interviews now on theCUBE, we used to go to pretty much. Probably 80% of our business was at events, or at peoples offices, or facilities. Now it's all dial-in. You talked a lot about people need to flex a little bit on enabling people to invest in the little bits and pieces of infrastructure for their home office, that they just don't have the same set ups. You're talking about multiple monitors, a comfortable chair, a good light. That there's a few things you can invest in, not tremendous amounts of money. But a couple of hundred bucks here and there, to make a big difference on the home work environment. And how people should think about making that investment into a big monitor that they don't see. It's not sitting at the desk in the office. >> 100%, look if you're coming from a co-located space, you're probably sitting in a cube that costs five, 10, maybe 20 thousand dollars put together. You might not notice that, but it's not cheap to build cubicles in a high rise. And if you go to your home and you have nothing set up, I would say it's on the people group to think really hard about being more lax and more lenient about spending policy. People need multiple monitors. You need a decent webcam, you need a decent microphone. You need a chair that isn't going to kill your back. You want to help people create healthy ergonomics. Sustainable workspaces in their home. This is the kind of thing that will inevitably impact productivity. You force someone to just be hunched over on their couch, in front of a 13 inch laptop. I mean, what kind of productivity do you really expect from that. That's not a great long term solution. I think the people group actually has a higher burden to bare all the way around. You know when it comes to making sure teams feel like teams and they have the atmosphere to connect on a meaningful level. It comes down to the people group, to not letting that just go to spontaneity. You want to have a happy hour virtually, you're going to have to put a calendar invite on peoples calendar. You're going to create topical channels in Slack for people to talk about things other than work. Someone's going to have to do that. They don't just happen by default. So, from hardware all the way to communication. The people group really needs to use this opportunity to think about, "Okay, what can we unlock in this new world." >> Right, I'm glad you said the people group and not the resources group because they're not coal, or steel, or a factory. >> No, if anything COVID has humanized this in a way, and I think it's actually a really big silver lining, where we're all now peering into each others homes. And it is glaringly obvious, that we're all humans first, colleagues second. And of course that always been the case, but there's something about a sterile or co-located work environment. You check a piece of you at the door. And you just kind of get down to business. Why is that, we have technology at out fingertips. We can be humans with each other. And that going to actually encourage more empathy. As we've seen at GitLab, more empathy leads to better business results. It leads to more meaningful connections. I mean, I have people, friends, located all over the world that I feel like I have a closer bond with. A closer, more intimate connection with that a lot of people I've met in office. To some degree you don't know who they really are. You don't know what they really love and what makes them tick. >> Right, right. All right Darren, so before I let you go and again thank you for the time, the conversation. I'm sure everyone is calling you up and I just love the open source ETHOS and the sharing. It's made such a huge impact on the technology world and second order impacts that a lot of people take advantage. Again, give us the place that people can go for the playbook, so they can come and leverage some of the resources. And again, thank you guys for publishing 'em. >> Absolutely, so we're an open source. We try to open source all of our learnings on remote. So go to allremote.info that will redirect you right into the All Remote section of GitLab handbook. All of which is open source. Right at the top you can download the remote playbook, which is PDF that we talked about. Download that, it takes you through all of our best information on getting started and thriving as a remote team. Just under that there's a lot of comprehensive guides on how we think about everything. And how we operate synchronously. How we handle meeting, and even hiring and compensation. allremote.info and of course you're welcome to reach out to me on Twitter, I'm @darrenmurph. >> All right, well thanks a lot Darren. And I find it somewhat ironic that you have a jetliner over your shoulder. Waiting for the lockdown and the quarantine to end so you can get back on the airplane. And we're looking forward to that day. >> Can't wait man, I miss, I miss the airplanes. I told someone the other day, I never thought I'd say I miss having a middle seat at the very back of the airplane, with someone reclined into my nose. But honestly, I can't wait. Take me anywhere. >> I think you'll be fighting people for that seat in another month or so. All right, thanks a lot, Darren. >> Absolutely, take care all. >> All right, he's Darren. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, from our Palo Altos Studios. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)