As technology has shifted a lot of our work to screens, more companies are creating opportunities for employees to work from home. Craig Bryant is a founder of several companies which have nearly transitioned to a fully remote workforce throughout the past five years, with employees spread all across the country. Craig Bryant, Founder of Kin HR and Co-Founder of We Are Mammoth, joins the podcast to discuss the realities of remote work: the benefits, the drawbacks, how to implement a remote workforce, and how to navigate all the day to day realities of everything in between.

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MP3 File | Run Time: 36:53
 
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Brandon: Welcome to the HR for Small Business Podcast, this is your host, Brandon Laws. Today I have Craig Bryant with me. He is the founder and CEO of KinHR.com, a cloud-based software platform that manages onboarding employee data and files, they do employer reviews, and time off in a web-based exchange that an entire team will enjoy using. Craig, it’s awesome to have you!
Craig: Thanks, Brandon, nice to be here.
Brandon: Today we are going to talk about a topic that I’ve actually never really touched on this podcast, which is remote workers. At KinHR.com, you are 100% remote, if I understand correctly, so I would love to hear about how you started the company, your role, and the decision to make it a complete remote workforce.
craig-bryantCraig: KinHR is a daughter company of a company I co-founded 10 years ago called We Are Mammoth. We started out in Chicago, just three partners. We are actually celebrating our 10th anniversary this month. For the first five years or so of our business we were all in an office in Chicago, we have a great office still today, but you’re right that the We Are Mammoth team, the Kin team, and our other product DoneDone, which is an issue tracking tool for software teams, all these teams, these 30 people, are 100% remote. So over the course of the last five years or so we have moved to a 100% distributed company.
We started hiring engineers five years ago and we had a couple of people who wanted to leave Chicago and move somewhere else. Meanwhile we were trying to hire people inside of Chicago and it’s a really competitive market for software engineers, so we started looking outside of the state. We found people in Texas and Florida, all around the country who were happy where they were. And when we looked at it, there is really no reason for them to have to be in Chicago, so we kind of took the leap and installed some infrastructure like a secure VPN and a few human resources processes to help ensure that they had a good onboarding experience and then for the folks who are still in Chicago would have to start using video conferences and being inclusive of people who are not in the physical office with us.
Over the course of five years or so everybody else who we have hired has been somewhere else, a couple of other people, including my two business partners, Mike and Ka Wai, have all moved away as well. So every day we have our stand up meetings. We are 30 people from these three teams dialing into a web conference, telling everybody what we are up to, and that’s how we run our organization and operations.
Brandon-iconBrandon: Did you actually start 100% remote, or was it an organic evolution through building the business as you hired people who, to your point, who were talented and you had to seek elsewhere, not necessarily in your region. Did this sort of happen organically or did you actually declare and say You know, we are going to start this company and we are just going to hire employees and they are going to work remote?
Craig: We designed an office and built it out and it was so full of people that we almost had to move to a bigger space. And coincidentally that’s the time when we was having hiring challenges inside of Chicago and we started going remote. I would call it more of a transition, though, because it has taken a solid five years for us to become a fully distributed company.
Brandon: When did telecommuting, remote workers, when did this become sort of a mainstream thing?
Craig: I think for companies like ours it’s got to be since the internet became so pervasive because it’s really, again, for design technology companies like ours, it’s almost better to be remote. We cover more time zones and whatnot, and because of the Internet and because of cloud hosting all of our infrastructure is distributed as well. I think if you reach back a little bit farther there’s the Clean Air Act of 1990 that helped sort of poke and prod larger corporations to explore telecommuting to cut down on the exhaust and commute times of all their employees. Like J.C. Penney opening telecommuting, like call centers, and hiring stay-at-home moms who had a few hours to burn each afternoon when their kids are at school to do some customer service calls and whatnot. If you reach way, way back there’s farming. Farming and agriculture in the United States has obviously been around a long time, and getting all that stuff to market and wholesalers and all that, you can look at that as telecommuting in a way, too.
Brandon: You’re in the tech industry, do you think it’s becoming more widely adopted in your industry than any others? Do you think this is just an industry agnostic phenomenon where having a remote workforce is going to keep happening and become more widely adopted by all sorts of companies?
officeCraig: I think it could, whether it will or not I don’t know. I don’t know statistics about overarching trends in our U.S. economy. it’s definitely easier for companies like ours, working in software where we have joint code bases that we’re working on. And, again, it’s sort of asynchronous project management that we have. You go off for a few days and work and then come back and check. So it is a little bit easier to fit that form into our type of company. In the banking industry, there’s a lot of security requirements and reasons to still have people come onsite. For a large number of industries I know it’s possible to work a couple of days a week, do like a flex time thing, but for a lot industries I don’t see it happening.
Brandon: Yeah, you see the big companies that were adopting policies of just having remote work forces. Yahoo comes to mind, I don’t know if all their employees were remote, but they sort of shifted and Marissa Mayer the CEO pulled that back and said You know what, we need to bring everybody back in. Do you see that shifting for a lot of the larger employers where the security and all those other things could be an issue? Where like a smaller based business might be able to be more nimble and have remote workers? What are your thoughts on that?
Craig: I think it could be. I don’t know that Yahoo is an example necessarily, especially at that time, of why it wouldn’t work for a large company. I think Yahoo is an example perhaps, that was a watershed moment in time for Yahoo where they had to sort of call their herd and ensure that the people who were still working at the organization were dedicated to their mission and willing to come back in and creatively dig back in and be onsite and keep those jobs. So I think there was a little bit more at play than just telecommuting wasn’t working for Yahoo. They had some larger cultural hurdles that they had to clear, and telecommuting just happened to be one way to solve them.
Brandon: That’s a good point. Let’s bring it back to your companies and the development and the decision to make it 100% remote. What sort of things were you thinking of? You mentioned security, the creative collaboration, what were some of the things in your head like, We need to get over these hurdles and we can solve these issues. We can make this thing work.
Craig: New hire onboarding is a huge one. Again, around the time where we had to grow, we also had to make sure that the people who we were hiring, the engineers, people are expensive. It costs a lot of money to onboard somebody, and to do so when they’re not in the same room with you is an even bigger challenge. So making sure that the experience that this person has in Arkansas or wherever they may be, is still a quality onboarding experience. That first six months are so important to that employee feeling a sense of commitment, a sense of camaraderie with, again, a distributed company.
So we started doing things like automating our checklist. That’s why KinHR was born ultimately. We wanted to have an onboarding program that was online to set expectations again for people who were not onsite. We needed to make sure, for example, that their connection to our office in Chicago was speedy as well. We do some secure web app development, there’s a lot of data that we have to pass around, it needs to be secure, it needs to fly under SSL. So it was a little bit of a challenge and it took a few years for us to get fiber optic connections to our building to ensure that our employees, who are somewhere else, have just as speedy a connection to our office as someone who’s sitting in a conference room.
Brandon: So how do you really control the speed because wouldn’t it be determined on what they have at their home? Do you have certain requirements at their home? How do you control some of those things?
chicagoCraig: Definitely. We have people in Florida who are experiencing all these tropical storms. So obviously with having people all over the place, we’re sort of exposed to natural disasters and well Comcast isn’t as fast in, whatever, Alabama as it is up here in Chicago which, I think, in the past few years, all of that is really normalized so that we can say Okay, we have this huge pipe coming in and going out of our central office in Chicago and everybody somewhere else wherever they may be has got a broadband connection that’s like 50 megabytes up and down.
So in the past few years all these cable companies are starting to compete for that business and they’re driving the quality of that product up. So yes, sometimes it’s been an issue. Sometimes our Internet connections drop for a couple of seconds and there’s a little bit of intermittency in our workday but overall it hasn’t been an issue and for us we’ve also decentralized our Chicago office. So it’s more like a co-working space than a headquarters for us these days.
Brandon: On a policy or I guess philosophy side of the world where you need to have a set of guidelines or rules about what people can and cannot do, do you have any rules or policies about remote workers in the handbook or something that says you have to do this, this, and this? Or have you just trusted people to do their work remotely, or how does that all work?
Craig: One important thing that I talk to our new hires about is a sense of online presence. So since you are not sitting next to me at a desk or in an office in Chicago, you need to express your presence in some other way that is not physical. Meaning the chat applications that we use and the email response times and all that, that is a way to express your presence and the fact that you are there, you’re available to do customer support, to talk with a coworker or a client. So presence is a huge thing and we say, Okay we’ve got normal business hours. Regardless of your time zone you’ve got to be available during those times.
Other things include making sure that, for example, in my house I’ve got the second floor to myself and I’ve got a little sign on my door. So when my kids come home from school, it’s flipped to the red side, like Don’t come up stairs now! If it’s on the green side, it means Yeah, come up and give me a hug when you get home! People have got to carve out a space for themselves, it helps them create a mental separation between their work life and their home life which are one and the same, physically.
Brandon: When you were growing the business and you’re hiring employees, did you ever have a moment—because you did say at one point employees worked in an office—did you ever have a transition point where some people were in the office and then you started hiring remote and then there was a combination of people both in the office and remote? If that in fact did happen, did you have any issues of people who wanted to work remote and thought this wasn’t fair?
Craig: Yeah, we totally did. Like I said, both of my partners are gone now. My one partner Mike Sanders, I think he took the dive first, he moved to Austin Texas.
Brandon: He’s like Screw this. I am out of here!

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Craig: Yeah, like Well I can go too! And then Ka Wai, my other partner, moved to San Francisco with his wife, they have a newborn and he’s loving it out there as well. There are still five people, including myself, who work in Chicago. Of those five people, I think three go in regularly to the office. It is the lowest number it’s ever been and it has gone down over the years. So it’s definitely been a transition we had. Before we had full-time remote hires that we went out and said Okay you stay in Texas, we’ll work with you from there, we had a couple of people who moved away from Chicago. They wanted to keep their jobs, we wanted them but they didn’t like Chicago anymore. They want to go to Portland or back to Florida. So Grant and Jennifer are the two people I am thinking of right now. We had to find out what that experience would be like for them. Meanwhile, we had a full-time remote experience for those other new hires who were never in the office. So they never knew our office culture, they were never going to miss that.
So we’ve had sort of three brands of experience. For the folks like me who are still in Chicago, for the folks who were in Chicago and transitioned away and we supported them, said You’re great people, keep your jobs, just go where you’re happiest, and then the third is the people who we’ve hired in Florida or Texas or California wherever they are, who have never worked onsite in Chicago. It’s been unique and we have to tailor that experience for each of them.
Brandon: Did you ever have to go through conversations with those that were actually working in the office where you were so used to having them there that you’re like, I can’t imagine any other way! and maybe had some challenging conversations with them about Okay, well let’s look at your job and maybe this could work and try it out. How did you evaluate all that?
Craig: Totally. I mean, two or three weeks ago I was in our Chicago office and, to be frank with you, I work remotely now, too, because the people who I interface mostly with on a day in, day out basis are not in Chicago. So it makes a lot of sense for me to experience our company the way that these other folks do. But two or three weeks ago I was in our Chicago office and we did have that conversation and it’s not the first time we’ve had it. It is different, and when you have twenty people in a physical space, there’s serendipity. There’s little sort of groups of people who go to lunch and there’s this real human sense of community that’s very natural. That’s the kind of organisms we are. We like our community and we like to get together. We like to go out to restaurants and bars and community events and whatnot.
So for the folks who are still in Chicago, it is a challenge and it is a transition. For me subjectively it’s been tough because I cofounded this company ten years ago and it was a big beehive of activity in Chicago. So I’ve had to come to grips, again, with the fact that the people I work with most are no longer around, so I might as well start to draw from the remote culture that we’ve nurtured and try to sort of reevaluate the way that I’m working with my own company now.
Brandon: I want to get more into the details of how you actually were able to implement this. You talked about speed and Internet, making sure everybody has quality connection, but how do you handle the equipment piece? I don’t know if you touched on that at all, but do you have standards around that? Maybe you buy equipment and then they use it at home, or do you give them allowance and they buy their own? How does that all work?
Craig: Totally. We buy machines, we buy nice Macs, brand new Apple Macs which bothers some of our .net and Windows developers a little bit! We buy these beautiful machines, we set them up in Chicago—we being our IT guy named Amir. He manages that, gets everything that particular role or person needs on their machine, and then ships it out to them. We send the screens and then we can do remote IT support with them as well. If we need to terminate somebody, it’s the same thing. We order FedEx labels and they have to take their machine to the FedEx drop-off and that gets boxed up and sent back to us.
Brandon: And then out of the box, once everything is set up, what sort of tools are you using for collaboration and just a normal day’s work?
laptop-workCraig: We use a tool called Slack which you’ve probably heard of. We were HipChat fans for a long time, but because of some of the online challenges that they were having, we moved over to Slack. Both tools are fantastic. We use that as almost like the persistent communication tool. So anything that might be swiveling around your chair in the office and talking to a coworker, that’s what we use Slack for. So instant messaging is huge for us and we cannot run our remote organization without it.
Video conferencing, we use Google Hangouts a ton for one-on-one conversations with folks. Even in a small group video conference we’ll use Google Hangouts.
For large conferences we use GoToMeeting. So when we have to have 30 people dialed in and we like to use GoToMeeting. It’s got the bandwith things really dialed in, so it’s a good experience for everybody.
We use Basecamp. We’ve used Basecamp since almost day one, maybe six months into starting the company we started using it and it has been great to help us stay out of e-mail and keep all of our communications centralized online and available for anybody. Again, sometimes remote companies are a little asynchronous. So someone may step away for a few hours and then come back. We use Basecamp so that they can catch up on any conversations that they may have missed.
What other tools are we using? I’m looking at my task bar down below. I mean obviously email.
Brandon: What do you use for email?
Craig: We’re all on Google. So every team is using Google.
Brandon: I imagine that when you’re communicating externally, you just use e-mail, I’ll assume.
Craig: Well, strangely enough, our consulting clients for We Are Mammoth need to use the Basecamp tool too. We like to sort of dial them into our culture, tell them why, and then get them up and running. They love it, too, for the same reasons that we love it.
Brandon: I think that’s the fascinating thing about everything being digital is that you have these tools available to help centralize communication. Whereas I work at a company where most of us work in an office where we may have conversations in the hallway, but none of it is documented. So your point about turning around in your chair and having a quick conversation, that’s all documented in either Slack or whatever tool you’re using. To be able to search for it, use a hash tag or whatever you need to do to find a certain communication about a certain project or something seems so helpful. You probably don’t spend a lot of time looking for stuff as a result. Has that been your experience?
Craig: Yeah you don’t lose breadcrumbs of conversation so much, for better or worse. Two examples come to mind, a couple of weeks ago Lisa, who recently started as our Director of Marketing, flew into Chicago so we could spend some time one-on-one to get her up and running. She was sitting right next to me in the office but we were still using Slack to communicate! I realized, Huh, I could just look at her and talk to her too. But it’s so ingrained in our culture that even when we’re onsite together we’re still using these tools because it’s second nature. Again, for better or worse. I think it’s better for our business. Sometimes it detracts from the real human one-on-one conversations that we should be having in the office, which we did subsequently have.
Brandon: I want to pull a thread on that a little bit. You mentioned it’s been better for your business, I want to talk about the productivity side. How do you measure productivity using remote workers? It sounds like with these tools you are more efficient in general, so how do you measure the output and that people are actually working and doing their jobs?
Craig: Measurement is through things like the online presence that I talked about before, making sure people feel accountable and that they understand the jobs they need to do. They understand things like their deadlines and the tasks and who their team is and whatnot. So just making sure everybody is informed about the work that they need to do.
In terms of being remote, well the fact that I don’t have to spend two hours every day going to our office, that saves me two hours a day and to be frank with you, I don’t use that extra two hours a day to always work. I’ll use it to have breakfast and help get lunch ready and get the kids out the door for school and I like to ride my bike a lot. It frees me up to almost an hour or a little bit more. So taking a few more liberties like that helps.
We do measure. We use a tool called Harvest. They’re totally cool, based in New York. Shawn out there, we know him. We’ve been using Harvest forever as well. So every project at pretty much every hour and minute gets tracked in there so that when we need to bill clients and we know how much and whatnot. So we get a sense of actual—I think it’s betraying it a little bit, but to say we get a sense of productivity by the number of hours that folks are billing to their projects as well.
I think though, overall, we do have to qualify productivity a little bit differently. We can’t say Well, this person worked 10 hours and that’s 10 hours of productivity. It’s really like, are they learning, are they progressing, and are they fulfilled? Are they meeting their deadlines? Then everything else we just got to let loose of. Maybe somebody is meeting all of their job expectations in 30 hours a week and they just bought themselves 10 extra hours. That’s fantastic when that happens.
Brandon: That data point you slid in there a little bit ago about it taking a two hours to go six miles, is that real in Chicago?
Craig: It’s terrible, yeah.
Brandon: That’s unbelievable. And so I imagine that there was a lot of intangible benefits that you get from working remote where you may be miserable sitting in traffic, and how do you be productive other than being on the phone or something while you’re driving? Or you may be happier at home and it could just probably change your demeanor versus getting into the office after an hour of driving and you’re just totally burned out.
trafficCraig: Yeah, I think it has its benefits. The commute does have its benefits if it’s not stop and go traffic and you’re yelling into your phone at someone, or something like that. That’s terrible. And I don’t know that anybody on our team has to deal with that other than one fellow Amir who comes from out by Midway Airport every day into the office and he does have to deal with some travel.
What a commute does, which is something that’s important for remote employees to try to recreate for themselves, is that sense of division. You have a buffer, right? You may use that hour, if you’re on a train, to read, to decompress, to sleep if you’ve kids or to catch up on a little work when you don’t have internet, to write a blog post or something like that. I don’t think it’s completely saying like if you don’t have to commute your life is that much better, because I think a commute still does add that in. So things like, again, what I talked about of earlier creating a physical buffer between where you live at home and where you work. Going to a cafe to work for a few hours is a great way to exit one room and enter another psychologically for a little while.
Brandon: I want to ask you about relationships. There are a lot of people out there who are really worried that with technological advances, the fact that we all have smartphones, we’re all just so glued to our tools, our technology, that we’re just looking at screens versus interacting. Since you’re a remote workforce you have people exclusively working on tools looking into a screen, but a lot of times you’re collaborating. What has the change in the relationships been? Have you seen a change? Have you seen deeper connections? I’m curious about how that’s all gone.
Craig: In the past year and a half we’ve hired people completely remotely. During the transition period, which I mentioned is still kind of happening a little bit, we would fly people in to do their final interviews and we still bring some people onsite to start their job. Well, we had a few people who had never even been to Chicago until this summer when we had our annual get together at our office. How that changes things, like I said, you become the person you are in those tools, in those communication tools and in your accountability to your team. I don’t think that that’s degraded at all by having a remote company. If anything it’s like the values are that much more clear in terms of who you are socially, who you are offline, what your life is like, your private life. We don’t get a lot of that, because I’m not going to Austin to spend time with the people who are down in Texas, so I’m not spending three or four days with them in their social network outside of work. So yeah, we do lose some of that. Whether that’s a positive or a negative I don’t know. I think the people who work for our companies are here to work and they’re good people, they’re great communicators. Everybody’s got a sense of humor. So we do still have these relationships with our coworkers. It definitely does not feel like a bunch of freelancers who are just dialing in for a couple of hours per day.
Brandon: Maybe it’s written into the policy or it’s an understanding, but do you have a requirement around how many video chats you have to do a week where you’re actually interacting with people face-to-face or even flying into a location where you’re all actually together?
Craig: We do video conferences every day team-wide. It’s a quick fifteen minute call. Now that the team’s a little bit bigger, frankly, it’s a little harder. It gets a little cumbersome. So it’s starting to sort of fragment up a little bit based on the project or the team that you’re on, which I think everybody appreciates. But every day at 11:45 Central, everybody stops what they’re doing. They hop on to GoToMeeting and we go around the proverbial room and say what we’re doing, what dependencies we have on other people. On Fridays we extend that out an extra half hour and we go around the room twice. The first time we talk about the work that we’re doing, second time we talk about larger things going on with the companies like milestones or project launches, whatever. And then everybody says a little bit of something that’s going on from their non-work life. So what are you up to this weekend or how was your kid’s birthday on Tuesday or that type of thing. That dials us in a little bit and exposes us to the non-work life of our coworkers.
Brandon: As we wrap up, I wanted to get your take on where do you see this all going? Do you see more companies adopting this long term? What do you think it’s going to do to the economy in general if you have any thoughts to that?
Craig: I think more companies can do it. I don’t know that a lot of companies necessarily need to or should. It takes a lot of trust, and that’s something that doesn’t come overnight, especially as a company owner. At some point you’ve got to go You know what, this company is not me, it’s the sum of all the people doing the work day in and day out. I am part of a network of companies. There’s a great company called Bureau of Digital and they run events like Owner Camp or Operations Camp and they have a digital project management summit. But we get to connect with all these companies that are fairly similar, they’re in the same industry as us. They do software design, visual design, branding, marketing, that type of thing. I don’t know what percentage of those companies are remote but pretty much every one of them has at least a flex time policy and a few employees who are working somewhere else. So compared to a few years ago, I think there is more of it. And as more tools like Kin HR become available and payroll, something that is largely automated, there’s really no reason to have people in the office, you’re not getting paper checks anymore. Your onboarding experience and sign up for benefits and all of that, that’s all digital now. So, really, it comes down to that. Operationally any company these days in our industry can be distributed.
Brandon: I want to give you the last word, but if you are speaking to another entrepreneur like yourself who’s really considering making their workforce remote, what sort of things would you tell them to look for in getting started in this whole process?
Craig: I think buy-in from people who are onsite. An interesting story, we have a blog and I did have a blog series with Emily Powers who works at a company called Fresh Tilled Soil out of Boston and they’re largely onsite. So most of their employees are in the Boston metropolitan area, but they also have flex time and a couple of remote folks, including Emily. One interesting thing that she said and what we wrote about on our blog series is the fact that once they made that decision, they’d said okay, you’ve got to make sure that everybody feels included in the conversation. So if you are having a meeting with four out of five team members in a conference room and the fifth one is in New York City, well, that is a remote meeting then. Everybody needs to start sort of accommodating for that. That takes a little bit of getting used to because, frankly, you forget it. You forget that there’s somebody on the phone there or looking at you on the screen. So just to be patient, to try it out, and to make sure that you’re measuring the employee’s experience quantitatively both in house and remotely as well. Find out what’s working what’s not and then work to improve it.
Brandon: Well Craig, this is been an awesome discussion and I really appreciate you coming on the podcast. Are there any links, resources, or anything else you want to mention to listeners about Kin HR, about you? About anything else you’re up to?
Craig: Sure. So at KinHR.com we’ve got a blog up there at KinHR.com/blog. We have that blog series with Emily Powers. So we wrote specifically about remote working and what’s worked, what doesn’t, so you can go check that out. On WeAreMammoth.com I’ve written in the past five years about our experience, about the fact that we try to encourage people to work wherever they’re happiest. So look around and there are a lot of companies out there who are helping with that culture and getting people set up with tools and helping them through that transition. So you can Google it, it’s a big trend right now.
Brandon: Amazing. Craig Bryant, founder and CEO of Kinhr.com, thanks for being on the podcast. I really appreciate you.
Craig: Thank you for having me!


 
 
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