DistantJob Podcast

In this episode, Darren Murph reveals why some businesses are failing in their attempt to work remotely. He also shares his insights into the meaning of culture and how GitLab, having approximately 1200 remote workers, has a culture that all their employees connect and relate with.

In this episode, Leo Mindel shares his key strategies to maintain efficient communication in distributed teams. He talks about his experience transitioning from an onsite company to a fully remote company and the right tools he has gathered along the way.   

In this episode, Dianne Crampton shares her experience in building remote cultures and reveals the tringle for business success: Roles, Goals, and Relationships. She explains why having the ability to work with companies and people all around the world is necessary during these times.

Thinking about gathering your remote team? Anne-Marie Jentsch shares her experiences in organizing group experiences for both onsite and remote teams in different parts of the world.

In this episode, Stacy Henry tells us her experience of working in the BNR company for almost 10 years. How they started being just 15 employees and grew to over 100 employees, managing hybrid teams and remote employees.

In this podcast episode, Alberto Cañigueral talks about the social impact digital platforms are having on the labor market, how they are transforming economies, and the way people work. He shares his experience in organizing projects and events with freelancers and people from his community working as a distributed team.

In this podcast, Yann Toutant explains the need for companies to digitalize and advises managers on how to lead their teams by managing employees based on outputs. What you will learn: The importance of having a digitalized company How to manage and build trust in a remote team Differences between managing juniors and seniors How to define goals in a distributed team This interview is part of the DistantJob podcast. To hear more from leaders and successful entrepreneurs on how to build and lead winning teams, check us out on Anchor.fm and on our website. Don’t forget to SUBSCRIBE so you won’t miss all of the other interesting episodes that we have coming up in the next few weeks!

Serial entrepreneurs, Stephanie Smolders and Peter Beukering, are the founders of BeeHavesocial and Touristexclusive. Consultants on business and marketing, they help mission-driven entrepreneurs scale their business with an aligned foundation and marketing strategy that works for them. In this special podcast episode, Luis, the host of DistantJob podcast, is interviewing Peter Beukering and Stephanie Smolders, a full-time travel couple who adopted the location independent lifestyle and worked from 34 different countries ( and counting). They share their story on how they built and grew their remote business while traveling and how remote work it's the core of their successful business. What you will learn: practical steps to consider when starting a remote business; building and leading a fully remote team effectively; benefits of hiring ambitious people with entrepreneurial spirits; why remote work allows you to hire the best people and have a more productive team; how to measure the productivity of remote workers.

Mike Soldan is the Chief Experience Officer at Shmoop, a digital publishing company that provides comprehensive test prep resources and certified online courses.Before Shmoop, he was formerly the VP of Pluralsight's Professional Services & Solutions Architect teams, and prior to that, he was a founding member and product leader for one of Verizon Communications' largest product and new business innovation arms. He has a background with the focus on enhancing education and training programs, and on building high performing and innovative teams. As more and more companies adopt flexible work practices, developing a successful remote work strategy is necessary to operate remotely efficiently and effectively. In this podcast episode, Mike Sultan offers strategies and best practices on how to manage the challenges that may come up along the way in a remote setting and how to help set up your remote team for success.  What you will learn: building a culture of collaboration in the workplace; tools you need to successfully operate as a remote team; managing your remote workforce without micromanaging; why you should be setting and tracking transactional metrics.

More and more companies are transitioning to remote working teams as the global workforce develops to gain access to a larger talent pool, in order to work with the best talent in the world. The benefits of remote work for organizations are more evident than ever. In this podcast episode, we get the chance to listen to Richard Fallah, founder of Vbout, share his successful entrepreneurial journey and his views on building a successful business with remote teams. He believes leaders must engage their people with a compelling vision to boost employee's performance and the business' growth. What you will learn: how remote work can help companies to produce rapid and durable growth; how to focus on areas of your business without burning out; practical strategies on managing remote teams; tips on bonding distributed teams together; how to provide a balance of positive and negative feedback; the importance of one-on one meetings in a distributed team. This interview is part of the DistantJob podcast. To hear more from leaders and successful entrepreneurs on how to build and lead winning teams, check us out on our website.

Teresa Gandy is the owner of Clarity CX, helping business and training providers to add extra client value by managing feedback, assessments, and reports. Her prior working experience in corporate- land HR and her knowledge with customer feedback ensures collecting clear, quick, and actionable feedback from customers and employees. After working more than a decade in an office setting, Teresa explains how transitioning to remote work, positively impacted her personal and professional life. Based on her remote working experience, Teresa Gandy is sharing her knowledge on collecting remote feedback effectively. She believes it is essential to have honesty in your feedback. Otherwise, it is useless.

In this podcast episode, we have a returning guest, Shauna Moran. Over the last couple of years she did extensive research on remote teams and qualified as an executive leadership coach. She is now focusing more on the holistic side of managing remote teams. Shauna Moran is an accredited coach and emotional intelligence practitioner. Founder of Operate Remote, a consultancy and coaching business, helps leaders in a remote company to create, manage, and scale high-performing distributed teams. She is sharing with us everything she is learned from her experience and academic background in leading and scaling remote teams. From the challenges you face in a remote team and how to overcome them to the importance of emotional intelligence and how it counts for 25-40% of work base performance.

In this episode, Andy Bedwell covers in detail, the list of advantages offered by coworking spaces, including innovation and networking opportunities, in a relaxed and supportive environment. Andy Bedwell is a property investor and developer that has a growing network of managed office spaces in the UK. Owner of Perch Co- Working, his aim is to cultivate a thriving community of workers, enabling people to come together and create great things. Coworking is a fast-growing global trend, mostly embraced by startups, small companies, entrepreneurs, and freelancers, but remote workers are starting to welcoming it too due to its benefits. While working from home can be an excellent option for some remote workers, others are having trouble focusing in a home office, so they prefer to work in a coworking location where they can feel like being part of a community, thus avoiding loneliness. Not only that, but there is an educational and networking component to it.

Successful serial-entrepreneur, with over 40 years of experience, Tom Mabey is the CEO and key founder of ECLIPSE, which provides tailored big data solutions as a service. Previously he founded Sahara, Inc. (regional construction service provider), The Consortium (civil engineering consulting business) and he is Member of the Board of Directors of Nano Stone, Inc. an international provider of natural stone. A professional engineer, his focus is on building and leading teams to solve problems in a collaborative and productive environment. According to Tom Mabey, a component key for a distributed organization is to build a culture and to maintain cultural consistency as the company expands in a geographical sense and becomes more diverse. Maintaining control of the culture and the values of the company can be challenging, especially in a distributed organization. In this episode, Tom Mabey, provides a guide on how you can bring your distributed team together in a way that can boost their productivity, efficiency, and collaboration. From constant communication and team building activities to finding top talent and optimizing your hiring process, Tom covers important steps you need to take so that you and your team can be successful.

Arthur Woods, is the the Co-Founder of Mathison, a talent marketplace focusing purely on connecting underrepresented population to employers all over the world. Being a serial entrepreneur, and having built his business virtually, he sustain the remote workforce. Even though the benefits of a remote workforce have been shown over and over again, there are still a lot of common misconceptions about virtual work and Arthur dives into them and explains how to overcome them. Remote work is really the key to drive diversity and inclusion in the workplace. And to get workplace diversity and inclusion right, you need to build a culture. On this episode, Arthur Woods is sharing his strategy on how to ensure a culture inclusion on a remote setting. He believes the power of remote workforce is in having a lot of intentionality and building systems that reinforce strong culture.

Sophia Bernazzani is the Head of Content Marketing at Owl Labs. In this podcast episode, Sophia shares some statistics that show how remote work is meant to be the future of employment culture. Don’t miss her recommendations and also a peek of her experience as a remote worker herself.

Max Klau explains the possibilities of teaching critical thinking in order to develop leadership skills through remote education platforms. Our guest talks about the program “Answering the Call”, which recruits and trains military veterans and national service alumni who consider politics as a way to continue serving their country. “Answering the Call” has both local and virtual offers, giving the opportunity of remote leadership education to hundreds of people in America.

Kevin Claus is a coach and consultant with a focus on leadership development and employee engagement. Kevin started managing remote teams 12 years ago, helping them reach their highest potential. Communication is the main ingredient that makes remote work possible. Taking that into consideration, Coach Kevin Claus provides a very complete guide on how to make virtual networking better: from face to face conference calls and employee resource groups to virtual shadowing and interactive training in virtual classrooms, Kevin shares some basic to do's to achieve success as a remote team manager.

Want to know how to get social at work even if you're in a remote team? Mary L Gray explains how the human workforce is in the middle of a software centered work culture and how remote workers can find a purpose in what they do. In this episode, Mary explains how our capitalist system dictates the productivity rhythm of job growth, the introduction and transition to new work models such as remote work. She also shares how these new work models have an impact in economy and society.

Think about taking your company remote? Stefania Chiorboli shares some insights to help your company transition to a remote or hybrid environment without losing part of your culture. Stefania is the founder at The Hoxby Collective, a consulting business helping people and companies build and manage remote teams. In this podcast episode, Luis and Stefania talk about how remote work can make the world a better place, not only because it's materially and financially appealing but also because it opens a space for a more diverse workforce, and it allows every remote worker to have the work-life balance that they choose in a way that is meaningful for them and allows them to give their best without being tied to an office.

Tom Libelt is the Co-Founder of We Create Online Courses, the Founder of WeMarketOnlineCourses.com and CEO of Libelty SEO. In this episode, our guest Tom Libelt shares his experience creating systems that have allowed him to lead several enterprises simultaneously. Tom and Luis talk about the pros of recruiting full-time remote employees vs hiring digital nomad employees. For Tom, who is more a seasonal traveler, the key to leading so many projects at the same time is getting a manager who supervises his staff, which he likes to keep tight placing quality over quantity.

In this episode, Luis talks to Mentor  Coach Steve Hamilton, CEO & Founder of the 18th Camel. Steve shares some of his key points to create an appropriate climate when you meet someone online for the first time and what you can do to bond effectively. He believes some of the key aspects to bonding with someone come from creating trust and empathy. They also share some strategies to be more productive when working from home, such as keeping a focus and being mindful of how you spend your time.

Ken Weary balances his life between being the VP of Operations at Hotjar (a product that reveals the online behavior and voice of a website’s users) and being a father and husband in a digital nomad family. Six years ago, he took a sabbatical which really changed his perspective about how we wanted to live his life and decided to start working remotely, house sitting for people around the world. Currently, he is house sitting and working out of Scotland, and while he tackles the tasks of a VPO, his wife "world-schools" their kids.

Todd Werth is the CEO and Co-Founder of Infinite Red, a remote design and creative studio creating beautiful and functional mobile apps and websites. Todd has been creating software for 20 years and has founded three companies. He still codes and designs but not as often as he'd like. In this podcast episode, Todd shares his experience leading a remote company and explains how big decisions are made when working remotely. He believes remote has nothing to do with how you work or when you work, it's only about where you're located.

A big part of building a successful remote team relies on effective leadership management. In this episode, Luis talks to Sabina Nawaz about one of the many benefits of working remotely. She mentions how managing a remote team really broadens your perspective and helps you become a more comprehensive leader. Having a diverse team helps you have a global point of view in your virtual office. Sabina shares leadership tips for CEOs looking to boost their business. Some of them include having active 1-on-1 sessions with employees and showcasing their achievements properly.

Angelique believes your company's culture should really reflect your purpose and values but how do you establish and implement that? Writing down where you want to be or where you are right now, might be a good place to start. This could help you have a clear vision of your company. There are different ways to build your company's culture but is always important to remember that as a founder, you have the obligation to build something that makes you happy. There will be times where you'll have to make decisions or sacrifices to follow your culture; letting go of clients might be one of them, if they don't follow your vision or if their values are not aligned to yours. Listen to learn how you can implement a good working environment whether you're working in an office or with a remote team.

There are a bunch of reasons why managers are reluctant to work remotely and June Bolneo surely knows about them. In this chapter, we go deep into learning the ins and outs of remote work and how your company can (or should) make the leap.  She's found that most of the problems that arise when working remotely are very psychological and rely around social barriers. So, what can we do about it? Listen to this podcast and find out.

A lot of people talk about communication being a challenging factor in successfully running a remote team, but Matteo Grassi explains how one of the main issues they've encountered as a remote company is managing projects. In this podcast episode, he shares how they have built their processes, improved them and made sure the whole company is following them. They've implemented a goal-oriented strategy at Eli Z Group that focuses on short and long term goals rather than day-to-day activities. Wanna know how this has helped the business? Have a listen. 

Elise Keith is the Founder & CEO at Lucid Meetings, an app that makes it easy for teams to run successful meeting every day. Their software embeds basic best practices and automates the administrative work involved in scaling a great meeting habit. She's also an author of the book Where the Action is: The Meetings That Make or Break your Organization.  In this episode, Elise shares what she's found are the most common habits of successful remote teams and the key to make a project go well. She's found that when all the members in a team have clarity of decisions, they know who's involved in what and how they are involved, it's difficult to not see a project succeed.

Ingrid Odegaard is the Co-founder & CPTO (formerly CEO) of Appear.in, a tool to bring your team and clients together with flexible video meetings so you can have a more productive remote team collaboration. In this episode, we talk about the benefits of remote teams and the importance of trust and work-life balance to achieve a good company's culture.  Ingrid explains how transitioning to a fully remote team has helped them develop more empathy for their users as now they understand better what problems they're facing and can offer better solutions to keep improving their product. 

Sharon Koifman believes every company, from the biggest enterprise to the newly-launched garage startup, should have access to the world’s top talent. That’s why he used over 10 years of experience in tech industry recruitment & HR to create DistantJob.  This episode is all about explaining how having a Virtual Assistant impacted Sharon’s work and life, allowing him to get more things done while achieving better work-life balance. He might not be living the 4-hour workweek dream, but he’s never been happier - and he’s bullish about taking on any perceived or real challenges about having a person from another country take care of your schedule and accounts. Luís puts him to the test - how did he fare? You decide!

Shauna Moran is the Founder at Operate Remote, a consulting firm where she helps individuals and organizations overcome the challenges when it comes to remote working. Her remote journey started about 6 years ago when she started working remotely for Shopify, an e-commerce platform for online stores. She got so passionate about remote working and decided to go back to school to get her Ph.D in Innovation Management where she focused on understanding what actually allowed remote teams to be successful. In this episode, Shauna shares her experience managing remote teams and gives some tips on how to do it effectively, according to research. 

Maya MiddleMiss is the CEO of BlockSparks, a startup focused on creating creative communications for the blockchain world . She's also a freelance writer and creator, obsessed with crypto, blockchain, and technology. She gets fascinated with the technological changes influencing our society and impacting our future.  In this episode, Maya shares how she got started in the world of cryptocurrencies and what we can do to use technology to our advantage. She believes those who are afraid of learning and trying something new, haven't realized how easy it is to connect with people who will literally give you a step-by-step guide on how to do the thing(s) you're afraid of. 

Jamon Holmgren is the Co-Founder and CTO at Infinite Red, a consultancy where they design, develop, launch, and support mobile and web apps. He's a software developer, husband, and father of four. His life-long obsession with coding has taken him from running large excavation equipment to framing houses to 3D CAD design, until he eventually landed on a career in software.  In this episode, we talk about a wide variety of topics, but fundamentally: leading a fully remote team. What is it like to lead remotely? What are the downsides? How do you manage your time efficiently? And, how do you measure your team's performance?

Welcome to StaffITRight, a Podcast by DistantJob! This Podcast aims to be a treasure trove of tools and resources for people who are on the quest to learn about how to build and manage remote teams. That’s right, this podcast is about people working together on great projects, through the magic of the internet – no office required. Here, we interview people who’ve built and managed remote teams and even full companies – and found great success!

On the second episode StaffITRight, the official podcast of DistantJob we interview Trevor Longino, le enfant terrible of the marketing world. 

In this edition of the StaffITRight podcast, presented by Distantjob.com , we talk to Ana Guerra, who was responsible for Social Media Marketing and Partnerships at Xbox.  During her stay at Microsoft Portugal, Ana found herself interacting with on-site colleagues, but doing the bulk of her work remotely, with a team that was physically located in another country. Here we talk about how she managed that situation and her advice to managers who want to integrate a remote superstar into their local teams!

Victoria talks to us (among many, many other things!) about what top performers come looking for when they consider joining your company; the importance of virtualising small workplace rituals; and how to build and benefit from a company with a network structure, as opposed to flat or hierarchical. (DJ Podcast drinking game: have a drink whenever Luis mispronounces “hierarchical”! Such is life.)

Todays’ guest is Gonçalo Silva, CTO of Doist. Obviously, we dig into the importance of checklists and process in managing remote teams, but we also talk about a lot of other things, including, but not limited to: how to test potential employees for remote skills; what are some good ways to document decisions in a way to have a single source of truth; and what an 80-year-old book can still teach us about management, even when it comes to the Future of Work.

Today’s guest is Liam Martin, the co-founder and CMO of TimeDoctor.com, Staff.com and co-organizer of RunningRemote.com – the largest conference on building remote teams. After working with remote employees for over 10 years, Liam regularly speaks about how to build and manage top-performing, metric-driven remote teams. In this episode, we talk with Liam about a broad variety of topics. He lays out how focusing on metrics is a boon for productivity, and shares his thoughts on how to measure creativity and stay disciplined as an idea person. But for the aspiring leaders out there, it will also be of great interest to learn how he goes about building peer groups online, and why it’s a bad idea to pay for masterminds – at least initially.

Rose Barrett is the owner of Folio Digital(https://foliodigital.eu) and a co-founder of Grow Remote (https://growremote.ie) – the people behind Ireland’s first remote work conference, and devoted to helping remote workers from all the world connect and grow together. In this episode, we talk about what businesses can do to make remote employees feel secure in their jobs; the benefits of building a remote peer group and why bosses should incentivise their employees to be part of one; how the key to building value is to focus on helping others develop, and much more.

Welcome to the DistantJob Podcast, a show where we interview the most successful remote leaders, picking their brains on how to build and lead remote teams who win. Molood Noori is the founder and owner of Remote Forever (https://remoteforever.com), and is behind the organisation of the worlds first fully web-based Agile Remote summit, the Remote Forever Summit (https://remoteforeversummit.com). She’s also a certified scrum master and has worked as an agile coach with clients all over the world. In this episode, we dive deep into a conversation about why Agile practitioners have been historically reluctant to embrace remote work; what are the problems of trying to replicate the real world office and its way of working in the digital real; and in what way scrum can be like an old Ericsson phone if you’re not mindful of the real purpose of using frameworks. There’s something here for anyone wanting to embrace the ethos of adapting to change by thinking differently.

Judy Rees, our guest today, has helped dozens of trainers, coaches, and facilitators through live online training. As a news editor and a media executive, she has extensive experience managing large remote teams. She is the co-author of Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors And Opening Minds, and a regular keynote speaker at Agile and other events around the world. In this episode, we talk about the power of clean language and how it can provide us with the tools and frameworks to develop a deeper relationship with (and better understanding of) our teams. Judy provides the listeners with specific techniques for giving and receiving feedback (actual useful, step-by-step ones, not your usual management blog post snake-oil) and engaging in deep communication with the people working with you. We also discuss topics such as the challenges of video communication, cultural norms, and degrees of separation, as well as some strategies on how to build psychological safety in the team.

Emídio do Sacramento has one of the most amazing origin stories of any podcast guest, ever, so we’ll leave it to you to find out where he came from – he is currently the founder and CEO of Zebiometrics (https://www.zebiometrics.com), and is working hard to  establish a new paradigm for online security and virtual identity. In this episode, we talk about why Emídio believes remote work was a crucial factor in building the team to bring his vision to life, and why it’s great to be able to tap into different cultures when doing so. We also talk about what the future of online identity looks like and what are some technological advances that you can tap into to be sure that the person on the other side of the screen really is the person you hired.  Emidio also points out that as good as video conversation is, it’s possible to build a world-class product just by text chat, and he tells the story of how that happened for him.

In this episode, we talk about a wide variety of topics with our founder Sharon Koifman, but fundamentally: finding the right people for your team.  Sharon is a big advocate for remote work and one of his core beliefs is that if you treat your team like family, it will pay off in the long run. However, there is one key quality that his team needs to have in order to be able to work remotely.

Welcome to the DistantJob Podcast, a show where we interview the most successful remote leaders, picking their brains on how to build and lead remote teams who win. Jo Palmer is the Founder of Pointer Remote, a platform to connect professionals in Australia who are physically isolated from roles in which they are qualified, or may have held in the past to roles that can be filled remotely. She loves witnessing the amazing things that happen when people are connected to each other. In this episode, we talk about a wide variety of topics, but fundamentally: hiring and managing the best global talent. What does it take to run a global team? What are the challenges? What should we look for when hiring a remote candidate? And, which tools can we use to make our remote team work more efficiently. ———————— Want to continue the conversation with Jo?  LinkedIn: Jo Palmer Twitter: @pointerremote Facebook: Pointer Remote Business: Pointer Remote  (pointerremoteroles.com.au/ ) Book Recommendations: Remote: Office Not Required (by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier) www.amazon.com/Remote-Office-Not-Required/dp/0804137501 ———————— As always, if you enjoy the podcast, we humbly ask that you leave a review on iTunes or your podcast syndication service of choice – and if you could share it, that would be even better! Need that one incredible employee to bolster your team?  Get in touch at  https://distantjob.com/contact/ and we’ll find you who you need.