Shayanne Gal / Insider
Nate Quigley, the CEO and cofounder of Chatbooks, and Deidre Paknad, the CEO and cofounder of WorkBoard.
- We spoke with Nate Quigley, the CEO and cofounder of Chatbooks, and Deidre Paknad, the CEO and cofounder of WorkBoard, for the first episode of our Business Insider Spotlight Digital Live Event series.
- They told us about how the preserve consistency, anticipate employee needs, and cultivate culture in our highly dynamic, newly distributed work situation.
- Find the transcript below.
- Sign up here for next week's Spotlight on remote culture. The digital live event will feature Joel Gascoigne, CEO and co-founder of Buffer and Carol Cochran, vice president of people and culture at FlexJobs.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Leaders rally their people in a time of crisis.
But what about when that rallying has to happen over a video call?
This is the new reality: remote offices require remote leadership.
To help orient all of us to how to actually lead a remote organization, Business Insider recently spent a good 40 minutes speaking with two executives with extensive distributed experience - on Zoom, fittingly enough . Both serial entrepreneurs, Deidre Paknad is the CEO and cofounder of WorkBoard, an enterprise software suite for the setting and hitting of objectives and key results, while Nate Quigley is CEO and cofounder of Chatbooks, where you can hook up your Instagram feed to print into highly flippable photo books.
They were interviewed by Deputy Editor Drake Baer, who runs the Strategy and Executive Lifestyle desks at BI.
The below conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
DRAKE BAER: Hello and welcome to Business Insider Spotlight, a digital live event. Thank you everybody for joining us. This is the first in an ongoing series of webinars and other events that we really hope will help all of you navigate the world. Our editorial aim is to bring together the most insightful people to talk about the most urgent topics.
The series is going to range across the many realms of business, from investing to healthcare to retail and beyond. For this week and next week, we're going to start at the very top of the house with leadership and precisely what leaders can do to help themselves and their teams adapt to this new reality of COVID and social distance.
I'm Drake Baer, the deputy editor of Strategy at Business Insider, and I am thrilled to be joined today by two founders who know all about how to lead and inspire remote workforces. First we have Deidre Paknad, the CEO and cofounder of WorkBoard.
Deidre, can you tell us what Workboard does for folks who might be unfamiliar?
DEIDRE PAKNAD: Yeah, terrific. Workboard helps organizations get everyone aligned on the objectives and results they're trying to drive, to iterate on those as internal and external exchanges, and to link the objectives we're trying to achieve with the work and the meetings that we have. It turns out to be a timely platform right now.
DB: Yes, very much so. And I've been told that Workboard has 150 people working across 15 locations, including the US and India. Is that correct?
DP: Yes, and actually I'm probably more excited to say, we're working with companies like Comcast, Microsoft, Cisco, Juniper, and others that are keeping us all connected, really wired, on the fundamental data that needs to flow between us.
DB: That's fantastic; thanks Deidre. And we are also joined by Nate Quigley, cofounder and CEO of Chatbooks. Nate, what's the elevator pitch for Chatbooks?
NATE QUIGLEY: Chatbooks are really simple photo books that you make on your mobile phone, where we take all our pictures. So there's a Chatbooks iPhone app and Android app. You can connect those apps to your social media accounts like Instagram, then Chatbooks automatically prints really affordable and beyond-easy photo books for you. We've been in business about five years. We've sold just about 10 million of those little books since launching in 2014.
DB: That's amazing. And that sounds like product-market fit, which can be a topic for another event. And how much of the Chatbooks workforce is remote versus co-located?
NQ: About half of our team are fully remote, meaning working from home, and they work across all the time zones in the US, and then the other half of the team are co-located in a headquarters office - you know, pre-COVID-19 - a couple of days a week in what we call a "fork" or a "tree-fork" office or outpost the other three days a week. So on any given day of the week, you're going to have more than half of our team in different locations.
DB: That's so interesting. And as somewhat of an organizational-design nerd, I'm really excited to hear about your elite leadership, which is usually thought of in terms of people in a group and the leader is on a podium saying stuff. So the fact that both of you guys have been leading teams - and I know you're also serial entrepreneurs and have a lot of experience with this - in these diffuse settings is incredible. I know that's something that everybody is doing now given social distance is being effected.
Before we move on, Nate and Deidre, can you say a little bit about how, if at all, social distance and the coronavirus crisis how has that affected the way you are leading your companies?
DP: I think it's had a profound effect on how I lead and it's important to, I think, bifurcate while I've led a large organization that entirely worked from home when I was at IBM - for decades they had half of the employee base was work from home and I was an executive there during that - and that, if you will, anxiety and distraction that goes directly to the core of our sense of self and safety. And so that's been the thing that's most informed.
The shift in my leadership isn't doing, if you will, double duty on providing safety nets on connecting people, on taking care of the emotional well-being of our team members. And that's quite different, like a factor in leadership that's really varied from just work from home to actually work with fear with the noise that people hear that is just really quite constant.
DB: That's fantastic. And I think those things are going to come back in just a second for us too. Nate, can you tell us about how social distance is changing Chatbooks, if at all?
NQ: Yes, for sure. And I think some of the same things I've heard from Deidre there are applied to me; I'm absolutely thinking more than I typically do about how are people feeling right now. You know, what is their level of anxiety, what are they worried about? And can I connect more frequently with my key team, give direct reports, as well as other people in the organization?
I just all of a sudden feel like I'm going to check in on them and I will drop them a quick Slack message or a jump on a quick Slack video call just to, without an agenda, say, "Hey, how's it going today?" I'm feeling the need to do that a lot more frequently than I would on a typical day or typical week.
DB: That's fantastic. Yeah, I'm looking forward to digging into this further. But before we do that, I would like to ask our audience for what size teams do you manage, if you managed any, and also what management insights would be most helpful right now during this coronavirus crisis. This poll will be up for just about 45 more seconds. If you can fill it out, and then the results will be immediately displayed. This is really part of why it's exciting to do this live rather than in more of a recorded podcast format because it allows us to be more interactive and get more info. And you'll also see that you can be filing questions that we'll get to at the end of the webinar, which will be in about 20 minutes or so.
I'll go ahead and read the two questions. So it's, what's your team size? And here we have the results. I'll read this aloud for our panelists. So for team size, the majority is actually one to 10, and then a little above 28% is 11-50, and then above 50 adds up to about 19%. So that's actually some pretty nice distribution and pretty well represented across organizational responsibility.
And then again, it's a wide range of interests for the kinds of management insights people need. First remote teams, good thing we're here, and also case studies of adaptive leaders. That's another topic. Solid. Luckily we have some adaptive leaders in our midst right now, so super fascinating. Thank you for the responses, folks in the audience; please be sure to be asking questions in the queue and we'll get to that in a second.
So I have some big questions that I would like to have answered. Question number one, how is remote leadership different from co-located leadership?
Deidre, you shared with me some documentation internally that I'll bring up now regarding responding and running, and folks at home can read this slide directly, but can you speak at a high level about what it means to respond and run?
DP: Most of our customers just eight weeks ago, those are of large enterprises and growth startups. But most of them are really focused on and they had strategic priorities to grow their business and then run the business. They had sort of referred to that as, you know, we have to run and grow the business and their strategic priorities reflected that. And what's changed now, is we need to run the business and we can't stop focusing on the business we have, but we need to run and respond to very new facts and circumstances.
So a lot of leaders are right now thinking through what's changed in their strategic priorities. And really a lot has changed in those, the three things that I think are super important - the high level one is this is not the quarter to skip setting objectives and key results and communicating; don't stop employees, channel energy, focus people on what's true now and what you need from them now. Everyone is, and this is what's so phenomenal.
I think in this situation versus other crises is people want to be of service and they want to step up. So leaders, whether you're leading the whole order of the team, set objectives and key results and this quarter for what you're going to do in the next 90 days and communicate those broadly and consistently. People want to know how they contribute.
The next is working transparently will be so foundational. So you don't want all the conversations between managers and team members to be, "where are you on this? What's the status on that?" And you don't want a thousand emails and Slack messages a day saying, "Hey, what's the situation on?" People need to be able to self-serve and get the status themselves. So work transparently so everyone can see where we are on things and then have your conversations be on what are we going to do to make progress as opposed to just find out where we are.
And then we've all had twice as many, three times as many meetings in the last two or three weeks and they don't leave us with any time to do meaningful work. And of course one of the things we can control, one of the things that gives us a sense of accomplishment and I'll call it even comfort, is doing work that has meaning actually accomplishing something in complex and case chaotic situations. So stop the meeting media, it's going to have to go down over the next few weeks not up. Right. And that means use transparency, use alignment to reduce the number of meetings you need to get.
DB: So I think we're losing you again Deidre, sorry, we lost you for a second. Are you saying with meeting mania, it sounds like the impulse for a remote work setting is to be really meeting as much as possible and being like a calm thing. A lot of communication about project management. Basically what I'm hearing is let's get the projects managed through our tool sets and then be really impeccable with the use of our time so that we're getting the emotional support that we need and also doing the meaningful work that needs to get done.
DP: Yeah. I think, I think we were meeting twice as often on, "okay, everybody, here's what we want to accomplish." And then, "okay, everybody, where are we now?" And it's really actually hard to run a business on meetings alone. Like we can't use meetings as the only way we point direction and get visibility on how close we are to where we wanted to go. And I think what I've seen is executives and team leaders need more time in their day right now to take care of the emotional gyration market. Gyration and business gyration - they need more capacity than they had a month ago and at a point where meetings are sapping every ounce of energy and time that needs to be remixed.
DB: So I'll stop you there. I think that the point about direction feeds directly into what Nate was saying earlier, which was the importance of actual repetition. That's hugely valuable. Both in a co-located leadership situation as well as a well as a newly remote one. Nate, can you speak a little bit to repetition and the value of that at Chatbooks?
NQ: Yes. On the topic of repetition, we've talked about these four brand cornerstones. Since the earliest days of Chatbooks, we decided this is how we were going to compete against the incumbents like Shutterfly for example. Who's the biggest player in our space, beyond easy, super affordable, great quality, amazing service.
Alone, those words don't mean a ton, but to the people at Chatbooks, they mean a lot. And this is how we make decisions on what to do or not do or what the theme of a marketing communication needs to be. And it doesn't read really clearly at the top that this is about easy because, again, in our industry at least, that was very important. I can feel like, you know, here we are five or six years in and I've said these four cornerstones something like 5,000 times. I think I probably have.
Then there are other things. For example, our key values, we have a a five point star that we talk about and those are the key. The values of Chatbooks are aligned around the five points of that star. And again, I feel like I've said, you know, spoken those five points, something like 10,000 times.
And again, maybe I have, I hope I have because even though we'll let you know 150 person team, we do have lots of people coming in and out and there's always, inevitably at almost every town hall, there are going to be a couple of pretty new people. If not, you know, this is their very first town hall. Maybe it's their fifth or 10th and maybe in the last five or 10 town halls, we haven't reiterated these brand cornerstones as clearly.
I do have this principle that I think is even more important in a time of, you know, more remote leadership or leadership in a time of prices of just repeating the things that we really, really believe. And there's a great quote from the CEO of LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner, that we've included here. Great.
When you are tired of saying if people are starting to hear it, which I think has been a really good reminder to me to I can sometimes be, you know, sharing something in a little town hall meeting or in a smaller group setting and think, "man, these people have gotta be sick of hearing me say that." And um, if we want to believe Jeff Weiner, cause there's obviously our terrific leader, that is the indication I have that. Okay. Maybe it's starting to get through if I'm totally sick of saying that, if people are probably picking up on it now.
DB: Yeah, I think that's so, um, that's so fascinating. And also consistency is something, that people need, right? Especially in times of great transition. So having these established principles coming back to them, like that's another kind of facet of infrastructure you might say that can carry across regardless of if people are in the same room or not. That's great. So let's move on to big question two. Here's the big reveal.
So what does remote leadership look like in a time of crisis? I'm going to keep it on you, Nate. One thing that I found really interesting about the communication style is how you run meetings is starting with the Y, and within the Y being the user experience, the end user experience and even user experience can kind of sound kind of abstract, right? But actual, here's the reality of people interacting with our product, and your team shared this testimonial slide with us. Could you tell us why you start with the line? And then also, how this might be valuable in a really topsy-turvy situation like we're in now?
NQ: Sure. So this is the slide that we use to kick off our weekly town hall every week. And I'm one of the, you know, our customer support team is kind of collecting things that people have written back to us after a customer support interaction or our social media team is watching for comments or other posts with it that our brand is tagged in, and kind of collecting them together and wanting to go. The folks in our design team put this slide together each week and we start townhall with this.
We say, "Hey, welcome to town hall, click." And then we kind of actually just read these word for word and it's really fun for me to, for me to see. Each week, everybody's faces light up and you know, smiles come on people's faces and someone will laugh and say some little list or something to the person they used to sit next to, pre social distancing.
I think it's interesting how consistent the feedback has been from our customers on why they love Chatbooks. And I think it's been really interesting to see how rewarding that is for us on Team Chapbook to appreciate again and again, even on year five, seeing these same kind of pictures of a kid with a smile on his face, looking at a photo book with memories from this family. And it's really easy, of course, to just get lost in the firefight of the day or the hour and you know, some bug or, "wow, we sent that email to the wrong segment" or you know, "this person I'm working with, we're not getting along."
So you can really quickly, you know, from one day to the next, sort of forget what the point of this whole thing is. And we love starting with the reason - we're doing all of this is, you know, for these kinds of interactions, these kind of reactions from our customers, and we think it's important that we talk about the mission of Chatbooks is to strengthen families.
And we think we accomplished that by helping families recognize these little amazing moments in their life and hold onto what matters most. We feel like we have a really important mission and this little pause at the beginning of every townhall - I might follow this with some scary chart of something that's going wrong in the company that we all need to work on and be aware of. But starting with it's worth, it has been really great for us and I think that's especially true in a time of uncertainty and anxiety like we're living through right now.
We have a Slack channel as well, it's called the Y. And some of our customer support team will often drop an interaction they're having with their customer into that channel where you can really see that the work that we're doing is making a difference in someone's lives or in the life, in their family life. And that's very, very motivating to us. So I would just say knowing why you're doing something, if you know why you're doing it, you can kind of put up with just any of what that you're dealing with in the moment if you understand and believe that it's worth doing.
DB: That's fantastic, and I just want to call out for the audience, speaking of the Y, on your Zoom, if you click, there should be a bottom bar on your desktop, and if you click on "QA" and that's where you can submit questions and then we'll be going through them at the end of the chat. We'd love to hear your questions. Thank you.
So Deidre, you shared with me and you were speaking earlier about the importance of the human element and kind of the emotional reality of the moment that we're in and how to serve that as a leader. Can you tell us a little bit more about getting ahead and being proactive? I think proactive management, for performance, that's probably a familiar idea to a lot of managers, but proactive management for emotions, that might be a little bit more foreign or a little bit more uncomfortable. So could you say a little bit about how you approached it?
DP: Great. Can you hear me? Yep. Okay, terrific. Sorry. As with many of you, internet is slightly unstable right now.
When I think about people at work, the first thing is their safety and then we get to do great things on top of people who feel safe and whose fear can be managed. So to me, there was a couple of things to look at. One is my job is to start with the whole person well-being. And there's, this is just an epic opportunity to really occupy the space of leading people, not just leading a business.
And so it's helped people manage fear. It's look at their home-work environment. So if you've got young people on the team that share a house with roommates, they end up in their room with their laptop on their bed and their video on all day long, and the only interaction they have is with the screen and they're locked in their room. And you gotta think about what that means to how they feel, right? And what their sense of well-being will be, particularly over four weeks or eight weeks.
I think for people who are extroverted and are used to a really high degree of interaction with customers, this will be harder in a different way for the extroverts that will feel different than for the introverts. And then we're asking people to stay apart, right at a point where we're in extremely scary situation. And one of the ways that human beings manage stress is by coming together as a community, by connecting even by touching. And also by moving around, and all of those things, we're asking them to stop at a point where those would be nourishing ways to work through anxiety and fear.
And then last - I have a lot of new team members - the last one is how do we help new team members thrive on the team because they, they are not having all those accidental opportunities to connect that happen in the kitchen or on the way in the door in the morning or with somebody at the desk next to you because the person at the desk next to you is now your six year old who doesn't get to go to first grade right now.
So those sort of the human being aspects I think are really important to consider. And what we've done is we've got 10 practices and these relate to some of the questions people are posting. We have 10 practices that were, how do we address the human being? How do we work through the fear, retrench the connections, bring people forward, and help manage wellness first. And the business second - business depends on their wellness.
DB: That's fantastic. I think especially like the coincidental conversation opportunities like that, that water cooler chat, how do you make room for that? And I'd also like to hear about that, how you're approaching that day.
DP: Yup. So there's a couple things we've put in place and we went all out on fun on Zoom, right? So we have Zoom, we have 5 o'clock stretch and exercise stuff. We have a walking AMA, which you have to walk to join the "ask me anything call," we have happy hours on Friday. I do instead of a less frequent all hands, it's more frequent all hands. We started using something called donut which is a cool tool on Slack that matches people up who wouldn't otherwise have conversations with each other, and that's actually been going super well.
We on our all hands have a best outfit contest. So we have the first five minutes of the all hands are actually just people cracking up. And I'll say that our people ops team lead has just, she's crushed it for the last three weeks, and it creates all kinds of new ways for people to have, "Oh, that was so cool. I loved what you wore. Where'd you get that costume?" Like just really amping up the social fabric thing and the informal ways that we can connect people and make those as many channels as possible.
DB: That's excellent. Yeah. I might incorporate some of those ideas for my own team. So we are all of a sudden at a half past the hour, so I'm going to just scoot us forward, and why don't we go straight to audience questions. So first one, one very reasonable question that came in here is, given the topic, why aren't we sharing video? There is a very reasonable response, I think is we just want to be sure in terms of bandwidth that everyone has a connection and there aren't any issues with that. And video introduces a lot of bandwidth, so moving on from there.
I'm going to field all of these questions anonymously just for the privacy of the audience. But a fantastic question came in which is how you maintain transparency, which both of you guys have emphasized is really important.
Situations like these have you mean maintain transparency without having tons of meetings, right? Sometimes it feels like things can get lost in Slack, so in person meetings or video meetings in a social distancing world can be really helpful. Do you run like a video update to the entire team? Are there other methods or channels you use, um, to maintain transparency? So I think the kind of, the underlying question here is how do we maintain or emphasize transparency without having it be a really manual, meeting intensive message, intensive email kind of thing. How can we better set up like the system of our organization, or the transparency that's so helpful in a super dynamic crisis situation.
DP: Obviously I'm deeply passionate about this because it's a platform for a digital platform for our objectives, our key results, the work that's driving them, their current status. And then the risks we need to talk about in our meetings is what Workboard provides. And for a lot of organizations over the last two years, they've been driving towards be more digital.
So for the companies that have already moved into a place where they're okay, the work streams aligned to those and the risks and progress against those are already on a digital platform. This is enough, this is an easier move, right? And if your team is still actually just using in person to connect with, "where are we on this and where are we on that?" It's a disadvantage. So one of the immediate things is actually shift to a toolset, work order, another one.
But where your OKRs are visible to every member of the team, where the work that's contributing to them is shared and transparent, and where you can go find out for yourself, where are we on that action? That was a high priority that we expected yesterday. And when you can go find that out yourself, you don't need to ping the other person, consume their time responding to you, when they already finished. Think of it as you need a digital platform that connects everybody to the facts on commitments, results, risks, and decisions. And now is the moment to move to a digital, if you will, operating system for the business. Self serve on the facts.
DB: Self serve on the facts. That's a nice clean take away. Nate, tell us about your approach with transparency and keeping it light on the meetings and messages.
NQ: It's great that Deirdre is talking about OKRs and tools for communicating. OKRs: That's the one of the topics of our all hands meeting today that we're having at noon, kind of wrapping up our Q1. OKRs and looking ahead to Q2, OKR finalization and planning, and some team adjustments that we're making there. So we are, we absolutely believe in the OKR framework, that they're just been talking about.
For all the reasons that she's described, think it's a very valuable way to let people just be confident that they're moving in the right direction. And I'm still like, they can move ahead on on those objectives without needing to have a ton of meetings to make sure they're working on the right things. So I do love that focus on using some of our new tools to make it more clear - or kind of what everyone is working on and how it's aligned with the company's objective.
But beyond, you know, OKRs, our tracking: We also have a lot of Tableau charts that are accessible to everyone in the company. So you we we really believe in just show all the data to everybody, or at least make all the data available and people will feel more comfortable and confident if they can see, "Hey, how are we tracking this week?
It seems like things are going to be really bad." You know, what are sales looking like, and what are our volumes looking like, and which products are falling off faster. All of that stuff is available to every member of our team on Tableau. And then we'll also screenshot and share key things that we want to highlight in our general Slack channels as well.
But beyond just sort of the numbers of the platforms on the frameworks and things like that, I do think at a time like this, it's especially important for the CEO to be providing lots of, you know, what would it look like in a public company earnings call setting. MD&A: management discussion and analysis.
It's been interesting for me to hear from my team in addition to looking at the facts, they want to know what's my mate's take on the facts and assuming, hopefully rightly, that the CEO has a good perspective on what's happening both inside of our company and beyond and how that relates to us.
I think it's especially important right now for leaders to be providing more, you know, the boring way to say that there's MD&A around the actual facts and results. But just in general, I'm more present on Slack on our Slack general channel then than I was a month ag, and I feel like the team is waiting to hear my take on the day's news or what I think the most recent results that we're seeing mean for what we ought to do next month.
And looking for me to also be able to provide what we do is talking about the security. Like, are we okay? You know, look: it looks like things are worse than they were two weeks ago. Does that mean that we are still okay or are we going to have to be doing some painful things to adjust and adapt to that?
DB: That's super intriguing. And one element in what you were saying there, Nate, about the earnings call kind of perspective, actually segues directly into another great question that came in from the audience, which is that we've been talking a lot about internal leadership and how to take care of our teams and individual employees. So let's now kind of take that leadership perspective and point it out of the organization. So how are you addressing investors and large customers or clients or end users? Have these uncertain times changed the tenor of that more market-facing leadership?
NQ: I'll jump in just real quickly to talk about on my approach with investors. For example, I had a great boardmember, in my second company - terrific. An experienced investor, a really tough guy who, you know, I had to stay on my toes to sort of provide him what he was looking for, but he had a famous saying that was kind of on his about page. That was, we can take good news, we can take bad news, but we can't take no news. And I've always remembered that.
Since meeting him, I definitely have this sort of like tingling sense in the back of my neck of I'm about to get an email from some investors asking how things are going. I want to be ahead of them. I'm going to send out the email with my perspective on how things are going without making them need to ask me. And I, as a sort of CEO leadership metric for me, I just run an internal tally on investors asking me for news or my providing news proactively and I want to always be on providing this proactively.
DB: Deidre, is there anything you would add about how you're handling leadership communication towards investors or towards the market? And please give us like the 30-second version of that.
DP: Yup. We communicated to our investors two weeks ago what our financial plan was in a V-shaped economy or a U-shaped economy. We immediately drilled into cash horizon. My CFO focused immediately on that, so that we had durability for two and a half years of cash in a U-shaped economy and we had a plan for a V-shaped bounce back that was immediate with our customers.
It's doubled down on how we are helpful to them as they make this move from a co-located, proximity-based management and leadership model to an "everyone is distributed" one. And how do we manage well, how do we lead well from home in a truly distributed world and environment? It's changing incredibly quickly. So transparent durability with our investors and doubling down on being helpful to our customers.
DB: That is very inspiring. Thank you. I'm going to wrap it up. I feel like we could talk for another 40 minutes easily. I wan to thank our guests so much and everybody, check out the writing and the various podcasting both Deidre and Nate have been doing. This has been super, super informing for me. I feel like I got a million story ideas out of this, so thanks to you guys.
I also want to highlight that a week from today we're going to be doing another one of these spotlight webinars, this time focusing on company culture specifically. And again, we have a great set of guests, including Joel Gascoigne, who's the CEO and cofounder of Buffer, as well as Carol Cochran, vice president of people and culture at FlexJobs.
So thank you guys so much, and again, amazing conversation. Deidre and Nate, thank you.
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