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SPEAKER: So let's begin with you telling us a little bit about yourself.
CHRIS KOEHLER: My name is Chris Koehler.
I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at Box.
We're a Silicon Valley-based software company
around cloud content management.
So think basically one secure platform for all of your content in the cloud.
CHRIS KOEHLER: So Raj Patel.
I am the former CFO of a company called Eyeglass Technologies.
I'm currently a senior advisor for finance and analytics
and technology at a company called Beehive3D.
CARA SHORTSLEEVE: So my name is Cara Shortsleeve,
and I currently serve as a CEO of a company
called The Leadership Consortium.
We're a growth company.
We focus on leadership development, most predominantly for women and Black
and Indigenous people of color.
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SPEAKER: What was the transition to remote work like for you?
CHRIS KOEHLER: We were, I would say a headquarters based company
with people spread around the globe, but we weren't a remote company.
We made this decision to send everyone home,
and say, OK, no more coming into the office around the globe.
We're going to shut this down.
We pretty much had the tools and infrastructure,
and luckily, our product is actually cloud-based for all of your content,
so everyone at Box could access all of their critical information.
So it's pretty easy for us to basically send everyone home
and they could be productive day 0.
CARA SHORTSLEEVE: The business I run today, we do a lot of remote work,
and we have since we launched the business, actually.
I think a lot of the practices we put in place together
as an organization definitely served us well.
From an operations standpoint, we can act as a team every day no matter what.
We have a standing call, it's quick.
We call it our stand up, and it's a time for the full team to come together.
Connecting not only in the business but allowing us to connect personally,
so that definitely carried us through.
RAJ PATEL: The first thing that we ensured
we did was we ensure that all of our infrastructure was in the cloud.
And everyone had a laptop, so that automatically
made it possible that our employees were at least connected online,
and there was a sense of community.
SPEAKER: You said that you had systems and practices in place that carried you
through.
Can you give us examples of what those were?
CARA SHORTSLEEVE: I have a fun captain on every and every team I've ever run.
[LAUGHTER]
So I'm a huge fan of, this has to bring you joy.
We do more time working than anything other than sleeping,
and so it better be worth it, and so we had some practices already in place,
where we do show and tell and we exchange stories
and we do goofy things that were already second nature to us,
and therefore, as they carried us through a more demanding time,
it didn't feel gimmicky.
It didn't feel like something we had to put in place,
but we already had some texture for one another
and how to connect, even when it's not the ideal setting.
RAJ PATEL: We made sure that Mondays and Fridays, we talk to the entire team,
and they could ask any question.
Nothing is off limits.
If they're nervous and they didn't want to ask a question,
they were welcome to call the CEO or myself, and anything.
CHRIS KOEHLER: As any Silicon Valley company, we had a lot of office perks
around the globe.
Not just in the Bay Area, but all of our offices have the snacks and the areas
and ping pong and people to collaborate and basically
just take a time to step away from their desk or conference room
and spend some time with their colleagues.
And so when you don't have that experience, how do you
replicate that in a digital world?
So we would try to do things like happy hours.
We would do trivia at night.
We would do Halloween contests.
You're trying to bring some levity to the situation, where
it's really, really hard as we're all adjusting to this.
We got into a groove, and we got into it.
So people still want to connect with their colleagues,
just in a much different way.
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SPEAKER: You're now working remotely.
People are equipped to a certain extent.
What were some of the challenges that you
faced, that people faced that you heard about even at this point?
CHRIS KOEHLER: The big one is, how do you maintain culture?
How do you maintain the norms?
What's acceptable, what's not?
We had to embrace this notion of bringing our colleagues into our homes
and seeing access to a much more personal perspective in our lives,
and maybe it's our kids jumping into the room and interrupting,
our dogs barking, or a lot of people don't have offices or workspaces,
and they're working from their kitchen office and that sort of thing.
We had to reestablish what all the norms were as part of this
and keeping that culture going that we had there was very office based, very
in person, and trying to bring that to a digital first, digital only environment
was difficult for sure.
CARA SHORTSLEEVE: The biggest difference was
people had a different level of just competing priorities,
and it was managing through that that was the most difficult part for us.
The whole life aspect of it.
We run a business, we're in the client services sector,
and so we had a lot of customers going through a great deal of change.
And so volume of work was increasing at the same time
when really the capacity of team members is inherently
decreasing a bit, given the amount of just extracurricular activity that's
coming into their lives.
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SPEAKER: What untold opportunities or benefits
did remote work bring to you personally and others in your organization?
RAJ PATEL: Being home with family, I would say,
is a big, big benefit of being able to work remote.
I'm not sitting in traffic.
Easily two hours a day lost.
It's also given me the opportunity to work on my own personal development.
I think, because there's more time, I'm able to set aside
some time to work on THINGS where I know I have a blind spot.
CHRIS KOEHLER: Depends on the type of personality
you are, but if you're in an environment where you're less distracted
and maybe a little bit more of an introvert,
introverts might be thriving through a lot of this, where they don't have
the noise and the people and people coming up
to their desk or their environment to distract them.
Being able to get a little bit weirdly more personal with your team members,
because you are seeing access to their lives and what they're doing
and what they're challenging, and so I feel like my team is actually-- we're
probably closer as a leadership team than we would have
been if everyone was in the office.
CARA SHORTSLEEVE: First and foremost, I'm
a huge fan of the time you get back.
So just as an example, I'm in the United States,
I live in the East Coast of the United States,
and I used to commute from my suburb into a city for work,
and that was an hour and 20 minutes each way every day,
and that's just part of what a lot of people do every single day.
So when you think of the time that you save
when you can do your work in a more conducive way closer to your home
or at your home, it's amazing.
So I'm a huge fan of, there's so much you gain.
You have to use that time well, you got to use it productively,
you need to guard it, but that is more time in your day.
The other thing that I'm a huge fan of.
I've worked places where the headquarters of my operation
is somewhere else, and you are ever aware of not being
in the room, quote unquote, right?
And there's a Broadway show, go see Hamilton, who is in the room?
So there's something that is very--
that I think is really democratizes access to opportunity, to scope,
where if there's literally nobody in a room,
it's almost as though every he has an equal shot at trying
to make their voice heard and trying to affect the course of the business.
So again, I think there's huge upside.
It obviously comes with challenges, but I
think the benefit is you get amazing time back
and you've obviously the opportunity to use that productively
and then hopefully it gives you access to opportunity and scope
that might not have been available to you before.
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