Ben Love [00:00:01]:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to today’s webinar. Today we’re going to be talking about remote work done right, so IT strategies here to help your remote team thrive. Let me just find the right button to push. There we go. So, quick introduction to Grassroots IT we are a technology services provider. We are based in Brisbane, Australia, but of course we provide services all over Australia and New Zealand with our extended workforce. Excuse me. We specialize in three key areas.

Ben Love [00:00:49]:
IT and cloud, cybersecurity and data and automation. Specifically, though, a couple of things I’d like to mention here that really speak to our credentials to be talking about our topic today. Grassroots it was founded in 2005. We’re coming up on 20 years old now. We employed our first offshore staff member in 2014. Now, that was a bit of a success and it was a bit of a nod of success. There was a lot of learnings that we took from that and we started our journey into to not just remote work or hybrid work, as we’re calling it now, but also offshore teams, which adds another element to IT altogether when you start to bring in different cultures. We now have a very, very resilient workforce, a hybrid workforce covering five countries.

Ben Love [00:01:45]:
We have staff in Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Norway. And we are a very resilient workforce. The way our organization is structured, the technology that we have underlying all of that, the tools that we use, but also a lot of the processes and behaviors and strategies that we bring to that particular team structure. And that’s really where I’m going to be talking more today. We’re going to be covering three key areas to help your remote team thrive. We’re going to be talking about asynchronous work. We’re going to be talking about building and of course, maintaining those real human connections and finally providing seamless access to your systems. Now, these are anecdotes from Grassroots it.

Ben Love [00:02:38]:
This is how we work. These are strategies which we have developed over the last decade or more, and we live and breathe these every day. So firsthand experience on these ones. So let’s launch in Mastering asynchronous work. Now, the way I’ve described that on the page, there is people working without having to engage with each other in real time. Now, love it or hate it, asynchronous work is the reality of the world that we are now living in. Particularly if you have staff across different time zones or if you have staff who work some sort of hybrid arrangement, it might be from home or the office. If you have staff who job share.

Ben Love [00:03:25]:
So you might have two part time workers covering the equivalent of an fte. Asynchronous work really is integral to the way we need to be working efficiently in all of our organizations. So I want to touch on a couple of the ways at Grassroots IT that we support that model of asynchronous working. The first one here is to understand who’s doing what and where they’re up to on the task. Now for a lot of our activity. For those who already engage with Grassroots IT for our clients on the call here you will know that we have a ticketing system which is the focal point of a lot of our activity. Now if we are talking about service tickets or project delivery, it often happens. Well, it does happen within that particular system.

Ben Love [00:04:14]:
Now I’m not going to talk about that piece of software, that system, because that is very, very specific to what we do and to our industry. It’s called ConnectWise for those who care. But what I want to put in front of you today is Microsoft Planner. Now, Microsoft Planner is a part of your Microsoft 365 subscription. It is a relatively lightweight task management application. You can track tasks that need to be done. You can assign them to people, you can track their progress as they work through tasks. It has a number of different views and ways that you can see what’s going on.

Ben Love [00:04:49]:
Kanban is a very popular view, but it also shows calendars and charts, views and so on. You can build out checklists within tasks for the, I guess the sub items that need to be delivered for a particular task. You can attach files, documents, images and so on. Now at Grassroots IT we use Microsoft Planner extensively in two key areas. First of all is within our marketing team and in fact that screenshot that you’ve got there at the moment is our the planner that we use to track all of our marketing activity. So for us this covers things like blog posts that we’re writing, ebooks that we’re creating and publishing, maybe graphics we’re preparing for social media posts, events that we’re going to be hosting, such as this webinar, such as our Executive Lunch and Learns and Executive Roundtable lunches. All of those things are tracked here within this planner. Now that’s extremely useful because Rachel, our marketing coordinator who’s on the call this morning.

Ben Love [00:05:51]:
Hello Rachel. She works not full time, she works part time and she is really quite autonomous from me because we work together on the marketing stuff. So by using Planner and by Rachel keeping that planner really quite up to date along with notes in Each of the tasks about where she’s up to, tracking activity with checklists. It means that both of us are on the same page with what’s happening, where particular tasks are up to, where blocks may be and where other opportunities are. So that’s the first thing I’ll put in front of you there. Now I will say that Microsoft Planner, as I’ve written on the page there is relatively light waste now for Grassroots. It. It serves a fantastic purpose.

Ben Love [00:06:34]:
It does, it does an excellent job. But if you do need a more hardcore task management application, there are certainly other options on the market. Might not be Microsoft Planner. Actually, I forgot to mention the other. The second key area that we use Microsoft Planner here in the business is for our level 10 meetings. So for those who are familiar with EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system, and using that as a way to really run your business and gain traction with a lot of your activity in your business, there are key meetings that happen each week at different levels in the organization and within different teams called Level 10 meetings. Now we use Microsoft Planner within each of those meetings to track all of the activities, what are the issues we need to be talking about, what are the tasks and to do’s that come out of those meetings and so on. Works extremely well for us.

Ben Love [00:07:28]:
All right, the next thing I want to talk about here in terms of asynchronous work is document collaboration. Now again, this isn’t brand new, these are features that you may very well be familiar with. But I do want to point them out here because they are a key part of how we actually get a lot done at Grassroots. It. So the screenshot that’s on the page there at the moment is from a Word document, Microsoft Word document, that it’s a draft of a blog post actually that Rachel and I were collaborating on. Actually not just Rachel and me, there was, there was James, there was probably a couple of other people who were all collaborating on this one document. Now of course, with that document in Microsoft 365, we can collaborate in real time on that. One person can type changes into the document.

Ben Love [00:08:14]:
Everybody else will see those changes appear in real time. But importantly, there are features in here that do allow us to work asynchronously. So James, for example, who works out of New Zealand and works on the New Zealand time zone, can come into this document, add his comments, thoughts, edits, et cetera, when it suits him during that day. And those document, those sorry comments and so on will be there for me to review when I sit down and I turn My attention to this particular task. So there are two particular features that are demonstrated in that screenshot there. One of them is commenting. So along the right hand side you’ll see that black strip. Now you can quite simply right click anywhere in a Word document or an Excel document or a PowerPoint file, whatever, and you can add a comment.

Ben Love [00:08:59]:
And in that comment you can tag another person in your organization using the little symbol and they will get a message saying, hey, you’ve been tagged in this with a comment. Please click here to read the comment. And so as you can see, you can then have this threaded comment discussion with, well, two or more people to refine a particular section or area within that document. Now of course, you could do that off in Microsoft Teams, or you could send an email or what have you. The benefit of doing that though within the document is that it is within context. Now the second feature that we’re seeing on that screenshot there is edits and suggestions. So if you look in the text down the bottom left hand side, you’ll see the green text and some’s underlined and it’s a different font and different things there. Now that’s a particular feature that was turned on in this document which basically tracks changes.

Ben Love [00:09:53]:
So in this instance here, I think it was James. James added those two dot points down the bottom there. Now rather than just adding those new words and that new text into the documents, it’s highlighted it as a change and it’s there for me as the document owner to look at that, to decide whether I like those changes, to edit them, to move them around or what have you before I click another button and accept those changes and actually just accept them into the main document. So again, another really great way that multiple people can work asynchronously on a single document and everybody knows what’s going on, irrespective of when they come and look at the document. You don’t have to get everybody in the same room in real time to collaborate on that document. All right, video messages. This one’s actually pretty cool. So this is a little feature that you may even not be aware of, to be honest, in Microsoft Teams.

Ben Love [00:10:55]:
Now we all know in Microsoft Teams, it’s fantastic for having a video call. So a one on one, a many to many, or indeed as we’re doing at the moment in this very webinar, more of a one to many type video call. But what you can also do in there, it’s a feature very similar to leaving a voicemail, but what you’re doing is you’re leaving a video message for the person. So when you’re in Microsoft Teams there in the chat section, you can see the bottom red arrow there. You click on that little button there, and it’ll bring up a list of things that you can add to the chat. And one of them is that you can record that. That video clip. So when you click on that, it’ll bring up another window.

Ben Love [00:11:34]:
It’s pretty straightforward. You can record a video of yourself speaking, just like I am now, or you can record a video of you sharing, pardon me, sharing one of your screens, sharing some content from your own computer. So what I’ve just added on that screenshot there, down the bottom, you’ll note that this is a little video recording that I’ve left for James, I think it was of just myself, just a talking head with a bit of a voice message for him there in the top section of the screenshot. That’s a recording that I’ve left him of me demonstrating an application, demonstrating some webpage that I needed him to see about. Now, this is a fantastic way of being able to demonstrate something to somebody that’s happening on your computer without having to do it in real time. You can do this asynchronously. So, for example, if you need to help a colleague with a particular feature in the software, or you need to prove to them that in the spreadsheet, one plus one actually does equal three, whatever the case may be, you can record a video clip here of your screen and simply send it to them like that. As I said, similar to a voicemail.

Ben Love [00:12:45]:
And then when they get that message asynchronously, when it suits them, they will be able to play that video and get the message. So these video recordings are a fantastic little opportunity for that. Now, one frustration, personally I do have with Microsoft Teams and their video messages is that they are limited to one minute. Now, that’s probably not a bad thing in context, but sometimes it’s pretty easy to talk for more than a minute. The top screenshot you see there of that tool I’m demonstrating is actually another tool. It’s called loom. It’s nothing to do with Microsoft or Microsoft 365, but it is another tool which lets you do the same sort of thing, but with much, much larger videos. All right, let’s move on to our second of our major areas here.

Ben Love [00:13:34]:
And this is about building that real human connection. Now, I said earlier on that we added our very first offshore staff member in 2014. I think it was almost 10 years ago. It actually seems like longer to be honest, but I looked it up and that’s what it was. So that was quite successful in the sense that he was able to get a lot of work done. His name was Norman. He was a lovely guy based in the Philippines. He was able to get a lot of work done.

Ben Love [00:14:05]:
He was relatively good at what he did. But ultimately the experience I don’t think worked super successful. I think we learned a lot of lessons from that and we’ve gone on, I think, to do it far more successfully. And one of the really big things that we missed with Norman was this piece here. It was actually building that real human connection. Because we didn’t know how to do that at the time. We kind of thought, yeah, that’s probably important to do, but we didn’t actually have any techniques or strategies that we could bring to bear to actually make that happen. So even though Norman was very good at his job and we appreciated everything that he did for us and we thought of him as a member of our team, the human to human connection really just wasn’t there.

Ben Love [00:14:48]:
So this is a really critical part here. So the first strategy I’m going to put in front of you here is that at grassroots it, we have a significant bias for video. Okay, now I’ll explain a bit more about what that means. So when you’re communicating with one of your team who is not physically in front of you, right, they might be working from home, overseas, whatever. Now teams chat is, okay, the text messages, right? Within teams, we use that a lot, right. We have quite a significant amount of chatter, to be honest, that goes on on teams, but it generally starts to fail for extended or more detailed discussions. So as soon as we start to get the feeling that this conversation is not just a quick 1, 2, 3, back and forth, we need to look for better strategies. Now fundamentally here, we don’t do any non video calls.

Ben Love [00:15:41]:
By that, I guess what I mean is we don’t do voice only calls. We don’t do phone calls, we don’t pick up the phone and phone another member of our team. Whether it’s phone or via teams or teams voice only or what have you. We always have a very significant bias to using video. All of our regular and scheduled meetings are on video. We have multiple scheduled meetings across the various teams and levels throughout the week. All those level tens I mentioned before and all of those of course are on video on Microsoft Teams. Now some of those meetings might have two people in them, some of them might have 20 something people.

Ben Love [00:16:20]:
In them, but they are all definitely on video. If we need to have any of those ad hoc conversations with people as well. Again, we have a very strong bias for video. Now, this last one I’ve got here, this is super important, to be honest. We have a policy in grassroots. IT One remote, all remote. Now, what I mean by that is if you are having a meeting with three or more people, if one of those people is remote, right, so would need to join the meeting via video, then everybody must be on their own computer connected to video. One thing that we really don’t want to happen is that we have, let’s say, three or four people sitting here at the boardroom table and one person on the video conferencing gear on the end on the big tv, right, Participating in that meeting because it significantly alters the balance of communication, the balance of engagement and involvement with everybody in that entire meeting.

Ben Love [00:17:25]:
It is startling how different the experience is when you have some people who are. Who are physically in person together in a meeting and other people who are joining that same meeting remotely. So if we have anybody who needs to be remote, we all go remote. We all go and sit back at our desks, we put on our headsets and we join a video meeting. And it keeps everybody on the same level, equitable, participating in that meeting on equal footing. For those who haven’t tried it, who haven’t paid attention to the. To the. To the difference in how a meeting feels.

Ben Love [00:18:00]:
If you’ve got some people in person and some remote, I would encourage you to pay attention. Next time it happens, Next time you’re sitting in that boardroom with the video conferencing rig up on the wall. This is a really important one for grassroots it, and I stand by it very firmly. Team huddles. Now, I mentioned that we meet quite a lot during the week. Some of that’s ad hoc, some of that’s level 10 operational meetings or more strategy meetings. We also have our team huddles. Now, team huddles are when we come together as a bigger group on video, of course, on teams.

Ben Love [00:18:40]:
And we. We come together as a group and we just catch up, to be honest, we make a lot of effort to make sure that it’s light and fun. We make sure it’s very quick and keeps moving and it’s high energy. Right? You don’t want to let these things get bogged down. And we have a different cadence of our team huddles throughout the week. So for Monday to Friday week, we have Monday, Wednesday and Friday, we have Full team huddles. Now for us, that’s 25 something people joining in from, as I said, five different countries around the world. So you’ve got to pay attention to time zones to make this happen here.

Ben Love [00:19:23]:
And we get everybody in there and it really is a quick lightning catch up for everybody. How was your weekend? What are you doing with the coming weekend? What’s your win for the day? And there is a lot of jokes, there’s a lot of joviality, a lot of fun that comes out of it. On the Tuesday and Thursday, we also have huddles, but they’re in smaller operational team. So our service delivery team have got their huddle, finance and admin team have got their huddle, and so on on those intervening days. So now this is probably less of an asynchronous technique here. This is a very synchronous technique. But that’s obviously the point, you know, and when we have people who do miss out on those huddles, my goodness, it makes a big difference. So, for example, it wasn’t that long ago that we had somebody move over to Norway, as I mentioned.

Ben Love [00:20:12]:
And so we now have somebody in Norway, which is a significantly different time zone to all of the other time zones that we’ve been working in to date. So we’ve shifted the time of our huddle at least once a week so that that person is now back engaged with the huddle because, you know, what she was missing out? You know, she was missing it. She was saying to us, you know, I really miss the huddle. I really miss the team and connecting and having a joke and stuff. So, you know, really, really valuable there. And as I said, we keep it light, we keep it fun, we keep it quick. So one of the fun little tools that we use is a thing called Kahoot. If you Google it, you’ll find it.

Ben Love [00:20:49]:
I’ve got no idea where it came from, but every week we have a Kahoot and there’s a different theme involved and everybody jumps in there. It’s like a quiz and everybody puts in their answers and we have the, you know, the leaderboard about who’s winning the kahoot and so on. And it’s a lot of fun. It keeps everybody really engaged. There’s a lot of chatter up afterwards, you know, people comparing notes about how on earth did you know that bizarre, random fact, you know, that you. That you got right and everybody else got wrong? So that’s a lot of fun. One of the other things that we obviously do is that we sing Happy Birthday when it is somebody’s birthday now, we do it in quite a unique way as it’s evolved over the years. It is.

Ben Love [00:21:33]:
We sing the most awful rendition of Happy Birthday that we possibly can. To be fair, it’s probably not possible to sing a good rendition of Happy birthday with 25 people on a teams call, but we try and make it as truly awful as it can be. And it sounds like a funeral dirge half the time, to be honest, but it is truly hilarious. So just little fun little things like that, keep it quick, keep it light. Everybody loves it, keeps it. Everyone connected. Okay, viva. Now this is squarely a Microsoft tool here.

Ben Love [00:22:05]:
So VIVA is like a. It’s part of your Microsoft 365 environment. I think every 365 subscriptions. Got it. It’s like a social media platform, but just for your business. Think of kind of Facebook without all the cat memes and more. Just a little bit about your business. So we actually use VIVA quite extensively for a range of things.

Ben Love [00:22:31]:
And I’ve just got some screenshots here, some examples of how we use it. So what you see there, that is a post that I put up at some stage, just teaching the team really about one of the key metrics, one of the key KPIs that we track in the service delivery here. There are some new people on the team who haven’t heard of a kill rate before. And it’s just these little educational pieces just to keep everybody informed and up to date. We have a bit of fun, right? There are some different communities there that we’ve got in our VIVA where we post. Gosh, I don’t know. I was growing tomatoes. Got quite serious about growing tomatoes.

Ben Love [00:23:10]:
I think it was during COVID Everybody needs a Covid hobby, right? So I was posting photos here of my most successful tomatoes and then when the rodents got into my tomatoes, posting a very upset face. The funny screenshot here of a call that James and I were on. We’re massive on team recognition here, by the way. So whenever anybody sends in positive feedback to any of our team here, we grab that, we celebrate it internally, we talk about it in those huddles that I was talking about. But another thing we do is we stick it up here on viva. We create these silly looking meme type pages here with the feedback from the customer, from the client, and really calling out and celebrating the person who’s got that amazing feedback. And that goes up on VIVA as well for everybody to see and share it. Also, this is actually an interesting point we Also actually print that out in big A3 in color and it’s stuck up on the wall here.

Ben Love [00:24:06]:
So for anybody who’s ever visited our office here, you’ll know the meme wall. So it’s a big wall and it’s wall papered essentially with A3 printouts of all of this amazing client feedback that we get. But of course that’s no good for staff who aren’t physically here in this particular Brisbane office. So those same things go up on Viva and we really try and make it very inclusive for everybody there. And the last one here, what’s this one? Oh, this is camo. So the professional develop of development, ongoing professional development is a significant thing here at Grassroots it, and this is a great example. Cameron’s gone away and he’s done some learning at a particular conference or a webinar, I’m not sure what it was, and he’s actually brought back and summarized some of the key learnings that he’s had here for the rest of the team so that we can start to share some of that knowledge and experience with the rest of the team. And Viva is the perfect platform to do that on.

Ben Love [00:25:05]:
So just like Facebook too, when you put a post on Viva, everybody can comment on it. So you can have the comments and the questions and the feedback and everything that comes in that threaded commenting underneath Viva. So that’s another useful one for us as well. All right, so I’m going to hit here on the third major topic here, which is providing that seamless access to systems. So irrespective of a physical location, it really is critical that staff have the same access to corporate systems. Right? You do not want anybody who works from home or who works offshore or remotely in whatever context, to feel like a second class citizen when it comes to having seamless access to your systems. Now that can start with having the right equipment. They’ve got to have a good computer, they’ve got to have two monitors and a keyboard and a mouse and whatever your normal setup is, people need to have the right equipment, irrespective of their physical location.

Ben Love [00:26:04]:
A couple of other things that we use that contribute a lot to this as well, teams calling is one of them. So teams calling is essentially when your phone system, your normal phone system goes through Microsoft Teams. So you don’t have separate physical handsets on the desk, you don’t have a separate application for you to use. It’s literally all there within Microsoft Teams. What that means is, irrespective of where our people are sitting at home, At a client site, at the office, whatever, they’re logged onto teams obviously, because that’s a key part of how we operate. And they’ve got their telephone sitting there, right there with them. It’s a fantastic setup too for multi office setups. So for example, if you’ve got two or three offices around the place, by putting it all in teams calling, you’re really bringing all of that together.

Ben Love [00:26:51]:
So you can start to do some cool stuff with. If the receptionist is at lunch at that office, then the receptionist at the other one can catch all the calls. A lot of cool stuff like that. But teams calling, it’s there, it’s a feature, so it’s fantastic. If you haven’t looked at that yet, suggest you do so. Azure Virtual Desktop. Okay, now I will say grassroots. It is not currently using Azure Virtual Desktop.

Ben Love [00:27:16]:
We currently have no specific need for this. However, we have used this technology in the past when the need was there. But I want to run through some of the scenarios in which Azure Virtual Desktop can be extremely useful for that remote workforce. The first one is really simplifying device requirements and management. Azure Virtual Desktop basically gives your people, your staff members, a Windows environment within which to work just like they were working at a normal Windows computer. But all of that functionality is actually happening in the Microsoft Azure cloud. It’s not happening on their own computer that’s on the desk in front of them. All they’re doing on the computer that’s in front of them is they’re seeing the screen updates and using a keyboard.

Ben Love [00:28:03]:
But all the heavy lifting is being done in the Microsoft Azure cloud. So what that means is that the computer that people are using or the computing device that people are using is far less important. So you can give somebody a Windows Desktop environment on an Apple iPad, for example, a lot of good opportunities like that around that. AVD is fantastic for extending legacy applications to remote workers. So what do I mean by that? So before we had all these amazing web based applications, all these SaaS applications, it was pretty common to have a network application, a business application where there was a server component which had to physically sit on a server in your office which held the database and what have you. And then there was the client application which was installed on all of your computers and it connected back to that database. Now applications like that are quite old, that particular design structure and they were designed for the server, the database, the users, the computers, everything to be physically within the same office where you’ve got high speed network running from your server room out to the desk. Now, when we’re working remotely, we don’t have that.

Ben Love [00:29:23]:
Those applications can really struggle and suffer a lot when you try and run them over wider distances over the Internet, that sort of thing. AVD as your virtual desktop is the perfect solution for those legacy applications. So in order to make sure that your remote workers have equal access into those legacy applications which they may need, AVD is a great option there. Graphics intensive applications can also be well suited for avd. So again, if you’ve got intensive CAD or video design applications that people need to use, you can put them up into AVD and it gives people equal access to them, irrespective of whether they’re sitting in your office or working from home on a computer that might not otherwise be up to the task. Data protection is a great one too, particularly for those of us with offshore teams, especially for those of us who have some sort of regulatory or legislative importance on keeping our data under tight control, maybe onshore here in Australia. AVD is a great way of letting those remote workers access your data, access your applications, do their job, but you actually still retain centralised, very tight, centralised control of all of your data here on Australian shores. So very popular there for accounting firms for that sort of thing, who do have offshore teams.

Ben Love [00:30:54]:
And the final point I’ve got here under this one is Microsoft Intune. Microsoft Intune is a piece of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. It is more technical, it’s not a user facing type thing. It’s a bit behind the scenes. One thing it helps with is device management. So it makes sure that all of your laptops, desktop computers, what have you, even mobile phones actually, are all properly updated with the latest configurations. You know where they are, when they are, you can remote wipe them. You can do a lot of that cool sort of stuff.

Ben Love [00:31:26]:
It allows for remote application management. So you can make sure that all of the necessary applications are automatically installed on all of the computers and mobile phones and so on. That needs to be. And security, it’s very good at enforcing a lot of security, security policy, security settings and so on, that are very important as well. And all of this really comes down ultimately to making sure that the computing environment and the access to your core systems is fair and equitable and equal to all of your staff, irrespective of where they may be physically located. So Intune is just a very useful tool that lets all that happen very seamlessly and that’s the end of the story. So I hope that was of use and of value to people flying, overview of some of the strategies, some of the IT tools and techniques that grassroots IT has been using for almost a decade now to help our very, very dispersed workforce thrive and continue to perform at the extremely high level that they do. Thank you everybody for attending.

Ben Love [00:32:43]:
And of course, as always, if you have any questions whatsoever, please don’t hesitate to reach out.