#159: Remote Collaboration Must Be More Than Just Videoconferences: Amir Ashkenazi of Switchboard

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. My name is Dr. Glapsipursky and the CEO of Disaster Witness Experts, the future of work consultancy that sponsors the Wise Decision Maker Show. And today with me is Amir Ashkenazi, the CEO of Switchboard. We'll talk about Switchboard later, but I want to start by asking you Amir, what are the biggest challenges for people collaborating in remote settings? Tell me a little bit about your perspective on that. Yeah, this is a fantastic question. You know, we were all thrown into remote work about what, two and a half, three years ago. And we had to manage with the set of tools that we added the time, mostly video conferencing. And I think what made it very difficult is that we've lost some of the things that were obvious for us in the office environment. So for example, in the office environment, the focus is on content. We immediately took the conference, the focus is on faces. We like interacting with people side by side and instead what we got in video conferences, one person pitching to all others. We used proximal tennis beyond multiple tools and video conferencing is limiting us to one tool at a time. We were regular to an environment, the space, the place where things are staying the way you left them. They're permanent. And what we got is a very formal experience where every meeting starts with zero and ends with zero. And I think all of this together got us very stressed. We've lost the spontaneous communication. And it felt very differently. So luckily for us, it saved the economy during the pandemic, but now it's time to think and develop the new generation of collaboration. Now a lot of leaders want teams to get back into the office because they feel exactly the problems that you described. They feel that that's a real serious challenge and they feel well, we need to get back into the office so that we can collaborate together. And that's creating a lot of pushback where workers clearly like working from home, we have surveys indicating that over 85% of people would choose working from home if they're given the option of doing so. And so they're clearly people are voting with their feet and their leaving jobs that don't offer remote work options that are the traditional in office jobs. So what does that say about people's desire to collaborate? They clearly feel comfortable collaborating with your conference software compared to collaborating with an in office environment. What do you think of that? So let's start with the end. Remote is an opportunity to solve many of the problems that we have. Remote is better personally. This is why people prefer flexibility. But remote is also a better way to build a company. Switch mode is a six company. I started five companies before Switchboard. None of them was fully remote. This is the first fully remote. And I can tell you know there is all the discussion about productivity and so on. People completely ignore the most important aspect of remote is that you as a startup or the ability to hire people from anywhere. So the geographical filter of people that live 30 minutes around the office is gone. And the result is that you end up with ability to hire the best people for any job faster. So this is why the comparison is not as simple of always people working either when they're in the office and so on. People need to remember that the ability especially with startups it's all about the people and the ability to hire better people more talented, more skillful is really transformational for the team. And I see it in Switchboard is the best team I've ever had. So do you think that there's a difference between startups which can really focus on talent and large companies which are more hierarchical bureaucratic maybe they're focused more in systems and processes. I see the it's easier for me to speak about startup because I run a startup and I see the advantages every day. Not even going to the you know bigger if you think that world advantages of like solving infrastructure problem and cost of living and big problems cities and countries struggle with. So when it comes to large companies large companies by definition work remote they have multiple offices they need to enable collaboration at a different level. So I think when you actually look at this 100% of the companies need to learn how to collaborate remotely. What do they work remote hybrid or in multiple offices? Yeah, it makes sense. I mean I've helped 21 companies transition to hybrid remote work. A number of them are in the Fortune 500 range and they definitely have already before the pandemic have distributed teams what and the right now we're calling remote work that had to collaborate with each other. So they didn't have as much disruption as many others because their teams were distributed anyway during the pandemic. They just worked from their homes but they already never saw their colleagues who were in India or Singapore or something like that. Let's talk a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey. So what you saw and what you learned. So in your background you said you ran five companies none of them were fully remote and switchboard. So tell me about that experience running those and then starting switchboard which is much more remote. Yeah, so switchboard was started out of my frustration with guitar lessons moving from in person to online, you know, you know, you know, you have a variety of tools, you have notes and a metronome and going back, going to video conference left over the face of the instructor which is less helpful than the other tools that need for the lesson. And I wanted the ability to do things side by side with anyone regarding a self-location. So that is the dream that started switchboard. Before that, you know, I, I don't, careers in interpreting different fields anywhere from e-commerce to video advertising to artificial intelligence started one company that went public and three that were acquired by companies like eBay and AOM. And so you started switchboard. Tell me a little bit about how switchboard addresses some of the challenges that we described in collaboration that Zoom doesn't. Yeah, so first of all, if you think about Zoom or video conferencing in general, we call them collaboration tools but they're really just communication tools. They allow us to see any of each other. They allow us to maybe share a screen but that's pretty much it when we're actually trying to do something together, they fall short. And what we've built the, we've switchboard is a remote collaboration platform that makes it as good as in person. It lets people work side by side on any tool. They don't need to learn new tools. They don't need to force into viewing things only. They can put anything in the switchboard canvas and it becomes immediately collaborative. So the advantages of this approach are many. So first of all, you feel immediately like you're in the same room. You're side by side just like you're in a physical office on any tool on website and it's all interactive and collaborative. The second thing is that it makes meetings more engaging. So instead of the passive view only mode that you're usually in video conference, you're engaged, you're working, it's interactive. And those rooms are permanent, meaning they stay the way you left them. It's just like a physical room. I have a room for every team I work with, every project I'm engaging. And when I want to start the next leadership meeting, for example, I just have to click on the leadership room and all of the tools and documents that we need are there and we could continue from exactly where we left last time. And other advantage is that it brings back this spontaneous communication. So you can see where the team is, you can see what rooms are active right now and you can connect with a click. So you don't need to schedule things in advance. And last but not least, it's a very secure environment because at the core, we run those applications in the cloud, the cloud browsers. They isolate your local machine from malicious code. Okay. Now, I have a lot of clients who are right now trying to figure out hybrid meetings. And so having some people remote, having some people in the office, how does switchboard play into that situation? Yeah. IBID is the most difficult model. Yeah, that's what I was talking about. We're not looking at the office. We're fully remote. We're figuring out too. IBID is difficult. Um. And the reason is that you need to keep everybody on the same page informed in exactly the same way. And what I like about Switchboard rooms is that they keep the situation. They're the hub for collaboration. They have all of the information and the history of all the conversations. So regardless if you are in the meeting physically or participating firm in remote location, you have the same access for information and decision making as anybody else. And I think leaders, you know, a lot of it is about leadership and being intentional about how you manage the team. So, and there are different challenges for remote for remote and hybrid we can discuss those separately. In I would specifically you need to make sure that they are all at the same distance, regardless of physical distance that they are all have complete access to the materials that the voices area that there is no proximity bias, meaning there is no preference for people that are actually with you in the same room. That that's what I find difficult kind of the proximity bias when I'm facilitating meetings for clients, the proximity bias is a definite issue in way to work hard to create norms and etiquette, which address the proximity bias, but it would be great if there were ways that we didn't have to push so hard to address this problem right kind of in from behavioral science perspective, that's kind of my background. I know you have to push against the natural to which for proximity bias, but that's definitely challenging to keep having to do so. It is especially challenging when it comes to performance and evaluation, because leaders tend to prefer or evaluate based on what they see. In the remote environment or hybrid, it is more challenging, but I think it is challenging in actually a very good way, because you don't want to evaluate based on face time hours, you actually want to evaluate the impact. Remote is giving you the opportunity really to be blind of hours on the keyboard or just a face time and think about the impact of every single team member. Talking about blindness, one of the things about remote work that is really interesting and impactful is that it decreases for people who come from underrepresented backgrounds, it increases microaggressions, it decreases discrimination, tell me a little bit more about how switchboard represents different people in their switchboard environment and how it intersects with diversity, equity, inclusion, concerns. The geographical filter that you have to apply when you hire locally is the worst problem with diversity and inclusion. You basically excluded 99% of the population because they don't live in a commute distance from the office. This is why remote as the potential of really helping to solve those problems. We are all over the US and we are getting at the worst set of candidate because we are open to all occasion. We are just opening an office in mountain view. You look 30 minutes from mountain view and you get pretty much the same socio-economic background for all candidates. I am going to introduce to the entire country my pipeline is more diverse. I have to it's easier for me to build a diverse group because I have not limited it with some arbitrary filters that really discriminate against many, many groups by definition. I definitely have decided to hire fully remotely or across the country. I am finding that there are getting a lot more people from underrepresented groups applying for those positions. Black people, Hispanic people, disabilities of course, not quite right, much easier for them to work remotely. I am wondering if that is something that you are seeing to the pipeline is naturally more remote for the more diverse positions because people who come from underrepresented backgrounds prefer to remote positions more. Of course. That makes a lot of sense. I think that we are very traditional in how they want to collab. They want everyone to be back in the office. Obviously they don't know how to collaborate very well in remote settings. I think that is the reason why we are working with the companies that choose not to have remote options as part of their toolkit. Among the companies that can work remote, those that adopt this style will win the war for talent. It is more appealing to the workforce and you mentioned it yourself, 85% actually prefer the flexibility that comes with remote. You add this to the fact that you basically open your pool to a much larger set of candidates and you will see that the remote companies have a substantial advantage when it comes to talent. What you will see is that in just few years the leading startups are going to be fully remote. We are forced into it but we had to learn how to adapt our processes and how to work remote. You have to be very intentional in everything that is different. The weekly meeting, the one-on-ones, the performance review, all need to be adapted to remote work. I personally believe that it is far superior and you will see the next Google or the next unicorn coming more often than not from fully remote startups. It makes sense to me. It sounds like Zoom and other video conference platforms. They allow a range of collaboration in remote settings. Switchboard allows more collaboration. I am curious from your perspective, what does not switchboard do that in person still does better than something like switchboard does? It is a great question. We need to be clear that working remote does not mean that you never see other people in your team. We are under cadence of meeting twice a year and we then spend about a week together. It is important. I do not feel that I miss anything in terms of creativity or productivity. I do think that in person meeting create connection, create an opportunity to know the other person. There is a level of commitment between team members that is difficult to create on any digital only platform. This is why we chose to meet twice a year. That makes sense. What is wrapping up? Is there anything about hybrid and remote work that you still wish to share that I have a test? Anything else but switchboard you wish to share? The amazing thing is that we find more use cases almost on a daily basis. Currently people use switchboard rooms for team rooms for those recurring things like stand-ups and sprint planning and so on. They do it because it saves all the preparation time. The rooms are permanent as I mentioned. Then we see different groups using it for project rooms. That can be to update status or for incident response. We have dev ops. The first line in the book is go to the switchboard room because they have various all of the telemetry that they need to control the incident, find the cause and solve the problem. That brings speed and clarity to any project and so on. The last group of rooms that we see and that we're very excited about is all of those that are related to the relationship between companies and our customers. If you think about it, we became very transactional. Like interfaces between companies became web interface. We prefer not to talk this product like growth and we're product like growth. I love the trend, but it's very efficient, but we've lost something in the connection between companies by doing so. So we have many customers that choose to open customers room for sales demo and onboarding and training and customer support. And at the end of the day, if you have a problem or question, there's nothing like sitting side by side with a representative on the other side that can show you how to solve the problem. So that really we've seen proven to reduce customer churn and and bring back the, you know, deeper connection between a company and their customers. Sounds like a useful use case. Great. Where can people find switch board? What website could you direct them to? It's easy switch board dot app, a pp. And you can sign up and start using it immediately. There is nothing to download, nothing to install every SaaS application and website works out of the gate is no integration record. And there is a free trial. Excellent. Well, thank you very much. This was very helpful. All right. Everyone. This has been another episode of the wisest vision maker show. Again, my name is Dr. Gletsy Pursky. I'm the CEO of disaster voice experts. The future work consultancy that sponsors the wisest vision maker show. Please make sure to review, leave a review for this podcast, whatever you check it out and subscribe to it as well. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode of the wisest vision maker show. And the wisest most profitable decisions to you, my friends.