👥 The opportunities and challenges of moving in-person teams remote and back again-with Seth Berman, Senior Director, Performance Marketing at Adobe 🏗️

Our guest today is Seth Berman, senior director of performance marketing at Adobe. Today, we are taking a departure from UA and marketing, by delving into what has affected the world for the last year: the pandemic and the resulting remote work situation.

Seth talks about how his team had to cope with moving remote almost overnight. He examines the unique learnings he has experienced as a leader, and how he plans to use them in the future. In what way is remote work an equalizer? In what ways does it make it easier for underrepresented folks to ‘hide’? We look at these and many more questions.

After a year, remote work is set to end, and life will slowly return to normal. How does that look for teams that will get back to offices? We discuss all that and more in this episode. Enjoy.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🦋 The changed mindset with respect to remote work

🗺️ Opportunities and threats of hiring talent located anywhere in the world

🔥 The impact of easily accessible top talent

🇺🇸 The continuing trend of US jobs being offshored

💻 The grand equalizer of a video meeting

🚗 No one misses commuting

✍️ How a writing culture is conducive to remote work

📧 Asynchronous work is the key to successful remote work

🌄 The rise of Slack and Zoom

💐 How to be fair to everyone

🏋️ How managerial overhead is set to increase in hybrid situations

🗣️ Why remote workers will lose out on micro interactions

⚖️ The challenges of remote work and the undeniable benefits

🥰 The rise of empathy

KEY QUOTES

There is a downside to a globally accessible talent pool.

The flip side to that is that it does put pressure over time on wages for average performers. Nobody wants to think of themselves as a B-player, but there are B-players out there. If a company can hire somebody anywhere, then they’re not necessarily going to need to settle for anything less than the best, just by hiring locally.

Video meetings are great equalizers

I think one of the biggest benefits that I’ve seen of that is it really is an equalizer when everybody is on the screen in the same size box. It’s a complete equalizer in terms of people having a voice, and there’s no special seats at the table. There are these dynamics that happen in in-person meetings that put people in sort of positions of power or less power in the physical meetings. And there are so many aspects of that. But when you’re on video, and everybody’s the same size rectangle, there are certainly a lot of disadvantages to it, but it’s really equalizing no matter who is on the call. In a meeting, everybody has the same real estate.

Aspects of the company culture that are conducive to remote work

Those companies who have and had a strong writing culture and asynchronous work model, I imagine that they are having an easier time of it. I would say for us, it’s much more like I’m in meetings—and for most of the people on my team, it’s like meetings—from beginning to end of the day and then work after that. That is pretty challenging, and I would love to see us do more writing, do more asynchronous work, have fewer meetings.

It is much easier to hide out when working remotely

It’s also easier to hide out in a remote situation. It’s easier to turn off your video, and not say anything. And sometimes you can’t see everybody who’s in the meeting on the screen at the same time. It’s harder to hide out if you’re in a room with somebody than it is when you’re on video. So when I talk about it being an equalizer: when I’m in meetings with the most senior leaders of the company, I feel more comfortable. But I do think it’s easier to hide out, so you have to really make an effort to ensure that people are taking advantage of that.

How will a hybrid work situation work

I think a completely remote situation would work. I just wonder how the hybrid situation is going to work. What new thing will come up when you have some people in the office and some people on video—how is that going to go? Is that going to be as productive as everyone on video? Like, everybody on video is a known thing. But then some people on video and getting some people in-person is a little bit less of a known thing.

The pandemic has uncovered surprising challenges

I would say the biggest challenge with performance management isn’t necessarily related to the remote versus in-person. The challenges in my experience have been the things that we’ve been navigating and being sensitive, empathetic, and understanding of different things that different individuals are going through.

Shamanth: Yeah, I’m thrilled to have you because we’ve certainly crossed paths digitally in many ways for a long, long time—and physically, of course—and excited to have you speak about a topic that would appear as somewhat peripherally linked to mobile and marketing and acquisition, but is very central to everything we do. And certainly much more so because of everything that’s happened in the last year and a year and a half. So thrilled to talk about what work’s gonna look like, and what changed around work just lately.

So I’d start by asking you about the lay of the land, let’s just say, once we’re all vaccinated. In the last year or so, a lot of companies have gone remote. You’ve certainly managed very large teams that, by force of circumstance, have had to go remote. So what does the long term look like for knowledge work in terms of location, how we work and where we work?

Seth: Sure. First of all, I’ll speak to this mostly from a US perspective, because I’m located in the US, I’m most familiar with what’s happening here.

I understand quite a bit of your audience is outside the US. And in fact, the mobile app space is probably one of the more successful global industries relative to some other aspects of tech that are a little bit more concentrated in the Bay Area of the US. I see mobile and mobile games, and productivity apps really happening everywhere. So I think that, as an industry, the mobile app space is actually well ahead of the game.

I work at Adobe, a very large, established software company, and we have a lot of neighbours by us in San Jose and San Francisco. What I’m seeing so far is people see that it’s possible to live anywhere, to work from anywhere. I think individuals are seeing that that’s possible; companies are seeing that that’s possible. We’re even seeing some companies offering the same pay to people regardless of where they live. So they’re going from a completely office situation to a completely remote situation, and offering to pay employees the same regardless of where they live.

So if you are the world’s best UA manager, you can get yourself hired by any company. You’re not limited to the ones that are close to where you live. And for the people who are really the top of their craft? These folks can expect to earn more; they’re gonna have more opportunities; they’re more in demand. So I think for people at the top of their craft, who are working for companies, this is a very potentially positive change for folks like that.

It also allows companies to hire talent anywhere. I know that as somebody who’s hired for many roles in the Bay Area: it is incredibly competitive. It is very difficult to find great people at reasonable salaries. People have lots of other opportunities in addition to the one that they’re working on right now. And so it’s really challenging in concentrated geographical areas like the Bay Area, to hire and retain great people. This also opens up a huge benefit for companies. If the best person for the job is in Cleveland, Ohio, instead of San Francisco, California, then it could be possible to hire that person, and that person might be better than the person we could have gotten locally, for example. So I think that definitely opens things up.

Now,

the flip side to that is that it does put pressure over time on wages for average performers. Nobody wants to think of themselves as a B-player, but there are B-players out there. If a company can hire somebody anywhere, then they’re not necessarily going to need to settle for anything less than the best, just by hiring locally.

Whereas the top talent might have an advantage, I think the average talent could find themselves being disadvantaged over time, because there’s simply more competition for similar jobs.

Then that’s just domestically. Then we talk about the international impact. It’s been quite a while that jobs have been moving to India or the Philippines from the US in the past few years. And the prior administration, maybe reversed that a little bit, given the difficulties with immigration and people going back and forth; and Coronavirus, preventing the ability to even have people come over and train them and go back and these kinds of things. We’ve certainly offshored a lot of work out of the US in the last 20 years—and some of that’s come back—but I think we’re going to see more of it. Where it’s been mostly places like India, I think we’re going to see more and more of it in the western hemisphere into Latin America, or potentially South America—places that are within a few hours from a timezone standpoint of the US; and in the eastern hemisphere, there could be similar opportunities. And maybe this is also the thing that over time, really helps the economy in Africa and helps workers in Africa play an even bigger part in the global economy.

Right now, it’s cool to be able to work at home or rent an Airbnb, maybe with your friends and working from anywhere. That has been nice for a lot of people. But I also think that there’s a potential downside for folks that maybe people aren’t considering at this time.

Shamanth: Yeah, right, and the world’s a very different place. Growing up in India, we heard the word globalisation a lot. But even then I don’t think we registered it in the way that is true today, where it’s certainly a whole new dimension to the world being flat and all of the world’s talent being accessible.

I’m curious just about your experience, as well as to how things changed and shifted for you guys, over the last year, year and a half, because it’s my understanding that you guys have had a centralised office structure in San Francisco. I know you guys do have an international presence. When your team had to go remote by force of circumstance, what changed abruptly, what had to change the daily cadence? How did the team’s work style have to change almost overnight?

Seth: Adobe is a global company, and even in the Bay Area, we have multiple San Francisco buildings, we have multiple buildings in San Jose. And so even before, it wasn’t unusual to have a meeting with somebody in San Francisco, in another building, or even sometimes in the same building, and people are on video. So that was an interesting thing that happened anyway. But yes, for the most part, we went into the office every day. My team is split between San Francisco and San Jose. For every meeting, there are usually people in-person and sometimes some people also on video in another location.

So the first week in March 2020, that all changed and we have all been working from not the office since then.

And yeah, it definitely has a huge benefit from that standpoint.

The other thing I’d say is, well, folks who have children have had a lot of ups and downs with this thing. I know, certainly, we have a child and for the first few months, it was extremely, extremely challenging to be working and childcare simultaneously. But on the flip side, folks have really appreciated the ability to integrate; not having commute time is incredibly helpful. The things that you can do when you’re not commuting—I do yoga and meditation every single day, pretty much. That was not the case before COVID, actually. And so, there are things like that, that have really opened up for me and for others on the team that allow more flexibility, that allow being around family more, that allow you to take care of the things you need to take care of without the stress of commuting and things like that. So I think that’s been a big benefit.

In terms of communication, I would say that Adobe didn’t have a writing culture. I think the companies that have a writing culture and work more asynchronously, probably are better suited to completely distributed work. So companies like Basecamp, Doordash, or Amazon for that matter—even though they highly value in-person work.

But I would say that we haven’t been super successful at moving the culture of the entire company from a synchronous model to an asynchronous model.

Shamanth: Yeah, right, especially with a large team, it becomes very challenging to have everybody shift to written communication rather than verbal. Our team started fully remote—mostly because I was backpacking at the time—but I think that almost forced us to be writing-focused. And I think as we’ve dealt with other folks, I recognise it’s not true for every culture. And it’s not always the best in every situation; it just happens to work for us.

And out of curiosity, when you said remote work was an equalizer in many ways, was it your observation that this helped folks that could be considered underrepresented to speak up more and be heard more? Was that a side effect at all of all of this?

Seth: On the one hand, it can allow for that but really, we as leaders have to draw that out. Because

it’s also easier to hide out in a remote situation. It’s easier to turn off your video, and not say anything. And sometimes you can’t see everybody who’s in the meeting on the screen at the same time. It’s harder to hide out if you’re in a room with somebody than it is when you’re on video. So when I talk about it being an equalizer: when I’m in meetings with the most senior leaders of the company, I feel more comfortable. But I do think it’s easier to hide out, so you have to really make an effort to ensure that people are taking advantage of that.

Shamanth: Understood, that certainly makes sense. When you spoke of how writing heavy cultures can really thrive in something like this, you talked about what changed and what had to change in the culture and the day-to-day work. But also in terms of the communication tools and collaboration tools, what had to change as everybody just went home?

Seth: I don’t think that much changed, honestly, in our communication; in the usage of communication tools as a result of remote work. I think we would have benefited from that, and to be clear, the company is doing great. We’ve done more of a lift and shift of what we were doing in-person to what we’re doing remotely. And it’s working for us. But it’s exhausting. It’s exhausting to do that same thing in a different context.

Shamanth: Is that an example that you can think of?

Seth: I think we all can relate to the Zoom fatigue. It’s exhausting to be on 6-7-8 hours of meetings, almost consecutively, on video. There’s just something about it that has more physical impact than being in 6-7-8 hours of meeting in the office.

Shamanth: Yeah, you’re not looking at screens, if you’re doing it in-office. Zoom fatigue is certainly a thing. And in-office, you could, I imagine, nudge somebody for a five-minute chat, rather than putting 30 minutes on calendar. And it almost seems like you have to put a significant amount of time on calendar.

Seth: I imagined it resulted in more usage of Slack on the team in general. I was a Slack power user prior, so I’m not sure that my usage has changed too much. But I do imagine that for a lot of people, they have significantly increased their Slack usage.

Shamanth: Certainly, what aspects of remote work worked better than you thought they would, and what worked worse?

Seth: I guess if I compare it to going back to the office, I think some of the things that I am concerned about as a people manager is fairness. It used to be basically everybody had to be in the office every day, for the most part. That was the agreement. When we go back, it will be something more flexible than that, where people will need to be in the office two or three days a week. I’m curious to see how it goes managing potentially 50 different arrangements, where each person might have their own arrangement and finding the boundaries as a company and for each individual that are the right thing to do or work for each person and work for the company.

For companies that are doing a hybrid approach, which is what Adobe intends to do, there’s potentially a material amount of overhead for managers that they didn’t have before, in terms of all the different arrangements. If it is two to three days a week in the office, okay, well, we have to coordinate those two or three days a week, or why are we coming in? Right now, it’s actually quite simple. We’re all on video; there’s no logistics. While I miss seeing my coworkers and going out for a drink, it’s also a lot simpler. It’s a lot simpler than I expect it will be when we’re in this hybrid office and remote situation.

Shamanth: I certainly recognise and agree that there can be such a managerial overhead if it is two days a week; just even coordinating those things can be a big deal. In theory, it would be like, oh, everybody works remote, everyone’s evaluated on performance, there’s no overhead. So the way you look at it, how does practice diverge from theory, if at all it does?

Seth: I would love for people to do whatever works for them, but they’re delivering on their responsibilities. I think in practice, people do pay attention to what other people’s situation is. One can’t help but be impacted by what some other person is doing. You know, it’s just hard to tell one person that you have to be in the office two days a week and another person that they don’t have to be in the office today.

And as managers, we work for a company, and we’re trying to follow what the company has decided. So we are representatives of the company and being supportive of whatever the company decides. It’s really those nuances: the difference in practice, with the company policy. And how do we follow that in a respectful, productive, effective and fair way. Fairness is very much based on perception. One person’s perception of fair might be different than another person’s perception of fair; and one person might not care and somebody else would care a lot.

Shamanth: I see. For a company that’s fully remote, from what you’re saying, it seems like people could just perceive that other folks on the team have different responsibilities or even different pay, and that opacity could just make them a problem. Am I understanding that correctly?

Seth: Well, the opacity is there, no matter what; I think that’s how most companies operate. There are things that are not transparent. I think these are all the things that we have to wrestle with.

Shamanth: I see what you mean. With hybrid, they’re going to be questions like, oh, how do you decide who comes in? That’s what you alluded to.

Seth: And that two-minute conversation you have after the meeting happens with the person who was there in-person and the person who was on video isn’t in that conversation.

Shamanth: Exactly.

Seth: Those micro moments happen over and over.

Shamanth: And they add up. With your experience with your teams going remote, what kind of people have you observed coped better with remote work? And what kind of people coped worse?

Seth: I found that everyone has adapted extremely well. Like I mentioned earlier, I would say the biggest challenge was for people who have children. For people in the US who have children in public school, those children have not been in school. Some of them are just going back to school now. And so, they’ve been working at home with children not in school for over a year, or about a year. I would say for those folks, it’s nothing about them or types of people or personality. I haven’t really seen differences on those vectors. I’ve found, really, every single person that I’ve experienced has adapted quite well. I haven’t noticed differences in effectiveness between people, other than the fact that the folks who have children at home have it really, really difficult.

Shamanth: Yeah, I don’t have kids. Certainly, I have had friends who do, so it’s certainly been very challenging in very different ways. And my parents do babysitting for their neighbours now for that reason. The neighbours are like: “Take the kids!”

I know you’ve alluded in many ways to many aspects of team dynamics. I’m curious how you’ve noticed and seen team performance evaluations or assessments—or even like informal ones, like 1-on-1s—change on your teams as folks just shifted remote?

Seth:

That’s probably always been the case, and probably something that we all should be paying more attention to. I think the difference is in this last year, we’re more aware of individual circumstances, and how those might be impacting people’s work. So that’s really what I would say, I have tuned more into what’s going on for people and letting them know that they can ask for help.

Also, the most important thing for people who are facing challenges outside of their work, is really to communicate and set expectations. And for me, as long as people are communicating and setting expectations, I’ve got their back, that’s probably been the biggest challenge. And the biggest difference is really increasing sensitivity to people’s circumstances and supportiveness of those circumstances. And certainly holding people accountable, while allowing for individual circumstances and having space for that.

Shamanth: Right, I would have thought, it’s easier to check in when you’re meeting in person. But it sounds to me like, if you’re meeting them in person, it’s somewhat easy to take that for granted, whereas if you’re connecting remotely, you’re making an intentional effort to actually ask and check in. I think that makes a lot of sense.

As people go back to in-office work—and I imagine you guys will, it’s my understanding that you guys are not planning to be forever remote. What, if anything, might be some of the things you see you or your teams doing differently, based on your learnings and experiences so far?

Seth: Certainly, at first, I think we’ll be more intentional about the in-person time. Having not had it, I think we all appreciate it more. I will aim to have set days that, for those coming to the office, that we all come to the office on the same couple days a week, for example. And if people want to come more often, they’re certainly welcome to. But I do think some more structure around that office time to ensure that we’re having that connection as a team.

Also, I would say the social aspect is something that’s really missing. Because right now we have a 30-minute meeting or 60-minute meeting; and it’s a meeting with a specific agenda. And that’s what we talk about. Of course, we do have a little bit of chat before and after, but for the most part, the social aspect has really fallen away, and the virtual substitutes are not the same. So having more limited time together in the office will push us to put more value on it, to be more structured about certain things, and to plan in some social opportunities, so that we continue to know each other better, outside of whatever our specific job or contribution is and work.

Shamanth: Yeah, suddenly things will shift back, but hopefully there’s some reflection, some learnings you can take back to going back to office.

Seth, I think we are coming up on time, so this is perhaps a good place for us to wrap. Thank you so much for being on the show. But before we go, can you tell folks how they can find out more about you and everything you do?

Seth: Sure, well, I don’t have a SoundCloud—which is the Twitter meme when you have a viral tweet. I don’t really have anything to promote, but we are hiring at Adobe for people who are in the Bay Area. We have some lifecycle marketing jobs that we’re hiring for. We actually have a mobile UA job coming up. So if you’re interested in working at Adobe, you could email berman [at] adobe [dot] com and we can have a conversation about that.

Shamanth: Excellent and we will link to the careers section in the show notes just as well. And of course, we will link to your socials so people can connect with you.

Seth: Great, thank you.

Shamanth: Excellent. Thank you for being on the show. And excited to put this out to the world very soon.

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

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