Welcome to The Bureau Briefing, our community podcast. Be sure to find us on iTunes or Google Play!
Darin Lynch
Founder Irish Titan
With so much uncertainty in our lives, how do we decide when to reopen our offices? And when we do how do we make sure we're keeping everyone safe? Join Carl and Darin Lynch as they discuss the Irish Titan Return to Work Plan. You'll also get the opportunity to ask your questions on the air.
You can also watch the live video of this episode.
Carl:
Hey everyone and welcome back to The Bureau Briefing. It is Carl and with me today, I've got my good friend from Irish Titan, Mr. Darin Lynch. How are you doing Darin?
Darin:
Hi Carl, I'm good. Hi everybody else, thanks for having me on.
Carl:
You are most welcome and thanks to everybody who is joining us live to listen. We have got a great show today. Darin sent me an email last week which prompted this invitation to be on the show and it was all around this document on Irish Titan and their plan on returning to work. Now I want to say first of all that the first thing I thought was, "You're going to make them do what?" And then once I started reading and I was like, "Oh, it's optional." So bring your a game with your questions, but realize this is an optional thing for those people who are working at Irish Titan, which are the Titans.
Darin:
Correct. That's how we refer to our employees Titans.
Carl:
They're the Titans. Before we dive in, I want to thank our sponsors thanks to MailChimp for everything they're doing and please check out some of the shows they've got running right now. They've got some amazing shows about small business entrepreneurs. Thanks so much to InVision for all they're doing and the content they provide. And also the Platform.sh who just joined us recently and they've got an amazing web platform for your agile team. So check them out. And now that we've gotten that out of the way, which I mean I love them. I did not mean it to sound like that. Okay, we're going to edit that out. You can start over. I'm going to start over. Just kidding. So here's what I want to do to start. Darin, the thing that I resonate with so strongly with Irish Titan, what reminds me of my old shop is the culture. Like you name things, green is a dominant color, all of this...
Darin:
Some might say overpowering.
Carl:
No, I don't know. I want a green off between you and Four Kitchens. I really do because you're both super, super green. You could probably save a lot of money, just bulk order stuff and log it later. But I want you to talk to us a little bit about that culture. I want you to talk about... like, let's go pre COVID. What is Irish Titans culture? Why is it so important?
Darin:
Yeah, again, thanks for having me on. I did notice Four Kitchens was green right away for some of those guys. I guess I don't know why culture is so important. When I started Irish Titan, I wasn't intentional about culture being such a tip of the spear for us. In today's environment, it's spoken about so frequently. People talk about culture all the time and either I wasn't hearing it back then or it wasn't being spoken as much about back then, but I think that over time it really emerged as something that took on a lot of visceral shape for us. And maybe that's because for better or worse, I tend to have a big personality and I know what I care about and what I like and really companies take on the personalities of their founders.
Darin:
And so I think that that's probably what has led to our culture being what it is. I would say it was probably... I should look this up because I can look through my email history and figure out when this happened, but it was probably seven or eight years ago when things really, I think took shape in terms of being able to articulate what our culture already was. So our culture is, as I describe it, defined by two lighthouses. One is our golden circle to use Simon Sinek speak, because I'm a giant Simon Sinek fan. I was fortunate enough to meet him in a small group setting, June 11th, 2011. Not that I remember the date, but I do.
Carl:
Wow you are a big fan.
Darin:
Correct.
Carl:
He's somewhere right now saying, "And I met Darin and it was in the small group setting."
Darin:
Yeah. He's like, "I met this guy who needs a haircut." ... business first online second, we've trademarked that and that really influences who we hire, how we engage with our clients and really influences the fact that we don't specialize in a specific vertical because we apply our business first online, second philosophy across verticals. So that's our why. Our how is partnerships not transactions and our what is ecomm agency. So particularly that why influences our culture because that's what I expect out of our Titans every day is a business first, online second sort of philosophy. I don't do any of the interviewing until later in the process now because we're of the size where it doesn't make sense otherwise. For example, with developers when I'm interviewing them, I'll say, "If this is the place... or if your wired where you're looking for bleeding edge technology, we might not be the place for you because we're business first, online second.
Darin:
If on the other hand you want to work at a place where you are engaging directly with clients and making a difference in their business, then we might be the place for you." So it conforms our culture that way. The second lighthouse of our culture is POTUS, which is not a political reference. It stands for our five internal core values, passion, ownership, [inaudible 00:05:21] from the inside. Ownership is carry your own bag, things like that. And so those two lighthouses have really served to define our culture. It helps our Titans self police and hold each other accountable. It's baked into our quarterly one-on-ones and that has defined our culture and been consistent for a long time now. T
Carl:
That's great. Darin, we're having an issue where your audio is dropping occasionally.
Darin:
Let me try this. I'm going to take you off my headphones.
Carl:
Yeah, do that.
Darin:
And we'll see if that works better.
Carl:
Yeah. You let me know when and we'll keep going.
Darin:
How's that? And you'll appreciate this, I guess since you brought it up earlier, here are my green AirPods.
Carl:
I knew it. I knew it. They probably looked like you have an ear infection when you wear those, right?
Darin:
Exactly.
Carl:
Let's get into this idea to put together the plan to come back into the office. Now, first of all, the other thing I know about your culture, why I know it's strong is because you name everything and you've got things I don't understand like these marbles and there's all this stuff that I think becomes like internal culture, which I think is great. But when did you make the decision? How did it come about? "We need to reopen the office. We need to put together this document." Like what's the origin of saying, "We're going to make this happen?"
Darin:
Yeah, I think from the beginning I knew that we would do that. We're not a remote work office to begin with. One of the things, everybody has their uniques, right? Excuse me, one of our uniques is that we do all of our work with just our Titans. We don't use any contractors, freelancers, Roswell resources. We've intentionally built an office. I'm turning this way because it's right out here. An office that is reflective of our culture. It's open, there's a lot of collaboration and a lot of breakout spaces that has a bat pole. Which is, it really is.
Carl:
It's off limits now.
Darin:
Right, scarecrows spirit toxin has polluted.
Carl:
That's right.
Darin:
So we built this office intentionally as our home court advantage and a place for us to come to everyday and work together as teammates, to go back to POTUS, the T and POTUS. So we've attracted Titans who consciously or subconsciously are wired to want to be working with others and coming in the office. We already have a flexible work culture and we talk with people during the interview process about the notion that we're not a work from home company, but we do have flexibility or people who need to work from home for any given reason on a given day.
Darin:
So when COVID hit which I remember specifically when I hit, because we do two big annual events every year. We do an event, we call it Ecomm Forum in the fall, that's a half day event Very content rich. Still full of shenanigans, like there's a whiskey side chat, sort of thing. But the other event that we do is just a client partner appreciation event and that's always in March to tie it together with Saint Patrick's Day and right when everything was starting to unfold was when our party was scheduled and so there's [crosstalk 00:08:41].
Carl:
I watched that online and I was like, "What's he going to do?"
Darin:
Yeah. So that became an interesting time to decide whether or not we were going to hold that. Anyway when everybody started to work from home during that period, I knew that at some point we'd want to bring people back. But really what I started to realize over time was we needed to offer people a home to come back to. And so I knew from the beginning that we need to put something together. At first, none of us, nobody on this call knew how bad it was going to be, how long it was going to be. We still today live in a world where there's more that we don't know than we do. So I had no timeframe when this started and I wasn't itching for that. That we were just trying to at first move from everybody being here to everybody being remote and extending our culture.
Darin:
That's how I started to refer to it because you were alluded to marbles. So for those of you who maybe don't know about our marbles, we have four jars of marbles at each of our two doors here. There's three, what would now be going to refer to as virgin marbles, right?
Carl:
Never been touched.
Darin:
Yeah. Green, yellow, and red and then there is a bigger jar where every day that accumulates marbles as people leave. If they had a good day, they put a green marble in. An okay day, a yellow marble and a bad day or red. And it's sort of a visual barometer or thermometer depending I guess on which meteorological tool you want to refer to. It gives us a sense of how people are doing, how they're feeling. It's a big part of our culture. Every year at our holiday party, I've counted the marbles and talk about [inaudible 00:10:24] all that sort of stuff. So it's a big thing. One of the things that we did when people start to work from home is we built a virtual online marble tool. So irishtitanmarbles.com. Anybody can look through it actually, and you can drop marble.
Darin:
I started to do biweekly video slacks, one-on-one with every employee. So I was talking with every employee twice a week. It wasn't scheduled because sometimes it was a one minute conversation and sometimes it was 15 minutes, 20 minutes. They weren't project specific. I had a super strong management team. I've talked with you about that before Carl. They're continuing to do all of their one-on-ones and their team meetings and drive the business and they're eternally grateful for that. But I felt like in this time it was important for me to be talking with every Titan twice a week to see how they're doing, what questions they have, and make sure they feel informed, all of those sorts of things.
Darin:
So that helped marbles, that a weekly Zoom cast that we do at three o'clock on Fridays, it's a little more lighthearted with all Titans. There’s a number of things that we did to extend the culture and so that helped us navigate this pretty well. I'm really proud of our Titans for how they've performed. Our productivity has been strong. I'm not worried about trusting people to be working when they're not here. That's never been a reason for us to have people in the office or to offer this return to work plan to take shape. So it's been from a performance and productivity perspective, completely tenable. I don't know if it's sustainable, but I'd say tenable temporarily for how this has worked.
Carl:
So for those listening in, this thing is like probably about 10 pages. I know there are a couple of pages of links in there and one of the things that resonates throughout it is respect. Respect for everybody to make their own decision and understanding that everybody's got their own context of what this is doing to them in terms of their personal lives, their ability to come into the office, all of that. It just has a great feel to it where everybody still feels empowered. They're just being shown how to come back if they want. One of the things that was really interesting to me when I looked at it, now your office is the same space, but obviously you don't want people right next to each other. So there was this idea of clans and I would imagine the idea of clans may have existed before, right? Not sure...
Darin:
Not formally, yes.
Carl:
... not formally, but now you've got this idea where you've broken the company up into two clans and they're going to alternate who comes in when. So walk through that decision a little bit.
Darin:
Yeah. I'll give a bit of a preamble to the answers. I think it's important. You hit on the point that was the absolute single most important nugget that I wanted people to hear repeatedly and to believe. And that is that people have choice and if they come back for the time being and when and those sorts of things. And those one-on-ones that I mentioned doing twice a week allowed me and us to start talking about that and have dialogue about that and let people think about it and ask questions the next time. Because I'm strongly defiant and independent and don't like people telling me what to do or what to think. So I don't want to do that to others and I want to encourage that same sense of free thought on others' behalf. So the way I started to verbalize that was that there's two dimensions and one dimension is from cautious to confident.
Darin:
Someone might be more cautious in coming back and someone may be more confident in coming back. Regardless of where you are on that scale, I don't want someone who's viewed as being cautious to be seen as a coward and I don't want someone who is more confident to be seen as a reckless cowboy or cowgirl, right? Then regardless of where you are on that spectrum, there's another spectrum that may be able to unable, like for perhaps you might be confident in coming back but unable to come back because you have kids and now you're doing the remote learning thing. So regardless of where you are in those two dimensional or those two different spectrums, I wanted people to know that they're respected, that we're not forcing people to come back yet. And one thing I'll police hard is any bullying, judging, anything that makes anybody on any side of that feel disrespected.
Darin:
We want to be able to joke and tease each other with respect. Then I'm not going to allow any bullying. So for weeks I could talk about that which led to, I think the most important part of the plan was that shape of how we did things. So now to answer your question after that long winded preamble.
Carl:
That was good. It was good.
Darin:
So we have plenty of space in our office and I think right now we have around 30 employees, I think 34. I think by code we go to, I think it's 92 people that could be in here, my court. So we have plenty of space. We have a lot of breakout space. We could right now today move everybody's desks far enough apart that they would have six feet of distance. We don't want to do that right now because we really like how our office is laid out. I think that sometime in the future we won't have to do that. We'll see. I could be wrong. And secondly, not everybody wants to come back right now anyway. And so one of our assumptions then was we're going to leave the desks located where they are and another assumption that I had, or I guess sort of a boundary was I didn't want to rodeo every day with trying to figure out who's coming in, who's not, where you can sit, that's not going to work well for me.
Darin:
I don't do well with detailed, especially that kind of detail. There's too much uncertainty for people on a daily basis then also. So what we did was group all Titans into one of two clans and we started the first that the first slice was location. So two people who sit next to each other would be in separate clans and we kind of zig-zag the physical layout so that there was six feet and I think there were three people that we had to flop desks because the first layer was the physical distance from their desks. Second was maybe some projects we're working on together or learning from each other. A few things like that.
Darin:
So we grouped everybody into these clans. At first, I was just calling them groups, but I knew that I would do something before finalizing the plan rolling out so I'd have more flavor to it. And then clans came to mind of course. And then it was off to the races after that. Clan Bagpipes can come into the office on Mondays and Tuesdays, Clan Kilts can come in on Thursdays and Fridays, Wednesdays alternate from one week to the next. So the first week Clan Bagpipes have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Kilts are Thursday, Friday, the following week , Monday and Tuesday and Kilts is Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Let's see, the rollout then was good and it was well received.
Darin:
Another thing I like about the clans is one of the first conversations I had with you at length was around pods a couple of years ago. This is a little bit of a step in that direction. I don't know if pods will start to emerge from these clans, but what I do expect to happen is these will have some lasting footprints here because I think if we go do a paint ball war with each other or a bowling outing or some sort of group outing, the clans might be battling each other. So I think it's going to outlive the current COVID situation. Than just to close the loop, this'll be shorter. Remember an important point, those two clans if you're a part of Bagpipes, so you can come in beginning next week on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, you have the choice to come in on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
Darin:
You don't have to. But then there's certainty. So you know which days it is that you might come in. We're not going to do a mandatory roll call Sunday night to see who's coming in and who's not. The way we have the clans grouped, the way we have people physically located the social distancing will be complied with and we might only have one person. In theory, I know that's not going to be the case, but here we could have one person come in and that's okay because we're not requiring return to work yet, we're allowing return to work.
Carl:
Well, so I have a question around that because I know, and again, this document felt so well thought out and I'll make sure we share it with everybody in the community. We'll drop it in Slack. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're allowed... if you're going to come in, you have between 8:00 AM and 10:00 AM, is that right?
Darin:
Yeah, I think it's 8:00 to 10:00.
Carl:
8:00 to 10:00. You have to answer a simple questionnaire that just basically says you haven't been around anybody, you don't have symptoms, that sort of stuff. Touchless temperature check, right? Thermometer, that's what they call those. Now, the one question I did have was there has to be somebody at the desk. So that's not an optional role. Or is that you? Are you doing it?
Darin:
I will be possibly some of the time. So our office director, Terra is going to be staffing that desk. She's there all the time anyway. But that's why we established that window 8:00 to 10:00. So Terra would know, she has to make sure she is in here by 8:00 so that people know general, okay, I got to come in between 8:00 and 10:00. We wanted to provide some flexibility. A window, right? Because some people are early risers, some are later. So I might have a... if I call, they want to do from home, whatever the reason. We wanted to provide a window because again, we're not trying to be too draconian about this. We're trying to put some structure in place for those people who want to come back because they might perform better.
Darin:
We have some Titans that I know from what they've told me are going to perform better coming in the office. They might want to be around people or maybe better equipment, whatever the reason. But we needed that window and that structure so that people could develop the patterns that I think are helpful in life. Because in the absence of patterns, you have to make decisions and decisions are exhausting. And so that's why Terra will be handling that from 8:00 to 10:00 most days. I'm the backup, so I'll do that. So yeah, that was one of the reasons that we created that window.
Carl:
There you go. One thing real quick I wanted to hit on was the conference rooms. You made a point in the doc and I can't remember exactly which conference rooms, but you remove chairs. So I thought that was a great way, and I know you're indicating where people should sit or the distance between. So that made perfectly good sense. But one thing that hit me, and I think I know the reason why, but I want to ask is clients will not be in the office, right? Clients will only be in meetings via Zoom. So talk about that decision.
Darin:
Yeah. So for the time being, excuse me, we're not allowing anybody but Titans into the office. There were a few people that were using some of our space on a ad hoc basis before, like renting a room every once in a while, et cetera. So not even a client, it's like a friend of the firm sort of thing. We're not allowing them either, so we're not allowing clients or friends of the firm in just because right now we want to be as responsible and in control of the variables as we can. So I should find that the drawing and share my screen. But again, I'm a giant Simon Sinek fan. And so at the beginning of this, one of the little pep talks I gave the team was based on a twisted version of The Golden Circle that I drew and called Lynch's golden pandemic navigation circle. And the center is what you can control, the second ring is what you can influence and that outer ring are things outside of your control. So many of those right now.
Carl:
So many of those right now.
Darin:
So those inner control were how we execute on our existing work, how we take care of each other as Titans, how we support each other both in work and in spirit. The influence of how we are interacting with prospects and doing marketing and those sorts of things that start to get more outside of your control and everything else outside of that we can't do anything about. So the plan and an example of that in the plan is the clients and friends of the firm not being allowed in here. We can't control what they have maybe been doing outside of work. We can't even really influence it. We can influence ourselves as Titans because the plan talks about and you maybe notice this, make good decisions of the office so you're not bringing risks into the office. Like we can influence that. So no clients, no friends at the firm in the office, and we're going to review this on a monthly basis. So maybe in July they can start coming in.
Carl:
Yeah, I thought that was great. You repeated that a couple of times in the document, I think. Again, this will be reviewed monthly and it could be, it goes the other way. It could be things get worse. You review it and you go, "You know what? We're not going to have the office available." That to me also showed the truth of the document, the way you are looking at it. Now, one interesting thing, I know that the office becomes available on Monday, but in the FAQ is on the document, it said there is no timetable. So talk about that. I mean, I think I understand it because you're trying not to put any pressure on anything but how have the employees reacted?
Darin:
The internal reaction has been pretty positive. And of course there's what would it be? Confirmation bias, right? Where they're probably going to be likely to tell me more positive things than if maybe you're probably working right next to them, but also I'm not overly sensitive. It's hard to hurt my feelings and I think that our Titans know that I want the truth. I prefer honesty over harmony. And again, the value of those biweekly one-on-ones and the value of the transparency communication I have with my management team. I have a pretty high degree of confidence about how things were being received and the feedback after rolling it out last Thursday has been exceedingly positive. The things that have made me the happiest about that are people saying without me prompting that they know that it's their choice whether they could come in or not. They feel respected in that.
Darin:
So that feels good as far as the timeline piece, there's really two aspects to that I think I answered in the FAQ and in a few other places. One was how long until... in so many words, how long until I need to be back in the office? Like how long are we going to deal remote workplace? And the other is how long is "this?" This environment of unknown and can we be within six feet each other or not? How long is that going to last? And there's no timetable on how long we're going to allow people to continue to work from home right now. If this all goes away tomorrow, which it won't, but just to illustrate an example, if it went away tomorrow, there'll be some point in the next, I don't know, three months, something like that where it's okay, now let's get back in the habit of everybody being back in the office. Like they were before where there's flexibility.
Darin:
On the other hand, it could be six months, then nothing's changed. We don't know. The other point was about how long this is going to last? And I said, "I don't know. We don't know. Nobody knows." And in some respects it's never really going to end. It's not like there's going to be a finish line that we cross. There's going to be enough aspects of our life that we get used to or that return to approximate what they used to be that we start to feel more normal.
Carl:
Yeah. So I want to ask a tough question on this now. Everything is laid out great, but humans don't play within the rules, right? Humans get comfortable. That first week, I bet everybody's going to be there between 8:00 and 10:00. They're not going to worry about getting their temperature done. They're going to wash their hands, they're going to sneeze into their elbow, they're going to go wash their hands after that. They're going to make sure they don't touch the dirty marbles. They're going to do all of those things. But what happens when somebody sneezes and then doesn't clean up or doesn't go? The word police sounds so brutal, but it feels like it's a real thing in this scenario that you have to police it. So what does that look like? What's the first offense?
Darin:
Yeah, I think that we don't have a lot of procedures defined around offense levels, so to speak and repeat offenders. But we do have a couple of references in the document and multiple verbal references in our all company Friday Zooms when I rolled this out specifically last Thursday, we had a Zoom about nothing but the return to work plan. And my management team has reinforced it also in the sense of holding each other accountable. So I'm going to name check one of our Titans because we love to pick on him and he loves it. [inaudible 00:28:22] who actually has attended one of your events before and one of our project managers. He makes panini sandwiches almost every day.
Carl:
Clan Bagpipe?
Darin:
Yup.
Carl:
Max. I read the document.
Darin:
So you know that's [inaudible 00:28:38] I don't know what Anthony has been a apart of. So max is someone that we've talked about as an example, including with him there and we can talk about it as an examples. Like, "Max, if you don't clean up after yourself, we all need to bust your chops. So Max clean up your god damn panini." And so we're expecting each other to help hold each other accountable. I'll be the first to do that and I'll be the first to expect somebody to do that in return if I don't sneak into my elbow or don't wash my hands or things like that. So that also factored a little bit into how we created some of the clans too, to spread some of the more vocal people who might be more inclined to hold people accountable across. People might need that a little bit more, so that was a little bit of a factor there too. But we're expecting people to need to be held accountable and we're expecting people to help each other. That's part of the teamwork in POTUS.
Carl:
Yeah. Well, and you put in the doc that everyone's going to have additional cleaning responsibilities now and if you're not up for the additional cleaning responsibilities, that's totally cool. Just don't come back yet.
Darin:
Right, that would be a perfect example of a signal that you're on the cautious side and not ready to come back yet because this isn't an ER room with a lot of germs flying around and those sorts of things. It's well secured. We have the office cleaned twice a week office space. And on top of that, we're just expecting everybody to pitch in on the enhanced daily cleaning activities. I'm the one that's cleaning the door knobs and door handles the stair rails. I wouldn't be cleaning the Bat Polls that scarecrows fear toxin.
Carl:
Batman's not Irish, so I'm not going to I'm not going to bust your chops about the one non Irish thing you got in there. But I guess I just did. Okay, sorry I just busted your chops on it.
Darin:
Some other time I'll actually go into detail on the backstory and the baffles. There's actually a lot to that, but I am the one doing the handles and the rails everyday because I felt like I needed to send a signal that, "Hey, I'm going to be right in there with you." And of course I'm comfortable doing some of the cleaning right now. That's okay. That's 100%. But then if [inaudible 00:30:59] you're not ready to come back yet, which is also, okay.
Carl:
I'm just curious, was there anyone who just thought it was too soon for this plan or did anybody push back at that level or was everybody like, "This is cool."
Darin:
Much more of the latter because I shouldn't have pointed like that at the screen.
Carl:
It's okay. I'm kicking your ass. It's fine.
Darin:
My money's on you, girl. Much more of the latter, but again, I think it's because of all the conversations we had leading up to it and because the plan itself was really the combination of the work of finalists. And I want to name check them, Terra that I already mentioned who's our instructor. She handles HR administration and that sort of stuff for me amongst some of the bookkeeping. And she spent a lot of time reading like Minnesota chamber of commerce information and Minnesota Department of Economic Development information and CDC stuff. Swift, who's our Marketing Manager. He took my notes that I've been building over the course of a couple of weeks and started to turn it into this document. And then Anna Kallberg and Tony Ticknor who are our my management team, she's Director of Client Services and he's Director of Technology.
Darin:
This really became the work of all five of us which also led to particular Anna and Tony since they have teams talking about it and planting seeds with their teams. And again, with my biweekly one-on-ones, I could start to talk about it and weeks before we released it, I started to ask people, what questions might you have if we go down this path? And that helped me get additional detail into here. So there are people that don't want to come back yet and that's okay to keep doing my cabbage twice. But we haven't heard anybody say, "We shouldn't be doing this. It's too soon." And I think that's because we have a lot of care in here about the social distancing, about being safe and being responsible and providing choice.
Darin:
So I think, there's all kinds of chatter on social and the news about masks or this or masks or that, or we should reopen or we shouldn't reopen. All those sorts of things hangs I think in those channels and in those margins comes from people who either aren't listening to the other side are feeling disrespected themselves and it starts to create this talking past each other. And so I've made sure to do everything I could to not allow any of that to start to build here, which is why I think the plan has been accepted and those who aren't ready to come back yet themselves just aren't going to, and that's okay because they're still part of the plan even if they're not here.
Carl:
Yeah. I think the way that you did it is such a textbook example of getting people on board because you told them the idea is, you listened to them, you incorporated things, they probably saw that in the document, realized they had a voice and still had that choice as well. I'm interested to hear how it plays out. I definitely want to get... we've got a few questions in here. First from Pamela Holt. She want to know where you're located and if there is going to be a requirement for face coverings in addition to being six feet apart.
Darin:
We're located in Minneapolis. We're technically in St. Louis Park, right on the edge of downtown Minneapolis. Right now face masks are not required. We are providing PPEs. So we're providing gloves and face mask for anybody who wants to wear them here. We're not requiring them right now. If the state starts to require that they be worn "everywhere". Then we'll comply with that. And I don't have it on me, but of course I had green face mask because I [inaudible 00:34:49]. "Terra, can I have you to face mask please."
Carl:
You and I were talking about the livestream of Prince's 1985 Syracuse, New York show last night. And as I'm watching the chat, occasionally an ad for a Paisley park mask would come through. I'll try that was so cool, but I could never seem to get the site was crashing because I was totally going to hold her son. But let's see it. Show me what you got there.
Darin:
These are our Irish Titan face masks that we had made. So we will be providing these but we're not requiring them right now.
Carl:
Okay, that's great. Well, let's get our next question. We got Bill, or actually this might be Jay as Bill. Based on what Bill said second. "Did your company receive any PPP funding?"
Darin:
We did receive PPP funding.
Carl:
Okay, great. I would imagine that question was, did you feel like you had to get back into the office or this should add? So I'm not positive that's what Jay meant, but I can imagine that that playing in for a lot of people.
Darin:
Yeah. So that had nothing to do with the return to work. Because again, we've performed well remotely. It's just our culture or chemistry that people we've hired are consciously or subconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally wired to be here working together and get the energy from that. So that is the impetus for us to start to open the office up again for return. It's not to be policing the work or checking to make sure people are plugged in.
Carl:
I can appreciate that because when we went from being a located firm to being distributed, we had people who were like, "Look, I want an office. When I came on board there was an office and I want that." Definitely, we're all different as humans, right? So I think that's very valid. And then Eric had a question, "Would you or the Titans travel by airplane host events are great idea on the rotation with the team?" A little compliment there at the end. But would the Titans travel by airplane or would you host events right now?
Darin:
Right now, no. Well would I personally traveled by plane right now? Yeah, I would, and I have a couple of good friends. Delta is headquartered in Atlanta but has a big, big presence here and I have a couple of friends airline and it said like, it's probably never been safer to flying a plane than it is right now. I personally would. I tend to be more in that confidence side, but I wouldn't be expecting Titans to travel as a group right now for work. And right now we wouldn't host any event. I mentioned specifically earlier this Ecomm Forum event that we do in the fall. We get around 500 people to it and we have national sponsors. So a lot of effort and we're already me more than anybody is starting to think, "Man, what do we do?" You've done a great pivot to the webinars digital [crosstalk 00:38:00].
Carl:
Thank you.
Darin:
We haven't and I can honestly say that because I would participate in one of them. I said I'd give you an A plus point. We haven't done that yet and I don't know so much of our brand I guess, and the experience is based on some of the shenanigans that just start to happen on stage and the whiskey side chat that the venue didn't know I was going to do and they were super pissed at me because I brought my own bottle of whiskey. Some wanted to be able to take it home with me. so I don't right now know on events for sure. In the fall, maybe and so they're already starting to think.
Carl:
Well, it's interesting. Obviously I have a vested interest in, in person events. But we were talking today about some of the upcoming events and we've done a 90 day rolling window and honestly, I'm not sure it's long enough. And then there was in the Slack channels, I forget who put it in there, but somebody was asking around like, "When would you be comfortable to travel?" And a lot of the answers were post vaccine two months. Right? So it's like you start to realize we should just count on things being online and be happy when they're not. I plan on them being in person and then disappointed when they aren't. I mean, that's the shift we're making.
Darin:
Yeah. I don't think we'll ever go back to any events of some combination of size and sophistication, not having an online component. I don't think we'll ever go back to that.
Carl:
No, I really hope not.
Darin:
Yeah. I do think events will happen again because I think we thirst for that, right? I think we thirst for handshakes and hugs and meeting people and it's human contact and there's also, you can't read the room the same way with a screen between us as you can in person. You just can't.
Carl:
No, and I do have to, I want to apologize to my dog Sherlock right now. He has been taking all of my hugs because my family basically shuns me now and walks away. I'm so hug hungry. That sounded horrible. I'm sure my parole officer won't like that. Okay, let's go over again. Another question from Steve. How's it going, Steve? Miss you guys. As we moved to a similar situation every day, we'll have a partially remote team. His first question, "What workflow changes will you be using to make sure those that are in the office and those that are at home can still communicate effectively?"
Darin:
Yeah. So that is something that I think to a reasonable degree, we know we need to figure out but haven't figured out.
Carl:
Fair enough.
Darin:
From a workload perspective, the way we commit our code, the way that we're sharing designs, the way we're communicating with Slack. We're moving to Asana soon. All of that stuff can happen whether we're all at home, or here or a mix. What I think will be a challenge that we haven't figured out yet is if two people are here for a project scrum and three people are at home do the two people that are here spread out so that they maybe on opposite floor events. We have two floors here and there and then all five people are Zooming even though with their own Zooms, even though two people are here in the office. We haven't really figured that out yet.
Darin:
But also we've had a few people who pushed appropriately for the plan before we rolled it out to have as much as possible figured out. And that's good. I'm not super wired like that. I tend to be the tide pool, jump off a cliff and make a parachute on the way down. But I think more detail is better than less than situation like this. That helped with some of the edges that I hadn't thought of. And this is a perfect example of those. So we have that, we've talked about that and one of the things I said to people when we rolled this out is help us all figure that out just like we all figured out how to start working from home like that. We'll figure it out and we all need to pitch in on that.
Carl:
Yeah. I'm going to jump in here as somebody who ran distributed teams for a long time and one of the things that I've heard so many times, and I think it's really important and Steve to answer your question, I think you have to plan on everybody feeling distributed, everybody feeling remote in the way you communicate. Because otherwise the people at home are going to start to feel like they're isolated. Like they're a satellite because there's going to be an internal joke or somebody who's going to make a decision in person and they're going to find out later. And then you start to have... it's not about trust of the individual, it's the trust of being included, which I think does start to fall out.
Carl:
Now we've got another question here from Andrew. Good to see you here, Andrew. "Thank you for sharing this amazing insight. My biggest concern is when the confident turn on the cautious at some unknown point in the future and how I handle that potential rift. This may speak more to my culture, but would you have any tips for mitigating this?" So the people who are there and are confident, maybe they get just a little bit snarky about the cautious people. It doesn't even have to be like really mean, right? It can just be a comment. So how do you handle that?
Darin:
Yeah, that stuff can be tricky because that really comes down to leadership, management, which are two different things, but also both play a role here. Having your culture defined and having the right communication patterns. Speaking just for myself, again, the value of those biweekly one-on-ones have allowed me to say and say time and time again that I'm not going to allow any disrespect. I'm not going to allow people to feel isolated or disregarded and I will police that hard and my management team also will. So for example, one of the things that we've talked about as a management team as if we know somebody is not doing a good job, social distancing outside of here, it's our job to talk to them, right?
Darin:
I think I'm not a big fan of the policy side of HR because I feel like a lot of HR policies are the result of people being too scared to have an honest conversation with somebody. Like dress code policies is what I always use as example there. If someone wears something that they shouldn't... we don't have dress code here. I mean, [inaudible 00:44:36] sometimes. So we could have really and so I think that if somebody is not wearing something that they, or somebody wearing something they shouldn't, then I'm going to talk to them and say, "Hey, don't wear that in the office again, that's not professional enough." And that's the same kind of conversation we're going to have, whether it's me or my management team, or hopefully and I know at least some of our Titans would have the same conversation where they say, "You don't talk like that. Don't make them feel that way." And then the person I say, "Oh shit, I didn't even know how it was coming across."
Carl:
Right and I think that's dead on. I worked in advertising agency and there was a whole dress code policy that changed because of one person wearing running shorts that were slit all the way up to the band and he did not seem to see a problem with it while the rest of us were seeing too much of the problem. I know that was woof. Suddenly nobody can wear shorts.
Darin:
They made a rule for the obsession.
Carl:
Exactly. So we have one more question here. "A lot of times people don't think about others families. I've been in isolation since March 12th because of an ill parent I'm taking care of who is super high risk." So that there's two sides to this. One is, and I'll say from reading the document, I think you've definitely touched on this, but some people may not even want to share that information. I mean that's super personal. So how do you address that if somebody's situation isn't just about being able to come into the office or be at home, but even the amount of focus that they can give because they've got so much going on?
Darin:
A couple of things, we've talked about on the fact that we need to be mentally taking care of ourselves too. For example, the document I hold has the employee assistance line. And we also talk about that about every other week in our bi-weekly or weekly Zoom cast at three o'clock, on Fridays. So we are acknowledging that at a high level and trying to support people and recognizing that need for themselves. I think that we do have some Titans who are staying with their parents to take care of their parents. And so we do have that scenario. I think that we tend to have... I think there's a high degree of trust inside Irish Titan because if there weren't, we wouldn't know all the things we know about each other. And so I think that by and large people are pretty comfortable sharing their circumstances because they know that they're not being judged.
Darin:
I think that everybody that has circumstances that are maybe family or kids or something like that, we know probably most of that if not all of that. But we do say a couple of times in the document and a couple of times when I rolled this out, if you don't want to come back for any reason, you don't have to. So we try to still support that privacy. We're not trying to pry with people. I think that there's hopefully a sense of trust where people are sharing because they feel trusted.
Carl:
Yeah, it's such a tricky thing, everything you just shared and what know about your culture and about your team, I would hope that that is the case, that you do have that information. Well, we're coming up on time. Okay, great. We do have one more question. I was going to say when we get through to whatever is next, I'm coming for the bat poll. You just need to know that.
Darin:
You're welcome.
Carl:
I'm coming for it. I'm a Marvel guy but I may be in full costume.
Darin:
All right. I have a Bat Poll waiver form for you to sign.
Carl:
Oh good lord, HR. Okay. We've got another question here from Bill. "Now that our team is working remote, it's amazing that the transition was so easy. A few want to come back to the office a couple of days a week. Most are happy with work from home. So we're in a bit of a struggle, expensive office versus no office. We found that working from the office is a drawback from recruiting some top talent. Have you seen that?"
Darin:
We haven't, at least not yet. As I game planned this out, I see that as a possible risk for how things might emerge. We already previously have chosen to not move forward on potential Titans candidates because they said that they wanted to work from home and we said, "Well, we're not a work from home company." And so we've already dealt with that three coated. I think that let's point forward, there is a risk that people will, existing Titans might want to say, "Well, I only really want to come into office a couple of times a week." And that starts to become tricky for us to determine how to best navigate that, right? Because I don't remember the name of the guy who asked the question, but it sounds like he's had a good experience too or productivity performance has been strong. So it's not that.
Darin:
I am stubborn with my vision and our culture and flexible with the details underneath that. And so, I can talk as to why an office makes sense for our culture. Maybe that evolves over time. I don't know and as owners, we all know like walking that fine line with what to be stubborn with and what to be flexible on, that's what makes for better days or worst days. Better months or worse months actually.
Carl:
That is absolutely true. I think that's a great place to end it. Darin, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing everything that you're working on and I'm going to share this with everybody. You mentioned earlier that was fine.
Darin:
Yeah, go for it.
Carl:
We will send this out, we'll drop it in Slack and also I'll be sending out a email to everybody when this video is posted and I'll include that in there. Special thanks again to MailChimp, InVision and Platform.sh our sponsors for keeping us going. And with that I will release you everybody have a great weekend. Take some time for yourself and relax a little bit and we'll see you here again next Friday. And next Friday we got Nancy Lyons is going to be here to talk about her new book, like about what is this? We get the Minnesota podcasts.
Darin:
I was going to say Minneapolis representing strong.
Carl:
I even said Minnesota. What just happened? I don't know what just happened. Everybody have a great weekend. We'll see you later.
Darin:
Thanks, Carl. Thanks everybody.