A startup’s guide to performance management in a remote-work environment

Ever since the global shift to remote working, managers across the business world have struggled with one question: How do I know my team isn’t slacking off?

Without being able to sit across from the people you work with, performance management can be a difficult task. And for teams staffed with talent across countries and cultures, understanding working styles and managing expectations can also be a challenge.

How then can managers perform effectively and ensure their teams are empowered to work on fulfilling the business’ objectives?

In this episode of A Startup’s Guide to Remote Talent, G-P’s Charles Ferguson talks to Alison Eyring, founder and CEO of Singapore-headquartered software-as-a-service company Produgie, about how managing remote employees has changed over the decades, the important role managers play in driving a business to succeed, and what it takes to manage remote teams effectively.

Timecodes:

00:00 – Intro
01:18 – Introducing Alison Eyring, founder and CEO of Produgie
02:16 – The talent economy today versus 20 years ago
04:39 – Technology can be a bit of a headache
06:15 – The changing attitudes towards work
07:37 – Why companies are experiencing a dearth of leadership
10:04 – The challenges and opportunities of having a diverse global workforce
11:21 – How to get better at managing remote teams
12:53 – The recap so far
13:19 – Next episode: How to tackle labor laws and regulations

Hosts:

• Charles Ferguson, Singapore-based general manager for G-P’s Asia-Pacific operations
• Nathaniel Fetalvero, managing editor of Tech in Asia Studios and host of the Startup Snapshot podcast

Featured Interviewee:

• Alison Eyring, founder and CEO of Singapore-headquartered SaaS firm Produgie

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A Startup’s Guide to Remote Talent is a podcast by Tech in Asia, produced in partnership with G-P. Visit G-P’s website to learn more about the increasingly remote working world and how your business can gain an edge in the talent economy.

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Transcript

Nathaniel Fetalvero:
You know, Charles, one thing I don’t miss about working in a traditional office setting is hearing the words, “Can I see you in my office?”

Charles Ferguson:
Haha you and me both, Nat. It’s like that feeling when you’re a little kid and your mom walks into the kitchen and catches you trying to steal a cookie.

Nathaniel Fetalvero:
But, you know, I became a manager fairly recently and I now understand why that was a thing. Like, it’s so much easier to have hard conversations with employees face to face instead of over a Slack message or video call.

Charles Ferguson:
Oh yeah, though I’d bet reading the words “Can we jump on a Google Meet?” from your boss might give you similar levels of anxiety.

Nathaniel Fetalvero:
100%. But I’m also thinking a lot about how, in a remote work setting, performance management is such a hard thing to do effectively.

Charles Ferguson:
Well, let’s dive into that, but first…

Hello, and welcome back to A Startup’s Guide to Remote Talent. My name’s Charles Ferguson, I’m the APAC general manager at G-P, and my co-host is Tech in Asia Studios managing editor Nathaniel Fetalvero.

In this podcast miniseries, Nat and I explore the new age of hiring and how businesses of today – and tomorrow – can navigate the talent economy of the future. And today, we’re going to talk about managing remote teams effectively.

Nathaniel Fetalvero:
I’m guessing you’ve very coincidentally spoken to someone recently about this topic?

Charles Ferguson:
You’re guessing right. Meet Alison Eyring, founder and CEO of Singapore-headquartered SaaS company Produgie.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
Let’s see. Today, I am the founder and CEO of Produgie. Produgie is a SaaS company that I founded. I spun it out in July of 2021 from another company that I founded and then led for over 20 years. So it’s been a long journey. Yeah, so that and I live in Singapore. So I’ve been here since 1999.

Charles Ferguson (Recorded Interview):
Awesome.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
So it’s been a long journey. Yeah, so that. And I live in Singapore, so I’ve been here since 1999.

Charles Ferguson (Recorded Interview):
Outstanding. We’ve been here about the same amount of time. I moved here in ‘97, so we’ve seen a lot of change on this little red dot.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
So much change

Charles Ferguson:
And what’s interesting about Alison is that both Produgie and the company that she spun out from both adopted fully remote working environments.

Nathaniel Fetalvero:
Wow, that makes her something of a pioneer.

Charles Ferguson:
Pioneer is right. But that also means that some 20 years ago, she was already dealing with the challenges businesses today are facing when it comes to questions around managing remote teams.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
So as a consulting firm, and we had 200, coaches, assessors, leadership development experts, we would work with mostly very large companies, helping them build high team performance, expand geographies, deploy new growth strategies. And so a big problem that we were often dealing with was, well, how do you expand across borders? How do you manage across borders? How do you manage people who are very different? That was… in fact, for 10 years, we ran a consortium of companies, and that was the problem they were trying to solve. So we learned a lot about that.

Nathaniel Fetalvero:
Right, but it’d be remiss of us not to acknowledge the fact that the talent economy 20 years ago versus the one today are worlds apart.

Charles Ferguson:
Oh yeah, but the difference is that it’s getting easier.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
It’s so different. It’s so much easier now. Oh my gosh. We didn’t have any… the only tool we had was phone. We didn’t have VCs then

Charles Ferguson (Recorded Interview):
No.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
I mean, this sounds like ancient history, but we managed on a phone –

Charles Ferguson (Recorded Interview):
I remember that.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
– conference calls.

Charles Ferguson (Recorded Interview):
Yeah, we had conference calls. You had a bridge.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
We did. So we had that. And that was it. And we had emails.

Charles Ferguson (Recorded Interview):
That’s totally true..

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
So now the tools are just so… more flexible. The other thing is, now the world is so much more cosmopolitan, right? Because you… so many more people have a brother or a sister or a mother or a father and aunt and uncle that’s from another country and they go on holidays to other places.

So we’re, as humans, more, I think, generally, more accustomed to interacting with people that are different. And I think that that has changed over time. I mean, just in Singapore, Singaporeans have grown so much over the last 30 years, so many people live overseas now. 30 years ago, that was so unusual, right?

So I do think that there’s mindsets that are different. Technology’s changed and made it easier. And lots of people have done it. So you can just Google “what are some good practices?” and you know, you get lots of resources. I think that in those days, you were just making it up. We didn’t know what we were doing. And there was no manual.

Charles Ferguson:
But, of course, there’s the flip side, where all this technology can actually be a bit of a headache.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
We used to have… we had a board game that we created to help people make the better choices in which type of technology to use in what situation.

Charles Ferguson (Recorded Interview):
No way.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
Because it’s a huge issue. For instance, some technology like email – emails, the least trusted source of information and yet it’s so overused. So if you have any kind of issue that’s at all sensitive or could cause somebody to be embarrassed, don’t send an email and don’t copy everybody, like, that’s the worst thing you can do. You start doing that, man, you just destroyed trust so fast, right?

On the other hand, you know, you have other kinds of technologies, like, a VC or, you know, you’ve got some magnificent technology, you almost feel like you’re in the same room, they use a lot of bandwidth, they’re a lot more expensive. So if you’re going to use that type of a solution, make sure it’s worth your while, right? That’s why sometimes you’ll see teams, they fly all around the world, and they sit in a room, and frankly, they’re doing what they could have done remotely. And I’m, like, what are you thinking? You’re damaging the environment, you’re messing up your bodies, you could have done it remotely.

So when you are face to face, do face-to-face things, build your connections with each other, build trust with each other, get clarity of direction. So I think it’s about the right tool for the right problem. And when you only have one tool that solves every problem, whereas today, you got a zillion tools, so you’ve got to decide what’s in your toolbox.

Nathaniel Fetalvero:
Right, but those points aside, people’s attitudes towards work have changed over the decades as well. I mean, for one, there’s all these buzzwords coining phenomena like “quiet quitting” and “the great resignation” that are plastered all over the web on articles discussing the changes in the working world.

Charles Ferguson:
Of course, and that’s something that Alison is acutely aware of.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
It’s really interesting, that conversation about the “quiet quitting” –

Charles Ferguson (Recorded Interview):
Right, right.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
– things like that, because, you know, if you look at turnover data, it’s been on the rise for a decade. This is not a new phenomenon.

Charles Ferguson (Recorded Interview):
Totally.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
And if you look at engagement surveys, I mean, oh my gosh, we’ve been doing engagement surveys for like decades and decades. And no matter how much money people spend on those engagement surveys, engagement, as measured, is going down, right?

Charles Ferguson (Recorded Interview):
Right, right.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
So there’s clearly issues. And I personally think a lot of it is about leadership. And when I say leadership, to me, leadership is… its action, it’s not position. And it’s about driving collective effort to succeed. And I think too many organizations are focused on so many things that they really aren’t. They’ve kind of lost focus on what is the leadership that we need in order to achieve our aspirations as a business? And the reality is, you’re never going to achieve your aspirations as a business, if your people aren’t on the journey with you.

Charles Ferguson (Recorded Interview):
That’s so true. And do you think that it’s indeed the case that a lot of businesses are not really focusing on the right things as it relates to cultivating leadership from within the organization? I mean, it’s sort of a rhetorical question, but I’m curious about your opinion or your perspective on this dearth of leadership and where it’s really coming from.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
I think there’s a mindset issue, and there’s an industry issue. And I think that the mindset issue is that many organizations think, “Oh, leadership, that’s those people at the top,” right?

Charles Ferguson (Recorded Interview):
The C-people.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
And then all those others, you know, then they’re just those lowly managers.

Charles Ferguson (Recorded Interview):
Yeah.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
Well, those managers are really important.

Charles Ferguson (Recorded Interview):
Totally.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
They shape the experience of people in the organization every single day. So I think that there’s a huge problem that organizations have continuously rising expectations of their managers and they don’t have continuously rising resources to enable them. I think that’s an internal problem.

The industry problem is it’s just too expensive, you know, if you’re an organisation… and again, you know, if you’re the largest company in the world, you’ve got armies of people that are helping solve these problems. If you’re a mid-sized company or a smaller company, you don’t. And that’s very, very difficult. You know, maybe once a year, you get somebody that helps your leadership team get focused and aligned around the strategy and how they’re going to deploy it. And then those people go away because it’s too expensive to sustain the support.

What I know from my own history, working with other organizations is this is very painful for many organizations, and partly because a lot of managers can manage presence, but not performance.

Charles Ferguson (Recorded Interview):
Oh, that’s a great line. Yeah, that’s really quite telling, isn’t it?

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
Yeah, it’s a lot more difficult. And how do you know if someone’s struggling? How do you know? How do you know when they’re disengaged? It’s very difficult to learn and to understand. So you… I think when you manage remotely, you have to do a lot of things differently. And you have to not try to just manage the way you know how to manage when you’re face to face.

Charles Ferguson (Recorded Interview):
Sure.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
So I think that that’s hard for people and people are stretched and they’re busy and so that requires extra energy. That’s tough for people to do.

Nathaniel Fetalvero:
I mean, just personally, I really relate to that. It is tough to know how your team feels when they’re just avatars in a Slack channel.

Charles Ferguson:
Yeah, and it can become even more challenging if your team is spread out across continents because, well, people from different backgrounds are sometimes just plain different. But that can easily be an advantage as much as a challenge.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
What we know, both from a research perspective and just practically, is the more differences you have, the more challenging it can become, right? But on the other hand, the more differences you have, the more opportunities you have to delight in those differences, right?

Charles Ferguson (Recorded Interview):
The better you are, right? Exactly.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
You know, research shows that when you have a highly diverse team, if it’s well managed, it will outperform a homogenous team, a less diverse team. But if it’s not well managed, you’re really out of luck because it’s way worse. So that’s really… it’s a liability and it’s a blessing.

Charles Ferguson (Recorded Interview):
Yeah.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
That’s why it’s so important to enable managers to be great at understanding, you know, how do they create psychological safety? How do they include people who are different? How do they help people feel that they belong? How do they help set up teams that have effective norms? How do they build trust? Those are all things that are very, very important in a distributed environment.

Nathaniel Fetalvero:
And all that really just underlines the importance of good management

Charles Ferguson:
For sure. So I asked Alison for some pearls of wisdom that we and our listeners could take away to try to get better at managing remote teams and she had this to say.

Alison Eyring (Recorded Interview):
Well, I would still come back to a very old fashioned idea, which is that having shared goals are really important. So whatever you do, whether you’re co-located or in different locations, that’s really important.

I think the other one is, take time to define what right looks like. And the problem is that we’re often in such a hurry to go and deploy or to execute that we don’t take time to have conversations about, well, what do we think it’s gonna look like when we implement this? Or what do we think… what is right? So have really clear, shared goals, have a shared view and take time to define what right looks like. And then always, like, I think, always find that balance between the sort of alignment and focus with the enable and empower.

Nathaniel Fetalvero:
That reminds me of your conversation with Imran from Kyber Network in episode one about how empowered workers can lead to innovation.

Charles Ferguson:
Yeah, that still holds true, but a culture in which everyone is just trying something new and cool and flashy can very easily turn into one where nobody is achieving business objectives, which is exactly what Alison is talking about. You want to encourage an innovative mindset, but you also need to make sure everyone knows what they need to do for the business to succeed at the bare minimum.

Nathaniel Fetalvero:
OK, so leverage technology to engage employees, but make sure it’s the right technology for the right situation, empower managers across the business to be able to look after and drive their teams, have clear communication of the overarching business goals and what success looks like, and ensure that innovating on new and exciting projects doesn’t get in the way of what the business and the employees need to focus on to succeed.

Charles Ferguson:
That about sums it up.

Nathaniel Fetalvero:
I’ve got one last question though: With all this talk about having teams across countries and continents, how can business leaders make sure they’re not crossing any lines when it comes to labor laws and regulations? I mean, there are just way too many policies from way too many countries for one to keep track of.

Charles Ferguson:
Well, stay tuned to the next episode to find out.

Nathaniel Fetalvero:
Not the cliffhanger again.

Charles Ferguson:
At least I’m consistent. To all our faithful listeners, thanks for listening to this episode of A Startup’s Guide to Remote Talent, a Tech in Asia podcast, produced in partnership with G-P. Make sure to follow us on your podcast platform of choice so you can catch the final episode – as well as all our past episodes – where we’ll be capping this conversation on everything you need to know about the future of the remote-talent economy. And if you’re on an app that lets you, go ahead and give us five stars and a review. It really helps us out.

Nathaniel Fetalvero:
Also, special thanks to Produgie’s Alison Eyring for sharing her tips and thoughts with us on this episode. We’ll put links to her LinkedIn profile in the show notes if you want to get in touch with her.

Charles Ferguson:
That’s right. And if you’re a business owner or business leader and you need or want some assistance in figuring out your remote-talent strategies, visit G-P’s website at g-p.com and we’ll be sure to help you out. I’ve been Charles.

Nathaniel Fetalvero:
And I’m Nat. We’ll catch you next time.