This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - 102 / Remote Work Is The Future with Lona Alia

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

In an ever changing world with increasing access to better technology, resources and people than in any other time in history, it’s amazing to me how many organizations and leaders refuse to test out new ways of allowing their teams to work. Despite the evidence that flexible work environments, schedules and trusting your people is profitable, organizations are still trying to force their team back to pre-covid work environments. On today’s episode I welcome Lona Alia - she is an expert on building revenue channels and fully remote teams. Head of Revenue at Safety Wing (where they have 100% retention… seriously), Advisor to Startups and EU for Innovation, Lona is a remote work advocate and Digital Nomad who has worked and traveled to over 80 countries and has learned 7 languages. She is even building the first country on the internet. I see far too many of us staying in unhealthy, unsupportive work environments out of some sense of displaced loyalty, or fear of change, or unwillingness to take strategic risks. Women make up a large and necessary part of the workforce. We have power. It’s time we use it for ourselves and everyone else that’s being underserved by their company. That is woman’s work. To learn more about Lona and her work you can visit www.safetywing.com or follow her on IG @nomadcities. For more info on Boundless Life and for an automatic $400 discount please go to: https://www.boundless.life/lona To learn more about what we are up to outside of this podcast, visit us at NicoleKalil.com

Here's one mind-busting thought from our guest, and you're definitely going to want to tune in for more. Why would a woman or a mother want to spend time in traffic twice a day, go into office politics when she can do her work really well in the location of her choosing, and then spend time with the people she loves the most, which is her family. I am Nicole Kalil, and you're tuning into the This Is Woman's Work podcast, where together we're redefining how it looks, feels, and what it means to be doing women's work. And one of the most frustrating things, at least for me, is in an ever-changing world with access to more and better technology, resources, and people than any other time in history, how many organizations and leaders refuse to test out new ways of doing things, new ways of allowing their teams to work. One of the silver linings of COVID, at least in my mind, was that it forced many people to test out remote work, more flexible schedules, and increased autonomy. And guess what? According to the Washington Post,

the majority of the largest American corporations prospered in the pandemic. And anecdotally, every single woman I coach had their best year ever in 2021. I'm not suggesting it was an ideal situation, not at all, but I am frustrated at how quickly organizations are trying to force their teams back to the way it was before, despite the evidence that flexible work environments, schedules, and trusting your people is profitable. And I get frustrated on behalf of the women I speak to that feel that they could do better work when they are able to avoid toxic cultures and toxic leaders. I don't claim to be an expert on organizational leadership or the impacts of remote work, but I know someone who is. Lona Alia is an expert at building revenue channels and fully remote teams, head of revenue

at Safety Wing, advisor to startups and EU for innovation. Lona is a remote work advocate and digital nomad who has worked and traveled to over 80 countries and has learned seven languages. She's even building the first country on the internet. And I have no idea what that means, but it sounds pretty incredible. Lona, thank you for being here to share your expertise on this topic. Thank you. And what an introduction. And I love what you just said about women, technology, remote work. Can't wait to discuss. Okay. So I'm glad that you said that because my first question was going to

be to ask whether or not you feel I'm off base in my frustration with organizations, you know, trying to get back to the way things have always been done. Are you seeing more flexibility than I am? And then because you've traveled to so many different countries, are you seeing more or less flexibility in the US compared to other companies? So big question, but. Wow. Yeah. Big question. I am a hundred percent with you and being a mother of two and a wife and a woman, I feel a hundred percent your frustrations and the world's frustrations, especially women, people of color, as well as other minorities and people with disabilities, right? When these leaders are telling us to go back to a model that's literally 100 years old, the 9 to 5, that was not built for today's day and age, when we have the technology that you mentioned, it makes zero sense. And I feel that it benefits the men who potentially own

all this real estate that they need people to go back to. This is like my hunch. It's like, why would a woman or a mother want to spend time in traffic twice a day, go into office politics when she can do her work really well in the location of her choosing, and then spend time with the people she loves the most, which is her family. So for me, it makes zero sense. And I'm very much on the complete other side of remote work. I actually discovered remote work in the late 2000s when it wasn't popular and I have been pushing for that ever since. So it's not something that I've been doing for the last two years. I did this when I was very young out of college and when people say like, oh, we need remote work because we don't need

remote work because people need to be in the office, especially young people. I say that's not true. You know, people can live and work from wherever they want to work. And yes, to answer your question, I am seeing companies in order to be competitive, in order to retain and attract the best talent. They have to be flexible. They have to offer people the opportunity to work on their terms. Because if you want to attract the smartest, the best in the world, you cannot tell them what to do and where to show up. And in theory, you shouldn't even have to or want to because, you know, when people love what they do, I find people do better work, do more work when they love what they're doing and are doing it in the way in which they want, in which they have ownership over it.

A hundred percent. Okay. I would agree. And I can give you some data to back that up because I love speaking from experience. At Safety Wing, we have almost 200 people on our team. We have 0% attrition or 100% retention, which means that we're doing something right. People want to work at Safety Wing. They love working here. One, we are growing rapidly. So we are producing a lot of revenue, which shows efficiency. Two, we are distributed in 52 countries. So people are in all over the world and different time zones,

and it shows you that you don't have to be tied to a location. And it is working out quite well. So the model that we are doing, it's showing good results when others are part of the great resignation, and they're part of many different issues they're seeing with productivity, efficiency, revenue, and we're not seeing those. So what are, generally speaking, the current trends as it relates to remote work? What are some of the challenges? So, you know, I don't think any situation is perfect without its challenges, so knowing what those might be. And how should companies be preparing for the future of work? The future of work, I see it as being very much employee or contractor centric. So basically, you know, the worker kind of like sets what is best for them and the company is flexible towards

that. Some of the challenges are time zones, for instance. So if everybody needs to be sync for two hours a week or four hours a week, then it makes sense for most people to be in a couple of time zones, which will sync together. For example, the Americas and Europe and Africa usually are good time zones just because you can overlap a couple of hours each day. Whereas if you've got like the Americas and Asia, it's a bit hard because your morning is their night. And especially if you're a working mother with two kids, it's not very conducive. So that's what we say in our company. In order to have like a better quality of life, it's best to be in this continent. But again, it's four continents, which is great

versus saying you have to be in New York City and 30 miles within that radius. And that works out quite well. So I see that the future will be more async. People will be able to do work when it's best for them. And then also kind of like meet up in places to build those connections. For instance, at Safety Wing, we meet up four times a year in person in really wonderful locations.

Like the last one was Mexico, before that was Slovenia. We're going to Bali in October as a team. We do that for about a week. 50% of the day is fun and play, and then 50% is work. So it gives us that ability to connect with each other without necessarily having to have an office to spend all this overhead to make people come to a place. You've talked about borderless benefits. What does that mean? Yes. So this is kind of an interesting thing. Like when people start moving around, like myself, I've been nomadic for the last four years together with my family. We are like three months in Mexico, four months in Costa Rica, six months in Slovenia, you name it. When you do that, you run into border issues, meaning that something like health insurance does not transfer over borders.

And that's what we innovated at Safety Wing. We basically said, OK, people need health insurance. They need to hire people wherever is the best talent. And that talent could be in 50 countries. But how do they actually cover everyone with health insurance. So we made something that is mobile and moves with you versus stagnant like most insurances. It says, okay, you live in Florida, you're only covered in Florida. If you go to New York, you're not covered. If you go to London, you're not covered. So we made something that works in over 180 countries. And we want to make even more things, more benefits like life insurance, maternity, paternity leave, income protection, like the 401ks, like retirement plans, have them be borderless

so that it serves this new wave of people being nomadic, being remote, working from anywhere in the world, because we see that as being the future. We talked about this a little bit before we hit record. And I think this is just a good time to ask, because I know people listening are like, okay, how does she do this? Right. You have two small children, you know, obviously a very big career. Talk to us about like more on the personal level, how you're doing this with a young family. Great question. And Nicole, many people ask this, actually, they're like, wow, you have this like crazy life. Like how do you do it? And maybe it's

not for everyone, but for me it's essential because I like to have variety in my life. I get bored easily, easily. So I want to explore new places, new cultures, eat new food. I want to be in places where it's walking distance and also places where my children can learn from other people versus it be so homogeneous in just one place. And we've been doing this on our own, hacking it for so long. But recently, there's a really cool company that just came along maybe a year ago called boundless life and what they do is they figure out all the logistics for you anywhere from you know your airbnb at the place you'll stay you have once a week cleaning you have an education center for the kids and the plugged-in community which means that there's a lot of people that are like you

some people might travel just for the one month out of the year, like on the summer vacation for the kids. They'll come to a place like Central Portugal, where I am now. But they have locations in Italy, Greece, and Portugal, and they're growing. So the idea is that families that want to try this life, they can have a turnkey solution without having to figure out anything. Their kids will be taken care of with the best schooling system in the world. And they will be together with other children of other travelers. So it's quite cool and unique, honestly, and I'm loving it so far.

Oh my gosh, it sounds incredible. I mean, I wrote it down when you told me earlier, I'm going to look into it because I've always dreamed of, you know, it'd be so great to live for a summer in another country or, you know, for a year. And I always get trapped up in the logistics, you know, especially children's schools and, you know, how would we make it. So anyway, I know what I'm doing after our time together. Let me ask another question based on your experience. What are some tips you have for companies? You mentioned attracting and retaining the best talent. I think that's probably most companies' primary mission and challenge, right? You got to attract and retain the best talent. What are your tips on how to do that, given what you know in today's environment? Yes. You know, the number one tip that I mentioned to many people, and it's very easy to remember, is do what people want.

And let me backtrack that. I went to Y Combinator, which I'm not sure if your listeners know, but that's the most prestigious accelerator in the world. It's in Silicon Valley. That's where Airbnb came from, Dropbox, Stripe, multi-billion dollar companies. And what the founder or the co-founders of Y Combinator say to all of the founders that come in to accelerate their businesses, they say, build something that people want. It's very simple, right? Like when you're building a business, build something that people actually want. Don't think or make up this business in your head.

And you're like, oh, this is exactly what people will want. But then you launch it and you find out, well, actually nobody's buying it. So because we're not building something they want. Now, when it comes to companies, because I've been building these teams fully remote and also building the company together with the founders of Safety Wing, what we're finding is that we do a lot of collecting the ideas and what our team wants.

And what I mean by that is that every six months or so, we sit together and say, okay, what benefits do we want? Let's revisit what we have. And what other things do we want to make us have a joyful experience here at this company? And we sit together, we do like a planning and prioritization kind of hour. We put a spreadsheet together.

We brainstorm on our own. We put all the benefits we want, and then we rank them independently. And then we see, okay, what are the top three that are showing right now? And we implement those three, because obviously, we can't implement 1000 benefits, it has to be some of the top ones. But the idea is to do what your people want. So every company is different, every company is going to have a different base of employees. Ask them, whether it's an interview, whether you're seeing people leave a lot,

have an exit interview. If people are staying long enough, ask them, why are they staying? What's making them stay? And then have these check-ins, have like an internal NPS, for example, where you're measuring constantly, are people happy? Will they tell their friends about your company on a scale from one to nine?

We measure this monthly and it's around nine, 9.2%. So like out of 10, which is great. Incredible. It falls into the category of simple yet extremely powerful in my mind, right? I think sometimes we overcomplicate or overthink, like we want to know what people want. Why don't we just ask them? Exactly. Make it simple for yourself. managing people remotely. So you manage a team, they're all over the place. I think some people start thinking like, how will I know what they're doing or when they're doing it? Or how will I train them? How will I develop them? How will I build rapport and relationship with them? What tips, what works for you in getting people that happy about working with you in a remote environment? Absolutely. And this is very, very important. I think the number one thing that we usually look for is people that believe in our mission and vision. So if we are aligned, let's say you and I are aligned that we both believe that this company will be the first country on the

internet, we're going to be borderless, all these things, we know we're going in the same direction. So I have much less to do in terms of managing you, because I know you already want this. And when two people want something, especially in a relationship, like a marriage or partnership, or however that is, it's much easier to manage that relationship. If two people want different things, then you know you're going to have a lot of problems. So to simplify your life, first you find those people and you can find them globally now. They don't have to be within a 30 mile radius. And these people can be super passionate about their mission.

And if they are, they will work night and day. They will put in whatever it takes to make it successful. So that's number one. And then number two is trust. This is a big thing. And I think this is what many big leaders or big leaders, company leaders of big companies, they don't really exercise this. Like, for example, Elon Musk, you know, it's like, everybody must be back at the office. I see that as having a problem or an issue with trust. You know, if I know that you are passionate about the mission and the vision, if I know that you are a talented individual, why wouldn't I put all my trust in you, you know, and by giving this trust, which I've been doing

with my teams, I don't have to manage again that much because I know that they will do what they said they would do. If there is an issue, then we can fix it later. But you have to trust first. When you give people that trust, usually they reciprocate. Usually they will kind of like hold up to it. But if you don't trust them from the start, if you're questioning, if you're micromanaging, if you're slacking all the time and like, oh, this person didn't get me this on time,

you're building a very toxic environment where like no one wants to be part of. And that's not how you build a big company. So I think the future is definitely more flexible, less hands-on, more let the expert do their work and then look at the results. So as you were speaking, I thought of just a couple of things that I've noticed that I think I've done wrong in the past myself, and I see leaders do wrong fairly often, is managing to the exception. So you have one employee who takes advantage of a situation or

a policy, and then all of a sudden it's like, we need to create a policy around this. And how often we inadvertently punish our best, most talented people when we put things in place to handle the people that we don't trust. Any thoughts on that? That's actually brilliant. I hadn't thought of it that way, but you're right. A lot of the policies, a lot of the things we put in place is to mitigate against the bad actors. But what we do at our company is that we shy away from doing that. What we do is like, okay, we figure out who maybe someone is not performing or a bad actor or not helping the culture. And then we quickly make a decision that we part ways in a very nice way, very respectfully, but you have to make sure that you address the person versus, like you said, make a whole entire company suffer because of this

one person. So that's why it's very important to build a culture that is really great to bring in people that fit that culture. And the moment that you see like, oh, I made a mistake, fix that mistake as soon as possible. Don't let it linger because then it spreads to the rest of the organization. And I've seen our leaders, the founders be quite good about this. And also what they're good at is really having a vision of how they want things to be from the start. Let's say putting trust in people or paying everyone the same equally across geographies. And they don't let investors or other people like pull them and say, no, no, you should do this and you should change that.

Because I feel like a lot of people will come into an organization and they'll be like experts and consultants or investors, and they'll give you all this advice. And then you're changing the company constantly and you're going in all kinds of directions because of all of this expert advice and the people in your company are going, what the heck is going on? What are we doing first? It's important that leadership sets like a very clear kind of like North star sticks with it and does not waver in the face of doubt. That is so, so important. I see so often where it's like being a ball in a pinball machine, and you're just pinging off of everybody else's good ideas and how confusing and frustrating that

can be for the people who work with you, because this is a podcast by a woman for women, I have to ask how much more important or less important are some of these things to women as opposed to, so for example, I think of like paid family leave. I used to think that that was really important just for women. And now I'm starting to realize that it's really important for everybody. Remote work. You know, I, I, on one hand sometimes have women say, oh, it's too distracting for me to work at home because the kids are around and I see all the chores that need to be done. And then there are other women who are like, are you kidding? Two hours extra a day saved on commute and having to get ready every single morning. That's like a godsend. So I guess, are you seeing any trends, gender oriented that play a part in remote work?

I mean, as a woman in remote work, I honestly, for me, it's been the most life-changing event in my life where I have been on the other side of the table where I had investors, I had to be in Silicon Valley, I had to have an office, but it was going against everything that I believed in. And for me, I talk about like living a rich life without necessarily being rich. And I've been doing this life because I can have freedom over my time and location. And for me personally, maybe it's just like one of me, or like maybe an entrepreneur side of me, it's like usually rich people get to have that, wealthy people. They have freedom over their time and location. They can be wherever they want, they can fly off, they can do this, they can do that, and be with the people that they want all

the time. They don't have to be going somewhere because they're wealthy or they're rich. Nobody tells them what to do. And this is what I see with remote work done right. So if remote work was done right, what I mean by that is that you have a company that gives you the trust, gives you the flexibility, tells you like, hey, Nicole, you can work from anywhere in the world.

You can go have that summer vacation with your daughter that's nine years old, and you can have this amazing experience in Italy, in Greece, in Portugal, have a person. It's just like all of the things you dreamed of now are possible because of this flexibility. Before this, you're like, oh, I only have two weeks, you know, a year. And let's not talk about, yeah, maternity and paternity leave, right? In the U.S., you get two weeks. You know, I had two kids and it's just like two weeks later, hey, it's gone. Whereas at this company that I'm now, one of the benefits is four months, maternity and paternity leave, which is incredible. So a lot of European countries have one year.

So a lot of things that we do in the US, remote work is opening up this window of opportunity for us to change some of those things. Like the two week, kind of like a year vacation. Now it's like a four week vacation. Maybe the five day work week turns into a four day work week. How can we make this more like worker centric, more life centric? How can we give people the life that they really want to live so that they're happy in what they're doing? And we don't have so many miserable people and jobs they don't want to do.

To be honest, like, yeah, I've never been happier in my life. And, you know, I get offers all the time. I have so many other opportunities, but I just love, you know, what we have built here because it's so conducive to life and I just haven't found it anywhere else. So anyone that's like, you know, in a company or leading a company or starting a company, make sure you start a company or a place where people want to be at and give them these things. Otherwise they'll be gone, the best ones. I couldn't agree more. And what resonated with me while you were talking is there's so many ways to compensate

people. We often think about salary, right? Or how much money they make. And sure, that's one way and an important way, but there are a ton of other ways to compensate people. And for some people, there are trade-offs they are willing to make, would happily make. And I think makes our opportunity as company leaders or as business owners even greater because we have flexibility and offerings and can bring talent in without having to always just be the top salary. Exactly. A hundred percent. Okay. Lona, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much. I want to give people an opportunity to find you. So your company website is safetywing.com. You can find Lona on LinkedIn at Lona Aaliyah and on Instagram at Nom discount code. If you put in Lona, L O N A in, you'll get a discount as you're looking into boundless life. If this is something that's exciting or something you want to test out in your life, like I really want to.

Lona, thank you so much. This has been such a good conversation. Thank you. And I hope it's helpful for everyone. It was a pleasure. At least it was for me. So I appreciate it. At the end of the day, each organization and their leader needs to decide what's best for them. But if leaders keep saying this is the way things have always been done, I can assure you it means you're on the path towards irrelevance. And you should never have to force people to come back to the office. If you do have to make them come in, it's a pretty sure sign that you have a problem with your culture. Because the vast majority of people aren't avoiding doing their work. They're avoiding

wasted time, whether that's commuting, countless interruptions, or meetings for the sake of meetings. They're avoiding micromanagers, places where they don't feel understood, valued, or included. They're avoiding toxic cultures. As Adam Grant says, if you want people to show up more often, make it worth the trip. And ladies, I see far too many of us

staying in places out of some sense of displaced loyalty or fear of change or unwillingness to take strategic risks. We make up a large and necessary part of the workforce. We have power. It's time we use it for ourselves and everyone else that's being underserved by their company. That is woman's work.