Remote Support Team Management with Erica Clayton

We're sitting down with Erica Clayton, CX expert and founder of Sunshine CX, to explore the strategies behind successfully managing remote customer support teams.

Whether you’re leading a global CX department or onboarding your very first remote hire, this episode is packed with practical insights on:

• Building team culture across time zones (Erica recommends The Culture Map by Erin Meyer)
• Creating effective onboarding processes
• Preventing remote burnout
• Fostering social connection without micromanaging
• Developing communication routines that actually work

Erica shares lessons from leading distributed support teams at companies like TuneCore and offers real-world advice on tools, processes, and leadership mindset shifts that help remote teams succeed.

We want to hear from you! Share your support stories and questions with us at happytohelp@buzzsprout.com!
 
To learn more about Buzzsprout visit Buzzsprout.com. 

Thanks for listening!

Transcript

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Introduction to Remote Team Leadership

Priscilla 0:00

Welcome to Happy to Help, a podcast about customer support from the people at Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Priscilla Brooke. Today is all about remote work. Leading a remote support team has its own set of challenges, so today we are going to give you some tips and strategies for leading a remote support team that is connected and motivated to do remarkable work. Thanks for joining us. Let's get into it.

Priscilla 0:30

I feel like at this point, the majority of people who work around the world are familiar with remote working. Like you know, five years ago, with the pandemic hit, anyone who could work remotely went remote, and so I feel like even people who weren't working remotely before that at this point have done it, done it at some point. But with remote working comes this new idea of leading people who are working remotely. It's just a new challenge, and so today we're going to talk about leading a remote support

Meet Erica Clayton from Sunshine CX

Priscilla 0:56

team, and luckily we have an expert with us who is going to share some insights that she has from her experience leading remote teams, and so Erica Clayton is here. She's the founder of Sunshine CX. She is a longtime CX leader and a self-proclaimed AI enthusiast and a proud cat lady. She has spent the last 15 years shaping customers' experiences, and she's led large teams and small teams and has a lot of experience leading remote workers, and so I'm really excited to have her with us today. Welcome to the show, erica. Thank you so much.

Erica 1:29

I am thrilled to be here, truly yes.

Priscilla 1:31

I'm really excited about this episode.

Jordan 1:33

Me too.

Priscilla 1:33

Before we get into all of it, Erica, do you have a story to share with us about someone who has made your day recently?

Erica 1:40

I so do. A few weeks ago I went to visit the coal mining exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry Very cool.

Jordan 1:51

Okay, cool.

Erica 1:52

Which is an immersive experience where you take like a dark, wall-less elevator and a train ride into this fake coal mine underneath the museum. It's thrilling stuff, honestly, that's so cool.

Jordan 2:03

That sounds so fun.

Erica 2:04

If you're interested in coal, let me recommend the Museum of Science and Industry. Yes, so you get to learn about coal mining equipment, about company towns and Scripp, which I didn't really know that much about, and unions my favorite all of it and our tour guide, who I think his name was Will it might not be Will, I know. I left a review and had his name right in it, but I couldn't find it before I got to this episode. But Will terrific, okay so he's enthusiastic, deeply knowledgeable and a super true know-it-all in all the right ways.

Erica 2:36

He was cracking jokes, he was delivering fun facts, he was warning us when equipment was going to be loud and he was just like, really sweet to kids who got scared, because being in a coal mine is scary and no question was too big or too small or too weird for him. He was just into all of it. And after the tour he let us stick around. He let us stick around and handle rocks, which was just really exciting. We had this like giant hunk of coal and it sparked this conversation about coal density and black lung and I don't know. It was just like surprisingly wholesome and it made me want to read a book about company towns and unionize a team I don't even have Like it just made my day.

Erica 3:20

And we left my friend and I left the museum that day telling everybody about this guy, and even the Uber driver who was my runner up for best guy of that day. So, yeah, Will made my day and I'm never going to stop thinking about the coal mine trip. Wow that's so good.

Priscilla 3:36

I love it because what it communicates to you is that he loves what he does.

Priscilla 3:40

Yes, that he's willing to like be so 100% in on it. Yes, like the person who runs, you know, the bodega around the corner, like that kind of a thing. But they are in the lives of the people that they're working with and it's such an important role and so you think of like tour guides at a museum, who you don't even think twice about necessarily as a job. But then you're like man. If you find the right person with the right personality and the right like love for that role, it might have a huge impact on, like a child, what they do in the future of their life.

Jordan 4:28

Yes, For him to have that infectious passion and take something that might be perceived as mundane or boring, like coal mining, and then he's like no wait, this is super cool and I'm going to tell you why, and then it's going to spark all this interest for kids and who knows, maybe they'll become geologists or something.

Erica 4:48

I went to this museum when I was a kid. When I would visit Chicago I had family there and so we would go. It was a museum that I remember being super, super friendly and interactive and amazing for kids. So I wasn't sure if I was going to have that same experience coming back as an adult. And they nailed it. So highly recommend the coal mining experience at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. The museum has something for everybody.

Priscilla 5:12

And shout out to Will.

Erica 5:14

Shout out to Will. I think that's his name. I hope that's your name.

Priscilla 5:18

So I want people to know a little bit more about you, Erica, and why you're passionate about customer experience and helping companies excel and offering that remarkable experience.

Erica 5:28

So I know it sounds really kind of cheesy or corny and we hear it every time we interview somebody to be on our team, right, like what are you doing here? Why do you want to work in customer support? Guess what? I'm here because I love to help and I love to be known as somebody who's helpful, and, on top of that, when it comes to process and policy, I love law and order. And customer experience sits at this really interesting intersection between helping people, caring about people and problems, problem solving and systems thinking. So to me, customer experience is about solving the most annoying problems, the ones that kind of slow your teams down and frustrate your customers, in a way that has a lot of cross-functional impact and cross-organization impact, and there's something super, super satisfying about helping teams just get under control and watching the ripple effect of that across an entire organization. So that's really what keeps me coming back to customer support and customer experience. It's the opportunity to have a really big impact through a series of like, often small to medium sized changes.

Priscilla 6:35

That's the thing when I'm interviewing someone that it sends the green flag up. You love people, you love helping, that gives you like, that makes you feel good, then this is going to be a role that you're going to excel in. Now there's lots of other things that go into being really good at customer support, but I think that's the most necessary thing is you have to enjoy helping people. You have to enjoy it. If you don't enjoy it, nothing else is going to work.

Erica 7:00

And that doesn't mean it's not hard from time to time or that there aren't times that are unenjoyable. I think anybody who's ever worked with customers or I don't know just with people on earth, knows that, like your job is going to be hard, especially when you're managing other people's feelings. It's not going to be easy but it can still be really enjoyable if that is the kind of way that you find gratification, if helping other people is like your jam. Customer experience whether it's support, brand marketing is a huge part of customer experience, whether you're in product operations like it's a really vast umbrella term that covers a lot of ways to help.

Challenges of Remote Leadership

Priscilla 7:52

Mm, hmm, let's transition. And then into leading a remote team and what that looks like, because that, you know, really is not necessarily new, because we've always had remote workers, even before the pandemic. Like, I know we were somewhat remote before covid, so there's always been kind of like that remote job, but I think it's become way more prevalent now and more expected. More prevalent now and more expected. I was looking up some stats the other day and there are three times more remote jobs now than there were in 2020. Wow, awesome, I think it must be pre-pandemic. But, like, still, that has just gone so much more in the last five years.

Priscilla 8:19

And you think about the people who went remote overnight, who had never worked remotely, had never, you know, had to lead a team in a remote setting before and then overnight, who had never worked remotely, had never, you know, had to lead a team in a remote setting before and then overnight. Everyone's remote and you're trying to figure out what that looks like and there's challenges that come with that, and so I kind of wanted to talk a little bit, erica, first, just about your experience leading teams and what kind of teams have you led in the past.

Erica 8:41

So I've been leading remote support teams or dispersed support teams for over a decade now. In one way or another, most of the teams that I've led have been globally distributed, so not only domestic, which is a challenge all on its own. That's not to pretend there aren't cultural differences between New York City and, like Idaho, everywhere else yeah, everywhere else that you have to account for Right. So they've primarily been globally distributed and partially fully remote and partially hybrid, partially fully in the office. It really depends on the market and on the department, right. But I've managed everything from small teams at startups to big international organizations supporting millions of users. I've seen how remote work can really make and break a team dynamic, depending on how it's been handled At. Tunecore is, I think, where I got most of my real my learning experiences from. I stood up teams in Nashville, mexico City, paris, mumbai and Moscow over three years only. It happened really fast. Talk about time zones.

Priscilla 9:44

Yeah, yeah.

Erica 9:46

And I had to actually turn the lights back off in Moscow almost right away, because we opened our office there like three weeks before the war in Ukraine started and we couldn't do business there anymore.

Erica 9:59

So it came with a lot of really interesting cultural challenges. That opened me up to a lot of experiences that I wouldn't have considered, let alone had myself, before. I've led organizations through hyper growth and layoffs, through tool transitions, a lot of ambiguity and change management. Doing that remotely really adds another layer of complexity to managing team morale and communication and accountability. But it's also made me a really deliberate decision maker about how I build culture, how I determine what systems are best and how I try to communicate clarity to my teams.

Priscilla 10:38

Yeah, you're talking about like such a dispersed team, and I think my team is pretty small and most of us are in Jacksonville, florida. We have one person in Denver, but that's my like leading a remote team experience. Right, we are technically all remote, we have an office that we can use, but for the most part we all work remotely and I have one person in a different time zone and that is the extent of it. And so I find challenges in just that, which is like such a small scale of remote leadership, to think about leading people in vastly different cultures and vastly different time zones, or in running into on a day-to-day with a remote but local team. And so you know what are? Some of you kind of just touched on a couple of them, but what are some of the biggest challenges that you've seen and just the differences you've seen when it comes to leading remote teams or dispersed teams and in-office support teams?

Erica 11:41

So the first is making sure that people feel seen and supported, without turning into a surveillance creep. Yes, right, I trust my team, I want to trust my team. But remote work removes a lot of passive signals. So if you don't have clear expectations and you don't have feedback loops, things can really unravel fast and people can start to feel monitored, micromanaged, even if that's not what you're trying to do. You're just trying to stay in touch. But it can be overbearing.

Erica 12:15

Cultural drift is very real. If you're not reinforcing values like your team's values and what your expectations and norms are. Very intentionally they tend to kind of fade away and what takes their place amongst those things are maybe not going to be the types of values that you want coming out of your team. And that doesn't mean like shove your values down your team's throats. These have to be collaborative efforts. You decide amongst your team what matters to you and then you make sure you hold each other to those standards. There's a lot of accountability in that. I've also seen people burn out really quietly. I think that's something all of us can relate to.

Priscilla 12:51

Yeah.

Erica 12:51

These last few years, in an office, if somebody is skipping lunch or eating it at their desk, right, that's visible. If somebody is coming in earlier, staying late to get their work done, that's visible. You can see that somebody needs help. Yeah, when you're remote, it's hidden and support teams are really vulnerable to that in particular, because the work is always on. Even the slow season is not slow and it is always emotional.

Jordan 13:16

Yeah, so I'm a remote worker and I really struggle with the divide between working time and personal time because I work from my home, so my workspace is always in my home space, and there are times where I will be cooking an egg in my kitchen for lunch and I'll just grab my laptop and I'll start like working on something while I'm waiting for it to cook, and it's so hard for me to stop that.

Priscilla 13:42

Yeah, I mean, what you were just talking about is such a good thing to keep in mind that I see it in my day to day. But in prepping for this I didn't even think through that idea of people burning out when you can't even tell because they are not in front of you. And the working through lunch is something on my team. I tell everyone on my team do not work through lunch.

Priscilla 14:01

Take a lunch Even if you don't want to eat. Take a lunch and go outside. Like you have to take a break in the middle of the day, especially with support, and so you pointing that out, I think, is a really good point, that you have to be hyper aware of that as a remote leader. Yeah, absolutely

Strategies for Onboarding Remote Workers

Priscilla 14:16

so. What other challenges have you seen and encountered?

Erica 14:39

Onboarding. Oh my gosh to me on day two and been like I quit and I'm like no what's wrong and they're just overwhelmed because there's so much information to know and maybe we don't have a good onboarding program, but, like, if you don't have that process in place for managing knowledge retention for your new people, they are going to fail and they're going to just stop coming to work. They're going to no call, no show, their way out of a job and that's going to be that.

Priscilla 15:05

OK, so let's talk about onboarding in 2020. So five years ago, we had a very small support team here at Buzzsprout. It was me and one other person, and we had just hired our third person to come on the team. And she had been hired. Her start date was April 1st 2020. And we were all working in the office at that time most of the time. I mean, we all get along with each other really well. Most of us are local at the time, and so we all came into the office more days than we didn't.

Priscilla 15:33

And then COVID happened, and about midway through March there was no more coming into the office and she was set to onboard, starting on April 1st. And I remember and she was joining my team and I remember thinking, oh my gosh, how are we going to onboard someone when I can't, we're not going to be in the same room with them at all during any point of the onboarding process, and it was very new to me because I had never led or onboarded anyone in a remote situation before, and so I learned a lot through that, like first three months of her onboarding, and there were a lot of challenges and a lot of differences. So what strategies have you then learned as you've onboarded people, especially in like different countries? Yeah, and kind of what resources do you use as far as like tools? Do you have any technology, anything like that, that you use to help onboard?

Erica 16:20

Yes, I have onboarded hundreds of remote team members over the year and I have gotten so much feedback from all of them. So here's what I've learned matters the most. First, having a strong buddy system in place. Yeah, your new hire is going to be overwhelmed, no matter how much you have prepared for them, and they are going to have a lot of questions, so please do not make them guess who they're supposed to ask. Assign them a buddy, or like a crew of buddies, like a bunch of like homies, right, and make sure that those people have opted into this as well, right? You want their first experiences with the team to be enthusiastic and helpful, with people who want to support them, want to support them.

Priscilla 17:01

Yeah, and it shouldn't be you, no, no.

Priscilla 17:03

I think sometimes the thought is, well, they can come to me and ask me any questions they have. But there's so much benefit to buddying people with other people on your team. One, because it just gets them to get to know other people that they're working with, yes, but also because they need to know that they can rely on their team and not just you Absolutely as the leader of the team. So sometimes I know that I have felt like, oh, maybe I'll be the buddy for this person and I have to push against that and be like, no, no, no, no. I love buddying new people that come on and helping them out, but that is not my job anymore, and so I think it is really important that when you give a buddy to a new person coming on, that it's someone that is kind of at a peer level, that can come alongside them and they can go. I want to ask this question that I wouldn't feel comfortable asking to my leader, but maybe I can ask this other person who's kind of at my same level.

Erica 17:50

In addition to your buddy system,

Training Tools & Learning Systems

Erica 17:52

you're going to need real training tools. You need a real learning management system. You need strong knowledge management, even translations in local languages, if you can swing it, even if everyone speaks English. I don't know if anyone here speaks a second or third language, but I find it much easier to consume content in English, even though my Spanish is pretty good, you know. Yeah. So if you can translate your trading materials and your LMS, do it.

Jordan 18:19

Yeah.

Erica 18:20

Especially with AI translations available. It's very cheap, if not free, to do that these days, yeah, but I know that these things cost money. Right, I know you probably don't have money. I ran an organization of over 150 people across five countries, seven departments, under a $5 million all-in budget. Like I get it. But the cost of a good LMS is negligible compared to the long-term impact. It's going to add legitimacy to your onboarding process. It helps remote learners engage. It improves retention. It makes knowledge gaps easier to spot.

Erica 18:51

If you really can't afford a proper knowledge base, it's fine, right, use Google Docs, use what you have available, but make sure that what you have is meticulously organized. If you can't have a learning management system in place, have a learning management person in place. And I would be remiss if I did not shout out my man, leftary Kotsulidakis, who I worked with at Shapeways, who built one of the most comprehensive SOP manuals I have ever seen in my life. It's the gold standard. I keep three copies of it across multiple storage devices because I reference it as what I want my manuals to look like all the time. Yeah, if you don't have time to build something like that, you can outsource that to a third party, whether it's me right through Sunshine CX or through Leftary. You could hire him to be your knowledge manager. Yeah, like you need somebody who's in charge of these documents and this experience for it to be really successful. If you try and wing it every time, it's going to feel that way.

Priscilla 19:55

Yeah, yeah, when you're trying to decide, is this something I'm going to put money toward or put time toward for my team? Do you expect to be onboarding a lot of people over the next couple years? If you do, it is worth putting the time and effort in now to get something in place. Yes, so that when those people come on, it makes those processes so much simpler. And like it could be something as simple as Google Docs, like what you were saying.

Priscilla 20:17

I mean, I remember I had like two weeks of notice before Megan started in a remote situation and I was like, ok, I got to start writing things down, I got to start preparing like and we and meetings I had to make asynchronous, and so even if it's just something as simple as getting all of that in place in a written way, one, it helps you like sure up your processes and why you do things the way you do them, because a lot of that stuff sits in your head as a leader that you might not communicate all the time to your team, and so when you sit down and write it down, you go wait. Why do we do this this way? We do it this way because we've always done it like this Maybe we can find another way to do it and so it kind of like helps you shore up your processes and so, even if you don't have the budget for something built out a big system, it's something you can start working on with your next onboarding right now, even if it's something simple.

Erica 21:26

And it's so much easier to audit your processes once they're centralized, like that too. Like, yeah, ok, you have a training manual that's like one hundred and fifty pages, yeah, ok, but you have it all. You know it's cumbersome, but you have it, and that's a lot better than trying to look for a single document somewhere hidden in a Google Drive that someone who doesn't work at the company shared with somebody else who doesn't work at the company anymore 10 years ago.

Jordan 21:44

Well, and I imagine that putting that much time and effort into creating a comprehensive manual and having everything really easy to access would actually reduce the churn rate for your employees too, which we all know the most expensive thing you can do is like hire a new employee. It is so expensive to do that, and so it's worth the time and effort in that sense, right.

Priscilla 22:08

Yeah, and you think about, like what is so natural and easy when you're in an office next to someone who's new and you're like, oh, they have a quick question, I can quickly answer that, no problem, we're sitting next to each other in an office or whatever it is. What I realized was OK, now we're completely separated, and I've got to figure out how to be available for this person when they have questions, in a way that is very intentional, because otherwise there's this big roadblock in between us where it's going to be so much harder for this new hire, who's been with us for however long a week, to reach out and interrupt me, because they're like gosh, I don't want to interrupt. And so I think there's like a lot of intentionality that comes along with it, and so I know that when we were onboarding Megan, we did a lot of like Zoom co-working. We would just be together on Zoom, but we were working independently, and so then when she had a question, she could just ask it and I'd be right there, but we weren't necessarily in a meeting.

Erica 23:03

It was more like co-working.

Priscilla 23:05

And that really worked well for us and was kind of this I was like gosh, how do I get her in the room with me without being able to have her in the room with me?

Erica 23:13

Yeah, and it totally does work and it's just, it's almost just as good, right? Yeah, Just to have somebody to do like swivel chair stuff with, just like. Hey, I need your help please, Just removing that barrier Exactly Of the step in between you and asking your question. It's a little thing but it's huge.

Jordan 23:29

It actually helps people with ADD as well, like the workplace mirroring. Yeah, there's a lot of people that go on like websites where you actually just work with like other strangers and you're just all on this video and it's almost like this psychological thing where you feel like you're in a workplace. You could stay more focused.

Priscilla 23:46

Yeah, yeah, well, and I think of like early days at other jobs that I've been in where I've felt, you know, apprehensive to ask a question that I feel like I should know the answer to, and I'm in the same room with them and it still feels like a hurdle to jump. I can't imagine onboarding completely remotely from someone and not having a way to ask that question and feeling like, okay, well, now I just I can't, I can't make myself ask it. I'm just going to either figure it out on my own, which can be more time consuming, or not ask it, not clarify the information, and then kind of be stuck. And then that can lead to the burnout that you were talking, because people can't learn as well as they should when they don't have quick access to the answers they need. So

What to Look for in Remote Support Hires

Priscilla 24:27

when you're hiring then someone who's going to work remotely, erica, what qualities do you look for for? Like really good, like your stellar remote workers?

Erica 24:36

So when I'm hiring someone remote, regardless of what level they're going to be in, they all have to be able to work well independently. And that does not mean somebody who just sits down quietly and knocks out their work and doesn't bother anybody. That's not what that means. That means somebody who takes initiative, somebody who asks questions, who gets curious and who really learns the ins and outs of their area until their peers and other people around them start seeing them as the go-to person. Right, I need people who are not afraid to speak up. What we were just talking about is a great example of that. I know it is scary to not know the answer, but I need you to be brave. I'm not being sarcastic, yeah, like you have to be brave and you have to ask, even if you think you might look like a fool on the other side. I've been there. I try to set that example, especially for things I should definitely know.

Priscilla 25:29

Especially when you're working in support. Yeah, because you're helping other people. So if you don't know the answer, how are you going to help someone else? Yeah, and depending on your industry, you tell someone the wrong thing because you're not 100 percent sure about it. It could be a real big problem. It could be a really big problem.

Erica 25:45

One of the teams I was overseeing was a copyright administration team, so overseeing intellectual property rights and licensing and clearing samples. You say the wrong thing in writing and that's a fine of $125,000. That's a big mistake. Yeah, it's costly and other small mistakes could be very costly in the same way as in a highly regulated industry. So, yeah, you got to ask those questions. You have to be brave. It's going to be okay. Yeah, and without a doubt, maybe most importantly is that I need maturity, and this is tricky to screen for, especially in high volume support roles, where people are often either earlier in their careers or maybe making a career switch. But it's really, really crucial. You have to be both sensitive and thick skinned at the same time. You have to be empathetic and firm. That balance is what makes someone successful long-term in a remote role. In addition to those other items, you really need to be independent. Don't be afraid to speak up and ask questions, and you have to be mature.

Priscilla 26:51

You have to yeah, I like the. You have to be empathetic and firm. Yes, swinging too far on either one of those is really dangerous in support, if you're too empathetic that you're not following your processes because you're feeling too much with every single person that writes in, that can be a problem. And then if you're so firm that you're not giving any empathy to anyone, that can be really detrimental as well. So I think finding someone in that middle ground who has the maturity to, like you were saying, be thick-skinned but also be able to connect with people on an emotional level, I think that's a really good, important one to point out. We always refer to kind of the independent worker as a manager of one. That's the way that we talk about it over here at Buzzsprout. But it's that idea that you are in charge of your work and you are in charge of doing it well. And that comes into play so much when you're working remotely, because the hope is that no one is going to sit there and micromanage your day. And if you're working from home, that's even more obvious that you're not going to have someone telling you what to do and when to do it and so being able to be in control of your time and use it well and have high standards for yourself. And hold yourself to that kind of a standard is something that we look for a lot when we're bringing on people, whether you're going to be remote or not, honestly, but it's so important if you're working remotely.

Fostering Connection in Remote Teams

Priscilla 28:09

Yeah, so you mentioned this a little bit before and it made me think of this.

Priscilla 28:12

A couple of days ago, I was on Reddit, classic my favorite website. I came upon a post that was pretty in line with what we're talking about today and it was someone asking about how to keep their team like connected in a remote setting. There was like a question. I was reading some of the answers and kind of seeing what people were saying, and one person wrote and said I assume you have projects and timelines and expectations. Just relay those to your remote team and let them do the work. Don't bother them during the day, just to be a manager.

Priscilla 28:42

Remote work is one of the few good things that we workers have going and we don't need someone micromanaging us. And I read it and I was like, ok, I agree with some of that, but there's some of that that I think I don't agree with. And it was interesting because you said it earlier, erica. You said something like it's not micromanaging, it's connection, and so finding the balance of like connecting with your team without it coming across as micromanagement is really important, and so I thought that that's just such a great segue into this next section.

Priscilla 29:11

I want to talk about the connection aspect of things. I feel like it's really easy to lose that when you get into remote work, especially depending on the types of people you have on your team introverts versus extroverted people. You know you can lose those introverts really easily if you're not really intentional about staying connected with them. So, with that said, I feel like there's this ongoing debate about like how much social connection should there be in your work, and so, in your opinion, like what is that role for the social connection should there be in your work? And so, in your opinion, like what is that role for the social connection? How does that play into leading a remote team?

Erica 29:47

well, Social connection is part of your team's infrastructure. Without it, they will start to feel like every interaction is transactional and that'll show up in morale, in engagement is transactional, and that'll show up in morale, in engagement survey results, in the quality of the work your teams are outputting and in retention. I think is going to be the easiest way to see whether your team's social connections are working the way that are intended right. When people feel like they know each other, they collaborate better, yes, and they show up more honestly and they're more likely to speak up when something feels a little bit off, especially in support, where the work is emotional and often thankless. That sense of connection amongst your peers who know the work that you're doing really well is really important and I found that making space for silliness, yeah, and venting and non-work related banter is actually a huge productivity booster in addition to just like getting to know the people you work with better and then you can advocate better for them because you know them better as a boss Right.

Erica 30:51

It just gives people room to breathe. It gives everyone an opportunity to remember that you're on the same team. You're not just a bunch of faceless names on a Zoom call. It's important. Same team. You're not just a bunch of faceless names on a Zoom call. It's important and that's not to discount being left alone by your boss, which is my favorite way to be managed personally.

Erica 31:09

You know there has to be some balance there. Don't be forcing people into things like virtual happy hours if they don't want to do it. You have to have people opting into social connection. It's okay if you have people who just want to show up to work and do work and sign off or go home and not be friends with their coworkers. They're still a valuable part of your team and you still have to treat them with respect. It's a balance between what people want and what people need. But social connection is extremely important and it's going to differ across departments. If you have multicultural teams, it's going to differ across locations depending on what's normal in that location or in that office or in that region. You really just got to be willing to kind of go with it and see what works.

Priscilla 31:50

Yeah, and it's about knowing the people that are on your team. It's not necessarily about being besties with them and being in every facet of their life, but it's about knowing them and then when those hiccups arise, you know like something is a little rough or you have to have a hard conversation. You have more grace for each other because you have a foundation of knowing each other and it's a lot easier to give people the benefit of the doubt in either direction. Yes, To give someone the benefit of the doubt if you know their character already. And if you're working remotely and you don't really know the person you're working for and they do something that maybe is out of character, you might not know that it's out of character because you don't really know them that well, and then you don't have the space to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Erica 32:33

The way that you're describing it. I think that support teams also have to think about benefit of the doubt, not just amongst their teammates, but the other teams they work with to this product and engineering teams that are working on your tools that just don't know them. They don't know you and you're doing online interaction with them and so it comes off as really kind of cold and curt and straightforward. When you meet this person in person, they're like so warm and it's like bubbly and fun to talk to. It just contextualizes the people that you work with. It makes a big difference.

Priscilla 33:15

Yeah, which is why it is so important to also have those cross department relationships as well. I mean, we're talking about this within kind of your support team, but there is a lot of value in knowing the people that are on other teams. Oh, yeah. And at Buzzsprout it's kind of like building the trust. Battery is kind of how we talk about it.

Priscilla 33:33

But getting to know each other in a real way. Who are you as a person, so I'm not needing to get in every facet of your life, but who are you as a person? So I'm not needing to get in every facet of your life, but who are you, what's your makeup, and then that way, two months down the line, when something comes up, I can see where you're at and, like you said, have that context for who you are and how you act and things like that. I think it's a really important part of remote work. So that kind of leads into then this idea

Should You Do Remote Team Meetups?

Priscilla 33:58

that I feel like I see a lot, especially in tech, of like meetups, meeting with the whole team, so bringing everyone together into one location for you know, a week or whatever, and getting together. What's your opinion on like having those meetups, especially someone who's worked with a team that is so dispersed?

Erica 34:15

So before anybody comes for me to say anything, let me just preface this. You can build a successful remote team without ever meeting up 100% possible. However, if you have the budget and you can get everyone there, do it. You're not going to regret it. And if you can't get everyone there, then make sure your budget goes towards local programming and make it equitable.

Erica 34:42

A question that I would get often around my budgeting for team events is like well, what's our budget? How much can we spend? I'd be like well, I can't just give the whole team the same number, because the cost of going out to dinner for 25 people in Mumbai is going to be a lot different than the cost of going out to do a team building event in New York City for six people. You know, it's really going to be dependent on your locale.

Erica 35:06

Yeah, I was really lucky to be able to travel to see my teams in their home offices often, and those visits created a level of connection and pride that was really irreplaceable. I feel like I learned so much about my teammates that I never would have gotten over Slack or over Zoom. If you can be there in person, it means a lot to your teammates to show up. It'll mean even more if you can get everybody there together and if you can't spending some time and energy on figuring out some other kind of way for people to get connected in a way that's not just based on the job that they do. Every single day is going to go a long way for building connections.

Priscilla 35:48

I know the budget is a big deal when it comes to that, because it can be really expensive to bring everyone to one place. Scheduling is also really hard to find a time when everyone can do it at the same time. And then, once you're there, how do you get it so that everyone can be together? When you're a support team that is working in an inbox that is constantly full of emails, you can't all take the day off to do an offsite together.

Erica 36:13

It's just not realistic for most teams.

Priscilla 36:16

Yeah. So it's really hard and you have to be really, really intentional about saying hey, when you're here, be here, be focused. Let that be either someone else's problem, another team for the day, or let it sit. Let your customers sit for a half a day and focus on the team. Yeah, I do think it's really important in building that trust battery, like I was saying, and like it gives you the ability to work better as a team when you're back separated from each other. So I agree, if you have the ability to do it and you have the budget to make it happen, even if it's on a small scale and it's just individual teams, it's so worth it. It's really going to help your team be connected in a way. That's, yeah, really necessary.

Jordan 36:54

Oh yeah, it's something that I look forward to every year when we do the meetup, and I always feel so much more secure in my job.

Jordan 37:04

I feel so much more secure with my coworkers after I come back and it's just like this amazing thing when I get to get in a room and you can feel the people's energies and you can like bounce ideas off each other and there's something about that that just makes you feel so much more productive and re-energized and, plus, you're out of the house that you've been living and working in 24, seven, right? Yes, we have a conference coming up and something that we're doing like. If you have a team that goes to conferences, it's so easy to just show up like a day or two early and take that time to be together. So if you're already, you know, footing the cost of going to a conference and attending and getting hotels and flights for everybody, like maybe just you know, add an extra day, add a day.

Jordan 37:51

And then you can get some of that in-person work done together and, you know, do something together, yeah.

Priscilla 37:56

It just goes toward that, like building up the connection which adds the context, like you were talking about Erica. Ok, let's talk about like strategy for keeping a team connected when you're remote. Do you have any kind of communication strategies or routines that you have used? Erica, like I know a lot of companies really live by the one on one meeting. I have some hot takes on one on ones, but what have you put into place? Routines, strategies for keeping that team connected and functioning well as a team?

Erica 38:33

So I think this will come as no surprise to anyone. I love Slack. I'm in 100 different Slack channels. I think Slack and the things like it, the things that came before it, the campfires, the propanes of the world allowed Slack to run right yeah, so Slack. Slack to run right yeah, so Slack, love it.

Erica 38:50

Microsoft Teams cannot recommend it. I'm sorry, microsoft, it's personal. I suffered for too long under your thumb at a company that used both Slack and Microsoft Teams. Yikes, I can't recommend it. I've used them both extensively.

Erica 39:05

I don't find Teams to be a particularly effective tool. Ditch it, don't use it. But that said, the tools are really only part of the equation. Right, routines are really everything, and consistency in those routines is key. I like to start the week with a quick stand up just to set the tone with the whole team. We're talking something very lightweight to check in on the priorities and the blockers for the week. If you can swing it, hold a full all team meeting later in the week. That's hard to do when you've got Latin America and Asia on the same team.

Erica 39:37

Yeah, but do your best to make it work and make sure you thank everyone for their flexibility, although this is one of those times where, if you, as the boss, have an opportunity to be inconvenienced so that nobody else is inconvenienced, yeah, this is what you get paid the big bucks for Sign on early, stay on late.

Erica 39:53

Sorry, you're the boss, that's your job. Every meeting needs to have detailed agendas and published notes that live in accessible places. Meeting hygiene matters a lot more in remote environments because you don't get the ambient alignment just from overhearing things from people in the office. Yep, during busy seasons or periods of change, I like to send daily kind of end of day reports to my entire organization just to wrap up the day, clarify what happened when it happened and keep everybody on the same page, especially because by the time my last team's time zone is signing off, only a couple hours later the next team is signing on for the beginning of their next business day. So I don't want them to wait for me to find out what happened the day before so that they can get started.

Priscilla 40:36

Yeah.

Erica 40:37

We also like to set clear expectations around workloads and outcomes and revisit them often to keep everybody on the same page. And I think, last but not least, I'm a really firm believer in feedback. I prefer to not receive it anonymously, but a lot of people are understandably scared of things like retaliation, and so I will collect anonymous feedback. Remote teams can get weirdly quiet, especially if morale starts to dip. You need to give people a safe way for them to speak up and be honest, and that feedback loop is what keeps your communications from becoming one directional. Make sure that your strategy for keeping people in the loop is working and don't just assume that it is. And that's where those feedback loops come into play.

Priscilla 41:17

Yeah, I think you were talking about like have everything written down. I like the sending the daily check in. You know, at the end of the day, to say here's what happened today. Especially when you have people in different time zones, like you were saying, that are going to come in, they need to know what happened the two hours before they came in. They need to know if there was something going on, if there was a bug, that maybe it got resolved and it's not going to affect them, but they need that context when they're working on tickets that are residual from that time, and so it is really important to write everything down and give everyone access to that information that if you were in a room together, they would know about, but because you're not, it's so easy to lose that information, and so I think that's a really important one. Also, I would just say make sure you have a space in your day to day for like chat. I mean, you said make space for like silliness, I think.

Priscilla 42:05

You know you lose the water cooler of it all when you're not in an office. You know that like what did you watch last night? How was your weekend? You lose that when you're fully remote, unless there is an avenue for it. So in Basecamp we have a chat and it is not required to be a part of, but it's where we say good morning, it's where we let people know, you know, if we're going to take a long lunch or if we're going to be off a few minutes early. It's where we ask people about their weekends or celebrate birthdays. And it's nice because it's not required. You don't have to be in there and you don't have to go and you know if you take some days of PTO, you don't have to go back and read through all the chat. But it's a nice avenue for just kind of that social interaction alongside. You know all the other chats that you have that are about work related.

Priscilla 42:53

Yes, you know process things.

Erica 42:55

We had a few really fun routines at TuneCore around fostering connection like this yeah, so every day around like 4 pm ish, eastern in Slack, somebody would post an icebreaker and it became a thing. People would announce earlier in the day if they thought of something that they wanted to ask. I got an idea for the 4 pm question.

Erica 43:13

they would post in slack, so nobody else would post something and there'd be this like build-up of anticipation super silly, very low pressure, super fun. Uh, we're talking like would you rather fight a chicken the size of 10 dogs, or know that on earth there is a slug that if it comes in contact with you, you will die Like? Which of those scenarios would you rather have? Like campfire?

Jordan 43:36

games. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Erica 43:39

Super, super fun stuff. Another one we really liked was when we would have new hires starting at their first all team meeting. They would introduce themselves and they would do two truths and a lie, which very culturally American yeah, we learned. Yeah, ok, and there was a lot of really fast trauma sharing going on. A lot of people are willing to just put their traumas out and two truths and a lie to a bunch of strangers, and I got to say I'm here for it, yeah, I was here.

Erica 44:07

Yeah, I loved it. And then we also had one of my teams did icebreakers in their weekly meeting too. It was just like is a hot dog a sandwich? Like that kind of thing. Right yeah, what's the best Girl Scout cookie? That one caused a, I think, a company meltdown at Paperless Post in like 2017.

Jordan 44:29

Someone in my team. Their favorite question to ask is what is the craziest conspiracy theory that you believe in? And that will reveal a lot about people. I have bonded very quickly with people like, wow, you believe that one too. That's good.

Priscilla 44:44

That's a good one. That is really good. I like what you said about having defined agendas and keeping your meetings really defined when you're doing those.

Priscilla 44:53

I hesitate to be a big fan of one-on-ones, yeah, because a lot of times I feel like one-on-ones just become this routine. They're not that beneficial and they happen just for the sake of happening, and I don't love meetings that just happen for the sake of happening, I agree. So I think if you're going to have those meetings, which I think can be really valuable, the thing that makes them valuable is having that agenda being really, you know, focused when you're in that meeting on what are you doing here and how long are we going to spend doing this, and that way that meeting doesn't end up being, you know, three hours of conversation that circles around some topics we wanted to talk about, but has a really good focus and a time limit, and I think that can be a really good way to have that connection and to keep things on track. But once you find that your meetings are just meetings for the sake of meetings, you should step back and figure out how to change that, because that is where you get into this dangerous like time-, routines that are no good for anyone,

Quick Tips for Remote Leaders

Priscilla 45:51

totally agree, okay, so, as we wrap up, we always like to give advice to leaders, both in small teams or new leaders or leaders of really big teams, for kind of how they can take this and put it into action.

Priscilla 46:05

So what advice would you have for leaders? First, let's talk about, like new leaders, people who don't have a big support team. Maybe they're like I was five years ago when all of a sudden, you're leading someone in a support situation, you don't know what you're doing. What advice would you give to them?

Erica 46:19

So the first thing I would recommend and I always recommend this to my teams when I have people come on board, especially if they're getting promoted into like a team lead or anything where you're responsible for managing people on board, especially if they're getting promoted into like a team lead or anything where you're responsible for managing people Do yourself a favor and grab this book called the Culture Map. It is a terrific and very accessible starting point for understanding how cultural norms shape communication and feedback and expectations at work. The Culture Map is specific to managing global teams, but there are a lot of lessons to be learned about just managing different personalities too, and it's an easy read. I would never recommend something to you that felt like a textbook. Oh my goodness.

Erica 46:59

But, you will not regret that, beyond grabbing the culture map, commit to consistency, transparency and communications to your teams. Do not ghost your team. Do not be mysterious, do not drop policies from the sky on top of them without context. You have to make sure that you are somebody who they know and they trust. You have to be visible, for as much as you want to see your teams and what they're up to, they need to see you, to know that you're still there for them and I think making space for fun, it really matters. Honestly, we've talked about it a lot. Try and learn something from each of your teammates. Everybody brings something to the table and your culture as a team is going to be stronger when you treat your team as more than just a workflow for the company.

Priscilla 47:46

Yeah, it is so true. You can be so productive, especially, you know, working from home. You can really find a lot of productivity there, but make sure that you are making space for your team to have fun. It will help with burnout, it will help with communication. It'll help in so many ways. So I think that's a great kind of place to leave it is. Don't lose fun just because you're working from home. Thanks so much for coming, erica. This was really fun. I feel like I know I learned a lot, especially about global teams that I just have had no experience with. But before you go, I want to make sure that everyone knows how to get in touch with you. So can you tell us a little bit about Sunshine CX and how listeners can get in touch with you?

Erica 48:24

Sunshine CX is my consulting practice where I help companies build customer experience strategies that don't suck. So that means building better systems, smarter support and usable processes that are going to scale with you. So I offer consulting and project-based work. I also offer fractional leadership VOC research. I love doing voice of customer projects. I love them. So you can find most of my brand shenanigans on Instagram, which is sunshinecxbklyn Brooklyn.

Erica 49:00

Okay, I was like hold on. And I also run a pet care business on the side called Tofu and Friendos. Tofu is my wobbly cat and the past six months I have been picking up pet sitting gigs and we just filed for a DBA so we could pay our taxes.

Jordan 49:18

And it's so cute.

Erica 49:19

It's so cute.

Jordan 49:21

Oh my gosh, it's the best.

Erica 49:23

So that is Sunshine CX and how you can stay in touch.

Priscilla 49:26

I love it and everyone should go check out Erica. In addition to being a wealth of knowledge around customer experience, she's also just really fun and entertaining, and she has so many facets to her. She's also a musician, so I would definitely highly recommend that you go check out Erica. Especially if you're struggling to give your customers a remarkable service. She can come alongside you and help you do that really, really well.

Erica 49:51

Please let me help you, I would

Support in Real Life: Customer Feedback

Erica 49:54

love to.

Priscilla 49:55

It's time for Support in Real Life, our segment where we discuss real life support experiences. Jordan, what do you have for us today?

Jordan 50:02

All right, so this is from Reddit. Someone asked is there a better way to ask for feedback without annoying customers? They say I've been working on improving our onboarding experience for new users, especially those coming in through email outreach. I started adding a quick feedback question at the end of every onboarding email, something like was this helpful or is there anything missing? And it worked okay. I got some insights, but I also noticed unsubscribes creeping up right after those emails went out. So now I'm wondering how do you ask for feedback without making it feel like another task? Do you just wait until a user hits a certain point in their journey or just ask early on?

Priscilla 50:39

I mean, that's a good question. I feel like feedback is so important to get and it is hard because you don't have complete control over it. Whether you are getting honest feedback, whether you're getting consistent feedback, it's not up to you. Sometimes you have to do your best to ask for it, but sometimes you're not going to get it the way you want to. Erica, do you have any strategies or recommendations for that?

Erica 50:58

I think when it comes to collecting feedback, you really have to go far out of your way to get everybody's feedback. A lot of BOC programs start as how do I translate customer satisfaction scores to executives? But that only tells the story of the people who needed to talk to you. It doesn't tell you the story of everybody else. I found not possible with every product, or reasonable with every product.

Erica 51:25

But if you can get out in front of your customers face-to-face in person, if you have a brand that does meetups for your customers, for example, or events, which we had a lot of at TuneCore, that was a ton of opportunity to get in front of people and ask them like, hey, what are we doing? That makes it harder for you to get what you need to get done, or what are we doing well, what do you like about our brand? What do you like about our product? Don't think we get enough positive feedback into our product feedback loops and, as a result, we're always focused on what's broken but not what's working. So I don't know, that's not a perfect answer, but finding creative ways to get your customers who are happy to tell you that they're happy, in addition to getting your customers who are unhappy to tell you why is going to be your first step forward?

Priscilla 52:11

Yeah, I think one thing you said you know getting in front of people face to face. I think the more personal the better. When it comes to asking feedback, yes, I mean I know that when I get an email that's so clearly a follow-up email, it's like how did this go? I'm not going to do that. But if I got a call from someone, or if I got an email from Sarah on the support team asking me to give her some feedback on the last support experience, then I might actually do it. I'm talking to a real person, or I'm talking to could be a real person, but it could also just be an email that's written in a way that feels real. You know, if you don't have the ability to actually put a person on it, you could write emails in a way that feel really natural and really personal. I think it's going to solicit better feedback and more honest feedback.

Erica 52:54

I think we're going to really want to disconnect a lot of feedback loops from specific actions. So we send customer satisfaction surveys to find out how people liked the support they received. There are in-app feedback surveys all the time throughout the customer journey. But we need to do a better job of soliciting feedback separately from something else that's going on. If you have swaths of customers who don't reach out, who are renewing. If you have a renewable product or repeat customers, just send them an email out of nowhere kind of. I know that sounds like a kind of ridiculous practice, but, like when I get a random email from a company I don't hear from often that says we would like your feedback, I'm like great news, I have time. You're going to get less bias in your feedback if you're reaching out at regular, nonspecific intervals, even though it sounds like it isn't going to give you better results, because people won't be thinking about only just that one experience that they had. They'll be thinking about holistically, their experience with your product.

Priscilla 53:54

Yeah, and you can send those out without them being like directly after an experience and still make them specific. You can still ask for specific feedback. I think you know we did a survey for our podcasters at the end of last year and we kept it to like two questions, easy yeah, at the end of last year, and we kept it to like two questions, easy yeah. No one wants to answer a 30 question, three page survey that you get 10 questions into and go oh my gosh, this is going to take me 30 minutes.

Erica 54:18

It's only 10 percent done. No.

Priscilla 54:20

Yeah, exactly. So pick two questions or one question and make it really simple, and one of those questions can be what else do you want to tell us, or what are we doing well, or leave it open-ended like that. But think about the feedback that you want to be getting, like what is it that you're trying to learn more about? And be specific on your questions. And then, when you send out those emails, make them as personal as you can make them, because I think people are going to feel more open to sharing that information if they feel like they're talking to a real person. More open to sharing that information if they feel like they're talking to a real person. If it's so clearly a bot that's sending them an email, that's going to go immediately to the trash, at least in my personal experience.

Priscilla 54:56

Yeah, if you have a question or a support story or situation that you would like us to discuss or shout out, you can email us at happy to help at buzzsproutcom or text the show using the link in the episode description. You may hear a question or a story that you submit discussed on a future episode. As always, if you liked this episode, please share it with someone who works in support who would benefit from some of these tips and strategies. Thank you again, erica, for coming. This was a lot of fun. I really appreciate you joining us for this conversation. Thank you for having me. I had a blast, and thank you to everyone for listening. Now go and make someone's day.