Savannah Peterson – Namaste at Home: Compassionate Culture Cures for Long-Distance Teams

It's an honor to welcome Savannah Peterson, my friend and CEO of Savvy Millennial, her session is entitled Namaste at Home: Compassionate Culture Cares for Long-Distance Teams. The more remote your team is, the more real the conversations need to be. Join Savannah for an actionable session on cultivating compassion in your organization.

Savannah, thank you for sharing your genius with us. Take it away. Howdy y'all?

And welcome to this fabulous session about Namaste at Home: Compassionate Culture Cares for Long-Distance Teams. I am so excited to be here with you today and a little bit of a secret. It's my first DevOps conference, I promise it's not my first time speaking, but it's my first DevOps conference and I couldn't be more excited that it's Gitlab and no they did not pay me to say that and yes, it's very genuine.

So thank you so much for joining this session. My name is Savannah Peterson, founder and Chief Unicorn of Savvy Millennial. We are an all-remote Community Building Agency and I'm currently joining you from Seattle doing a National Park Road trip to stay sane during this pandemic.

And we're actually going to talk about some of those remote strategies for sanity throughout the course of this presentation. And just as a side note, you can say hello or ask me questions on your favorite Internet platform throughout the course of this presentation or whatever you're watching this recording. Easiest to get me on Twitter @Savassavvy, but feel free to stalk me anywhere the Internet reaches some pretty easy find and all my handles at the end of this presentation.

All right. So the first thing that we're going to talk about is building a strong internal community, because it's especially important when we're all remote, whether that's a remote culture that was built from the ground up or whether that sort of culture that we're adapting to now, if you don't love the people in the product that you're working on, you're not going to want to feel a sense of purpose at work. And believe it or not, largest generation workforce millennials, 78 percent of us, a sense of purpose as the number one reason that we select our jobs.

So as you're building your team and fostering them, it's it's really important that there's this sense of community, because from that sense of community comes the sense of purpose. It's not just doing work that gets people up during the day. So let's talk a little bit about a hypothetical exercise that I realize seems a little bit silly in August of 2020.

But bear with me. I promise. It's going somewhere fun.

So you're at a mythological bar since there at least not places we can go to America, though, if you're in any of the savyer countries like Taiwan and New Zealand right now. Congratulations, you got a real bar. This isn't a myth.

When someone asks you what you do, how do you describe that? And think about it, I think that we all we we answer these questions sometimes very routinely, we might answer them with our job title or with a few words that describe the role that are common in our industry. But we don't often or at least I'll speak for myself.

And I hear that a lot. We don't always share what we do in a way that is digestible or translatable for somebody else. And this is really important, not just because you need to be pitching yourself all the time.

That's not what I'm trying to convert this into, that we are going to do a little exercise next. What what I want you to think about with this is it's it's really nice when you can develop internal advocates that are across team. It's not always going to be your boss, but in every single meeting where they could advocate for you or for somebody else on your team or for the resources that you need, and the more people that understand what you do and what your team does and the value provide and what your process is, the easier it is for them to advocate for you to have all of those things that you want.

So that's important that you think about your pitch, even if you absolutely hate talking about yourself. If you can't talk about what it is that you do that special and share that with your team, there's no way that they can feel connected to that work, figure out how they fit into that and an advocate for the greater entity within the internal or external organization. The other thing that I want to have you think about with this is I know for a lot of us, it's really uncomfortable to talk about ourselves.

And I promise we're going to be talking a lot about teen services as well, just all about self. But if you can't talk about yourself and you can't figure out how to empower yourself, it's really hard to do that with others on your team. And when we are are thinking about our friends, it's so easy sometimes to brag about them.

When a friend is doing something cool and you hear them in this situation, whether it's at the bar, the library or the park or whatever's going on the virtual happy hour. However, you're however your world is panning out right now. It's really easy to hear someone that you really believe in and you're proud of start talking about their work and then almost interject, maybe interrupt and say, oh, my gosh, Jordan's being so humble.

He's actually the leader of the team designing the iPhone or whatever it is. Right. But the idea is sometimes it can be very tricky to advocate for ourselves, but it's really easy to brag about your friends.

So doing this next exercise is something that I encourage you to do right now while you're listening to me talk or with someone on your team so that you can or even with a different team so that you can share with each other the unique value that you add to the group, but also have something for you to be able to advocate for that as well as yourself moving forward and in the future. And I realize this might just sound like a lot of good vibes from a marketer, which to a degree, yes, much of this is I am a non technical, but the reality is this this type of communication, this ability to share what you do for the team and what your process looks like is actually a very big part of documentation. And this is one of the steps in documenting your work.

It's not just every line of code you write or the things the products that you launch. It's also about the communication that you're able to share and the education that you can expand across the organization about the different things that your team does. So there is method to this madness.

All right. So maybe some of you, especially on the American side, have done an activity called Madelin when you were a kid. Fill in the blank with the letters.

When you flip over the carbon copy and it tells a really funny story maybe about a banana and an elephant. Who knows what kind of silly, very fun. I have modified this for an exercise which I really love doing with people of all ages.

And I think that when you talk to someone about figuring out how to pitch themself or to sell themselves, it's an immediate turnoff. And if right now, even as I'm saying those words, you feel yourself recoil or tune out, just bear with me and hang in there for this exercise, because I promise it's a super simple fill in the blank. And once you do it, you're going to feel a lot better talking about yourself and and you're going to be excited for others on your team to potentially leverage this and share this across the organization.

So it's three super simple questions. Fill in the blanks. The most unique thing about you is and it can be anything, this can be like a super weird, fun fact.

You hold the triple jumping record at your high school or you are the champion at at Halo in your small town or whatever that is, be something awesome. Or it can also be something about your character. You don't take no for an answer.

That might be the second fill in the blank. Is the problem that you solve for the value that you add is so this is sort of the meat of your sandwich. This is this is your core value.

Add the thing that you know you can. Do confidently every time you show up to work or to the table or to the Strategy Session, whatever that may be. And the third fill in the blank is the reason that people should want you on your team or if you are found or leaving a smaller team or reason people should give you money quite literally is because what?

And if you fill out these sentences and feel free to tweak the words, if you don't want to feel like a unique sparkle pony, you can you can definitely change the language in the way that these sentences work. But if you take a moment now or here after this presentation to fill in the blanks, you'll have something fun. A very short and reusable pitch, like my example over here on the champagne glass.

Spoiler alert. It's part of the brand. And I think you ought to celebrate your team and champagne moment.

So here we are. And my example, just in case you don't feel like reading or you're listening to this on audio is I care more about helping other people realize their dreams than I do achieving my own. I built community around new technology, making the future less scary for consumers and companies alike.

Together, we make the world a better place and have a blast doing it. Not right. I mean, I should want to work for myself.

I'm writing my own patch, but we'll spare you the narcissism and the shenanigans that said, give it a try. It's three sentences and it's the type of thing. What's really fun about this is you can do it with anyone in your life.

This doesn't have to be with your team. This can be with your family or your friends at home. This can be with your buddies.

Are really the things that you'll learn about your team just by doing this is is really remarkable. And you can identify a lot of passion and a lot of potential within the group that maybe you're not necessarily unlocking. So give it a shot.

Newsflash. Buddha is a remote worker, or at least Buddhism has some really nice framework for how to think about communicating empathetically with your team when you're not in the same room with them. Quite frankly, I think a lot of the tactics that we use to communicate remote, we can use to communicate when we're together.

But there's there's something that I learned about 15 years ago, actually, when I was a student and a friend of mine came back from a retreat, one of those one of those young lad leadership retreat events. And he had been asked a question. And it's and it's a it's a Buddhist question.

And the question is, what are you avoiding and what are you craving? And it seems really simple at first. But if you break this down and you ask people about this, you often learn about their fears, about their struggles, about their challenges, about their insecurities.

You also learn about their ambitions, their desires, their excitement, their passion. And what's nice about phrasing a question like this, rather than saying, hey, what's holding you back at work or why are you struggling with this? Is it affords people the opportunity to show you the full picture and to provide context.

So here are I'm just throwing out examples here. There are there are plenty of different things. And hopefully your team will surprise you both on the good and the constructively insightful side with what they're what they're craving and what they're avoiding.

But I think sometimes I have found when I asked this question in particular, when an employee is at a really pivotal moment and whether that's a peak moment or a moment, I love to ask them this question. And a lot of the time, the frustration is not necessarily that they need something dramatic, like a massive salary increase. m.

because that's when they spend time with their family and they keep having to miss some family events or whatever that is. I mean, I know with GitLab, their friends and Family First is a very big priority and it's well documented. And I think that oftentimes we're craving more of that and we're creating the trust and the belief in our autonomy that we can be efficient without being micromanaged.

But I don't want to put words in your mouth. The idea is just an exercise for you. But but think about it.

And when you find yourself feeling frustrated or if you see and a teammate, whether they be someone that you're managing or your manager and they seem like they're stuck or they're frustrated rather than assuming and leading with a guiding statement and leave with curiosity and and ask them a question like this or a question similar so you can sort of unlock where that that emotion or that tension or that stress is is coming from. There's a lot of other really fun tips that I think we can pull from from so that I'm not trying to put any sort of religious perspective on anyone. I think these are really great questions.

But if you want to go down this rabbit hole, there's some very cool leadership and Buddhism toolkits to explore. All right. This is a little tip for nurturing your long distance team, but I think it's actually a really delightful one and quite honestly, an extremely affordable one, which is nice because it's scalable no matter the size of your team.

I I'll just admit that I personally have always been a really big fan of mail, but little bit of a sucker for physical things in general. I work with a lot of physical products, software to be around. I enjoy holding a thing and and touching a thing and having a tangible piece to interact with.

So I often I still send Christmas cards. I might be a millennial, but I still send Christmas cards. And when this pandemic started, I started sending cards again and I noticed actually some friends of mine sent pictures of them and their cat out Christmas cards.

They were like, meh. Pandemic postcards is very cute. And but the point is, when you receive mail, it indicates more than just I was thinking about you.

It was I'm thinking about you. And I took time to do something thoughtful with you in mind, but I knew wasn't going to bring me instant gratification. And that means that person and that employee can process that experience in their own private space rather than being forced to have a response.

Because not everyone likes the public chatter. Not everyone likes to have to. And for example, I don't really like opening presents in public.

It makes me uncomfortable. I want to have a private response to it is probably something I need to unpack with my therapist. Let's just set that aside for a second.

But the idea is I find very few people who get a card in the mail. I mean, they're out there. There's outliers to everything, but who don't get a smile on their face when they receive something.

For example, GitLab shared little treats with us before this conference. And it was so nice to get a little treasure unexpectedly when I wasn't thinking about it and when the sender wasn't expecting me to. Respond right away and I could explore it and enjoy it, so the way that you can explore it even further beyond this, assuming everybody wants a postcard, I'm not saying that that's the end all be all.

But going back to questions and tools that you can take moving forward is ask your team how they want to be thanked. And I know that this also sounds simple, but truly think about it. When was the last time somebody asked you how you want to be thanked?

I actually count on one hand the number of times someone's asked it within and not just try to love something over the fence to settle what they consider a tally or a ledger, but genuinely, earnestly wanting to know how to thank me for something that I have done and whether that was just doing your job. When we go above and beyond, it's very important that we know how to thank people. And it's quite funny.

I've done these types of surveys when I started my consultant and when I start working with companies, I'll do these these sort of happiness surveys in the beginning of our interaction. If I'm if I'm helping you with your culture at all. And I it's so fun to map how people want to be thanked because sometimes people have crazy things in common.

Right. Maybe there's a weird mess collab section in the office that nobody goes Croft's team but can really spice up happy hour or everyone's totally and almond soy latte freak and they can start stocking the fruits of that. Or maybe everybody wants Fridays off and they can set a company goal and everybody takes Fridays off.

Whatever that is, it's it don't assume that you know how to thank people and don't assume that people just want money. Sometimes money is really great. Oftentimes people are afraid of autonomy, explorative hours to pursue a passion project at work, the ability to volunteer for their favorite non-profit.

Whatever that is. I ask, just ask. You can get so much farther by asking.

And and when you ask questions like how would you like to be thanked? You also create an environment for your team to really open up to you and tell you what it is that they're looking for and what they're wanting. And it shows it shows that you have empathy, even if empathy isn't exactly your your strongest suit.

The curiosity and asking questions will give you so much farther than assuming and blanketing response to people across team. And I realize we're all trying to build things that are scalable, that sometimes you can scale and personalize at the same time. So don't be afraid of personalization just because it's not the same cut startup t for everyone across the company.

So if you are shameless plug, if you are looking for gifts for your team that you would like to send them. I've created a list of different products that are under fifty dollars and easy to ship. And if you go just go to remote treats you can find it there.

There's a link here on the slide. I'm not forcing you to purchase my affiliate stuff, but I have found it's very fun to get some kind of a gifted person and when the team shares things with me, it always makes me really happy. So you never know my surprise and delight the a little friendly mail.

There's no reason not to just as a final example of this. So I was actually quarantined before coronavirus. So I was on a flight with some folks who had the measles.

m.. So I was quarantined over the holidays before it was cool. I got to dress rehearsal and shelter in place.

And one of the things that was really incredible to me with my community and I guess it's obvious that because they know me as someone gift is when I got locked down, I jokingly tweeted out, hey, weirdest twist of twenty nineteen twenty nineteen. Felt weird and which was twenty nineteen on quarantine over the holidays and whiskey. I was being cheeky but friends started to send whiskey.

There's a bottle of it right here and and then other friends of mine were we're really sweet. I still live in New York City and one my dear friends in New York City asked me, what's the number one thing aside from people they really miss about New York City most bagels. So he FedExed me overnight a dozen bagels that I got on Christmas, and it was really special.

There's something really incredible about food and flavor and smell and beverage that gives us a real sense of being somewhere else, even though we can't leave our place. And so maybe even curating good news from your local market to send to somebody else on the team with our nonperishable to be a really fun way to feel post and explore and to learn about each other. But the thing that I'm sort of alluding at here is find bridges with your team that are not necessarily directly related to logistical and tactile work you need to have.

It's not that you need to be BFF with everyone, but you should know something about everyone on your team, which is not just their literal output or who they were. Or two, because that's not culture, that's robots, that's what the robots will do in the future. So maybe they're like maybe they don't.

But ask them what we think those really low investment, but very delightful ways to surprise and delight your team. So there's something really fun between that GitLab and that me personally, actually, not even just Savvy Millennial, but I personally have in common. And that is that we both have a history with the broadest shout out to all the bronies out there.

Love you all out there. You're not familiar with the bronies bonus are grown men who like My Little Pony. And though this is not creepy, do not judge this fabulous community.

They are governed by a peace, love and magic. And they happen to be early users of GitLab and they happen to be folks who did a lot of printing, 3D printing when I worked for a 3D printing company in New York called Shapeweights. So we've both seen the power of the bronies and the positive impacts of the brownness.

And the reason that I bring up the bronies is not just because everyone should take every excuse they can to talk about My Little Pony and happiness, especially right now. But it is because you never know what delightful and unique or quirky things that your team or your external community may have in common with you. And if you don't share about those things, you're never going to build these bridges.

And it may be it's a love of tennis or maybe it is bronies or maybe it's making sour dough or whatever it is you won't know unless you start sharing some of these more accessible and more personal anecdotes in a place that feels safe and not work related. And my last little exercise before we get into a hands on demo is actually about that. And back back actually same same company back from your venture backed by Union Square Ventures.

They would do a very cool thing. And unfortunately, this is in person very much do this from afar. I know that GitLab did a virtual talent show.

But they we did an exercise where for each summit so when the when the the marketers of the depths from each one of their portfolio companies would come together quarterly, they would ask us all what, what, what is it that we're trying to learn or what's our biggest challenge, where are we stuck? And not surprisingly, what could we take? And it was awesome because not surprisingly, also a lot of time there were people who are figuring out right on the front lines, figuring out how to solve the problems that you were trying to solve.

And the summit would start with an hour or two of us cross teaching each other based on was how to game ten thousand Twitter followers organically in a week without spend on how to and others would teach me how to build community programs that can demonstrate our OAI at an executive level or whatever it was. But there is really I encourage you to do that, not just from a logistics standpoint, in terms of internal knowledge and and network wealth, in terms of your power as a team, but also for the silly stuff like what is what is something that you can teach someone how to do virtually right now that may be really small, like I've been done some weird art at home. I can teach you how to marble paper.

Maybe people want to do that and it does matter. We probably do it or I think there's there's just an opportunity to really explore the talents of your team by asking and understand their passions and also give them the opportunity to celebrate that they teach and force anyone to teach everyone how to do their thing if you don't want to. But people are often very empowered by being able to share their best or to share their passion.

And I encourage you to give that a shot. So this this whole conference is actually an example of what I was just talking about. This is all of us coming together.

Everyone here submitted their talks. We're all in the hopes that contributed our ideas because we enjoy the community and we're delighted to be a part of it myself, especially. And this is literally the example of what can come together when when you invite people to contribute.

So, yes, GitLab is is a bigger company, maybe some of us or perhaps some of your much bigger companies then. But the point is, you don't know what lies in your network until you ask and until you invite people to share and you can't get what you don't ask for. So if you're struggling right now, you're feeling lonely and you feel like your team is disconnected, ask them what they want.

Ask them how you can help and be OK iterating and prototyping. If something really fails or your people don't like it, cool. Do something else next.

It's totally OK. And you never know what little fun tricks that people have up their sleeve. So these are your reminders and then we'll do.

One really quick exercise, so listen, don't assume we've talked about this a lot, but I think we all sometimes we have assumptions about what someone's going to say even before they say it sort of empathetically was, especially right now everyone is dealing with a lot and you never know what's going on behind that virtual background. So be a little more empathetic than usual. Empower everyone on your team to talk confidently about themselves and the marketer.

Of course, I use the term pitch, but that's all a pitch is. It's a confident discussion. It's a short story about something that provides value to someone else.

And everyone on your team is one of those short stories. So empower them with that. Remember that honest communication conquers all, whether that be about what you're craving or what you're avoiding, just be honest, especially right now, there's no sense in hiding it.

This is an unprecedented. This is very unique. And even those of us who are all veterans, there are many aspects of this that are very dynamic.

And so just be honest and be transparent with your team and as a leader, leave with vulnerability. If you're having a hard time, be transparent about as a content creator. My most engaged with content is when I was emotional about feeling depressed.

So there's a data point for you. You just never know what's going to say when you are authentic. Everyone has a story to create space for it.

Let people talk about whatever they need to talk about and let them also keep whatever they want to keep private. And that goes for their workspace, their family, as I'm sure you all them to talk about it. And at least if you can send a virtual hug via the mail and whether that's a postcard or a little gift, send it.

It's going to be it's going to put a smile on their face. OK, so now we're going to go on a small field trip for a little change. I want to show you two things.

Two moves that really help when you're sore working from home. But it doesn't matter if you're on a standing desk or desk and have a phone to actually the spot on that remote's cheapest. So the first move, because we always hunched over a laptop like this is to lay down on the foam roller.

It feels great, just the wheel edge right near the back. And to relax like this now, I'm not going to do it for too long because I don't think you want to watch me. But if you laid out like this, you had fifteen minutes.

You can do it during college. You're going to be like the on camera. You and then lie down on the floor, you will be absolutely amazed at how much more grounded you feel and how calm the muscles are around your spine.

So when we clench over our laptops, we're actually kind of stressing tensing our muscles all around the spine. And it's totally curious. My mom recently showed me this move and it's changed everything about my life.

Last minute going to be and I'm sure you all know this is rolling on your shoulders, given how much time we spend on our cell phones and everything is like one of my favorite parts of the day, I make sure after exercise or even before after a stressful call, my back on the audio give myself a nice and nice little role. And even people stress about wellness because I think it has to take a lot of time. It doesn't honestly, two to five minutes on that foam roller or a few minutes using headspace.

And I feel maybe not like a new woman or like my pandemic self, but I certainly feel a lot better and a lot more calm. So that said, now that we have gone on the floor, we've talked about feelings. We've covered bronies from from everything from bronies to Buddha.

I want to send you off by saying thank you so much for joining me today and thank you very much to our hosts at GitLab, the #GitLabCommit squad is amazing. It's a privilege to be one of the speakers on this line of thank you for welcoming me to this community and encouraging me to get creative is the first time I've given this talk. And hopefully it's enjoyable.

So do send me your feedback. I want to hear what you have to say. It's just remember, we're fragile, but tell me the truth and don't hesitate to communicate in the future.

You can find me at all of the channels on all of the Internets. Like I said, thank you so much for joining me. Now I'll stay at home, but y'all stay in touch.

You can find me at the handle's below and don't hesitate to reach out with any questions or comments that you have. My name my name is Savannah Peterson. And this has been such a blast.