Summary:

In this episode, CheeTung Leong interviews Nels Pedersen from Oyster about building elite teams while working remotely. Nels shares insights on how Oyster has successfully built a distributed team and offers practical tips for creating a high-performance remote team. He emphasizes the importance of thoughtful onboarding processes, asynchronous work, and open communication. Nels also discusses the value of collaboration within the team and the need to celebrate wins along the way. He concludes by highlighting the significance of planning for the future and continuously evaluating and improving processes.

Key Takeaways:

1. Thoughtful onboarding processes are crucial for creating a positive remote work experience.
2. Embrace asynchronous work and create an environment that supports different working hours and time zones.
3. Collaboration and cross-functional partnerships within the team are essential for success.
4. Celebrate wins and show appreciation for team members' contributions.
5. Continuously evaluate and improve processes to ensure scalability and adaptability.

Chapters:

[0:03:15] Importance of thoughtful onboarding for remote teams

[0:05:37] Emphasis on asynchronous work and flexible working hours

[0:07:35] Building a foundation for scaling a distributed team

[0:08:03] Keeping the team motivated and aligned on a daily basis

[0:10:36] Adapting to a changing market and adjusting as needed

[0:11:04] Finding opportunities to work internally energizes teammates.

[0:14:29] Evaluate if processes are working today and in the future.

Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung

Connect with Nels Pederson: linkedin.com/in/nels-pederson-13b11536

Music Credit: winning elevation - Hot_Dope



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I'm CT once again at Engage Rocket. And I've always been curious about this. Now that we've all gotten used to remote work and hybrid work, what are the secrets to be able to build an elite team while everyone is working remotely? And not even the same geography or time zone. We're going to be answering that question with Nels Pedersen today from Oyster.

And he's currently based in Seattle. He's got deep roots in the technology space. He's And he's working at Oyster and they've raised over 250 million to allow companies to be able to access the best talent globally. Really glad to have you on the show. Welcome, Nels.

Nels Pederson: Yeah, thanks for having me.

It's great to be here.

CheeTung Leong: Yeah, so tell us a little bit more about yourself and what Oyster does.

So you don't need a, an entity in a different country to work with us, or sorry to hire somebody you can work with Oyster. And we help you compliantly play, pay them, manage them, onboard them, off board them. We're really, we're a part of this kind of new wave of companies in the employer record space that is really focused on helping make the world a little bit more global.

And it's been a really fun, wild ride. I've been at the company for just over a year now, which is almost a third of the life of the company. We're a we're a just about, I think it's about a three year old company now close to 700 teammates. And I think it's over 65 countries. So all across, just tons of different teammates all across the world, we really very much practice what we preach, right?

So this question and idea of how do you do that successfully? And how do you build an environment that scales, that allows you to do that has been on the forefront of our minds at Oyster. But my role specifically, so we have a partnerships team. And partnerships at Oyster is, I guess it's twofold, we love building partnerships that helps drive new business that we otherwise might not meet.

So building partners where we can help add value to their clients or their customers. About the other side too is, we have a specific product and we love bringing in partners that can also help add value to ours. The area I work within partnerships is we have a specific team focused on.

Building partnerships with service based businesses. So I think lawyers, accountants HR consultants, and, we're focused on building really, close value out of partnerships with those types of folks

were cool.

Nels Pederson: think the champagne one sounds more elegant.

We'll take that

CheeTung Leong: sounds much better. Yeah and it's not easy. It's really not easy to build a team when you're completely remote. Especially I think like people like you and me, we like being with people. And, especially when the people that we're working with, we see, we get into high stress environments with them and sometimes it's always good to fall back on that human to human connection in person.

Nels Pederson: It is mind blowing to me when I first joined Oyster, I've been at companies that have been decades old and it feels like processes just aren't thoughtful or scalable.

And, I've gone through some clunky onboarding processes with other companies. I was really impressed with when I joined Oyster. So just over a year ago, I had my onboarding process that I went through was incredibly thoughtful as far as my introduction to the company, my introduction to we're a team of 700, so there are multiple different teams within Oyster, and you. You have to learn about, how do they all operate? So product sits over here, engineering sits over here designs here, sales is here. Like how, who are the leaders on the teams? Who are the people that you're working with? How do they operate? What are their directives? What are they focused on?

We as a team, we have mastered the craft of consuming content asynchronously. And I, that was something by the day that I joined, we had a kind of a thoughtful list of Hey, here's your onboarding and you're going to go through this and you can reference it after the fact. And it's a series of videos and different learnings.

So it was that perfect blend of getting a chance to actually meet and talk with real people, in a distributed environment, that means it's through a video call. And it was something that I really appreciated when you can't do it in person, the next best thing is doing it through video.

It might be they really love, working in the morning and getting done earlier, regardless of what it was or what it is. It's supported and the infrastructure of oyster. Very much supported this idea of asynchronously working. So there was a huge emphasis on being very open about your working hours and communicating with that, with folks, not taking meetings that fell out of those hours, really prioritizing certain aspects of your life.

And I, I found, to your question of what game changing things help make this. Distributed world possible. That was the biggest thing. It's like people are people. And I think we did a really good job at oyster recognizing that that's the case. And there's a reason they hired Nels.

So our team did a really good job building a foundation that scales and for us, that was super quickly, right? 700 people almost in. In three years, like we were hiring like crazy and it was almost every Monday. We would have another 10, 20, 30 people start and you can't chance the fact that's going to go well.

You have to be really thoughtful about it. I was really impressed with the infrastructure that our team had built out and it, they were able to continue to grow on it as we grew as a company.

And. Every week, literally everyone in the team is pretty much going to be new to everybody else in, in many cases. And what do you find like beyond that first 30, 60, 90 days? What have you found like on a day to day basis? What do you do to keep

your

team motivated? What do you do to keep your team aligned and, excited about what's coming?

Nels Pederson: Our partnerships team is 12 people. We sit within the sales team as well. And so it's, 12 immediate folks that, that kind of work on partnerships and then more, more after that. So there's a lot of different people that you might work with on a given day to day basis.

It can get easy to live in this silo, right? At the end of the day, I'm a salesperson, right? I have certain numbers and quotas that I'm trying to hit for the segment that we have. anD it can be easy to live in this silo where I'm not collaborating with other internal folks.

And I love looping them into our conversations, right? I love getting sales team involved, getting our product specialists involved, where it makes sense. If we're talking about integration, getting our product team involved. So the, how do we, how do you keep the energy high in a, in an environment where when you've raised as much money as we have, you need to grow quickly.

That is the directive of any company that's fundraised like we have, and you need to do it in a thoughtful way to, I found the way to embrace and have fun with that growth is just find fun ways to collaborate with your team, right? Take, everybody's got a little bit of an expertise, how do you loop them into what you're doing?

So I, I love. How do I keep that energy? A lot of it is finding new people to meet on our team, finding new ways to work with people on our team. And I, as silly as it sounds, almost get as much satisfaction out of helping other people hit their goals as I do myself. And at the end of the day, it's one of those.

It's one of those circular things where if you're the more activity you do, the more good work you do, the more good things come back to you. And it it also makes it way more fun to work, right? If you're too narrow focused on one particular thing, you're going to burn yourself out. And we're in a world that changes like every day, right?

Our we're in a market that changes every day. Like some months companies are hiring a ton. Some months companies are. Are restructuring their teams. They're rethinking their hiring plans. And like we're a product built on helping companies hire compliantly. So it's, we have to be able and willing to adjust.

CheeTung Leong: How do you go about doing this? Because, some, sometimes when we look at employee engagement research, we find that the best teams. tend to have people who are quote unquote best friends at work and It's easier to make friends at work when you're in the same Location and geography you get it hang out at the water cooler together You get a break bread together that kind of stuff.

How have you gone about doing this with your team?

I like, this is now my own personal thing. I like to get to know people, right? I like to know what's going on in your life, to the extent that you want to share. iT's fun to hear what your hobbies are. It's fun to hear what you did over the weekend. And I hope that, you're as excited to to know that about me.

So I, the way I do it, and it's not a calculated thing. It's you treat it naturally, right? We're meeting for the purpose of a meeting, but it can get so stale if you're living in an environment where you go from back to back transactional meeting where there's no time to just like figure out who you're working with, what they're, what they get excited about in life.

That would might normally happen at a water cooler. Now for Oyster or for distributed teams, it happens over Zoom. And I find that, it's a little bit of my personality. And I think, and I also try to be intentional about it. It's just I, I just, I, it's how I like to start meetings and conversations.

Like I I'll take the little notes down. It's Oh it's somebody's birthday next week. And I want to make sure that I'll make a calendar invite to wish him a happy birthday. Little stuff like that. I just try to be intentional about it.

CheeTung Leong: How would you break down everything that you've said about building elite teams remotely into some kind of framework or checklist that someone in your position in another company can just take away from this conversation and apply almost immediately?

And so I think that's always important, make time into your agenda to do that and get human for a little bit, but when it comes to the infrastructure side of things, like I, going back to this foundation, I felt very fortunate that when I joined, we had a lot of really strong leaders that helped lay that foundation.

So Nels and others could be onboarded successfully. There's a, there's this framework that you can follow. And it's it's just a series of questions that you ask yourself is it. Is it working today? You don't ask yourself that. Hey is the, is our processes working today? whEn it comes to if it's maybe it's onboarding, you can look at everything as a whole.

And, our team is twice as big will these processes hold up, right? Time just flies so quickly. And if the answer is no to either of those. So if it's no to the first one are the processes working today? Does somebody get a world class experience when they get on board today?

If the answer is no, we need to dig into why that's not happening. So we can like immediately fix that the injury. And then if it's like, then there's the preventative care thinking about, okay, six months from now, how do we build the infrastructure in order to support our growth ?

It's a simple framework, but it's that the idea of asking yourself Are we prepared for the future? Can we handle what we're trying to do today? Are we prepared for the future? And, what can we do to better prepare ourselves while still needing, while still trying and working to accomplish the goals we need to hit today?

I would not be as successful as I am if I didn't think about. Q1 of 2024 and the activities that I want to do then, right? The work I do now can sometimes lead to outcomes that happen six months from now. There, that can be applied to many different aspects of your business, whether it's, hiring or retaining and engaging people or, individually, how you think about building out your function, be it sales, be it product, whatever it might be.

CheeTung Leong: It sounds like there are two main components. To, to how you tackle this. So the first one is on the personal level, just being very intentional about how you approach meetings, setting agendas, making sure that you have some space in those agendas to connect with people celebrating wins, giving thanks to and recognition to people that have.

To people

as part of the process, and then also thinking ahead, asking yourselves what's working, what's not why not, is it still going to work in six months , I think those are extremely helpful to those of us who are, even those of us who are working with teams that are not remote and trying to trying to build them into elite high performance teams.

People wanted to find you, what's the best way for them to do Nels?

Nels Pederson: LinkedIn is, you can feel free to email me. I'm just Nels. Petterson at OysterHR. com, but also LinkedIn, that's my. I really hate social media, so you're not finding me anywhere else.

I am not a prolific tweeter by any means or anything like that. Or, uh, but yeah I engage with folks on LinkedIn. I'm happy to email. And really, to that idea of just being an open mind I love connecting with folks on anything really, whether it's, I am not in that mindset that, my, that I only ever think about partnerships for Oyster.

CheeTung Leong: Perfect. Thanks so much for hanging out with us today, Nels. And for those of you who are listening, I hope you enjoyed this conversation and have taken away a few good nuggets that you can apply.

In your teams as well, make sure you drop us a review and tune in the next time on the HR impact show where we're going to have more and more great leaders like Nels sharing with us their best practices in building elite teams.