What if just sitting in the same office as someone wasn't the key to connection at all.

On today's quick Win episode, we dive into how you can actually keep people connected when they're scattered around the world, or at least not in the same office every day.

You'll hear from Avani Prugophar, who is the chief people officer for a Lassian, the global tech company with more than thirteen thousand employees.

She's been experimenting with distributed ways of working long before COVID forced the rest of us to catch up, and by the end of this episode, you will have a concrete framework you can borrow to help your own team feel more connected, even if you're thousands of kilometers apart.

Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day.

I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber.

So what's the difference between remote first versus a distributed first model?

So, A, we believe that the future of work is going to be distributed, and even as we speak, teams are fairly distributed.

In the world.

How the work is coming together, It's no longer the office concept.

Same people working in the same office, working on the same thing.

It's fairly distributed, So that's the difference remote.

Often people associate remote means work from home, you know, or remote means like you're not coming into office, and distributed means you can come into office or you can work from home, so it can actually be wherever you want it to be.

That's the clear differentiation.

What we mean by distributed first though, means I'll make it real with an example.

So for example, the four people in a team, three of them are in office whatever, like you know, they all decided to go into office one day and the fourth person is logging in from Melbourne.

They're not in Sydney, for example.

Are the three people who are sitting in office will have to go in three different pods or meeting rooms to make sure they optimize for distributed first experience, which is the person who's logging in from home.

You optimize for that.

So you know, where you have one person on zoom and three people sitting in a meeting room, you're not optimizing for a remote distributed first mindset, that's what we mean by that.

Yeah, that's really helpful.

I would love to know when you first moved to the team anywhere model, What were some of the more unusual challenges that you had to overcome, things that you didn't even think would be a challenge.

So I would say this was all and maybe I'll zoom back, because everyone associates there's ways of working model post COVID and pre COVID, post pandemic, pre pandemic.

I think for us as at Lasan as a company, we were experimenting heavily in the future of work being remote at that point in time with small teams, so we had about eight percent of our teams already working wherever they wanted to work that time you used to call it remote.

When pandemic happened, for us, it was like we had enough data points to say like this in this works at scale, it works for everyone, so we are going ahead and doing it.

So I think for us, the approach was like we put our stakes in the ground, this is what we believe, and we just go from there.

So it was pretty much a one way door decision, and we knew we are taking a one way door decision.

What it means is like once you make it, there's no coming back from it.

So when you make decisions like that with that premise, I think it's much easier to solve for it what we learned.

And I can tell you being a HR person like it was, it wasn't part of my DNA to say like, hey, let's just roll with it and then we'll figure it out.

I'm like, we're talking about people like we need to put some policies in place, we need to put some checks and balance, says what will retell employees?

And this was the first time where I think it tested my I would say DNA as well as HI to say no, we're doing it now, we'll figure it out, which meant at every stage had to go back and tell people we don't know about this.

So I don't have an answer for what happens to your internal mobility if you move from here to here.

I do not know what is the tax implication.

I do not know what will happen, but hang in there.

We are working through it, right.

So I think that approach itself is very important to call out because it's very different.

Otherwise most of the other companies we like, let's write down all of that, put it to tea and then we take it versus this was like we're doing it.

So I think what it helped us was we did a lot of experimentation.

So I'll give you an example in terms of we are figuring it out, things like collabse zones.

We call them collaboration zones in terms of what type of work can happen across different time zones.

What is a good amount of overlap?

Is four hours overlap between Sydney and West Coast California.

Is that a good amount of collaboration time zone for people to work on the same thing?

Right?

Does it make sense for somebody in Sydney to work with somebody in London?

Maybe not?

The overlap is not there.

So I think when we were kind of listing it down, it gave us a clear framework in terms of the what are the real pillars that we'll have to really establish as we think through it.

So one was that how distributed the work can be, how do you solve for productivity?

Like everyone wanted to make sure that we are not burning people out and we are making sure that we are doing the right thing.

Third thing was about connection and I think connection was the most interesting I would say part that we unpacked during this learning in terms of there's so much, so many myths around connection, starting from the fact that, hey, you build connection when you're sitting next to each other in office.

So I can talk a bit about more.

But that was one of the most interesting part.

I would love to know more about connection because I think it's one of the biggest challenges that leaders grapple with.

So how have you solved for connection?

So what we learned, and again I will always emphasize that this is our learning and our journey and probably each organization has their own experiences.

What we learned was connection wasn't built by sporadic office attendants where people just show up and you know, you assume like the water cooler chat and like going out for a coffee is when you build connection.

What we found out was when you you bring people intentionally together.

We call them intentional togetherness.

That's our framework.

It's called ITG So we every once every quarter.

If you bring teams together, and it can be cross functional teams, not like your hierarchical teams.

You bring the teams that are trying to solve a particular problem.

So you bring them together, give them a strategic problem to solve.

It could be an ideation, sprint, it could be a strategic brainstorm, whatever it is.

But you bring together teams for a purpose to solve something, and that's when you build real connection.

Most of the time people remember like you know each other, like hey, remember we were doing that project together and it was socialty, but they build the most amount of connection with each other.

So the way we have solved for connection is really doing once every quarter.

Itgs and every team can decide what framework works for them once every quarter, once every three months based on the nature of the work the cross functional team is working on.

They come together, they spend two three days together on doing a particular thing, doing some connection, you know, team building stuff, and then they go back and then that connection last for like another two three months and then you come back again.

So you don't need an in office attendance to build connection.

It is more in terms of you bring people together for purpose to solve something, ad a cadence that work for the team, and then you go back and solve it.

What struck me most with my chat with a Varni is how connection didn't come from random office days.

It came from intentionally bringing people together once a quarter to solve a real problem, and that is what created bonds.

That lasted far beyond a few days.

So next time you're worrying about how to keep your team close, try this.

Forget about mandating office attendance.

Instead, design purposeful moments where people come together to work on something that matters.

And of course, if you would like to hear the full conversation with a Varnie, you will find a link to that in the show notes.

If you like today's show, make sure you hit follow on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop.

How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the Warringery people, part of the Kulin nation.