Crossover ’s Post

Transcript

I love to travel. We, together with my wife, lived in 15 different countries across the last five years. So that's been a journey. A few weeks ago, I came back from Saudi Arabia, I was there for a few months. So now, now it's family time. Family time. And Luna is here today with us. Hey Luna! So cute! That pose with the, with the legs in the air. She is just chilling. She loves you. Uh, actually, I could tell you my fun fact. My dogs just had puppies, so I have two dogs, and now there are seven puppies, so there's nine dogs in the house right now for the next couple weeks. Yeah, it's nuts. Oh my god. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. It's so, it's awesome to have you on the show. I've been following what you do for a long time. But some of our viewers might not know a lot about you. Thank you so much for having me. We started the journey with Remote-How, which ended up to be world's largest marketplace with remote and hybrid work experts. We've been running a bunch of, virtual conferences. Then, I co-founded also the Remote-First Institute, which has a goal to help as many teams, companies, individuals as possible embrace that the work can be done from anywhere. I've been digging into how artificial intelligence can help distributed teams both be more efficient, but also make people happier. I mean, running two companies, in your spare time, writing a book, being published in some of the world's most major publications, and consulting for Microsoft, ING Bank, so many others as well. How did you become so deeply committed to the advancement of remote work? So it was always on my mind. In 2017, when we moved to US, I had this question: Can we make people happier and enable them to work anywhere? It can be the same city, the same state that you just don't need to commute every day, spend more time with your family, et cetera, or enable the talent from abroad to get opportunities in other countries, like you guys do at Crossover. We work in an industry where everyone wants to be an innovator, everyone wants to be a disruptor, and yet when it comes to remote work, so few companies are willing to lead the way and actually be first at something. Yeah, here we are. It's May, 2024. And, uh, I feel like we're still fighting a very similar battle. The problem���s - it���s not remote, hybrid, whatever. It's how bad the work is managed within your company. You mentioned that more recently you've become a real advocate for AI has anyone ever asked you to try and explain the relationship between remote work and AI? Like, what would you say? So TLDR, why I fell in love with AI coming from the remote work world is that AI enables you to put the best practices, how you or your team should be operating on autopilot. I saw AI as a way to both empower the individual to work smarter, not harder, but then also empowered your organization to help them establish these processes, workflows that are building the healthy workplace, and be able to measure what's going on. We are really entering a totally new phase of work where it's more about facts and less about opinions. You said something super interesting that you are helping companies implement AI tools, not just to improve efficiency, but also to improve the happiness and well being of their people. What kind of use cases are you seeing? So on the individual level, one of the things that we saw - if you feel like you had a good day, you got stuff done. And especially if those were like some significant thing, not just that you kept replying to emails, right? So we've been experimenting with this AI assistant called Productivity Partner that is helping you in the beginning plan your day, like your personal, productivity coach. And then at the end of the day, AI is asking you, how was your day? Let's have the reflections, et cetera. And then it gives you the score at the end, et cetera. If you keep improving your planning and then execution, right? This is the simplest way to be like, amazing. That was a really good day. I'm happy. I'm happier. So that's number one, then number two is, something what we noticed, when the pandemic hit is that, a lot of the things that in theory, someone was supposed to be doing them in terms of, keeping up the culture, making sure that everyone is taken care of, etc, etc, in the office, it was just an assumption that, it's fine, right? But then when you're distributed, you need to implement mini processes for you as a team leader to make sure that you're supporting your team, right? So set up an assistant that is, checking in with your employees on a recurring basis. In the pre AI world, you would call it like a pulse survey, but here you can make something way more conversational. And then the manager, can have a dashboard when it's like red, orange, green, and that's again like a direct correlation to happiness because you're providing a tool that is enabling the team to really understand what's going on and be able to react quickly. What I really love about everything that you just said is that happiness equals job satisfaction and you get job satisfaction from feeling productive. When your people feel empowered, they actually want to do the things that make good business. I agree. I completely agree. Let's start to talk about, how AI can help individual remote workers. Do you think that long term, all the progress surrounding AI is going to affect remote workers differently than it affects office workers? So I would say that it will impact everyone. and now it's the question: how do you adjust? Is it about upskilling, right? To be efficient with more sophisticated AI tools, right? Is it about upskilling when in terms of your soft skills? Or maybe, you're in jobs that would really be severely impacted by AI getting smarter and smarter. Think about A: maybe working in front of your computer is actually not the stuff that you want to do until the rest of your life. That's actually, a growing trend that people are like, hmm, is it really what I want to do? I think it's a brilliant time to ask these like, half long term questions and then go into this direction of like re-skilling, right. Be curious, open minded because things are changing, so fast on so many fronts. AI is getting smarter. We're still in the beginning of this phase, the exponential growth is kind of taking off. Assume that it will get 10 times better, a hundred times better, and how it will impact what you're doing. It's like judging what cars can be in 1923 based off of the Model T. That's what anyone who is judging what AI can do based off of, what they can see in, in 2024. It's such an important mindset to have. Let's say they're a remote worker who knows that they need to level up their AI game and they want to do that, but they're just not really sure where to start. Do you have any universal tips that would help? So start experimenting with building AI assistants for different use cases. If you're part of the company, organizing a hackathon internally. This is the proven way how you can kick off a widespread adoption of AI within your company. And then there is this very interesting framework of introducing AI. It's called the STEP. It goes for segmentation, where basically you're categorizing tasks, then you have transition, so you're redistributing tasks, then you have education, re-skilling and adjusting to increasing AI capabilities. And then performance, so you're looking at how things are changing. It's a very powerful framework that can help understand where really AI can move the needle. And then make sure that this is a process that is being measured and improved upon. While we're still here, Iwo, is there anything else that you'd like to say to our audience? Work smarter, not harder. It's no longer about working long hours, but it's about figuring out the way, how you can get something that normally takes you three days to, to get it done in four hours. It's a win-win: the stuff is done, you're happy. Voila. It's been an absolute pleasure meeting with you. Before I let you go, I have to know if Luna is still lying in the exact same position on the couch. Yes. Hello. Oh, hello. Thank you so much, Luna. Thank you so much for having me, Andrew. No worries. Thank you. Take care.