Zach Wright: Hey everyone, welcome back to Untangled Vines, redefining the rules of work podcast. Today, we have a special guest who embodies the spirit of entrepreneurial innovation and work-life balance: Barbara Turley from The Virtual Hub. Barbara is a mom-first entrepreneur who has not only bootstrapped, but also scaled a 350-employee, digital-first virtual assistance company with a global client base.

Remarkably, she’s achieved this while attending toddler ballets, kids ski club, and play dates, splitting her life between the majestic mountains of Europe and the beautiful beaches of Australia. The question everyone asks Barbara is, how the hell did you do that? And her answer is simple yet profound: by focusing on building great systems, nailing process delegation, and leveraging offshore team of virtual assistants in the Philippines. Platforms, processes, people.

Barbara sees countless great companies filled with talented individuals being bogged down by the vortex of busy work. From small businesses with just five employees to large organizations with 500, the story is the same: exceptional people hindered by necessary but inefficient and time-consuming tasks.

By identifying the 20 to 50% of people’s work consumed by admin and process-driven tasks, Barbara helps businesses strategically optimize their human capital budgets by delegating to offshore virtual assistants. From e-commerce and SaaS to coaching and services businesses, Barbara’s company, The Virtual Hub, unlocks business growth by freeing up valuable time for their customers.

They provide fully managed, in-house trained, and dedicated virtual assistants starting at just $750 US dollars per month. By integrating these support assistants into your business, The Virtual Hub becomes a bolt-on scaling partner to your growth plans. So join us today as we explore Barbara’s inspiring journey, gain insights on building and scaling a business, and learn how to leverage virtual assistants to optimize business operations. Let’s welcome Barbara Turley to the Untangled Vines community. Let’s get started.

Scaling Business & Culture: Blueprint for Remote Work Excellence

And welcome back to another episode of Untangled Vines, redefining the rules of work. Today, we got a special guest, Barbara Turley from The Virtual Hub. Barbara, thank you so much for joining us on the Untangled Vines podcast.

Barbara Turley: Great to be here, Zach. Thank you for having me.

Zach Wright: Yes, and just to let people know, where are you calling from?

Barbara Turley: I am calling from Sydney, Australia, despite not being Australian, if people can pick my accent up. But I am in lovely Sydney, Australia, very early in the morning for you, Zach. I’ve had my coffee, and I’m ready.

Zach Wright: Good, good. You might’ve answered the question of the lightning round later on, but we’ll go ahead and start with somewhat of an introduction here. But I know that you’re a mom-first entrepreneur. That’s kind of how you describe yourself—scaling a digital-first virtual assistant company while balancing family life and globetrotting. It’s truly inspiring. I’ve kind of followed your journey a little bit on LinkedIn. This is the first time that we’re meeting.

But reflecting on your experience, how do you see the workplace shifting to accommodate the demands of the future of work, especially in terms of flexibility and remote capabilities?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. I mean, obviously, look, I’ve been doing this for a decade now. So I was kind of doing the digital-first remote-type structure long before it was cool, long before COVID made it mandatory. But I still see one of the challenges—I see, and I’m sure you would see this as well—I still see companies are not set up in the right operational way to really make it work. And they’re sort of—it’s failing for a multitude of reasons. Not everyone’s failing at it. There’s some great companies doing great stuff. Obviously, Atlassian is like the trailblazer in it.

When I look at the way that I built The Virtual Hub, for me, it was built this way out of necessity because I wanted very much to be a hands-on mom. I also was living in Australia at the time, but I had a wish to potentially move back to Europe, where I’m originally from. So I needed something I could bring in my pocket, so to speak, and do from anywhere.

So, you know, I did it that way. But I still see companies struggling to realize that it’s not just remote or hybrid. It’s actually the way that you set the company up. It has to be digital-first in order to then make remote or distributed teams kind of a completely frictionless experience and therefore make location kind of irrelevant, is what I think, and take it out of the conversation as opposed to it being front and center.

Zach Wright: Yeah, and we were talking before—we’re obviously on board with that because we think that it’s great to get in person every once in a while, but to actually have the office be mandatory—we even see it turning off people. And even some of the top people in companies are leaving if someone mandates a return-to-office policy.

So I kind of have constructed some questions that we’re going to be going through today. And after I was reviewing some of the topics, I kind of call it the five stages of becoming future-work ready. So we’ll go through this, and you can tell me if that’s correct.

But just speaking of—because you kind of tapped into it a little bit—navigating the future of work is kind of topic number one. And given your unique journey, I just wanted to see what insights you can share about the changing landscape of work and how businesses are adapting to meet the demands of the future, particularly in accommodating flexible work arrangements. Like, how do you do that at The Virtual Hub internally, but then also for the clients that you work with?

Barbara Turley: Wow, there’s so much I can unpack in this. I’m going to try and sort of start at the beginning. I think the first I would say is that the challenges are on both sides. So I think where the debate gets a little lost online is that, you know, the companies that are sort of mandating back to the office have challenges with how this is working, and employees not wanting to go back to the office have challenges with that. But actually, the answer is kind of in the middle, which is the same answer for everyone, in that it’s the way that we work and how we work that is actually fundamentally the problem.

So from a company perspective, a lot of them are not set up in the right way, like I just said. You know, the shifts that need to happen are things like—we’re used to seeing people in the office or having meetings, you know, all of the stuff that’s being talked about online, really—having lots of meetings, tapping someone on the shoulder, everybody’s in the office on a Tuesday, water cooler, all that sort of thing.

But what’s missing in a lot of companies is this idea that—and this speaks to kind of what you guys are doing at Grapevine—you know, I swear I’m not being paid for this, but I do fundamentally believe, and it’s how I found you, is that we do need to create an environment, a virtual environment in the cloud, where people show up to work, do work, collaborate and work, and are seen. Visibility online is a major problem.

Now, one of the things I think people who are demanding remote don’t realize is that the level of visibility and transparency that a company needs in order to have trust and to make sure that all of these things actually work is much higher than when we’re in the office. Okay? So people working remotely go into a bit of a black hole, and they don’t realize that once you go remote, you’re kind of in the black hole and nobody can see anything.

So it’s fundamentally very important that employees understand this. But also, the companies understand you need to build the operational architecture and the documentation, the platforms, the processes, and the system of how we’re going to network for a digital-first environment. And that goes a long way to start to clear the emotional issues that both sides are facing around lack of visibility, lack of transparency, and the fear that that brings up.

And everyone’s afraid to kind of talk about that because nobody wants to be seen as a micromanager. Nobody wants to be seen as lacking trust. It’s not really about that. It’s just this black hole problem where everything becomes a little opaque, and opacity is not a great thing to foster trust.

Zach Wright: Yeah, and we see that in studies we do every single week—unless we’re busy—we do a future-of-work weekly report. And we see that throughout the studies, where transparency helps create trust, consistent updates, just so the employees feel like they understand what’s going on in the organization.

And what I always say, ever since kind of becoming a remote work pioneer, so to speak, is that whenever it comes to working remotely, you have to be very intentional on how you’re working with your employees. But how—like you mentioned micromanaging—how do you balance that? Because I do think that, like, in the office, they used to say management by observation or walk-by management, which I think is terrible. If you have a disagreement, let’s talk about—I like that.

Barbara Turley: I think you can walk by people that are actually doing nothing and delivering nothing, and they look like they’re really busy, right? And we’ve all worked with those people. We all know who they are.

Zach Wright: Exactly, or in another sense of the word—and we can even see this in remote—where people are good at promoting themselves, and they’re not actually doing the work. So I guess the question that I’m trying to think of is, how do you balance the micromanagement aspect? Because you’re really just trying to check in on your team and seeing, do they have what they need? Are they making progress? Are they performing in the way toward our goals? How do you kind of balance that being remote? Because I know you kind of have to let go of control a little bit, but the way to overcome that might be micromanagement. So how do you kind of balance that?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So the control thing is interesting. Everybody thinks you need to let go of control. Control is a funny thing because the word control has a connotation for a lot of people of micromanagement, but it’s actually not. Micromanaging is a different thing. It’s looking over someone’s shoulder. It’s changing everything. And we’re all guilty of doing that in certain areas, especially as entrepreneurs. I mean, it’s our baby. But active management is a different thing.

So micromanaging is one thing. Active managing is actually taking an active role in the fact that we have a top-down vision and mission that we’re going for. We have top-down company goals, and I’m a big fan of objectives and key results. Anyone who’s not doing that when you’re in remote—this is a game changer. It’s a game changer to roll this out, and you can Google that and look up what that’s about.

But really, from that top-down approach, you have to kind of design the entire architecture. And like I said, a platform is one thing, which is the space you’re in. Look, you know, Asana, Monday.com, all these—the tools, right? Slack, you know—but the tool doesn’t make a digital-first company.

So you need the right architecture in terms of platform. You need to design what that looks like. And then you need the process part, which people think that process mapping is around individual processes and tasks. It’s not—it’s entire systems. It’s how we use the tools.

So a classic problem that I see is, well, our marketing team likes Asana, and then our other team likes this, and our other team uses that. I’m like, that’s wonderful for them. That is terrible from a company perspective, right? So you need to actually all, as a team and as a culture and as a company, come together and realize that we need to row the boat in the same direction with the same type of oars and the same speed in order to achieve the mission that we’re on.

Now we can have lots of people running off and working in different ways. We can have lots of different personalities, and we don’t need to be controlling fully how people work. But we need to control and have some sort of structure and a system that people can then go in and paint their canvas on, so to speak. So you give flexibility within a structure.

You need to have some form of structure, and that goes from top-down to bottom-up, if I could describe it that way. So top-down structure is designing the architecture, designing the objectives and key results that are company-wide and cross-departmentally, and then making sure that all the projects and the work and the pipelines and the stuff that people are working on—everything in the company can be connected actually to a key result.

So everyone in this company knows what they’re working towards. Now in that environment, then really all a COO or an entrepreneur or a CEO kind of needs to know at that point is, are we on track or off track? And if we’re off track, what’s the roadblock? That’s where the status updates become really, really important because what we’re trying to achieve is—people think, oh, they’re just checking am I doing the work? No, we’re checking for the roadblocks to the milestones, to the results.

Because potentially someone in a higher position might be able to clear a roadblock very quickly for you in your role. So it lends to this visibility, transparency issue when you’re doing it this way. So it’s just about thinking of the actual design and the construct of how we’re working.

And then once you have that—and I find this—our team can just go off and do their thing. I mean, I know because we have a structure for the transparency and visibility. And when new people come in and they don’t quite get that and they’re not on board yet, the black hole exists. Literally, I’ve had to go into a black hole, and I’m like, no, no, it doesn’t work like that here, you know? Because otherwise, we really have no idea what’s happening or what’s going on.

Zach Wright: Yeah, and you’re speaking my language. I don’t know if you—I don’t think I told you—but the last company that I worked for, I ran our OKR program.

Barbara Turley: Oh, I didn’t know that. Yeah.

Zach Wright: And we were 100% remote, and honestly, I’m a huge believer of OKRs, exactly for the reason that you’re talking about. And if somebody is listening and they don’t know what OKRs are, it’s like the reason that I love it is because every single thing, like you said, is attached to the strategy or the company vision. Like, what are we trying to achieve?

Whether you say, okay, this is our company vision, and then here’s our strategy, the next layer down—so what are we trying to achieve this year? And then you break those down into quarterly goals, depending on how you want to do it. But the way that we did it—

Barbara Turley: It’s alignment. It’s top-down, bottom-up alignment. And then there’s no confusion about—and then you can say, see this project here? Let’s kill that. That’s not actually contributing, and somebody’s doing it. Or you can go deep in the weeds and go, why is this project not contributing? That process that that person is executing there is old world. It needs to be revamped. It’s not getting the results we think it should.

And those are conversations then you can have with your manager. And it makes the manager layer far more effective and less micromanaging. And they actually then feel, as managers, like they can achieve something. So it’s a leadership tool as well.

You’re right—OKRs, we could talk for hours about this—literally a game changer. Difficult to bring in, takes a lot of work, but a game changer for any company. If I can share, it literally cleared 70% of meetings out of my calendar. My calendar is empty. So it’s great.

Zach Wright: Exactly. Like we were talking about managing by observing earlier, I felt like I managed by OKRs because I would bring it up in the one-on-ones. I would bring it up in the team meetings. Since I was running the OKR program, I would bring it in a company all-hands and make sure that we were all understanding what they were and then also how to do them.

And so I actually had another company, a consulting company, where we focused on OKR consulting. And so we would come into an organization, and we would teach people how to implement OKRs. And I think, like obviously with Untangled Vines, we’re focusing on remote work and future of work. And like you said, if you are a remote organization, especially 100% remote, OKRs are going to help you balance that micromanaging piece because it’s almost like each time that you speak to that individual or that team, you’re talking to them about performance because it’s tied to their OKRs.

So it’s like employee performance mixed with, are we achieving our strategy? It’s the best of—

Barbara Turley: It creates, as well—it also creates—KPIs are kind of an interesting thing. People get confused between OKRs and KPIs and targets and stuff. I have found what OKRs have done for us really, really beautifully is it creates a bouncing-off ground for conversation at a team level, at a performance level.

And it’s not like, we’re now going to review what your performance was over the last year. It’s in the trenches with you going, yeah, that’s not really working. Let’s think about what solution we could come up with to meet this target or to meet this result or to drive this further.

And it’s a more exciting conversation because there’s collaboration built right into the core of that. So I think where we’re getting to in this whole conversation is that—I call this—people are talking about the future of work. I’m like, this is the future of business. I mean, this is how businesses need to be constructed in this new world.

And since it’s been happening for a decade, COVID absolutely sped it up, but there is a moment in time now where if we don’t kind of keep driving this conversation, then there is a wish to run back to the old world. But I do understand that from some company perspectives because they don’t have this architecture, and it takes a bit to build it. You’re talking about re-architecting a lot of different things inside companies.

And I think employees who want remote need to understand that that’s actually the friction point. And we need to get there, but it is going there. It will get there. It will take another five years.

Zach Wright: No, I 100% agree. And I think you’re so right—if we don’t have the pioneers like yourself—I would throw myself in there, maybe a little too early to call that, but we’ll say it for now—but if we don’t have these future-of-work pioneers that are driving the new landscape or the new frameworks that we’re going to leverage, then we will go back eventually to the traditional nine-to-five.

And I know this isn’t on our questions, but you call yourself a mom entrepreneur first. And so if we go back to the nine-to-five traditional normal, then we’re actually leaving a lot of people behind, right?

Because in the studies that I’ve seen, I know that people of color have a better experience if they’re either remote or flexible. I know mothers have a better experience because they aren’t as likely to have to have a gap in their resume if they can work from home. And fortunately or unfortunately—I don’t know how we want to word this—but the mom is still considered the caretaker. Yeah. And so what are your thoughts on that?

Barbara Turley: So the first thing—yeah. I mean, look, I’m so passionate. I mean, that would have been the reason I left corporate. I was in corporate for 15 years, and I left because at my core—look, high five to all the corporate moms out there. I mean, you ladies, the corporate moms, you are doing an incredible job that I don’t think I would have been able for.

And I decided that I didn’t want to tread that path because I thought, you know, I don’t really want to leave my house at 7 a.m. and ride home at 7 p.m., which is kind of—yeah—and you get maybe half an hour of storybook time, and that’s it. I wanted to be very present. And some moms don’t want to do that—that’s okay too—but I actually did. I wanted to be very present.

So I needed to design something that worked for me. And like I said, that really worked for me. Now, having said that, anyone listening out there, you need to be very clear that being a remote employee or having a remote job does not mean that you can have the kids running around you all the time. We need to be clear on that.

You do still need potentially a nanny or daycare and things like that around it. But I was able to kind of mold the two together, and I was able to go to the toddler ballet class. I did have a nanny that helped me out, but not all the time. And I was able to structure my work around what the needs were of my family.

And I have loved doing that, even though it has placed a lot of pressure on me too. But that’s a key thing—the reason I did this. And I’m very passionate about talking about having been one of those categories of people that you talk about, like the moms.

I know there’s people who are potentially transgender or all sorts of different things—different flavors of the rainbow—that actually prefer to work in their own communities or be around their own people while still working for amazing companies. And I think it lends itself very well to all of those things, but if it’s done right. And that’s why we need the pioneers to be out talking about it.

Zach Wright: Yeah, yeah. Or do you specifically focus on anything like that whenever you’re hiring? And this is off topic 100%.

Barbara Turley: Oh, that’s okay.

Zach Wright: But because I know diversity, equity, inclusion kind of gets a bad rep now, especially in America—for some reason it’s “woke” now—not to get political. But what are your thoughts on that? And how do you kind of overcome that, or is there a certain method that you leverage?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I love this topic. I actually have a lot to say on this topic.

Zach Wright: Let’s hear it.

Barbara Turley: I can’t stand gender diversity targets. I think it is a terrible way to approach things. So the way we do it is you have to make diversity become a byproduct of how you recruit. So what you obviously want to do is be magnetically attracting the right people with your culture and all those sorts of things.

But realistically, where the problem occurs is in the recruitment process. Now, this wouldn’t work at every company, but at our company, I can only speak to what we do. So we have designed a recruitment process where name, resume, and the interview are last.

So we actually have people coming in fairly anonymously into a testing environment online. It’s all remote.

Zach Wright: Oh, cool.

Barbara Turley: And we’re putting them through—so we’ve built a pretty robust thing now. We’re always refining it. And it’s actually pretty rough because what you’re trying to do is extract the best talent. Now, the best talent comes in all shapes and sizes, all colors, all sorts of, again, flavors of the rainbow.

And what we have found is that we have ended up with quite a naturally diverse population because the best people end up showing up in the interview.

Zach Wright: Yeah.

Barbara Turley: And then, you know, we do obviously have to do interviews, but we’ve ended up with a beautifully diverse—like, I was in the Philippines a few weeks ago, and I literally looked around the room and I said to one of my colleagues there, I was like, look at this room.

We’ve got everyone from the most flamboyant, colorful people to quite professional, corporate-feeling, introverted-type people and all sorts of different flavors. And that is not really—I won’t say by accident—but we didn’t go out with targets to try to find those people. We just went out to try to find the best people, let them rise to the top.

So I just feel that, again, when we try to put targets or we try to make things—you try and falsely structure something to get the results you want like that—that’s when it becomes a kind of a “woke” thing where people are like, I don’t know. That’s like saying we should hire more of these types of people because they are—and it almost feels like you’re saying, because poor them, they’re lesser—rather than let’s just find the smartest people.

And the smartest people come in all shapes and sizes and colors and flavors.

Zach Wright: Exactly.

Barbara Turley: So that’s my view. I’m very passionate about that, actually.

Zach Wright: Yeah, and it reminds me of—we just dropped the future of work weekly report for this week—and in the article that I read, there was a callout that was surprising to me, where whenever it became part of the interviewing process, the thing that companies lack in interviewing or even assessing is a cultural fit.

And so it sounds like you’re more focused on the cultural fit in the sense of the culture that you guys have built, and are they going to be able to move the company forward in the right direction. So basically it’s like you said, we’re finding the right talent based off of what we need, but also they fit in our culture. Is that appropriate?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, because we’re big on culture. I mean, culture is everything in a company. Every company is a people company, really, but we’re pretty heavy. And culture is something that—wow—takes a lifetime to build in some ways and can be broken overnight. So you’ve got to really treat culture like it’s the newborn child that you hold in your hands, and you have to hold it close to your heart.

Zach Wright: Yeah. So speaking of culture, just to segue perfectly, how do you build a culture remotely? Because I know that we were talking about being intentional, having the right processes, the right systems in place. How do you specifically, at The Virtual Hub, create culture without kind of missing a step, even if it’s remotely?

Barbara Turley: Yes, okay. First of all, I think one of the most difficult things to do—so you have to be intentional about it. You can’t just go, well, our culture is that our people are friends or whatever. Culture is really a set of beliefs and behaviors around the mission.

And you have to attract people that are actually bought into your mission. Now that’s not that easy to do. People can say that they are, but actually they realize later they’re not.

But I think the main point is you have to be intentional about it. And what that means is you must put resourcing behind it. You must put energy and financial behind it. We’ve built an entire employee engagement and experience team.

And what we do is we have an entire separate sort of function that—of course, within our teams, we have talks and conversations—but we also have to get people together physically. That’s really important, both virtually and physically.

So we have online, almost cabaret-to-us-show-style parties and stuff we do. We do hybrid events. So I was in the Philippines recently, like I said, and we ran a massive town hall that was half live, half hybrid, because we brought a load of people in.

I did it live. I was there with the whole team, and it was like a party. But then we went online—we were streaming it live into our Facebook group as well. We have a Facebook group—probably a bit old school—but it actually has worked for us over the years, where we’re all together in there.

And we stream things live in there, and we run—we gamify the whole thing. So it’s not just me talking. It’s all sorts of things going on with raffle prizes, and we do food drops out to people. And we’ve got this great thing in the Philippines where you can just send food deliveries out to people really quickly. It’s pretty cool, actually.

So we do that. But then we also ask the people. So it’s really, really important not to try to make this up. People go, what should we do? I’m like, I have no idea—why don’t we ask the people what they think? Because actually they know.

So I find a lot of companies trying to fabricate culture without actually involving everyone. And we involve all 350 people. Now, does it take work? Yes. There’s surveys, there’s questions, there’s polls. We run live polls in the town halls around new things we want to do.

And then having chats with people. So I randomly go around and just book little calls with VAs or with team members, and I ask them, how is it? What do you think? And all sorts of interesting stuff comes out.

So, for example, we launched a thing last year called the Munch and Mingle. And this was designed because one of our VAs said to me—I was talking to him about something else—and I said, how is it now? He used to work in the office years ago.

And he was like, love working from home, it’s great. Because the only thing is I used to kind of like—the way our company is quite large—I used to kind of like the way you’d always meet new people coming in. There were always new people, and the office was kind of like that.

So I developed this idea. I said, what about if we get random strangers together—technically random strangers—and every month we run a dinner for 10? Now we run them in different locations, and we have an invite that goes out, and whoever RSVPs—it’s like 10 people show up to this dinner together.

And it’s nothing to do with work. It’s not a team-building event or anything. It’s purely to get random people coming together over conversation and food. And that’s been quite a lovely experience. We’re going to do more of that now.

We’re launching a club version where people who love to play basketball can come and do that together. And then you have to have online as well. So one thing we do really well, which I love, is we have this online gaming tournament that happens every year—online—because in the Philippines, gaming is everywhere.

But we run an actual online tournament, and we stream it live, and it’s a gaming—

Zach Wright: It’s like your own personal Twitch stream.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, where there’s teams and everything playing against each other live, and it’s very cool. So we have the Battle of Brilliance, and we have—so it’s very intentional. We have created an entire team that actually run and come up with these ideas, and it’s designed to foster connection—human connection—even when we are hybrid and remote.

Zach Wright: Yeah. And just as you’re speaking—well, one, I’m thinking about Grapevine, but then two, I’m just thinking, like, what would you say to people who think that this type of stuff that you’re talking about is unimportant because it has nothing to do with business? Because this is one of my pet peeves, where we know through the—and I know I keep referring to studies and all that kind of stuff—but my undergraduate was in psychology with an emphasis on organizational psychology. And then I did my thesis paper on the happy productive worker thesis.

And one of the things that I learned from there was the job characteristics model. And it is all these different things that come into play that are beyond just the responsibilities or the job duties of that specific person. But whenever culture is involved, you actually see satisfaction rise, you see productivity rise, you see the connection between the manager and the employee become better, the teams—there’s less silos. So I won’t keep going, but what are your thoughts on that?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So I think a couple of things that came to mind. Look, I’m also a big fan of—so OKRs—but also scaling up. The Scaling Up methodology is what we have followed massively, with OKRs built in. And in that, they talk a lot about—and the people pillar of the Scaling Up methodology is phenomenal. So I kind of built a lot of things from that.

So we have our set of core values, but one of our core values is “we take fun seriously.” The reason we put that in there is because I work—you need to come—you need to actually work. Work needs to be fun. I know some people would disagree with this. I’m like, you need to come to work and love the people you work with. And you don’t have to—you don’t have to love everyone, but you need to feel that actually you really enjoy your job.

Because then, on the tough days—there’s going to be tough days—that’s what’s going to get you through the tough days, right? Not having—you know, having a supportive manager and all that’s great—but having fun, great teammates, and even online, you’ve got to try to create that connection. So that’s number one. So fun comes first.

Then what we’ve got to do is, again, be very intentional about how do we plug fun into the way that we say—how do we kind of hide pockets of work and updates of what we’re doing as a company, et cetera, into the fun environment?

So like I run these town halls, which are mostly virtual because we’re all virtual, but we actually inject fun into them. So I will come on and speak about our OKRs, I’ll speak about how the company’s doing, and then we’ll have—we have hosts and everything—so it’s like a TV show.

And then the hosts come in, and they do raffle prize draws, and everyone’s in the comments. We ask questions, and of course we plant things that we want in there. So GDPR—like cybersecurity is a pretty boring topic—but it’s pretty important in our industry.

So what we do is we will plant—we’ll give out prizes and everything for the first 10 answers that are correct in this thing, and we’ll ask something around cybersecurity, which we have trained on. What we’re doing there is we’re introducing gamification.

So we try to bring gamification and fun and connectivity and a bit of a laugh into everything that we do. Even when it’s bad news, we’re like—let’s say one of our key results is bad—we’ll have all these sound gigs in there going “boo,” and everyone can—and then we start to talk about what we’re going to do about it.

And then we’ll run live polls on the screen, and we’ll ask funky questions, and you have to inject—again, it’s so intentional. And then you have to make sure—this is the problem—you always need to be upping the game a bit or changing it or putting surprise and delight in there.

Now that’s the bit that gets hard the more that you do it. So like, how do you keep putting surprise and delight in there? And it’s design. I keep talking about this—you need to design your operational architecture, but you also need to design how we’re going to inject human connection, human fun, get people to laugh and connect with the heart. You’ve got to be intentional about that too.

It’s a lot of work, but you need to have resourcing behind it because you can’t do it yourself as the CEO. But you can drive it. So I drive it from the top, and I insist on it. But I have teams now—and they look like the team that does it. I just go, blank canvas, off you go, come back with your ideas.

Zach Wright: You know, it’s crazy because it’s also a marketing tool for your talent acquisition. Because the way that you’re describing this—if I was a listener, and I am because I’m listening to you speak about it for the first time—it’s like literally the words in my head were, “I want to work there,” you know?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I think we could do it—I think, look, you know, when you run the company, you always think, yeah, we could do this a lot better. We do it quite well, but I think we’re bad at actually promoting our—so inside the heart of The Virtual Hub is something we’re trying to now create.

We’ve got a video team, and we’re trying to create coverage of this so that people can actually see it. Because I do think even for clients, you know, like when clients come to us looking for remote virtual assistants, one of their key questions—apart from things like how’s their English and stuff like that, which again, nobody wants to ask that, but it’s a valid question, right?—but what they actually really want to know is business owners and people trying to grow companies, they have enough to worry about.

There’s enough stresses and overwhelm, as we know, right? There’s enough stresses and overwhelm that you don’t want to have to worry about: is my person who’s with me on my team in the Philippines, are they okay? So we create culture for them. We create that vibe that maybe a smaller company can’t do.

They don’t have the time and the resourcing to make sure that this VA sitting 10,000 kilometers away, on their own at home, actually has culture. We provide that. That’s what The Virtual Hub is. We create that for that person so that the client doesn’t have to do that.

Or they can also—we facilitate culture for them. So we can organize—if they have a team with us—we’ll facilitate organizing, making sure that that team has team buildings going on and goes out for dinner and has events that they’re part of that the client might want to do as well, like birthday cakes and celebrations and things like that. So we take the heavy lifting of that for the client.

Zach Wright: Yeah. Was there ever a time that you didn’t do this, or was it always from the beginning?

Barbara Turley: In the very early days, no, we didn’t do any of it. I mean, I’ve sort of learned this from—actually, that’s an interesting question. Yes, in the early days, no, we didn’t do any of this. I mean, it was just like, hey, you want a VA? Great, there’s a VA. Okay, we’ll handle the payroll, and it was just very transactional, I think.

Relationship is everything. And actually, that circles us back to this whole point of remote. We need to get remote right. But we need to remember that the future is human. The human is actually the bit that we need to foster, even in an AI-driven world.

We need to be very careful that actually—let’s not forget that actually the future is human, and we need to create human connections and actually have that as one of our key objectives as any company.

And I wasn’t doing that in the beginning at all, but I learned through trial and error and through listening to problems and watching churn rates rise, employee engagement scores be low, and retention issues, and all the stuff that’s talked about online—like how do we get employee engagement up, how do we stop our attrition levels, how do we keep and retain our best talent?

Well, some of that is culture. A lot of it, though, is how we work. And another part of it is taking overwhelm—and I’m going off topic here a little bit—but I fundamentally believe a lot of companies globally are doing all of those things right and still having problems with retention.

And the final piece of the puzzle is saying that’s because your key people that you’re paying a lot of money to are spending anywhere from 20 to 60% of their day doing stuff that could be process-mapped and delegated to an amazing support assistant, like we do.

And you could free their time and energy to actually do the work that really moves the needle and really moves your company forward. Instead, you’re bogging them down with all of this—I won’t call it admin layer because it’s not just admin—it’s more process-driven stuff that is trainable and is delegatable.

Zach Wright: Yeah, no, that makes 100% sense. And I was asking because I wanted to see from the time that you didn’t do it versus now, what type of differences do you see? Because it’s kind of like a leading question, because obviously we’re trying to get people to understand that it’s not fluffy, it’s not soft.

This is something that you do that maybe in some cases it’s not ROI-trackable or measurable. In a lot of cases, it actually is. But yeah, so what has been the difference? Are there any metrics or just something?

Barbara Turley: What I would say as a sort of verbiage around what I would say is that you go from a company spinning their wheels to a scalable platform. So all of a sudden, when you get this right, you’ve built the foundation which you can scale from.

Scaling obviously involves so many different facets, but I think particularly startups—where they sort of fail—is getting product-market fit right and then going for it. But then your foundation is so not solid that you don’t have the foundation from operational frameworks, process, and how we do business around the OKR structure, how we all collaborate, and then culture to tie that all together.

That’s your foundation. And getting all of these pieces right does take work, but the result of it is that you build a very strong foundation, which I think does two things: you can scale it quite easily then, safely, and also if people do leave, you’re not all running around like headless chickens trying to wonder what we’re going to do because the IP has walked out the door.

In my company, we’re like, if somebody chooses to go on and do new things or move to Canada or do something else—I mean, we’re in the Philippines today—but if they choose to go do something else or go be a mom and take time off, we’re not all scrambling going, oh my God, what are we going to do?

We’re like, no problem, we’ve got a transition plan. We’ve got our process maps and everything dialed in so that this role can be handed over. Obviously, you do lose some IP at the top, of course, but that’s life. You just have to accept that people do move on for different reasons.

Zach Wright: Yeah, and in some cases you actually encourage people to move on because they’re so good that you know that if they went and started their own thing, they could be great. And only a strong culture can offer that opportunity, right?

But I love that you’re talking about the foundation because the other day I posted something—it was like, if you’re not intentional about your culture, then you’re operating your business in a house of cards. Anything that goes wrong, it falls down.

So I know that we’re coming up on the top of the hour. So what I want to do—we didn’t really go through the questions—but I like this conversation better because it’s more conversational. It’s learning about The Virtual Hub. It’s learning about what companies need to understand about remote work, building culture in a remote environment.

Because one of my pet peeves—apparently I have a lot of pet peeves—especially whenever it comes to the future of work, is people saying that remote work doesn’t work. But in the reality of the conversation, it’s not that remote work doesn’t work, it’s that they haven’t identified the infrastructure that they need.

And it’s like you said before, it’s not just about software. Obviously, we think Grapevine can help there. But it’s also about the culture that you build, because those are the behaviors that you’re really pushing forward. And if you don’t have those foundations, then you’re not going to be around for a long time.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I mean, look, I’m somebody who runs a scalable, large organization from anywhere. I mean, I have worked from my children’s playroom to a co-working space to literally on top of the mountain. So I just fundamentally believe—and as I said, I’ve been doing this for a decade—this is a no-brainer.

But people still can’t seem to get on board with this—that yes, you can. People always say to me, how the hell did you do that? And I go, it’s actually quite simple. But you have to keep it simple. Don’t go into complexity. Keep it simple.

Zach Wright: That’s so true, because in so many different organizations that I go into or that I’ve been in—it’s—I mean, the last company that I worked for, I was a director of sales operations and sales engineering, but then also had the OKR hat on too, so it’s a lot of hats.

But what we learned was—we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring in this consulting group to help us build a sales process and all that kind of stuff—and me and the SVP of sales, we started off a strategy, and then they brought us over to sales because we had some people leave.

And we looked at this, and we were like, no wonder nobody’s doing this correctly, because each slide deck—this is no joke—was 100 slides. Each slide deck. So for the BDRs, there were 100-slide decks; for the account executives, 100; and so on and so forth.

We looked at this and we were like, let’s make this stupidly simple—like a three-year-old can understand.

Barbara Turley: Yes, because you know what? People don’t do it because simple is hard. It’s easy, right? I’ve seen this happen over and over, and I’ve worked with lots of different people. And when I see people go down into the weeds and into the complexity, I just go, come back out of there for a second and let’s think about what’s the objective we’re trying to achieve.

Because it’s this whole first-principles thinking—it’s harder to actually come back into simplicity. And often the answer is much simpler than people realize.

I’ve seen—sometimes I used to think maybe I’m too simple, I don’t know—but I just think by focusing on keeping—I mean, like I said, simplicity is difficult. I can say, folks, I’m keeping it simple, and then someone makes it too simple and hasn’t really—it’s not thought through.

It’s not intentional simplicity. You know, from that first-principles thinking of going, why, why not? And just keep digging, digging, digging until you get down to the simplest answer.

Zach Wright: Exactly. Because you still have to be able to see around the corners and have that business continuity, have that risk management aspect of it, and understand—like you said—if somebody left the company tomorrow at The Virtual Hub, obviously you would feel some type of way, but at the same time you would know that you have this whole process coming into place.

Whenever a new employee comes on board, you know that you’re going to do steps one through 10 or something like that. And a lot of companies don’t take the time to do that.

And just to kind of full circle this into remote work, this is where I think a lot of people are lazy—and I’m not afraid to say it—because the traditional nine to five allowed us to get away with so many things that were bad for the company.

Barbara Turley: It’s just sloppy.

Zach Wright: Yeah—sloppy is the perfect word.

Barbara Turley: You don’t have to—you can have it all in your head, and all your people can have it all in their heads, and then they walk out the door with the IP in their heads.

And really what you’re building—when great people come to work with you—I’m not going to say “for you,” I hate that term—when great people come to work with you, what you’re actually buying is the IP in their head.

You’re bringing them in to bring that IP into your company, to bring their ability to transform or do a job or whatever. And we’re not actually optimizing that budget. Your human capital budget is the one we’re not optimizing for.

And what we’re doing is we’re allowing people to come in with all that IP, do it while they’re here, and then walk out the door with all the IP, and you don’t get left with the assets. You’re not building an asset base doing that.

The other thing that we’re doing is we’re not getting all of that IP because we’re bogging them down with this support-layer-type stuff that every company has in every department that needs to be done, but not necessarily by the person you’re currently employing to do it.

So what you’re doing is you’re having a human capital budget that is not optimized. You’re not optimized for the now, and then also you’re not building that IP asset base while that person is there.

Zach Wright: Yeah, 100%.

Barbara Turley: You know, I mean, that’s it. Look, I’m ex-financial industry, so things like dividends and asset bases and stuff like that—that’s kind of my background. But yeah, if you want to build something that is scalable, you need that strong foundation.

And if you want to build something that is saleable—because at the end, of course, we all want to build an asset—even if you decide not to sell it, the asset value of your company is way higher if you actually listen to the things I’m saying and build it this way.

This is actually the end game: the asset value of this thing that you have is way higher the better you build the foundation, the better the culture is, the more magnetic it is as a mission.

Look at Atlassian, look at all these amazing companies that have built this. This is what they did. Listen to any podcast or any of the amazing big podcasts out there—you will pick up these nuggets, and you’ll start to hear the same vernacular come through around building the asset that is a company. They just word it differently.

Zach Wright: Yeah, yeah. And I want to circle back—and I know we got to wrap up soon—but I want to circle back to one of the things that you said that I didn’t call out earlier, and I wish I would, because it would have been more continuity.

But the thing that you said—you said mission, vision—that’s how people kind of word it. But the way that you at The Virtual Hub go about this, from what you said, is you’re actually talking to the employees and bringing them into the conversations.

And you’d be so surprised—maybe not surprised—of all the companies out there, especially the larger ones, because they think that it’s going to take too much time to get input from their employees. But you actually take the time to speak to the people who are going to be doing the processes, using the systems, using the tools, and then you apply it back into the organization.

That’s what we did at the last company that I worked for, and it is such a game changer. And honestly, the bar is so low for employees to feel like they are included. I could literally ask one question a year to an employee, and they would feel like this is a great workplace. But if you do it periodically—

Barbara Turley: You know as well—yeah, if you ask—you don’t have to—we do surveys and things, but this can get a bit tiring. So you’ve got to find a way—we’re actively moving this way at the moment—you’ve got to find a way to ask interesting questions more often. One question, not being things with lots of answers. Polls are brilliant for this.

What do you think of this idea? If this, what would you do? And then you can gauge all that. But also what I find very interesting—and I’ve learned this many times over, and I’ve learned it again when I went to the Philippines recently—you present the problem.

And all the stuff we’re talking about is really good for identifying what is the problem that you have. What’s your critical number, and what is the constraint that is stopping you reaching that critical number? That’s a Scaling Up methodology analogy.

But what I’ve built helps us get to the actual problem that’s stopping us from getting our critical number quicker. Then what you can do is bring your team together and actually tell them: here’s the number, here’s the constraint.

And you would be surprised at the number of people who come out of the woodwork going, I was thinking about that, and I was thinking, what about if we do this? And you go—like, the pressure it takes off the entrepreneur and the founder is phenomenal.

Because then they get all excited, and you’re like, blank canvas, off you go, go build that. Go build something, come back and show it to me. Like, there’s 101 right there. There’s a problem—let them contribute to the solution to the problem.

Because if they believe in the company that they’re working for, and they like the culture, and they love the people they’re working with and all that great stuff, they want the company to do well. Of course, yes. And they love to feel like they contribute to that. Everyone wants that.

Zach Wright: Yeah, a term that I haven’t heard in a while is employee ownership. And that’s exactly what you just described.

Barbara Turley: Now we could do it better. Like I’m saying that we could—we ask people, but I don’t know if they feel ownership over it. So I’m going to think about that. I’m glad you said that because I want to develop that more.

Zach Wright: But still, I think that you’re ahead of the curve compared to other people from what it sounds like. And even just you being willing to say we can do it better is something that—

Barbara Turley: Oh yeah. We can always do it better.

Zach Wright: Exactly. Well, okay. So I’m going to jump to the lightning round. But before we do that, is there anything that you wanted to say that you haven’t been able to speak about so far?

Barbara Turley: I think we covered a lot of ground there. I mean, I think, like to say, this future of work topic is—I mean, I love talking about this because I just think it’s completely—it’s gone in all different directions, but people are forgetting the central issue. Employees want to blame the companies, companies are blaming employees. Actually, the problem is the same from different lenses. And the solution to the problem exists in the middle, where employees need to have this way of becoming visible and transparent and understanding that it’s not about micromanaging, that’s actually about trust building. And you can’t look into a role and just assume, “my, they don’t trust me.” I’m like, well, no, if you’re in a black hole in remote and nobody can see what you’re doing, unfortunately, that’s not great for trust, right? So, you know, but on the company side, they need to kind of go, we need to invest in the architecture and in the way we do this so that we can just take this location thing out of the conversation. Just take it out, right? Make it frictionless. So that’s my soapbox on that.

Zach Wright: Yeah, no, that’s so true. Yes, take it out of the conversation and build it where it doesn’t even need to be there, but still connect periodically. Yeah, 100% agree. Cool. Okay, the lightning round. I did not send you these questions on purpose because I wanted you to see them or hear them for the first time here. Okay, so we’ll go through them quickly. I’ve yet to actually go through these quickly, so let’s see.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, let’s do it.

Zach Wright: Let’s see what we could do. All right. Okay, first question: coffee or tea for those early morning Zoom meetings?

Barbara Turley: Oh, coffee, definitely!

Zach Wright: Yes, I agree. I am the same way. Have you tried mushroom coffee yet?

Barbara Turley: No, no, a traditionalist. I can’t mess with my coffee yet. I’m so out there with everything else, I kind of—5:30 AM, I’m just going to go with what I know.

Zach Wright: Yeah, I’m addicted to caffeine, so I have to go with coffee too. Um, favorite remote work playlist or music genre?

Barbara Turley: That’s an interesting one. I don’t listen to music while I’m working. I like silence. I always find my—even when I go walking and things like that, I actually like the silence because I think, because I’m quite a big thinker, there’s a lot of noise there already. I like to get into silence. However, if I am putting music on, if I’m about to go clean the house or do something like that to get in flow, I’m definitely like—I just love some banging house music from the ’90s, the noughties—showing my age now. But yeah, I love anything uplifting and something you can dance to.

Zach Wright: Nice. I like that. Yeah, I’m more of like a documentary or podcast person while I’m working.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I listen to a lot of podcasts. In fact, to all the podcast hosts out there in the world—game changer again for me. I’ve learned so many things from just deeply listening to lots and lots of podcasts. So yeah.

Zach Wright: This is not a podcast necessarily, but there’s a course—it’s not a course, you don’t have to take any quizzes or anything—but it’s called Justice. It’s a Harvard lecture series with Michael Sandel. He’s a political philosopher. And so he goes through all these different things. And so if you’re a deep thinker, like I am too, it just makes you think about things differently.

Barbara Turley: In our roles, actually, that’s important.

Zach Wright: I’ll try to remember to send it to you. But if you’re not a lecture person, it could be boring, but I’m a nerd.

Barbara Turley: We’ll see.

Zach Wright: Okay, so most creative location you’ve worked from remotely?

Barbara Turley: Oh, that’s interesting because I’ve worked from some seriously amazing places. So I have the luxury because I run the company the way that I do. I choose to live most of the time—I live in Sydney, Australia, which is—yeah, I mean, Bondi, anyone who’s been here, it is incredible. I’ve been here for 20 years and I still drive down and see that ocean and go, wow, it just never gets old. But I also do spend several months of the year back in Europe, and I choose—I’m a big skier—so I choose to spend time in the French Alps in a place called Chamonix Mont Blanc, and that’s a pretty creative place, actually. When you look at those big mountains with white snow, it’s a pretty epic place. Ocean or mountain is me.

Zach Wright: Yeah, I’ve never been to either, but I have them on my list. All right, I think we answered this before we started recording—one essential tool or app for remote productivity?

Barbara Turley: Well, for me, it’s Asana, but there are tons. I mean, we’re an enterprise customer of Asana, and I’ve been on that platform for a decade. But of course, there’s so many interesting tools coming out. But I think it’s a good staple. I think it’s a solid place where it’s not—people describe it as a project management tool. It started out as that; now it’s like a system tool. We run our whole company on that practically. So yeah, big shout out to Asana. Amazing. Been a game changer for me. Their phone app is amazing, so I can work from my phone.

Zach Wright: Exactly. Yeah, I use the same. We just started using it because I was doing a lot of Google Docs and Google Slides and all that kind of stuff.

Barbara Turley: We moved off all of that. Yeah, we did a bit—process maps and all that—we actually have them all embedded inside of Asana now. Everything living, breathing, it’s all in there. So there’s no confusion around where something is.

Zach Wright: Exactly. Yeah, I like that. Eventually—don’t quote us on this—we might compete with them. Let’s see.

Barbara Turley: Well, Slack is coming in there now too. Slack is trying to get it back together to not just be a chat tool because everyone’s like, it’s so noisy, it’s too noisy.

Zach Wright: It is, it is.

Barbara Turley: And people use it for the wrong thing. That’s another soapbox of mine. I’m like, chat is for chat. Asana is for instructions, right? Two different things. You can chit chat over there, but when you decide something, put the instruction at the site of the work, in the task, in the project, linked to the result, so you know what’s going on.

Zach Wright: Exactly, 100% agree on that. How do you combat Zoom fatigue?

Barbara Turley: We don’t do much of it, to be honest. So how we combated it actually—we used to have lots of Zoom meetings, and there still are quite a lot of Zoom meetings going on, less for me. But how I combated it was that I—well, OKRs blew it open for me because it reduced the need to have so many update meetings because the updates are now asynchronous. So we get these updates—it’s great. And then, of course, we use Loom as well. So in our status updates, we started introducing Loom videos. So we can just do a quick—when you don’t want to write the status update, you just do a little demo of what you’re doing. And that makes async work. So I can do this from any point in the world, and it doesn’t matter what time my team are working.

Now that’s a whole other topic—you’ve got to really nail that to make that work properly. You’ve got to be good at that. But it’s reduced the Zoom meetings. And then using live dashboards, dashboarding, live metrics, scorecards, all these kinds of tools has reduced the amount of time we need to spend on Zoom calls. So how we deal with Zoom fatigue is consciously, and again intentionally, asking ourselves, do we need to have this many Zoom calls?

Now you still need the calls, right, in certain areas. We now say, let’s have love and connection calls rather than two-hour-long update meetings. We don’t have to do that anymore. Or then we jump on a Zoom just to discuss a roadblock. And also, there’s so many things on this—it doesn’t need to be half an hour. Like, stop the hour-long thing. You can have a 10-minute call. It doesn’t have to be half an hour. You can just solve the problem and get off the call.

And one more tip—for those that are feeling overwhelmed. So the first two are around clearing your calendar, creating space in your calendar. So people feel like if my calendar is empty, it looks like I’m not busy. Well, that’s not true because you need time for deep work. So clear your calendar. Stop with all these meetings. Try to structure your company, your way of working, your how working, to reduce meetings.

The other thing is then think about your energy level during the week. There’s nothing as bad as having a lovely clear calendar, but you’ve got pockets of little meetings all over the place. There’s no deep work time and you’re going to just be spinning your wheels. So then you’re going to decide—this doesn’t work for everyone—but I did this where I was like, okay, Tuesdays are my big meeting day because I’m in that energy field all day, and I hammer that. Then Mondays, Monday afternoons, and Friday mornings for me are deep work time. There’s nothing in my calendar. No one’s allowed in there. Wednesday is sort of catch-up day. So try to structure your calendar in such a way that you actually have space and time for all the pockets that you need, including your gym session or whatever you want to do to get in flow state so that you can access strategic thinking.

Zach Wright: Yeah, no, that’s so true. Yes. Take it out of the conversation and build it where it doesn’t even need to be there, but still connect periodically. Yeah, I 100% agree. Cool.

Okay. The lightning round. I did not send you these questions on purpose because I wanted you to see them or hear them for the first time here. Okay, so we’ll go through them quickly. I’ve yet to actually go through these quickly, so let’s see.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. Let’s do it.

Zach Wright: Let’s see what we could do. All right. Okay, first question: coffee or tea for those early morning Zoom meetings?

Barbara Turley: Oh, coffee, definitely!

Zach Wright: Yes, I agree. I am the same way. Have you tried mushroom coffee yet?

Barbara Turley: No, no. A traditionalist. I can’t mess with my coffee yet. I’m so out there with everything else. I kind of, you know, 5:30 AM, I’m just going to go with what I know.

Zach Wright: Yeah, I’m addicted to caffeine, so I have to go with coffee too. Uhm, favorite remote work playlist or music genre?

Barbara Turley: That’s an interesting one. I don’t listen to music while I’m working. I like silence. I always find my—even when I go walking and things like that—I actually like the silence because I think, because I’m quite a big thinker, there’s a lot of noise there already. I like to get into silence. However, if I am putting music on, if I’m about to go clean the house or do, you know, do something like that to get in flow, I’m definitely like—I just love some banging house music from the 90s, you know, the noughties, showing my age now. But yeah, I love anything uplifting and, you know, something you can dance to.

Zach Wright: Nice. I like that. Yeah, I’m more of like a documentary or podcast person while I’m working.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I listen to a lot of podcasts. In fact, I—to all the podcast hosts out there in the world—game changer again for me. I’ve learned so many things from just deeply listening to lots and lots of podcasts. So yeah.

Zach Wright: This is not a podcast necessarily, but there’s a course. It’s not a course—you don’t have to take any quizzes or anything—but it’s called Justice. It’s a Harvard lecture series with Michael Sandel. He’s a political philosopher. And so he goes through all these different things. And so if you’re a deep thinker, like I am too, it just makes you think about things differently and walk you through.

Barbara Turley: In our roles, actually. That’s important.

Zach Wright: I’ll try to remember to send it to you. But if you’re not a lecture person, it could be boring—but I’m a nerd.

Barbara Turley: We’ll see.

Zach Wright: Okay, so most creative location you’ve worked from remotely?

Barbara Turley: Oh, that’s interesting, because I’ve worked from some seriously amazing places. So I have the luxury—because I run the company the way that I do—I choose to live most of the time in Sydney, Australia, which is, yeah, I mean, Bondi—anyone who’s been here—it is incredible. I’ve been here for 20 years and I still drive down and see that ocean and go, wow, it just never gets old. But I also spend several months of the year back in Europe, and I’m a big skier, so I choose to spend time in the French Alps in a place called Chamonix Mont Blanc. And that’s a pretty creative place, actually. When you look at those big mountains with white snow, it’s a pretty epic place. Ocean or mountain is me. I’m so proud of those people.

Zach Wright: Yeah, I’ve never been to either, but I have them on my list. All right. I think we answered this before we started recording: one essential tool or app for remote productivity?

Barbara Turley: Well, for me, it’s Asana, but there are tons. I mean, we’re an enterprise customer of Asana, and I’ve been on that platform for a decade. But of course, there are so many interesting tools coming out. But I think it’s a good staple. I think it’s a solid place where it’s not—people describe it as a project management tool. It started out as that; now it’s like a system tool. You know, we run our whole company on that practically. So yeah, big shout out to Asana. Amazing. Been a game changer for me. Their phone app is amazing, so I can work from my phone.

Zach Wright: Exactly. Yeah, I use the same. We just started using it because I was doing a lot of Google Docs and Google Slides and all that kind of stuff.

Barbara Turley: We moved off all of that. Yeah. We did a bit, like process maps and all that—we actually have them all embedded inside of Asana now. Yeah. Everything living, breathing, it’s all in there. So there’s no confusion around where something is.

Zach Wright: Exactly. Yeah, I like that. Eventually—don’t quote us on this—we might compete with them. Let’s see.

Barbara Turley: Well, Slack is coming in there now too. Slack is trying to do sort of—it’s trying to get it back together to not just be a chat tool because everyone’s like, it’s so noisy, it’s too noisy.

Zach Wright: It is, it is.

Barbara Turley: And people use it for the wrong thing. That’s another soapbox of mine. I’m like, chat is for chat. Asana is for instructions, right? Two different things. You can chit chat over there, but when you decide something, put the instruction at the site of the work, in the task, in the project linked to the result so you know what’s going on. Yeah.

Zach Wright: Exactly, 100% agree on that. How do you combat Zoom fatigue?

Barbara Turley: We don’t do much of it, to be honest. So how we combated it—actually, we used to have lots of Zoom meetings, and there still are quite a lot going on, you know, less for me. But how I combated it was that I—well, OKRs blew it open for me because it reduced the need to have so many update meetings, because the updates are now asynchronous. So we get these updates—it’s great. And then, of course, we use Loom as well. So in our status updates, we started introducing Loom videos. So we can just do a quick—you know, when you don’t want to write the status update fully, you write it quickly, but then you just do a little demo of what you’re doing. Yeah, and that makes async work.

So I can do this from any point in the world and it doesn’t matter what time my team are working. Now that’s a whole other topic—you’ve got to really nail that to make it work properly. But it’s reduced the Zoom meetings. And then using live dashboards, live metrics, scorecards—all these kinds of tools—has reduced the amount of time we need to spend on Zoom calls.

So how we deal with Zoom fatigue is consciously and intentionally asking ourselves: do we need to have this many Zoom calls? Now you still need calls, right, in certain areas. We now say, let’s have “love and connection” calls rather than two-hour-long update meetings. We don’t have to do that anymore. Or we jump on a Zoom just to discuss a roadblock.

Also, it doesn’t need to be half an hour. Stop the hour-long thing. You can have a 10-minute call. You can just solve the problem and get off the call.

And one more tip—for those that are feeling all of this—the first two are around clearing your calendar, creating space. People feel like if their calendar is empty, it looks like they’re not busy. That’s not true—you need time for deep work. So clear your calendar. Reduce meetings.

Then think about your energy level during the week. There’s nothing as bad as having a clear calendar but little meetings scattered everywhere. There’s no deep work time.

So I structured mine: Tuesdays are my big meeting day. Thursdays I allow some meetings. Mondays (afternoons) and Friday mornings are deep work—nothing in my calendar. Wednesday is sort of a catch-up day.

So structure your calendar so you have space for all the pockets you need, including your gym session or whatever gets you into flow state.

Zach Wright: No, that’s so true. Especially the spacing out of meetings—I hate those. I want to think, do, and deliver something. And if there’s only 30 minutes there…

Barbara Turley: You really can’t. Everything in that 30-minute phase—you can’t do anything, really.

Zach Wright: Yeah, you really can’t because it takes about 29 minutes to get into deep work, according to Flow. And then notifications…

Barbara Turley: This comes back to culture as well. I’ve said this on town halls: just because I ping you doesn’t mean I expect an immediate reply. It’s just when it suits me. You come back when it suits you—unless I say it’s urgent.

Zach Wright: Yeah, and you have to repeat that over and over.

Barbara Turley: And I have to live it too. If something is truly urgent every day, you have a bigger problem. It should be rare.

Zach Wright: Exactly.

Barbara Turley: And leadership needs to protect energy. Strategic thinking requires space. I even encourage leaders to take half a day and go do a hobby—on work time—because that’s when ideas come.

Zach Wright: Yeah, like Google’s 20% time—Gmail came from that.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it lights you up.

Zach Wright: Okay, name one unexpected benefit of remote work for you.

Barbara Turley: Oh, my children. I’m there for school drop-offs, pickups, playdates—I’m around.

Zach Wright: That’s awesome.

Barbara Turley: I still think I work too much, but compared to others, I don’t. Location is irrelevant—I can work from anywhere.

Zach Wright: That’s huge.

Barbara Turley: Honestly, being a parent—that’s the real job. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. You have to design everything else in life so you can be present for that.

Zach Wright: I’m going to remember that.

Barbara Turley: We even think about that when hiring—how our work impacts parents.

Zach Wright: That’s amazing. Okay, last one: remote work pet peeve?

Barbara Turley: The black hole of remote. People want remote work but don’t provide visibility or transparency. Then companies micromanage as a symptom.

You can’t disappear for three or six months and then deliver. That creates anxiety for leadership. It’s not micromanaging—it’s about trust and visibility.

Zach Wright: Yeah, 100%. Well, we’ll end there. Thank you so much for being part of the Untangled Vines community.

Barbara Turley: It was great. Thank you so much for having me. I didn’t mind that we rambled on at all—I think that makes the best podcasts.

Zach Wright: Exactly. I’m ready to share it. Thank you again, and we’ll see you on the next Untangled Vines Podcast.