Scaling Business & Culture: Blueprint for Remote Work Excellence
Untangled Vines
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Episode breakdown
In this episode of Untangled Vines, Barbara Turley, founder of The Virtual Hub, shares her journey of building a successful virtual assistant company while maintaining a work-life balance. She discusses the importance of creating a digital-first company, the challenges of remote work, and the need for visibility and transparency in remote teams. Barbara emphasizes the significance of OKRs in managing remote work effectively and highlights the role of company culture in employee engagement and retention. She also touches on the impact of remote work on parenting and the necessity of fostering human connections in a digital world.
- Introduction to Barbara Turley and The Virtual Hub
- Navigating the future of work
- Building a digital-first company
- The importance of visibility and transparency in remote work environments
- Micromanagement vs. Active management
- The role of OKRs in remote work
- Diversity, equity, and inclusion in hiring
- Creating a strong remote culture
- The future of work and human connection
- Employee engagement and retention strategies
- The impact of remote work on parenting
Culture is really, it's a set of beliefs and behaviors around the mission. And like, you have to attract people that are actually bought into your mission.
In this episode
00:00 Navigating the future of work
Barbara Turley shares her experience as a long-time remote work pioneer and discusses how companies struggle not because of remote work itself, but because their operational setup isn’t designed for digital-first structures. She emphasizes the need for digital-first systems and operational architecture to make remote work frictionless.
07:41 Balancing micromanagement with active management in remote teams
The conversation shifts to addressing concerns about micromanagement in remote work. Barbara differentiates between micromanaging and active management, highlighting the importance of using structured systems like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and company-wide alignment to create transparency without resorting to constant oversight.
14:55 The power of OKRs in remote organizations
Both speakers dive into the transformative role of OKRs in remote organizations. They discuss how OKRs help reduce unnecessary meetings, increase transparency, and provide a framework for alignment and collaborative problem-solving, making remote work more efficient and strategic.
18:46 The role of remote work in supporting underrepresented groups
Barbara discusses how remote work can benefit groups like mothers, people of color, and other minorities by providing flexibility. She shares her personal motivation as a mom entrepreneur and emphasizes that while remote work provides flexibility, it still requires discipline and structure.
22:35 Recruitment, diversity, and bias-free hiring
Barbara critiques diversity quotas and explains her company’s merit-based, blind recruitment process that naturally results in diversity. She advocates for finding the best people through skills-based assessments before revealing resumes or identities, resulting in a naturally diverse and high-performing team.
25:15 Building culture in remote-first companies
The discussion explores how to intentionally build culture in a remote company through structured conversations, virtual town halls, hybrid events, Facebook groups, and initiatives like ‘Munch & Mingle’ dinners and online gaming tournaments. Barbara stresses involving employees in shaping the culture.
35:21 Why culture and employee connection matter for business performance
Barbara shares why culture is central to business success and employee retention. She highlights gamification, intentional fun, and integrating essential updates into entertaining formats as ways to foster human connection, reduce churn, and improve company performance.
39:52 From transactional to relational: Evolving the virtual hub's model
Reflecting on her early days, Barbara admits that culture wasn’t a priority initially. Over time, she recognized its importance in scaling sustainably and reducing churn. She underscores the shift from a transactional model to one centered on human connection and culture.
43:20 The critical importance of operational infrastructure in remote work
The speakers discuss how companies blaming remote work for their problems often lack the infrastructure to make it successful. Barbara stresses the importance of building operational frameworks, processes, and culture that support visibility, trust, and autonomy in remote settings.
46:11 Simplicity in scaling business systems
They reflect on how overly complex systems hinder growth and how simplicity — while difficult to achieve — is key to scaling remote businesses. Barbara champions focusing on core objectives and resisting complexity for the sake of clarity and operational efficiency.
50:02 Humanizing remote work: making culture tangible
Barbara emphasizes that behind the remote systems, companies must remember to foster human connection. Fun, personal connections, and employee ownership are central to building a thriving remote culture where people feel seen, valued, and involved.
55:06 End Lightning round: Personal insights on remote work
A rapid-fire round where Barbara shares personal preferences like favoring coffee, loving silence or house music for focus, working from mountains in Chamonix, and using Asana as her productivity tool of choice. She explains how OKRs and asynchronous tools like Loom help combat Zoom fatigue, and shares her biggest pet peeve: remote workers not understanding the importance of transparency and visibility.
