Managing Teams Remotely
In this episode I speak with Brian Graczyk. Brian has been at Mars for 30 years. He’s a finance guy who has worked in a variety of functions in industrial engineering, research and development, and marketing. He has worked in all the major Mars segments. He’s spent time working for Mars ice cream factory in Burr Ridge, Illinois; in Albany, Georgia’s factory where they roast peanuts to use in Snickers and Peanut m&ms; and in Hackettstown, NJ, a major site in making m&ms in the US, and for Mars Drinks which has since been sold off. He’s currently based in Chicago working for Mars Food, known best in the US for Uncle Ben’s currently, but his team is spread out around the world.
I wanted to talk to Brian because he’s been working remotely for more than 10 years. He’s had to be especially resilient during the pandemic because since it’s started, he’s changed jobs twice.
He’s still never met most of his current team.
He’s experiencing what many of you are, and then some. So, I wanted to talk with him about how he’s managing it. Here’s my conversation with Brian Graczyk.
Managing a remote global team
I’m looking forward to you talking about how to do teamwork when you're sitting at home by yourself.
Our ice cream business is transitioning some of our wonderful, candy brands into an ice cream version. There’s Snickers ice cream, there's M&Ms ice cream products, but the company was actually founded on the Dove bar, which I'm sure everybody knows and loves, but for those who haven't been fortunate enough, it's ice cream on a stick with a chocolate coating.
Mars bought that company quite a few years back. So that's the origination of the ice cream business. And then on the food side, in the US folks would know Uncle Ben's as our rice, which will be transitioning to Ben's Original as a brand. And we also have a company called Seeds of Change, which is more of an organic rice-based products. Globally, there are about 15 different brands. but the one you'll see on the US side, I know in the club stores, is Tasty Bites purchased in 2017. It's really more Indian-based flavors and there are some rices, too. Go out there and try some!
What’s it like transitioning to 100% working from home after traveling for work so much?
Carlos, I was actually a little bit nervous at first from having been in an office for 20 years. But a couple of years prior to that, I'd been traveling 60 to 75% of the time. So, if I was totally honest with you, it was actually great to not have to also travel into an office as well, but I was still traveling quite a bit while working from home.
I was home maybe 50% of the time and traveling to the other offices. As travel cut back more and more, I was probably doing about 30% travel. Working from home, was definitely different because not too many people had a really home-based position. I had no desk in the office for Mars. There were a lot of people at Mars insisted, “No, what office are you at?” “I'm at my home office in my house.” I’d reply.
And they're like, “No, no, you can't do that. What are you talking about?” It was very foreign to them. It was still a little bit strange probably up until the last few years of people being based in their home location versus having a desk in the Mars office.
Pressures on a remote-working manager
Not necessarily. A lot of people asked, how do I get that gig? I think the funny thing of all this will be, how many people are going to want to still work from home once this pandemic is over, because if you’ve got the right setup, it's great, and if you don't, I'm sure it's awful, thinking of those poor people who have small children and babies screaming and dogs barking and all that. This probably does not work for them at all, but for myself, I was pretty fortunate.
I've been fortunate - for the past, 10 years or so, I've been working from home. All my roles have been more program management. I'm working with many other people who've all been in global roles. So really, none of them is based altogether in one location anyway, so it's worked out pretty well for that kind of a setup, and then being part of the team. It's the physical part that’s actually a little strange because you're not going into an office and physically being around other people and having lunch with them, et cetera. That part's a little different. But the connection - you couldn't do that anyway because the work I do is global. There's really no way I'd ever get the people in London connected with people in the US all in the same location anyway. So, in terms of creating more of a team environment, I've been fortunate that, when we used to be able to travel, there was a period, once every four weeks, we’d get together as a part of the broader team or as a project team or in a workshop. So, there was always some sort of a physical connection piece there. And then, through just a normal working operating day-to-day phone calls, project calls, people are engaged.
I was really lucky, here in Chicago, that the folks I was working with would actually do things like happy hours after work and try to do some kind of a social thing. I'd probably go about once a month, and then you're actually creating some personal and social bonds outside of the work environment which helps tremendously. That's probably the thing that I miss the most. That just doesn't happen now.
I've been very lucky that all my direct managers were supportive of this because it worked just for the job itself, but I've had some people I've worked with who just really struggled with the fact that you could have a person working remotely.
A couple of years back I was working on a project and the overall project leader worked in another country in Europe. Most of the work was based out of the Chicago office, so I would go into the office maybe once a week, sometimes twice a week, just because I interacted with some of the folks there, but he would come in two weeks on and two weeks off.
And it was like, Hey, when I'm here, you need to be here. And I was like, well, why do I need to be here for two straight weeks? We don't really interact a whole lot. There was a tension where I actually had to lay out, what exactly do you need me here for, because I'll be here for the things I need to be here for, but it takes me almost a four hours round trip to commute? So, let's come up with a mutual reason of why you would need me here for the whole time you're here. But then he said, okay just be here two days a week. So, when he was there, I would just come in and it was a bit frustrating because I’d spend a whole entire day and not even see him or talk to him. I just made sure that those days I would go find him and be like, “Hey, how are you doing? I'm here”, just so he knew I was physically there, but in hindsight, I would just encourage you to be mutual, for both people. It's not that I'm working from home because I just want to sit at home and not do anything. It's literally the opposite. I find myself tremendously more productive working from home than when I'm in the office. I mean, it's a five-fold increase in productivity when I'm at home versus going into the office.
That's the beauty of this new situation. Those people who thought working from home was great are probably thinking this isn't so great. Maybe I should give those who do work from home a little bit of a break here.
The 3 ways working remotely has changed
I think there's actually three things that have really changed for me. We'll start with the first one. It was that social interaction. So, the fact that not only can you not go in into the office and have a coffee with somebody and just catch up and see their face. But none of that after work happy hour, going to a Cubs game, all that's gone now, which is very strange. It's so different. So, what we've done to try and replace that, and it doesn't quite work is we've created this group in, WhatsApp so that people can just say, Hey. It is all personal. Hey, I just cooked. I showed pictures. I just grilled a steak. Hey, I just took my daughter out picking apples. It's a non-work-related social thing and it's better than nothing. It's still not the same. but that's one way to replace that.
The second thing has to do with those who said, “Well, Brian, you've been working from home for 10 years. This should have been really easy”. And at first it was, and I actually had offered and helped some people who had never worked from home before, not even for the day. I counseled some people on some things to try: try to set up a dedicated space, close the door, those kinds of things that I think everybody now knows. But for me, the new learning was, Oh my God. Now everybody else is also working from home. And all of a sudden, everybody now schedules a meeting to talk to you. Whereas before, in the office stage, you just walk over to somebody's desk and you chat with them.
We have an open office at Mars, which means nobody has their own private office. So if you want to talk to somebody, you just walk up to their desk and talk to them. Well, that's gone now. now you have to either try and get them on the chat function of the computer, or set up an actual meeting and say, Hey, I need to talk to you for 15 minutes about something and actually put a meeting on the calendar.
So my calendar now is booked anywhere from 6:30 in the morning, till 6:30 at night, with 15 minute meetings, 30 minute meetings and things that would either normally have been done before when I bumped into somebody in the office, or they would just hit you up on the chat. And you had time because your calendar wasn't full meetings. So now, nobody has time to just have a free chat because the calendar is overloaded with meetings.
The third thing has been a very positive thing. The fact that I could work globally now with a whole bunch of people I've never even met personally. I never physically have met these people. I moved into a brand-new job during the pandemic, having worked in Mars for 29 plus years. I moved from our global services business into our global food business. I think there might've been one or two people I had worked with before. So now I probably work with two dozen folks on a daily basis in the food business that I’ve never physically met.
They're in Australia and London, Germany, the US, Canada. I've never met these people face-to-face physically. it's very odd, it's very different. I've been working with these people for six months now and I've never physically met them.
Remote Onboarding
And today I have somebody new working for me. I onboarded her today, had to do a virtual interviewing, virtual onboarding, virtual training. I have one now, another one starting in a couple of weeks.
The first thing is, one works in Brussels, Belgium, the other one's going to be outside of London in the UK and I'm sitting here in Chicago. We have a time zone difference. And then the second thing is, again, I haven't been able to physically meet them in person, which is very odd, but that's okay. This is a new way. That's fine. I'm really just asking them a lot, how's it going? Is this making sense?
I've shared files with them to read. And today was just doing a walk through some of the foundational things of what needs to happen in this new job and making sure the person understands. They only kept it at two hours. I took a break an hour through because it's a lot of material to cover.
I just checked in with her and say, is this making sense? She asks questions. I guess it's really no different if you're physically together, because you'd want to do that anyway and make sure they're comfortable, but it was very hard because you can't really see the body language and you can't tell if this is really making sense to the person.
It's really just trying to read slides on the screen. We'll have the little video down there. I was trying to look for those visual cues. That was really tough. I'll tell you.
Today was day one, it was two hours - only scheduled two hours. I haven't tried to do an eight-hour session in one day. I'll just do two hour chunks this week: every day we'll do two hours together and then give her material to read, which will keep her occupied for a few hours and give her some other people to connect with. It's basically going to be about a three-week onboarding: 50% on this job, 50% on their old job. Hopefully by then she'll be able to jump in. She’s already in Mars. Thank God. I couldn't even imagine trying to onboard somebody external.
Actually, I would say just while we're on that subject, there's a bigger program that we're working on that the program team developed, I call it an Onboarding Deck to the program itself. It's 228 slides long. But it's not as bad as it sounds because it's actually really good foundational information. It's laid out in sections. That's what I went through today in the two hours with this person saying, here's how this is laid out. Pay attention to these six or seven slides in this particular slide here, the rest you could just browse through. And I wrote it out for her last night and just said, “Skip through these sections focus on these eight pages.”
Right at the beginning when we started the call she said, “I really appreciate how you laid out where to focus and where to skip through.” I would take that as a good lesson learned for probably for a global team, but even in this way of working there is some foundational structure that you can bring a person into. When I hung up that call, I thought, Let me send this to the person who said, “Although it was a ton of PowerPoints thank God you created this because I don't know how the heck I would have onboarded somebody without this.”
What does the future look like?
Obviously, I've been working from home, so I'd like to continue that, but the fact that we actually have a global team that I work with, connected all around the world, and having some of these protocols in place, the 228 pages of structure. It's cool that I could actually have two people working for me that I never physically met and they’re six hours apart, it's developing a new muscle. I think this is the new way of working. that's something that I'm looking forward to.
I can't wait to drive four hours round trip into the office to see all the people I haven't seen for months. I can't wait. I can't wait to do that, seriously. Because some of the folks I work with are in Chicago, across the street from the other office I used to work in. I’m looking forward to seeing a few people now in the food business that I haven't even met and working with them as well as seeing multiple friends in the other building. We have a campus where there are multiple buildings on Goose Island in Chicago, so in one trip I can hit three different buildings and see a bunch of different people that I haven't seen in a long time. And I'm sure I owe somebody a dinner who did a favor for me. I owe this guy big time. The dinner is a small price to pay for those kinds of things. That's what I'm looking to be able to do: actually have that physical presence that just hasn't been there since way back in March.
I know we've talked about this before, I have a low need for affection in my psychological profile. I don't need to be involved in everything. I don't need to be included. I don't need to be in the parties. I don't need to be close to people.
And I'm dying that I haven't seen people, shook their hands. I can't even imagine people who have that high need for affection. This has gotta be really psychologically traumatic for people. It's bothering me and I'm pretty low in the need for affection, contact and all that.
This has to end sooner back to your point. We gotta find a way.
Oh, thank you. I mean, anytime Carlos, and hopefully your listeners can get a piece of the gold nugget out of this.
We'll set a date for that. Maybe we can do it in Vegas again!