Lessons on a Meeting-Free Experiment, Delegation, and HR-Dev Collaboration with Amy Casciotti, Vice President, Human Resources at TechSmith

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Amy from TechSmith about their month with no meetings experiment. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:14) I'm super excited about this specific interview because there's an entire new term that I had never heard, but when I hear it, it makes complete sense. Async first. I love that. That is really catchy. Is that something that already existed and you expanded upon, or is that a phrase that TechSmith sort of coined?

(Amy at 00:00:33) I think it's a phrase that async has been out there, just in little small pockets of groups. So it wasn't like it was a really common term until we all got thrown into this world of remote and are trying to figure our way through it and the flexibility for employees.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:51) But the idea of async first as a cultural thing, that's you guys?

(Amy at 00:00:55) That was us, yes. Trying to figure out, really, how do we allow for more flexibility for our staff, which includes schedules, and ensure the information gets where it needs to when it needs to be there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:08) How did this adventure start? Why do this?

(Amy at 00:01:11) So actually, one of our product marketing managers, Emmy, came up with the idea for a week just to let's try doing away with meetings completely. And when I was talking to her, I said, you know, habits are really hard to break. It's a minimum of twenty-one days, and we also do a work from elsewhere month in July. So I said, hey, we're already going to have staff all over the place. Why not do it for the whole month of July and really give us a chance to really break our old habits and try to start establishing some new ones? So that's really how we ended up with the Async First experiment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:46) How do you do a month with no meetings? That doesn't make sense to me on the surface.

(Amy at 00:01:50) I'm not going to say it was easy. Just staff hearing "no meetings," which is not actually what we meant. It was really, we don't want you to just schedule a meeting because that's the easy thing to do. We really want you to ask yourself some questions of, does this need to be a meeting? Is there a better way to do this communication? Do I need all of these people in a room at once? What am I looking to accomplish? And then make the decision. Now we still put employee well-being first. Obviously, we've been coming out of some tough times, and we are worried about staff's mental health. So if anyone felt they needed to have a meeting just to get eyes on someone or because they needed to talk to someone, absolutely, they could schedule a meeting. But we really wanted them to rethink scheduling a meeting and figure out when do meetings make sense and when do we not need a meeting and we don't even need to be together at the same time. I could be working at five. You could be working at seven.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:43) Can you give me and the audience an idea of the size of TechSmith so that way we can continue this conversation with that as an understanding?

(Amy at 00:02:52) Sure. We have over 300 full-time employees, so somewhere around 320. And then depending on the time of year, which in summer is our highest time of year to have interns, so we usually have another 30 to 40 interns as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:05) Oh, very cool. When I saw TechSmith, I was like, that's a new company. I haven't heard of them. And then I learned about what your products were, and everybody knows your products. What are the products that you make?

(Amy at 00:03:15) So we have Snagit, which is screen capture, screen recording. And then we have Camtasia, which is really video, not just recording, but editing. And then we also have Audiate that will help you with audio.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:27) Okay. Camtasia, that's the oldest one, correct?

(Amy at 00:03:30) Nope. Actually, Snagit is the oldest one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:31) Oh, really?

(Amy at 00:03:32) Yeah. Snagit's been around since, I believe, 1994. It was actually around before I started at TechSmith. And then Camtasia has been around since 1999.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:41) So how long have you been at TechSmith? It's like twenty years or something, right? Thirty years?

(Amy at 00:03:45) Over twenty-five years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:46) Twenty-five years. Wow. That is crazy. How did you get that job? What was the experience like?

(Amy at 00:03:52) So I was actually a student, and to be honest, TechSmith was looking for someone that was willing to just answer phones and do some mail. And I was like, sure, that's something easy I can do in between classes. So that's how I started with TechSmith. I didn't really know a whole lot of what the company did. And then as I got there, I realized, like, this isn't tech. This is cool. This was when the Internet was really just taking off, and TechSmith was trying to figure out how to sell Snagit online. It was clear it was cool and cutting edge, and I guess I'd say I was hooked on technology. And then nothing stays the same in technology, and I get bored pretty easy, and there's never a dull moment when you're in tech.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:33) How big was the company when you joined?

(Amy at 00:04:35) When I joined, I think I was the eighth person, eighth or ninth person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:39) Wow. Now today, if you were to get the twenty-five-years-ago Amy to come hand you the resume, how would you critique that? What would you have to say to her?

(Amy at 00:04:50) I'd probably tell her to go get some experience because I definitely didn't have any. I'd worked some retail, and I was a varsity gymnastics coach, but I definitely did not have any tech or HR experience when I started at TechSmith.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:07) Do you attribute any of your professional growth to your experience being a coach?

(Amy at 00:05:12) Oh, definitely. I think whether being an athlete or coaching athletes, you can never rest on your heels. You always have to continue to improve and do better because all the other athletes out there are continuing to do that as well. So if you don't continue working and figuring out how to do things better and improve, find new ways to do things, somebody else is going to pass you by.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:33) A hundred percent. I love the coaching aspect. I played sports growing up, but it wasn't until 100-plus episodes into this endeavor that is me talking to great leaders like you and getting their best insight that someone brought up this idea of, you know, great coaches, great leaders. And then I started looking at what coaches do and how they train coaches, and that was incredibly beneficial.

(Amy at 00:06:01) Yeah. I 100% agree. I mean, whether you're an athlete or you're an employee at a company, the great leaders know when they need to lead from in front. But most of the time, they know you're better off in behind and knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your team and putting them in those strategic places so that they can be the best them that they can be and pushing them to grow in the areas you see they have those capabilities or opportunities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:24) And so you currently have direct reports, correct?

(Amy at 00:06:27) I do, correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:29) So how did they respond to this? How did you coach them through the difficulties of going down this journey of a month with no meetings?

(Amy at 00:06:37) So I think for my team being in HR, a lot of the rest of the company comes to us when they're not happy with something or they don't know how to choose something or they want to make sure we know their opinions on different things we're doing as a company. Their biggest concern was for our staff. You know, how are the staff going to react to this? How are we going to put this out there in a way that they're going to be receptive, that they're going to understand what we're doing? And a lot of times, I'm sure you know, with a lot of developers, they tend to be very analytical, very black and white, and they want to know where the guardrails are because they don't want to step outside of them. And so it's just making sure our communication was clear in what's okay to do, not do, but also to help them to understand why we're doing this, why it's important for them. And that was, if we want to keep finding ways to give you more and more flexibility in the way you do your job, where you do your job, when you do your job, but to do that, we also need to figure out how to share information within the company so that there's no silos happening, that others have the information they need when they're working so that they can move whatever they're working on forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:44) Yeah. I read your, like, a fifteen-, seventeen-page report of the results of what you did. So not only did you do this entire experiment, but you documented it. It was such a good document. Did you make that? Is that your team that did this?

(Amy at 00:08:02) Our PR team, that in marketing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:05) Wow. It's so thorough. I think the reason why we need to share it is because it's a complete blueprint for anybody that wanted to execute this themselves.

(Amy at 00:08:14) I don't want to kid anyone to think this was easy. It was not easy. In my opinion, anything worth doing isn't easy to do. If it's easy, it's probably not going to move the needle a whole lot if it's that easy to do. But it's totally worth it. And, you know, you need to go into these things with the mindset though of putting your people first, making sure they understand why you're doing these changes, what's in it for them, but also what's in it for the company. The "me" and the "we" of why we're making changes, we like to say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:45) My favorite part, I think you surveyed people on the hesitations of even doing this, like, what they think would go wrong, all of that. And then before you did it, you actually figured out how to address those concerns and set the expectation. That is one thing that I took away from reading that document. Myself leading people is you did a really good job as you entered into it, setting the correct expectation, and that's really hard to do, especially across 300-plus people.

(Amy at 00:09:14) I would like to say that the team of us that worked on it could take all the credit, but we really have great employees that give us a lot of feedback and very insightful feedback, not just a, like, "that's stupid. Why would we do that?" But really articulating well their concerns and, you know, sometimes what they think is the answer to address that concern. As we dig in and figure out where they're coming from, we might not agree with their proposed solution. But it is super important to understand what things they're concerned about because those are the things they're going to focus on instead of focusing on how they can make this successful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:49) Absolutely. And so did you continue this no meetings past the month? How did that go?

(Amy at 00:09:55) So we are not doing the hard no meetings, but we still have asked staff to continue to question whether they need a meeting. I mean, as part of that experiment, 85% of our staff had said that they already had ideas of ways they could do things more asynchronously. I personally have been doing things more where I have an idea pop up in my head where I probably always knew I could have made a video and just sent it to my staff. And then when they have time to think about it and thoughtfully respond, they could. But I didn't always do that all the time where now I'm getting better at doing that. You know, a lot of people, even if you think on your feet quickly, it might not be the most thoughtful reply. Whereas if you give people time to sit on and, you know, marinate on some information, you're probably going to get a lot better, thoughtful, more thorough response from someone. And I think that is one of the huge wins with this experiment is being more inclusive and allowing everyone to have a voice at the table, not just those that can quickly respond and think during meetings.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:53) Oh, so you noticed you got different types of feedback from those people?

(Amy at 00:10:57) Yeah. I mean, I'm sure lots of us notice that in meetings. Sometimes it might seem like the same handful of people are always speaking at meetings, and they're the ones that you hear back from. And we're hearing from a lot more voices through this async communication.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:11) Well, they're the talkers. It's a gift, right?

(Amy at 00:11:13) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:14) And so I completely get how you would, especially in engineering, right? Because my background, software engineer for seventeen years, and I started the show. And so I worked with engineers my entire career. So they're not necessarily the most chatty of folks.

(Amy at 00:11:31) When they are, they want to think. They really want to spend some time thinking about what they're trying to get across to you. And, you know, communication can be so nuanced that written communication is usually the number one way that there's miscommunications here at TechSmith, is somebody sends something quick in Slack or in an email, and they're not really thinking about the words that they're using and how they could come across to someone else. Someone else is having whatever day they're having, and that comes into how they're reading emails. And next thing you know, we have some kind of a conflict just because, whereas if they'd had that conversation, even said their message over video where you get the tone and their facial expressions, we never would have had the conflict that ended up happening.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:16) We worked on that a lot during when the pandemic happened and we all went remote. The way I handled it was I just continuously reminded everybody in our meetings that, hey, when you're slacking with people, just remember the text lacks the tone, and you're going to apply whatever your current mood is to the situation. They might be high energy, getting off a plane in New York, going on a subway to a meeting, you know, doing their thing, and you might be, going to bed or you might have just had an argument with your spouse and, you know, you're doing some work at home or your kid's screaming or whatever it may be. And you apply those onto the text, and it's a losing battle to try to imagine what situation they're in so that you're communicating perfectly. That's how we handled it. We just overcommunicated this, but I love the idea of videos. Did you just use Slack? How did you do the videos?

(Amy at 00:13:09) So we actually use our own product, Snagit. Especially for those quick communications, Snagit has a quick video feature in it where you can quickly record, and then it will actually upload it. You can get a link back pretty quick in our screencast.com. And then I just put the link into Slack or the email that I was communicating with someone in just to ensure that I wasn't, you know, misconstrued of what I was trying to say. You know, it's easier just to say what I'm thinking and not have to worry about exactly writing it perfectly. I feel like an email sometimes, it can take me a half hour because I'm so worried about somebody taking something the wrong way or thinking something I didn't mean where I feel like I can be a little more verbose in a video.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:52) Absolutely. Yes. That is one thing I have learned with this show and doing a lot of videos and clips. When I wrote the first book, it was amazing to me how many people came back, and they said thank you for advice that was not in the book. I was like, I never said that. There's nothing even close to that, and they'll just apply whatever their situation is to your text, and it's part of life, I guess. So that's when I learned how to communicate slightly better as far as a book goes. But then I started looking at transcribing a clip and what people say versus dialogue in a movie versus what that would look like as written text. Three vastly different things.

(Amy at 00:14:35) Yes. I mean, I think it's part of why I know they cut out scenes when they turn novels into movies, but I think that's part of the reason. You know, that old saying, a picture's worth a thousand words. You can just show a picture and convey so many things that in text, you have to write that all out and explain it. And we also know people have short attention spans. So I know if I do more than a couple paragraph email, there's a lot of people that might not read through to the end, which I needed them to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:02) I go like this. I go like this. TLDR?

(Amy at 00:15:04) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:07) Get this. So if you want an insight to my life, this is how it is. I open my phone. I see a wall of text. I say, wall of text. Next. I just go to the next one. If it's not text message size for me, are you one of those people too?

(Amy at 00:15:21) Yeah. I don't like reading long, you know, things. Catch me out of the corner of my eye. Next thing you know, I have squirrel moments.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:28) Yes, 100%. We did a whole episode on distraction from this distraction scientist, but that's another topic. So the wall of text was solved through video, and then you got all the emotion and the body language, and they can see how you process it A to Z versus just the output. You did that through Snagit. Did you use Camtasia at all during this?

(Amy at 00:15:49) So if it's going to be more like—if it's still a one-way communication, but it's something that's going to live on longer and maybe even possibly be used in our onboarding—because some of the messages I share out with staff, we decide to incorporate into our onboarding process for new employees too—that I would use Camtasia and spend more time, probably write an outline of the points I'm trying to make, and ensure I have all the right context there. But more like the quick and dirty communication, that's what I use Snagit for. The more I know it's going to live on or it's going to be seen by a lot of people, that's more when I choose to use Camtasia and make it a little more polished.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:29) And Camtasia, that has to have been out for 10, 15, 20 years, right?

(Amy at 00:16:33) Yeah, over 20 years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:34) Yeah. What advice would you have for these engineers, technology leaders, managers—the whole stack of people who want to grow and improve or the ones who listen to this show? How could they better interface with their HR team?

(Amy at 00:16:48) Oh, that is a great question. I think, one, remember that we're people too. I think a lot of people sometimes forget that HR are people. We have feelings. We're experiencing things.

(Amy at 00:16:58) We live by the policies as well. So, one, just keeping that in mind. But come curious. Don't come with assumptions. A lot of times, you know, I'll have someone come into my office and they have already assumed 20 different things of what had happened, because a lot of the things that happen, we just can't share.

(Amy at 00:17:19) They're behind—we try to be as transparent. It's one of our values here at TechSmith. We try to be as transparent as possible, but there's some things we can't be as transparent on for confidentiality reasons. And so they'll come with all these assumptions, and then I have to help deconstruct some of those assumptions for them, where if they just come in curious and asking questions, we probably would have had a much better conversation earlier than the 15 minutes it took to get through those assumptions to have that positive, constructive conversation. And again, you don't have to have the perfect words put together, the perfect messaging, but just come with an open mind and understanding that we might not always speak the same way that devs do.

(Amy at 00:18:00) I've definitely learned how to communicate with devs over the last 25 years, but there were a lot of miscommunications between me and devs when I first started at TechSmith. And I've started to understand, like, they don't mean anything by what they're saying. I work with amazing people who don't have any ill intent. We just use different words for the same thing. And so starting to learn to translate those—so I guess that'd be the other part.

(Amy at 00:18:26) If you don't understand something, just ask questions or restate what you think you heard and ask them if that's true. Because that is the other area I see a lot of maybe miscommunication between development and HR—just we use different words, and so assumptions are made again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:44) When the developer, engineering leader—when they're going—let's say there's a lot of job shaking up happening right now. It's beginning of the year. There's all sorts of stuff going on in our world. We're busier than ever before just learning about all the issues.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:59) But there's a lot of things happening. There's a lot of shake-up happening across the organization. So there's several people who are looking for new organizations to join. As they're going through the process of interacting with a new organization, a potential one that might hire them, they're working with HR. What are some of the red flags that they might pick up on that says, "Hey, maybe this organization doesn't have a healthy culture"?

(Amy at 00:19:27) Yeah. I mean, just like candidates are putting their best foot forward when they're hiring—you—most likely, the company's putting their best foot forward too. So if you have concerns just even with how they're interacting with you in the interview process, that's probably a telltale of what's to come. But also, you know, go out on Glassdoor, connect with some people on LinkedIn that work at those companies, and see how they're talking about the company. Lots of times, sure, you'll get your disgruntled employees that maybe, you know, that's a some—a percent of them out there.

(Amy at 00:20:00) But I feel like a lot of people just are fair people and are just being transparent, and they're sharing their frustrations. So it doesn't mean that everything's bad, but it might be clear of some areas where maybe there are some concerns within the company. And especially if you're seeing the same concerns come up over and over again as opposed to once or twice, that would be a good indicator that that might be a problem at that company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:23) You're a wealth of information. What question am I not asking you?

(Amy at 00:20:27) Always a great question. I think whether it be async or, you know, in this world of remote-hybrid that is definitely all the buzz in tech and even outside of tech—I think a lot of those conversations are still centered around the individual and the "me" and what I think I want. But we're all human beings, and sometimes what we need may not be what we think we want. And we also need to think about the whole of the company, our coworkers, new people coming in. Because at the end of the day, we all need the companies to be healthy, not just today, but in a year or two from now. We do have things where companies go out of business, they start doing layoffs. We all need to be invested in what's best for the company.

(Amy at 00:21:12) And regardless, employers need to remember there has to be a balance there. Because at the end of the day, if you're doing things that only are to the benefit of the company, your employees at some point can walk with their feet. They can vote with their feet. They can go. The Great Resignation—I think that's a lot of what was happening—is employees saying, "I'm not okay with this anymore. I'm not agreeing to this contract of what you think—you think you have this power over me. You don't. I'm going to go work somewhere else." So that's where there really needs to be a balance on both sides. And sometimes that flexibility might be in an employee's favor. Sometimes it's in the company's favor, but it's got to really balance out in the end to be fair both ways.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:52) And I do believe that the responsibility is put onto the company. I mean, I'm a business owner. And because of who I am and my personality style, when I first started my own business, I just imagined that they should all be like me. And then I realized really quickly that does not work. And then you realize that, alright, so now I got this great visual from a friend who said, you know, you're the gardener. You can modify the environment. You can create an environment, but you can't force something to grow. And I thought, "Wow, that's actually really good." And so when I started looking at things like that, it made me think about benefits and, you know, the quality of life and overworking and forced time off and all that type of stuff.

(Amy at 00:22:34) Well, and, you know, you want people to get outside of the office. You don't want them working 120 hours a week and never getting a different perspective. You know, that to me, that's where really diversity shines—is bringing in all these diverse perspectives so that we're seeing problems and situations from all different angles and not just from this one where we think we've got everything figured out and we don't realize there are two or three really important pieces of information that we are missing because we all think the same, we have the same life experiences. So we were all just looking at this one side.

(Amy at 00:23:06) But on the other side, there was a lot of information that if we had had it, we would have made a completely different decision.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:12) Yeah. You get the one-sided perspective if you just have a culture where everyone's a workaholic, right? You're going to get one perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:18) I found—I'll just talk subjectively for me—me working too much, I become unproductive. I end up starting screwing things up and making mistakes. I think it works similarly with manufacturing, but it's probably a little bit more of an argument that, you know, working longer hours in manufacturing is more productive, especially when doing simple tasks. But robots are replacing most all of those now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:38) But it's interesting to see how the different industrial revolutions—how we're always taking the principles of what previously worked, applying them to the new thing, and then there's this huge time lag where they have to change and new principles have to come about.

(Amy at 00:23:53) Yeah. I mean, how many times have you—when you got away from work, there was some really hard problem that you just—you're having a hard time figuring out your way through, and then you get away from work for a few hours and like that, it pops into your head, like, the answer to it, just because your brain needed a second to think about something else and just let it sit there and marinate in the back of your mind. So I 100% agree with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:16) Yeah. There's a lot of great science behind that. It's not just a personal experience. I found that out, I'd say, in my early 20s when I was still writing software every day—that I didn't want to leave the desk because I wanted to solve the problem. But the times I had to, I solved it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:34) So then I started creating these forced breaks. And whenever I get the feeling that I don't want to, I got the discipline to do it, and I ended up making progress faster, ultimately. But it's a hard skill because it's one that requires a lot of discipline.

(Amy at 00:24:48) I agree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:49) Yeah. So you did this whole thing. You run this whole experiment. I've got the cheat sheet in front of me. I know you probably don't have it in front of you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:55) But so I'll rattle the numbers and ask the questions here. The end result of the experiment—15% of employees felt more productive, right? 8% increase in the perceived importance of meetings, and 85% of employees considered replacing future meetings. What did that do to the finances of the business? Anything?

(Amy at 00:25:22) Oh, that is a great question.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:24) I'll have your CFO on and ask them.

(Amy at 00:25:26) Yeah. I think it's more everyone just rethinking how they're spending their time. I mean, time is our most valuable resource that we all have, especially as knowledge workers. And it was really questioning, are meetings the best place to be spending my time? And we found there's some places where absolutely—a meeting is—a contentious conversation, probably should have a meeting with each other to try to work your way through that.

(Amy at 00:25:52) Probably an email or Slack is not the best way to have that conversation. But if it's a one-way information share that you want someone to give you feedback on that's not time-sensitive, actually, the meeting might not be the best way to do that. It's better to share the information and let them think about it and get back to you when it works for them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:11) I'm curious if you were to poll people to see if they ended meetings sooner after this, what data you would get back. Because we started that—I like Elon Musk, right? Awesome guy, changing the world. And he talks about if the meeting becomes unproductive, just walk out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:26) And so I said, "Okay, I'll try that for a couple months." It is phenomenal. The meeting will just change topic to some pop culture thing, and I'm like, "Alright, we're talking about Futurama. My meeting's over. See you." You know, it's a—we are very squirrely as a species.

(Amy at 00:26:40) So it's kind of funny. Our owner, gosh, at least 10 years ago, had actually said that because people were complaining about meetings. And he was like, "If you don't think you're getting value in it, just walk out of the meeting. I'm not going to get upset for you for that." And so we do have people—some people will stand up in the meeting more as a signal that, like, "I'm getting restless. I need to stretch." But for whatever reason, that's like a check to people in the meeting of, are we on track? Like, should we be continuing this meeting? And then we do have some people that they'll leave or they'll email you before the meeting.

(Amy at 00:27:11) Like, "What is this about? Do I really need to be here?" And that conversation actually happens before the meeting even happens. And that's what I feel like is happening more since this experiment—is people really questioning, like, "What is the agenda for this meeting? What are we looking to accomplish? Do I need to be here? You included me on it. Was that just like a seat, more just so I was aware of it? I'm optional." Like, a lot of those conversations are happening more. But I do think it would be interesting to resurvey people now to find out, like, are your meetings shorter?

(Amy at 00:27:41) I find that I'm having less meetings and they're shorter now than I did before, but it would be curious to know for others.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:47) Do you think you'll repeat this next year? Do a month of—

(Amy at 00:27:51) I would love to repeat this and actually for longer than a month. I think in a month, we were just really starting to get in the hang of async. And had we done it for one more month, I think we would have learned a lot more lessons and gotten a lot better at it and really honed in more on when does this make the most sense, when doesn't it, what things do we recommend for staff that we are just starting to kind of chip away at at the end of that month.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:15) I think—here's my off-the-cuff theory. I think if you manage to get people to do it for a quarter, it would never stop.

(Amy at 00:28:23) I actually agree with you that that's probably true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:25) Because it's so beneficial, and there's no reason why it has to stop. It's not like there was a memo sent out that said, "Hey, everyone have useless meetings now."

(Amy at 00:28:34) Right. I think that's the exact thing. None of us want to be a part or have a useless meeting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:40) Yeah. And it's tough too because you're a leader, and you've got team members, and it's really important for you to have that skill as well. So that's one of the things I'm working on this year. I've got four things. I want to be a better dad, better speaker, better writer, and delegation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:56) So that's the four things for me for this year. And the delegation thing has resulted in a lot of—I guess I'm just going to trust them to have this meeting—because at some point, the company is going to be out of size where this is going to happen without me. Let's just see if it can happen now. And I have been so excited and happy with the results of that, as far as working myself out of the business, because it just lets my team shine in their competence.

(Amy at 00:29:24) Yeah. I had the—delegation is something I've struggled with myself. I think that's probably a lot of us struggle with delegation. And someone had shared with me, "Yeah, but when you don't delegate, you're taking growth opportunities away from others. To you, it might be something you can quickly do and just move on. But now that's one more thing someone on your team isn't learning how to do." And it was, like, reframing it that way that really got me to start being better about delegating things of that. Like, I'm taking opportunities away from them, and I want to be giving them as many opportunities as I can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:56) Yes. Yes. So are you doing another big experiment right now? Can you talk about it? Or—

(Amy at 00:30:01) Yeah. So I would say our whole flexible work benefit is an ongoing experiment. Right now, we require—the majority of our staff is hybrid and comes into the office just 20% of the time. And that doesn't include January or July, which we have work-from-elsewhere month where no one's required to come into the office at all. I mean, it's still open. You can come here if you want, but there's no expectations that anyone be in the office. We're experimenting with compressed work week, so doing four 10-hour weeks and see what people like about that. We already got some feedback. So we're actually doing four nine-hour days with a four-hour day on Friday and then the afternoon off, because some people were like, "Nope, absolutely do not like the 10 hours."

(Amy at 00:30:45) But nine was like the sweet spot for me. So could we do that? And I can take a half day on Fridays. So we're constantly evolving and iterating. We're looking at data.

(Amy at 00:30:53) We're getting sentiment from employees and making changes as we see necessary.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:58) And are you all in the same time zone?

(Amy at 00:31:00) The majority of us are, but we do have employees in other time zones. We have a couple over in Europe. So as we're starting our day, they're ending their day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:08) Mhmm.

(Amy at 00:31:09) So, you know, keeps things interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:11) Where's your main headquarters?

(Amy at 00:31:12) Our main headquarters is in East Lansing, Michigan.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:15) Oh, okay. Very cool. It is. Yeah. Do you like it there? Is it a good place?

(Amy at 00:31:19) Yeah. I love it here. I mean, I've grown up in this area with Michigan State, so I'm a true Spartan at heart. And so, yeah, I love the campus, and we're actually on campus. So it's really nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:33) Very cool. Do you have a specific call to action for TechSmith? Go use Camtasia. Go use Snagit. You have a third tool. I can't remember. What's the third tool?

(Amy at 00:31:41) Oh, Audiate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:42) Audiate. And what, help me understand that.

(Amy at 00:31:45) So, audio. It will record your audio. It will help you remove your ums, likes, sos, things I say a lot. So anything that helps me identify them and quickly get them out of my audio recordings, I appreciate. It will do a lot of, again, I'm not a techie, so...

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:03) Noise reduction. Yeah.

(Amy at 00:32:05) It'll help you make your text or your voice crisper. And then you can export that into Camtasia to add with visuals and other videos if you want. You can also take a Camtasia video, pull it into Audiate, edit the audio, pull it back in, and it will fix your video along with the audio. It's really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:24) Yeah. Very cool. Well, what else do we want to get out there to the world?

(Amy at 00:32:28) I think it's still, it's people first.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:31) Yeah.

(Amy at 00:32:32) That's the biggest thing we learned. Yeah, technology is great, but you still need to think about the people and the way you're going to implement it. You can't just buy technology and think on its own it's going to solve all your problems. You need to train them on that, help them to figure out the best ways to use it and utilize it, what processes do you want, and how you communicate that to employees matters. Like, what's in it for them? Why is this important for them to do? And my team just did want me to make sure I say that the report is at techsmith.com/moderncto. They can find the white paper.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:04) Yes. And please, actually, people who are listening, type in the, no one wants to type in the full URL, but do it because then they say, oh, they came from Modern CTO. Most people just type it into Google, and it would really be helpful, people, if you just typed in techsmith.com/moderncto, no spaces. Correct?

(Amy at 00:33:23) Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:24) Perfect. Nailed it. We did it. Look. We're professionals now. We're doing calls to action. We're doing a show. It's great.

(Amy at 00:33:30) Oh, it's been great talking to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:31) Thank you.

(Amy at 00:33:32) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:33) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.