Speaker 1: Hi, Ryan. It's good to have you on BetterTech. Let's start off today's episode first with your introduction, your current role, and then we'll move right into the topic.

Speaker 2: All right, great. Appreciate it. It's good to be here. Yeah, I have about 21 years in the tech space. You know, achieved my Cisco CCIE invoice about 15 years ago. So been heavy in the collaboration space as well as building out data center practices, security practices, wireless. So very Cisco heavy, maybe for the first half of my career. And then, you know, broadened those horizons to other vendors and manufacturers. Grew in a company that was then acquired maybe after 12 or 14 years of existence. And they kind of moved into larger organizations. Currently, I'm the CTO of ConvergeOne Government Solutions. So we are primarily focused on the federal space, DoD, and civilian. And we're a solely owned

Speaker 1: subsidiary of ConvergeOne. Right. So Ryan, the topic that we have for today is hybrid workforce and building teams. First of all, does a hybrid work model mean that the work

Speaker 2: culture of the company will change entirely? Not entirely. I think if it's done correctly, you'll see a lot of benefits from it. So putting in the foundation, you know, the correct collaboration tools is key. You know, make sure that those tools fit with the way the organization is shaped and can provide easy access and mobility for the, you know, users and users, all the support side of the house as well. Do you guys follow that at ConvergeOne? Do we follow that at ConvergeOne? Yes, we do. We actually sell majority of the product lines in the collaboration space. So everything from Teams, Webex, Zoom, Avaya, Pepsit. So there's a lot of different things that we can, you know, offer a solution set. So it's really understanding what the customer's needs are and how they work their workflow for what

Speaker 1: solution would be best for them. Right. So as a CTO, so how do you believe that the C-Suite and, you know, like upper management, how can they make adjustments and modify their work culture to fit this hybrid model? I think it starts on the management side of

Speaker 2: really providing the correct training on how to work with a disperse, you know, set of workforces, you know, how teaming works, how you really should collaborate, you know, as a team and kind of build those models as a standardization across the board. And is this

Speaker 1: something that you feel is like more comfortable? Are you more comfortable working in a hybrid work environment as opposed to something that was followed previously in your previous

Speaker 2: roles? Yeah, you know, I've been working hybrid for probably 15 years. So I've seen some big benefits from it, just being able to do, you know, a lot of productivity on my side, but also really being able to reach out to other individuals, you know, across the world at certain time zones to get work done during the 24 hour cycle. So there really

Speaker 1: is some good benefit to it. And are there any cons to it? Yeah, I think just if it's

Speaker 2: not managed correctly and expectations aren't set up front, it can be pretty messy. So just as long as you have a good strategy, overall, it really helps that flow and understanding

Speaker 1: across the board. Right. So just like speaking of that, a recent study in Harvard Business School showed that hybrid work is going to be messy and there are risks associated with it. And it kind of brings the worst out of both worlds. So what's your take on that? You've been working in such a model for like 15 plus years. So do you see any truth in

Speaker 2: that? Oh, I've seen some mess. Absolutely. I mean, you got the shadow IT aspect where people are on different collaboration platforms. So that really needs to be standardized. Once that strategy is put in place, that really helps kind of shape that long term strategy on all the back end systems that need to be integrated interoperability. So if you don't have the interoperability and that strategy in place, you really have a disparate systems set across your board. And, you know, with individuals putting on their own collaboration tools, it really isolates and silos certain aspects of the business. And again, that's

Speaker 1: standardization is more so on the hierarchical level. It's not something that, you know, everybody gets to take on. It's something that the senior management sites.

Speaker 2: Yes, but you really should spend the time with, you know, the employees, see what their workflows are to come up with that strategy to be, you know, pick something because you have a vendor that you like and you think is going to be good because you were sold on it from the upper management aspect of it may not actually be the best strategy to go with. If it's not going to work for the workflows of your user base, as well as the interoperability on outside of your organization and how people would interact with the organization.

Speaker 1: So, Ryan, what's your take on managing the onboarding and offloading process effectively, specifically in a virtual environment?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So, you know, I actually onboarded four individuals on Monday, all virtual. So it's really good to kind of get that first process done, you know, make sure that they have access to everything, how the tools get used. If you start there on that strategy, all the other things that they got to do on the onboarding becomes a lot easier. And then they have a group, you know, where they start their first team. So there's back and forth now between that new group for all the base questions that they have. So they feel like they've joined a system. And then from there, you know, you kind of introduce them to the other teams and it just spreads. And that culture, you know, should start from day one.

Speaker 1: Absolutely. And what are the effects of hybrid systems on vendor management? How is this adaptable to the organizational change? What are the dynamics? I mean, I'm a layman over here, so feel free to elaborate as much as possible.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So, you know, when it comes to managing vendors, I think, especially in the COVID area, it's been pretty tough. You know, no trade shows, conventions, everything's kind of, you know, been put online, but really you don't have that feel and the ability to really ask those deep questions. So I think that's been struggling in general across the board. It's probably helped some of the bigger players out there because they have a lot more depth and breadth. But the newcomers are something that could actually, you know, have a big transformation within an organization has been tougher to obtain. So I do see a transition back to, you know, more interactions with different vendors across the board and having that more personal touch, I think, is key. And you're just not a member across the board on the vendor side.

Speaker 1: Right. So Ryan, you have experience both in B2B and B2C marketplaces, so I'm just trying to understand in hybrid systems, what are the major dynamics of winning attention in B2B marketplace and how does it differ from B2C?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think, you know, on the B2B side, being a little bit more vendor agnostic in solution sets, you know, is key. You know, really trying to focus on the outcomes and providing, you know, the right solution set to offset that is pretty easy in the B2B market. And I think marketing, advertising and solution selling, you know, is fairly straightforward in a hybrid marketplace. Now, the B2C, I think, is the tough one. So, you know, I've been on the retail side for a good amount of years as well, and that works in a certain amount of knowledge transfer and easy access. So it's a very positive route, I think, for if you're selling a commodity on the B2C side. But if you're selling something that's very touchable and emotional, like my sister in law on the high-end fashion side in New York has a small design house. She had a really tough time because, you know, her clients want to feel, touch, experience and emotional by going directly online for the last year and a half. She had a big learning curve and now it's kind of going backwards where she's actually starting to do, you know, shows and get that feeling back. So it's been an interesting ride for sure.

Speaker 1: So, Ryan, speaking of the current environment, right, with the pandemic and we've seen a major problem with employee retention, right? There have been a lot of layoffs, lots of turnovers. So considering a move, a shift towards a hybrid working environment, is it good for employee retention? How can we possibly build upon that? Yeah, I mean, I think it's great for, you know, organizations that embrace it, you know,

Speaker 2: the ones that give the flexibility to come to the office, the ones, you know, to work remote and be able to collaborate back and forth so you're accomplishing the same goal and being productive where you really can be productive. So I think it's the best of both worlds, to be honest. And if you do it right, you should be able to maintain your employees that way. Did you did you kind of notice like a shift, for instance, I don't know if you guys were

Speaker 1: fully on a work-from-home model before and you recently, you know, you kind of before and you recently transitioned into a hybrid. When did you see some employees kind of resisting to that? Has there been any kind of difficulty?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so, you know, we've always worked within our organization internally in a hybrid mentality. But, you know, DoD is one of our larger customers. So they went from, you know, all on-prem to having to work in a hybrid model and, you know, having that whole period of time where they didn't have any access to hybrid workforce. So putting in things of Webex, Teams, Zoom was their first step in that that actually for them, from my perspective, opened a lot of different doors for transformation within the DoD and civilian agency sector for cloud solutions. You know, anything that they want to be able to transform now is a lot easier for them to do once they move into that cloud scenario. So that's been really great for them, I think, in the long term moving forward.

Speaker 1: So basically, the client kind of equipped employees with all the necessary tools and stuff to kind of make the shift easier?

Speaker 2: Absolutely. And everybody had to do it. So it was a great, I think, learning process for everybody and opened the eyes of many executives to make that change and the willingness now to go to cloud and accept what that change is and how fast that change can be. You know, as a quick example, did a large deployment, took 18 months. This was before everything was kind of cloud heavy, that same deployment, same type and scale took 45 days. So just the scale and as fast as you can transform is very, very powerful at this

Speaker 1: point. And has there been some sort of a challenge regarding communication with this?

Speaker 2: The challenge I see is really if you don't really have a good strategy, if you don't have a good strategy for understanding how the workflows interact on your organization and what technology you're going to put in place to interact with those workflows is key. So the collaboration tools, the backend systems all kind of need to be aligned and interoperability. So if you don't have interoperability part to it, that's also going to be a deterrent for, you know, people actually using the tools correctly.

Speaker 1: Right. So we're just nearing the end of our episode. So, Ryan, do you think that the future of work will largely be based on hybrid teams?

Speaker 2: Absolutely. I do. I think it's especially when you're looking on the technical side to get a resource, you know, now you can go source across the nation or other countries, it's key that that marketplace really opened up for employment. So you can find somebody specialized in something in a completely different area than you were looking previously. And now they can be part of your team. No problem.

Speaker 1: OK, just speaking about that, would it be correct to say that this type of work model is more suited for those in technical roles?

Speaker 2: No, I don't, I think, and I just kind of go back to the technical role in general, because I live and breathe that every day, but the technology has been put in place for organizations in general. So it's really just the management and the strategy that organizations put in place to make that very useful and productive.

Speaker 1: What are your key takeaways from scaling distributed engineering teams? You know, really, I think it comes down to that's a very positive thing to be able to

Speaker 2: scale and distribute engineering teams, have them collaborate and in the management that you put in, you know, from what I've seen, that works really good, especially on a distributed engineering model is to have a team of maybe four to five individuals. As soon as it kind of goes above that, you know, that's kind of where you're going to run into some problems of people feeling isolated, not in touch, you know, et cetera. So communication planes, you know, that's a big part of it. You know, et cetera. So communication plans are very key across the board as well for the distributed model.

Speaker 1: Right. And lastly, Ryan, do you have any advice for scaling more teams and regarding any future workforce?

Speaker 2: Yeah, really look at, you know, what strategy is in place today that you have for collaboration? You know, how the workflows work, you know, spend the time to understand the details of that and the interoperability to make it really scalable and interact inside and outside of your organization.

Speaker 1: Okay. Thanks, Ryan, for joining us today on BetterTech. That wraps up our episode.

Speaker 2: Yeah, appreciate it.