Against The Herd with Tracy Keogh

It’s a warm and inspiring afternoon as you stroll through the lively park, the melody of birdsong and rustling leaves creating a soothing ambiance. As you pass by a quaint coffee shop, you catch a glimpse of two thought leaders deeply engrossed in a conversation about the evolving landscape of remote work. Intrigued, you lend an ear as Chris Herd and Tracy Keogh delve into the challenges and opportunities of a world embracing flexible work arrangement. 

• Impact of remote work on society and the future of cities 
• The need for an on-ramp for organizations to adopt remote work 
• Addressing isolation and social needs for remote workers 
• The evolution of remote work to simply “work” where location des not matter 

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Find the Transcript Here

Chris:

Welcome to Against the Herd, the series where we dive deep into conversations with contrarian leaders in vision rays at the cutting edge of the future of work and living. In today's episode, we're excited to introduce our guests, Tracy Keogh. Tracy is a co-founder of Grow Remote and is a recognized international leader in the world of remote work. With over a decade of experience in technology startups, Tracy spent the last few years focusing on community development in regional and rural Ireland. Please welcome Tracy Keogh. Hey, Tracy. Pleasure having you.

Tracy Keogh:

Thank you so much for having me.

Chris:

Well, I've been looking forward to this. We have had a few conversations over the years. And like me, you are never short of an opinion, which I think makes for way more interesting conversation.

Tracy Keogh:

When you said contrarian leaders there, I was like our chairman would definitely agree.

Chris:

Yeah. Well, John might be listening somewhere.

Tracy Keogh:

Yeah.

Chris:

He is probably here. We may see some comments as we go through this. So yeah, maybe kicking off with a softball, tell us about your journey and how you became interested in remote work and community development in particular? And how do you tie those two things together?

Tracy Keogh:

So many different things. I suppose it was hundreds of things coming together. So I started off in the startup community in Ireland around 2012. TechStar startup began, moved into Bank of Ireland, [inaudible 00:01:24] bank in Ireland, running the renovation programs, moved out of tech and startups and into general community development. There was one particular day where I was leaving the technology incubator and one the founders said to me, "If you find anybody, they're good attitude, just tell them we're hiring and we'll train them up on everything else." And I was like, okay, great. And then you go into these local rural and regional communities and they're looking for jobs and you're like, well, how can this be an issue? It evolved in Ireland to be a little bit controversial. Well, I'll mention the names... I'll mention the bigger one. Companies like Microsoft were owning the remote workspace, but they didn't really do remote work.

So we were like, okay, is remote work something we should focus on in community development or not? And why does there seem to be so many paywalls to the information that we need? And then really the rest of it happened accidentally. But fundamentally, if we want to help our communities, we need to take a first principles approach, which is give people secure income and time. With secure income and time, spend locally. In Ireland, GA is a big thing, but coach sports teams, go to the farmer's market, that's critical. And remote employment can reach the most far-flung areas that no other form of employment really can. So it was the most impactful thing that we could use to help our communities.

Chris:

Yeah. And I think naturally where that leads to is you obviously co-found Grow Remote off the back of that. What are the main objectives of the organization? I guess maybe I can set the scene a little bit better than that. My admiration for you and the work that you guys have done has always been driven by the fact you're the only nonprofit and you don't make affiliation with all the big brands. My feeling is it would've been really easy to do that. And you guys are trotting a difficult path, but you're doing it incredibly well. So what's that been like?

Tracy Keogh:

What's it been like? I thought we'd be done in six months. I was like, we found the jobs. I still remember the day I found GitLab. I was outside of coworking space. So Ireland, there're like 400 coworking spaces. They were trying to use it to stop the commute. Then I found... What was it? Nodesk.com. Found GitLab. I was like, what? And still those two worlds are separate. And the reason that we had to remain neutral, so we're registered as a CLG, which is a company limited by guarantee no shares, is because, A, hundreds of people built us. So it wouldn't be fair. But second, there's no business model in telling local communities about GitLab and Automatic.

And again, it felt really frustrating that people who are gate keeping information from communities and people who really needed access to this. So the goals started off as let's bring remote employees together in Ireland no matter where they are and have a thriving ecosystem. Then we realized they're not actually here yet. So we've got three goals, transition organizations to remote land, remote jobs, and foster local communities of remote workers. And that's the journey that we are on.

Chris:

Yeah. And then there's the overlap that comes with that I guess is private business, public investment and government. And there's probably a few other places, but in my mind, that's the three circles of the Venn diagram. The private parts may be the easy piece. You discover NoDesk, you discover GitLab, and that feels like a revolution. And then to your point on, we thought this was going to take six months, I suspect the reason it took a lot longer than six months is when you get into the government realm, things perhaps don't move as quickly as you want them to or they can move that quickly.

Tracy Keogh:

Yeah. So it's not all government. When you talk about GitLab in rural and regional communities, there's still, what's a scam and what's not? What's freelance, what's not? There's still a lot of confusion. GitLab, it's so well known in the remote space, but it's not known that, again, areas you need the most. So there's that. And then on the government side, the Irish government have been incredible. They gave us half a million to start out with, which was superb. They've built a remote work strategy.

And I was thinking about this, how straight I'd be, but have they capitalized on the opportunity? So from our perspective, and we're not just Ireland, we're in 17 different countries. And in the States, Microsoft have paved a set of community of Grow Remote. But are we capitalizing on a hundred thousand [inaudible 00:05:41] jobs open across Europe and we need to be competitive and landing them here. And that's a different approach to the idea who land in HubSpot, Twitter, Enterprise Ireland who create indigenous businesses, both superb. But to land in remote distributed employment is a completely other thing. And yes, it is taking slightly longer than I would like, but I would like everything yesterday.

Chris:

Yeah. Well, I think you have a very unique aperture of the things that are going on. And I think the thing people listening probably don't know is the circles that you and John and the rest of the people sit within. And when you lightly reference the Irish government, we're not just talking about random politicians, we're talking about real politicians more than people who can't do stuff. And then that extends the European Union as well and it goes further with you. So I think when you talk about that, I think the gravitas is there. And the question we've batted about for a while, and we batted about it on our last call is, and you alluded to it a second ago, we had the biggest generational shift in work and history perhaps in terms of speed.

There's certain things that might have had a bigger impact, the industrial revolution, so on and so forth. But in terms of how quickly a remote work and flexible work came about, the question I always end up at is, have governments done enough? Or have we missed part of the opportunity of a lifetime to what you're talking about, drive economic development, drive rural regeneration, by not moving more quickly and not incentivizing it more?

Tracy Keogh:

Haven't missed it.

Chris:

Yeah, I guess [inaudible 00:07:23] not done enough.

Tracy Keogh:

Exactly. So we were speaking to the European Commission, the coming chair conference in June, and maximizing the impact of remote work really on these conversations. And I'd read a document that they had done around remote work, and it was remote work was used interchangeably with fishermen off an island. And both forms of employment are really valuable, but it's not really giving space.

Chris:

They're not analogous.

Tracy Keogh:

Yeah. And so you're like, oh... And sometimes it feels like there's a hundred thousand careers open here. This is part of the STGs. And GitLab are not going to come to an island off the coast of anywhere and promote their jobs. It's logistically impossible for them to do that. Shopify aren't going to do that. So we need to step in and do it. Sometimes I compare it to the adoption of the internet. It's in the cloud, it can be here, but you need to go and buy a modem, get a provider, get a laptop, plug it all up, and then you have access to opportunity. Remote work for me, and we focus on distributed employments, not [inaudible 00:08:29] freelance, it removes location as a barrier to employment.

That changes fundamentally how everything works. It's massive. It impacts housing, it impacts climate change, and it impacts the bottom line positively on businesses if they do it correctly. So yeah, we need to be maximizing it way more. Just this week, Chris, I saw the Irish government doing... Again, we love them, right? They're super. But I just saw a Get Online workshop. And I'm like, okay, the internet is here though. There's a next step that we need to be doing these road shows around support to transition to remote, both for companies and individuals.

Chris:

Yeah. For me, that's the piece that I think governments miss the most, the environmental impact. In many ways, I see as the biggest green revolution nobody's talking about. The ability to eradicate the commute, the ability to eradicate international travel to the extent that you don't need to do it. And then I think you get into the other second and third order effects where certain regions have done really interesting things. Like Barbados, come here for the next 12 months, and by the way, you don't have to pay any tax. Okay, well, that's an incentive for a tech worker to go somewhere. You look at other places in world. Tulsa in the US is interesting. We're going to pay you to come here. And I think when you start to look at what the impact of that is, the taxation that comes as a consequence of having higher paying jobs.

And then to your point, I think the one that isn't lost on me... I come from a small city in Scotland. You're in Ireland. We love our countries. There's a lot going wrong here. For the last 20, 30 years, we've just bled talent to other parts of the world. And I think for the first time, we've given ourselves some weaponry at least to try and retain the most talented people in our countries, and not pull them all to Dublin or Edinburgh or London. They can actually stay locally. They can spend more time with their families. And again, it's not just one demographic. It's always been easy for one demographic to work. But your point is what about access to opportunity? What about single parents? What about people who don't live in those big hubs? What about people who can't get visas to live in those countries? I think that's the missing part for me as well, that I think you do a great job of illustrating in particular.

Tracy Keogh:

Yeah. And again, I think for single parents, for gender, for any kind of diversity thing you're in, there's two barriers to entry. The first is your location, and the second is any barrier you would have in a city. So just remove that first barrier. Think you stumble on something correct there. And the guys in Tulsa would say the 10,000 has nothing to do with why people moved. It was them putting their hands up saying we want you here and having a hospitable community for them. But they understood that the shift has gone from B2B sales to B2C. So you're not going to Dropbox saying, hey, will you open up here? Or shop by saying, will you open up here? You're going to their employees and you're selling them on schools, quality of life, 5K run routes around your home, all of that kind of thing. That's what they really understood about that.

Chris:

Yeah. And I think there are people who get it and talking about people who get it, you're running remote just now. I'm sure there's a whole host of conversations happening there. What's your general feeling when you're in those type of arenas versus the... And let's not single out the Irish government. I think that's unfair. You are in probably wider rooms than that with other people as well. Yeah. What's the difference in excitement about the opportunity?

Tracy Keogh:

So I still think at the last running remote, we were talking about what is hybrid? And that question is still coming up this year. We're still forming this, we're still defining this. I think it was brilliant to see the amount of people increase dramatically at running remote from last year to this year, that shows where the industry is moving to. But I think again, the cohort here who are supportive and everybody works together and it's just brilliant, but it's a bubble. And we need to take that bubble and just bridge the gap between that and government, that and regional and rural. Sometimes I get frustrated at companies selling remote work in rural areas, the impact, and I'm like, that's a bit saying the gender equality issue is solved, so there's loads of leadership positions open.

There's gaps between those two things. There's nuance with all of this. And we need to spend time with the problem in maximizing the impact for it. The one thing I do as I feel as well is that the companies who could benefit the most, so we work with large indigenous enterprises who aren't running remote because they would feel alienated by it, but they're the companies who actually need the benefit of the likes of [inaudible 00:13:13] is here from Zendesk, everybody basically here to benefit those companies as they switch over to remote.

Chris:

Yeah. There's something interesting there, which is there are these real success stories. We may have led some people believe in the first 10, 50 minutes, it's all doom and gloom. I think in many ways it isn't. I think it's all really positive and I think the opportunity for the transition has been enormous. And now, there's frustration around the edges that, to your point, we're not doing more. So yeah, maybe talk to me about some of the successes you've seen. What are the keys and the positives around that rural regeneration piece? And if I can direct you a little bit more, maybe it's in like innovation districts and maybe it's in the community building work.

Tracy Keogh:

Yeah. So yes, you're right. It's not all doom and gloom. It's just simply that the potential is so massive that to maximize it is going to take a lot of people on it for a lot of years with a lot of resources and investment. And again, knowing where we're going to. So there's been a huge number of successes. In Ireland, we have again, 400 coworking spaces all connected on one app. We have companies in Ireland say, just to focus here for a second, the companies like Shopify Globalization Partners, Wayfair, other companies, ring-fencing remote jobs just to the tax jurisdiction of Ireland. That's really exciting new model for remote as well. And we're seeing people coming together and starting to have conversations. If you think about some work we did on the Valentia Island, which is in County Kerry, not the other Valentia, there was a school closing.

And if a school closes, you're never going to get it open again. So one of our [inaudible 00:14:59] leaders, community leaders volunteer. Again, with all of this information and powered by it, was able to attract two new families to the island. That meant the school stayed open. That's transformative. Tiny, but as our minister for community development would say, percentage wise, that's massive. Massive. So we're seeing stories like that where [inaudible 00:15:19] through meetups, people are getting to know people in Shopify, GitLab, HubSpot, Automatic and getting employed in those companies, by community, no recruiters, just exposure and a way in. And that's transformative.

Chris:

What do you think people can do generally? And I realize that's a broad frame. But you guys play a very distinct part in that. Companies play another part. But when you think about the individual level, what are the types of things that the average person off the street could do to have an impact here?

Tracy Keogh:

So what we do is put everything we know about remote work into a box and educate asynchronously people in their local communities. The reason we do that is that for the first time, an individual can create employment in their local community without even setting up their own business. So we in [inaudible 00:16:06], we had a local volunteer leader, [inaudible 00:16:10], and she just got up to speed on Automatic, Shopify, et cetera, and ran a couple of events, printed at the job spec, and somebody got employed in Automatic off the back of that. They moved into talent acquisition in Automatic. They were so grateful for the sport that then they began helping other people. And that was just a circle of pure goodness, Chris. So it is getting up to speed yourself and spreading the word around these companies, around where we need to go. For me, in rural or regional areas, just telling people that these jobs exist is still massive.

Chris:

Yeah. That's really interesting. It takes one person to have the right experience and then the butterfly effect that happens as a consequence of that is often huge. It's like one person hears something from you, from someone else, and then they get a job and then they tell their friends and then there's a bunch of remote workers in a random place in the world that nobody's ever heard of, but it's really supporting the local community. And then I think if we return to where we started, there's always this mass hysteria around jobs being taken away from cities, and it's not really the reality.

Tracy Keogh:

So I think that we need to have a conversation about what's the future of cities, because it lacks imagination firstly. If people feel forced into a city and they're allowed to go home... We wrote a letter to our President around the impact of this, and Joanne [inaudible 00:17:36] in our team just put a brilliant [inaudible 00:17:38], that years ago we had stopped people immigrating to the states, but we're okay with them immigrating from regional and rural places into cities. So we really need to redefine what every community does. If you can imagine a city with slow streets where kids are playing there, where you know your neighbors because you have the time, where we have housing and experiences and culture, and people aren't just sitting in traffic, that's massive. Also, what remote work does is fundamentally build in choice. So they're not forced into cities. They can stay there, which means cities need to be more competitive. I do not know how that could be a bad thing. Become more livable.

Chris:

In my mind, the real against the herd perspective on cities is they're actually made better by remote work, because you have people that are there not because they have to be there, they're there because they want to be there. And the people that aren't there are with their families or their friends. And one I've run into a lot is like, well, what about the young people who have to go there to meet people? And you're like, well, maybe, but you do realize that a lot of people leave their cities, their towns behind because they have to go and get jobs, and then they're not particularly happy about it. Their entire life is built around the office. And there's probably a much deeper conversation to be had here.

But I think you get into the thing that I've spoken about a couple of times, which is nobody really gives a about the future of work. We all talk around it and we all work in this space and we all operate in it. But what people really care about is what's the benefit for me or my family? And I think when you start to look at the second, the third, the fourth order effects of that, you look at cities, you look at rural development, you look at companies, you look at the public sector, you look at the private sector... I think if you answer that question, you actually solve a lot of the problems.

Tracy Keogh:

Yeah. Now I would say I'll go against the herd on that particular one, Chris. Because I think actually an awful lot of the narrative around family life, work life balance, let me work flexibility, blah blah blah, is actually hurting us, because big corporations just need you to return on the investment. And actually I think we need to have a lot stronger conversations around the business impacts of remote work and really understanding it from an employer's perspective. I think we don't understand it from that side. We're going to miss out an opportunity. And it can be a win-win. It's just maybe opening up the narratives. So we're speaking to companies, we're talking about the ROI, the business case. Sure, you're going to change society, but that's secondary to people who have sometimes short term views of just making sure they can pay the salaries and look after their shareholders.

Chris:

Yeah. Well, in the fullness of time, those companies will not exist. I am fairly confident of that. I think me and Howard had a conversation about the egotistical drive of certain people to have an office where they can see people on a day-to-day basis. And it's somewhat scary that individuals can make those decisions where the impact on the bottom line is so enormous from a physical office footprint. I spend a decent amount of time speaking to companies. I think that's the conversation that's starting to happen at the board level where it's like, well, actually what's the tangible benefit of the office? People don't want to be there. They do want to spend time together, but it's certainly not every day and it's probably not every week. So how do we do this in a way where we're not just wasting money, throwing money against the wall, trying to find a solution? And I suspect that's where we are right now. It's like we're in this massive middle where organizations are figuring out their strategy. But I think to your point, they still don't know what hybrid means.

Tracy Keogh:

That's exactly it. I'm sorry about the noise in the background. I did try to find a private room [inaudible 00:21:31] running remote, but obviously it didn't work so well. That's exactly it. So sorry, I'm not saying it needs to be return investment completely. I think they're seeing that actually the distributed models of should celebrate [inaudible 00:21:43], an Irish company, just got acquired by Zoom. Remote company, right? Millions. Superb. At least that's talking about again the business impacts to the bottom line because unfortunately, Chris, no matter what might happen in the future, that's where a lot of companies are now, if we want to increase that pipeline of employment available on the market.

Chris:

I think where I ultimately get pulled to, and again your experience in the banking sector is certainly hugely helpful here, I still don't think there's an easy enough on-ramp for these large organizations to opt into the right version of remote work. That feels like a gap to me.

Tracy Keogh:

It is. It's massive. At our first event in 2018, we had actually John [inaudible 00:22:32] our chairman there who was... He was my chairman then, but he was chairman of Shopify International, and told brilliant story about Shopify. But somebody from a bank called me who was head of the ways of working program and was like, it's completely different for Shopify and our organization that's 300 years old. How do we do this? So we formed the alliance, which was a commitment of CEOs to transition over to remote. From that, we facilitated their HR leaders meeting on a monthly basis, did training programs for people managers and training programs for all colleagues, all free. And that was driving change at four levels of the organization collectively. And that meant they could share knowledge by industry for industry. Two companies out of that began to advertise their location in remote. They just completely bought in because it made sense to them. But that was really incredible. So really bringing them together around this topic is something we need to do more of to help them find their own model that works for them.

Chris:

Yeah. And something tells me there's still a septic reaction to the word. People still have this visceral reaction to the word remote. For whatever reason, a lot of people don't like it. I wonder if that holds us back in some ways.

Tracy Keogh:

Definitely. And I even hear from people in the remote community... Again, we built Grow Remote accidentally, so we wouldn't have called it I don't think Grow Remote if we knew it was going to be more than one event in some rural place in Ireland. So I do think that it holds it back. There was a talk [inaudible 00:24:04] Claire Donald, she's a VP of engineering at [inaudible 00:24:07]. She did a talk at running remote and hybrid isn't a dirty word. But again, what's hybrid? So for hybrid for them is that they'll employ anybody across England. And then one of their guys who ended up moving home has a farm on the side. So he brings them up once a month to run wellbeing days where they all go out on the... It's fantastic. So their version of hybrid is actually remote first hybrid. Which is very different to hybrid in larger organizations where if you're sick you can work from home. So there's a bit of building around that. So the word remote and hybrid are both contentious [inaudible 00:24:47].

Chris:

There's also something deeply ironic in my mind in describing a mode of work that's about working anywhere and giving a location in front of the word work. Remote to mean work anywhere, but just work. I think ultimately you end up somewhere like you do with the internet, which is like, you wouldn't tell someone if you bought something online, that you bought it in a shop online anymore. Someone was just like, look at you strange. He'd be like, are you okay? That doesn't make any sense. And work's maybe the same thing. Eventually we should end up in a place where it's like, oh, I just work for a company. Location shouldn't matter. We need to detach the need to be somewhere physically from the ability to do the job.

Tracy Keogh:

That's exactly it. And then we're finding to go against it, again, a bit of a contrary view. We're finding then that talent for organizations, they're saying, well, I want to work all over the world, all year. And they're saying, well, actually that's not tax compliant. And so the whole work anywhere, anytime, isn't always actually a usable mode of work. So it gets really complicated. And I do think that it will just distill down to the most simpler form, which is simply work, Chris. Yeah, for sure.

Chris:

We can hope for that. Maybe a final question, and it should be a somewhat [inaudible 00:26:10] one. In your experiences, what's the top piece of advice you give to people coming to remote work for the first time?

Tracy Keogh:

Oh my gosh. It depends on who it is.

Chris:

Young professional, living at home maybe, or not living at home, living in a city they don't know. Maybe give me three different versions that you've given to people in different life experiences.

Tracy Keogh:

So, it depends. So I'm 34, just 34, and I work at home in a rural Ireland. And so I'd be maybe younger, hopefully, demographic of remote workers. Isolation is still the biggest killer of remote work. So when you speak about people going to cities to meet their friends, that's why our community work is so important. So we have some free beers on a Friday night in multiple pubs across multiple different communities. We have hiking groups. We have meetups where you can get to know people and socialize. And that is incredibly important, not just for the individual, for wellbeing, for connection. We know loneliness is a huge challenge outside of remote work anyway, but it's important for sustaining these jobs in the communities that they're created in.

So for me, it's knowing yourself enough to know what you need. Other people don't need that at all. They don't want to talk to anybody. That's part of the reason why they're working remotely. They don't need to see anybody. But if you know yourself enough to know what you need, you need to be way more intentional and deliberate about how you make that happen as opposed to in the office where you are amongst people every day. As you say, I think one of your tweets said, [inaudible 00:27:55] pick your friends. Oh, yeah.

Chris:

Don't judge me on my social media output.

Tracy Keogh:

Yeah. Oh, come on. It's brilliant. Your social media has been part of pushing the boundaries of how people think. That has been extraordinary. Even for people to see how popular it is, the people are getting behind these ideas. Okay. It's what you do on social media is beneficial to everybody.

Chris:

I appreciate that.

Tracy Keogh:

Changing the world one tweet at a time.

Chris:

Yeah. It certainly makes it easier. It would be very black and white on an issue versus some shade of gray. Because I think you're right, there's some tweets that are mainly driven towards, let's have a conversation here. We don't know everything. I think we're still so early in the exploration of what is a very new mode of work for a lot of people. It's obviously been around for a long time, and some people have done it a lot longer than others, but it's still relatively nascent. We've still only had the technology to work the way we're working for a relatively short period of time. I think we don't know everything. We're not that smart. And I think if we can crowdsource that intelligence and we can help other people see the interest that there is there from other people like them, we can have a slightly more open and honest conversation versus one that's driven by the media and paid for by people that own a lot of office space.

Tracy Keogh:

Yes. So in Ireland, there's two organizations, Ibec, who are the employers union, and then there's Trade Unions, the employees union. And we say we fit in the middle. Ibec, you're right, collaboration is hard remotely. Unions are right, everybody should be able to work remotely. And actually, there's a bridge in the middle here where everybody can get what they want. We are more in the gray area. But you being out on the edges helps us because they're like, hey, he's got a point. Yeah.

Chris:

Well, we can draw the line there, Tracy. As always enjoyed the conversation and really appreciate your time.

Tracy Keogh:

Thank you so much.

Chris:

And see you soon.