Before the pandemic, remote work only made up 5% of total workdays. However, it has now become widespread for workers across all levels, ranging from entry-level employees to CEOs, to work from home for at least some part of the week. Given the absence of a shared physical workspace, what strategies can be used to effectively discover, encourage, and cultivate a productive work environment?
In this episode, our guest Irina Bgatova shares valuable insights on the current state of work culture and offers practical tips for enhancing engagement, fostering collaboration, and preventing burnout in the workplace, particularly for remote teams. She also sheds light on the innovative platform called Weljo, which provides a unique solution for remote teams to build and maintain strong bonds.
Join us as we delve into the world of remote work and explore ways to create a healthy and productive work environment.
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Building a Thriving Remote Work Culture with Irina Bgatova
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We’re at an interesting cultural moment, especially with respect to our work culture right now. People have put in most of the pandemic or the fear related to the pandemic behind them and now we’re trying to decide what to make of our work culture given that a lot of people have gotten used to remote work, some people have even moved to other cities or other places to work remotely, yet there are some leaders of organizations that are concerned about how to foster the team camaraderie and some are calling for bringing people back to the office or some kind of a hybrid type of schedule where we can still have that camaraderie. It is a challenge that a lot of us are trying to solve and how do you really still feel close and still feel connected to your teammates. My guest today, Irina Bgatova, is a product manager with Weljo, a platform that helps these remote organizations find ways to foster better work environments as well as bring your co-workers together. This represents one of the possible solutions that we may have in this particular cultural moment.
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Irina, welcome to the program.
Oh, thank you very much, Stephen. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I’m excited.
That is awesome, and so, first, let’s start, tell us a little bit about Weljo, about what your product does.
Yes, of course. Weljo, it’s a platform for remote teams that helps with engagement, collaboration, and avoiding burnout. And, actually, it’s like challenges, it’s team challenges that every week, for example, a team can make meditations, workouts, or collaboration challenges that every day, they have short meetings for 15 minutes where they exchange their ideas, learn something new about each other.
What do you think are like the key advantages and disadvantages of that, you know, working remotely, whether it be from home or whether it be some of these nomads that we see that have a job and then just kind of move around?
Yes, of course. We’ve done a lot of research on this topic and I can say that people usually mention that the main advantage of remote work is that you work flexible. Sometimes, you can not only work but, I don’t know, wash your clothes in washing machine or just do something else. You can go outside to walk. You can, I don’t know, cook your food for your lunch. And it’s all advantages. But, disadvantages, that you’re in your home, sometimes, your family can be at home at the same time and they just can distract you. Or if you’re working in the kitchen, once I heard, the girl said that you’re working in kitchen and you’re sitting near the fridge and it’s very difficult to when you’re nervous don’t eat something from your fridge, just you’re thinking, “Oh, I bought something tasty yesterday,” and it’s such kind of things, it’s like disadvantages. And also that, sometimes, family can distract you, someone thinks that you are not working at all, that if you’re at home, it means that you’re home and somebody can come to you and something, but, sometimes, people who is alone, actually, they’re feeling more isolation, they started to feel more loneliness, a lot of cases of depression or just lack of communication. People started to be more close or just such kind of things, and all of these, unfortunately, goes to burnout. Well, I would say that it’s the main disadvantage of remote work, unfortunately.
Yeah, it’s tough because I was commenting this, I think I mentioned this to about four different people in different settings over the course of this week, this past week, that, right now, we have a setup like where theoretically someone could go a month without leaving their house. If they’re working remotely, they get all their food delivered, everything ordered, delivered through Amazon. To me, it doesn’t feel like there’s any way that that’s really healthy. As much as we love that flexibility, there’s something kind of missing from it. And so one of the questions I always had is because right now, there are some people who are thinking the only way to tackle these problems is to go back, to go back to the old way, but there’s a lot of evidence that the old way of work wasn’t working either. And I remember the Gallup Employee Engagement Survey from 2019, the year before the pandemic, saying that only a little bit over a third of all employees, and this is in the US, I think the number globally was actually even a little bit lower than that, are actually truly engaged in their work and there’s a number of different factors for this. So, do you envision a setup for work as we kind of look through all these factors, the positives and negatives about remote work, a lot of other people’s ideas behind hybrid or shared workspaces or other kinds of ways to set it up, where we can have it be better than what it was before the pandemic and have better engagement and, as you mentioned, burnout is probably a really big factor in that?
I would say that everyone needs something personal. Yeah, for someone, it works when you are working at home, that they are not distracted by something. For someone, it works going to, I don’t know, co-working, for example, and they are working from another place. For someone, café works the best because, I don’t know, their music and they’re focusing more listening to music. I think that all such kind of things, it starts from understanding of yourself, just to observe what works the best for me. For example, I can say that, for me, in the beginning of pandemic, that it was very hard to work from home because I’m a very distractible person. If my roommate at home and she is, I don’t know, free and I can talk to her, good, and I can’t work during this time. Or if I know there’s really something tasty in my refrigerator or if I understand that, oh, I don’t know that, I just can’t be fully focused, I try to do something else, not my work, and then I started to observe what works better, when I can focus, and I also noticed that I can work from home, yes, just more effectively during the time from four to eight. From 12 to four, my focus is not so good, like I’m an old person, and then I just started to notice that, I don’t know, that, sometimes, for me works co-working place. I can be focused too that I have this feeling that they are working and I need to work. And, sometimes, I just want to be home and, for me, it’s absolutely a good fit. And I can say that for my colleagues, yes, for someone works cafes as well, for someone home, for someone co-working, for someone hybrid type of work, for someone fully remote, someone can’t without communication and they try to invite their friends, for example, to work with them from their apartment. That really depends on different people.
Now, do people’s different work preferences, I guess, like once we will figure all this stuff out, when you’re working in a close team, do they ever get in each other’s way? Like does there have to be some sort of a collaboration with your team members where there’s some of the work that you’re doing together or some of the meetings you’re having where you have to have a conversation and maybe compromise a little bit on, say, your preferred times, say, like, “Well 12 to 4, I’m never focused, but, at some point and some days of the week, I might need to do a little bit of this 12 to 14 time because so many of my other teammates have that and that’s when we’re going to have our brainstorming session”?
Yes. I would say that, again, in this case, the best thing just understanding of yourself and just what works for you. That collaboration of things, I can say that, now, we have a lot of, I don’t know, different tool that can be helpful in this case, that we can, for example, that we are in Weljo just try to implement collaboration through challenges, you can do it not every day, you can set up more appropriate time for you, for example, for you, it works like 9 a.m., for me, I don’t know, another time, but if we are a big team that more, I would say, that any way that someone who has similar time more closer to you, he will be in your company in this case, or just maybe it’s not your company, it can be another company where you can exchange your experiences and ideas and knowledge. But I can say that, in this case, that it’s not like every day you’re doing something like this, that you understand yourself, you can work productively from this time to this time and then just for you more appropriate to talk to somebody, I don’t know, this period of time, but, anyway, if you understand that, sometimes, you have a meeting that you need to participate even if you understand that maybe you will be not productive or something, just after that, you need to understand how to recover or just what will help you to feel better after that. Because even if I can be focused during this time, I just understand, okay, I will try, just we’ll be trying during this time hardly and, after that, I will drink tea or go for a walk or just do something simple that will help me to feel better. And I think the main point, for all of such kind of thing, is that, sometimes, unfortunately, we need to do something that we don’t want to do but, in this case, we just need to understand how to help yourself to feel better.
How much of it is trying to minimize the I don’t want to do it, whether it be at the time of day when you’re normally not at your best or the types of tasks that you just naturally don’t excel out because of who you are, which is something we’re also trying to all figure out, versus the recovery of saying, I mean, one of the advantages of remote work, I’ll be honest, is that you could take a nap and get back to it in your bed, I assume nearly all people in their homes, apartments have access to a bed, but, obviously, if you’re always recovering from something, that’s not necessarily a good setup.
Yeah, I hear you, and I can say that I’m still learning as well, that I just see that, sometimes, it’s good to push yourself to do something but you need to understand that, after that, that it has a price, that I just mean that if you decide to work from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. or just 12 hours and you understand that you need to do that, okay, but then you just need to understand that, okay, that maybe on weekend, I should do nothing and I need to cancel my plans or that, again, it all, as I said, started from understanding of yourself, just to observe that, sometimes, you’re doing this and what kind of issues maybe you have, what kind of struggles, and what helps you with the struggles. I don’t say that you need always to recover, of course, and just relax and chill and anything but I can say that we are all trying to find this balance, try to find where we can be working productively, efficiently, and when we can do something for ourselves just to feel fulfillment from life and to be satisfied because if we are trying to overwork or just trying to achieve a lot of goals and just pushing yourself that I need to do that and just forget about sleep, food, anything, then we will feel emptiness inside of us and we need to recover it.
And because of that, it’s good to balance and try to understand that, okay, if I’m working like this now, I would say that it’s good to understand yourself and just to observe when you have more energy and just if you have more energy during this time, try to do a hard task during this time because, sometimes, we can work nine hours but it can be nothing just because we are tired or something, but when we are full of energy, we can work one hour and it can be the most productive hour in our life. I would say, because of that, it just depends. We need to observe and make some takeaways from all of this and just try to understand what works for me because for someone it can work but it doesn’t mean that it works for you too.
Now, is this observation, figuring out what works for you, part of the Weljo platform?
In this case, we’re just in the beginning of starting our work. Our challenge is we are making a survey, a short survey, where we try to understand the needs, interests, just motivation of the person, their priorities, and after that, we can give them tools what they’re interested in, but I can say that observation, no, that, unfortunately, I would say that it’s more we can help maybe in some ways but, anyway, full responsibility on us, just to understand what works for me.
So, of all the things that people need to be productive individuals, people need some consistency but also some variety, people needing rest, people needing sunshine, people needing an actual exposure to sunshine, people needing social interaction, are there any aspects of these needs that are most commonly ignored when people are observing themselves, when they say, “Oh, I didn’t think about I’m not getting enough daylight, I didn’t think about I’m not getting any time in nature,” because people tend to think of it only in a narrower set?
I would say that, again, it’s also personal because I can say about daylight, about all of these things, I was listening to a podcast by Andrew Huberman who is scientist from Stanford. He mentioned about daylight, in the beginning of the day, you need to see the sun, then you need to drink glass of water, then you need to do some exercises, meditation, but I can say that it’s very cool, it’s very good thing if you have it in your life but someone doesn’t. I can say that for somebody, it’s not necessary, even that when they wake up, they’re doing something else but they’re feeling not worse and it’s their life. That mainly that daylight and all such kind of things, walking, right foods, the healthy foods, all nutrients which means that we need, but, again, it’s so personal because, sometimes, somebody can eat not burgers but just some kind of food not so healthy maybe, but be fully healthy at the same time and someone can eat, I don’t know, just fruits, vegetables, everything is right, but they have some problems with health. And I can say that it’s also personal. In this case, we just need to understand our health, our physical health, our needs that. for example, this kind of thing that you mentioned, get daylight and just, I don’t know, meditation maybe, that Andrew Huberman mentioned in his podcast as well, that I would say that if you feel that you need it or some people, me, for example, I’m a pretty anxious person and I can say that, for me, it works. For me, it’s necessary to have some workouts, meditations because I’m just feeling calmer when I’m doing it.
But some people, they just don’t need it. They are pretty confident without meditations. They know themselves. Maybe they have another type of meditation just doing something, they have full concentration and flow and that’s it. And I can say that because of that setup, it can be absolutely different but I would recommend anyway because it’s scientifically proved more people need it. Again, it’s enough water, it’s walking, because during the remote work, usually people worked from home and some people usually don’t move. It’s bad. We all understand it. And a lot of research also shows that because of remote work, people started to eat more sugar, more hamburgers, these kind of food, and because of that, now, the level of people who suffers from diabetes, unfortunately, increased now because of that. We just need to be conscious in our health, what we are eating, what we are drinking. It’s Coca-Cola or water. Are we moving during the day? Because any way that our body, it needs activities. And communication. Any way during the remote work, now some people who are alone in their apartments or their just workplaces, some of them, it’s recommended for them just to talk to their close people or just to try to meet new people because, unfortunately, again, depression increased too and it’s good to understand your problems, what gives you this state of mind here, why are you feeling so and how can you help in this case.
What do you think, given where our work culture is today, and I know this is 2023, a lot of our work culture is up in the air and there’s so many different organizations with so many different ideas but where we are today, what do you think is the number one thing that gets in the way of each and every person being able to do their individual iterative process to find out a setup that works for them to be at their best?
It’s knowing your priorities, or just now psychotherapy is very popular because it’s a type of communication when you have a lot of questions regarding your problems or just regarding yourself and you try to reflect on it. Share on X
And I would say that in this case, it’s self-reflection, it’s just understanding who you are and what you need and your priorities. For example, the number one priority is their family. Probably, if their employer knows that family for them is number one, it’s better just not to give him work during the weekend or just overwhelm him. And when an employer and his employee understand each other’s needs, goals, not maybe some details but just in common, that I understand that, for you, it’s important to travel or just to have other kinds of activities, not only your work, because you are a creative person and you need it. And just in this case, I would say that just understanding that and respecting, because we are all people, all people, and we are not robots who can work 24/7 and, because of that, if your employer conscious and he understand that you’re a human too and you have your family or just you have your hobbies or anything, it’s already a good thing and I would say that good culture starts exactly from it, that when employer synchronized with interests of their employees or just understand what’s important for their employees and respect that.
And for employees, it’s good to see the recognition, that they are important, they are doing something for their work and that it has a goal, it’s not just a process about anything, that any way that now culture, to build good and strong culture, it requires just full understanding of each other, and employer should invest in their employees to support them, understand their needs, “Aha, my employees now are feeling more tired,” or, “I see that marketing department, their performance now is not so good,” okay, it’s good to talk to them and understand why their performance is not so good. “Aha, I understand that they don’t know why they’re doing it, they don’t understand their goal,” and it’s good to talk about their goal too, just start to define it and I would say that all cultural kind of things and be cultures, it’s first about talk so when employer and employees are synchronized with their interests and needs, just support each other, that employee does something for their employer and they are not doing something because just, “Oh, it’s my work,” that they are doing something and they need to do it —- not need, but it’s good when people do something when they feel like this and it’s really their interest and they understand why they’re doing it because in this case successful companies come and employer as well, they need to understand that their employees can’t work 24/7 and they need to relax and they need to have good rest and sometimes to have vacation and just to support, not to destroy. It’s like a flower that needs water. And just employer, from their side, need to water this flower, and the employee, from their side, needs to do their best, in this case, if you’re working in this place, I know you chose it, try to do something meaningful.
That makes sense. So it sounds like, first of all, on the employee side, the same way we were talking about we need to understand who we are and how we work best, but on the employer side, there needs to be kind of some respect for that, which is something that I don’t necessarily always see in, say, more traditional organizations where they just, say, have a top-down structure and say, “This is how we work. We work from here to here. We do these systems, we use these tools, we have this set of policies,” essentially. Do you think that coming to this recognition on both ends is a bit more of a challenge at bigger organizations versus small- to medium-sized companies and startups?
I think that a lot of people still feel that it’s strange or that if you want your employee to work good and gives you best results, he needs vacation. And for you, it’s like, “Why Who will be working if he took this vacation? Or if he, I don’t know, works eight hours a day, no more, or if he wants to have a psychotherapist or anyone or he asks for some help from you. Why? You need to be strong, you need to be always full of energy to achieve the best result that we can. And it sounds a little bit like, again, maybe strange for some people and, because of that, I would say that more old generation, if I can say so, and companies that was built 20 years ago or maybe even 10 and just sometimes young companies as well, that I can say that for them, it’s just difficult to understand that people in this case can work more productively. And also, I can say that all of that has a reason. Before that, I was thinking, for example, about my parents. When I was talking to my parents, to my mom, that, for me, it’s important that my work is interesting for me. For her, it was weird to maybe hear because you need to earn money, you get money from your work, it’s good you have good colleagues, nobody insults you there, it’s already good. And I just understand that all of that has like history because during old time, people had work just not to have hunger because they need money to buy food and anything they need. Yeah. And then, oh, during this time, we have a lot of things —-
Yeah, like we’re more secure in those like physiological needs.
Yes, and we started to think, oh, what’s interesting for me? What can I do just and be obsessed with? Where it’s my passion? And now we have this kind of questions in our head, just, oh, how I can unleash my potential? And during that time, people didn’t think about it, and because of that, for them, they have other priorities. They think that we pay money, you need to work and to give this money back from my business. Some people still think like from that time that I’m paying you and you need to pay me back by yourself, just do everything I tell you. But now, we started to be more conscious, internet, psychotherapy, self-reflection, how it’s in USA now but in some countries, psychotherapist is still something very weird and that you’re sick or why do you need psychologist, psychotherapist?
And because of that, I would say that people now, that some companies still think in old way and some companies who understand that now it’s a lot of stress, it’s not only work, we really live in a stressful time when, I don’t know, pandemic, when you don’t understand what’s happening, a lot of people die, and just you need to be at home. And now, the war between Ukraine and Russia, I don’t know, this earthquake that was in Turkey, these news, I don’t know, makes you feel anxious and nervous that, oh my god, life is so fragile and just you start to think not only about your work but about your life too. And in this case with what I’m doing, in this case, of course, employer needs to understand and respect it, just we are all human, that we have our basic needs. Of course, we need money but life is short and we need to do something out of our work and sometimes —- not sometimes, it’s always, I think that when people are doing something out of their work and enjoying their life, they are more efficient and productive than anybody else who can work, I don’t know, 24/7.
We actually have a similar kind of divide in general on therapy. I think my generation in the US refer to us as millennials, I don’t know what other countries have those terms, but amongst millennials, it’s kind of pretty normalized to seek a psychotherapist, like to go into therapy, a millennial will say to another millennial, “I was talking to my therapist the other day,” just casually drop it in the conversation, it doesn’t matter. I think amongst some older generations, there might be some sectors of it where it’s still taboo. I know in the Colorado startup community, it’s definitely not taboo. In the Colorado startup community, people will just say therapists all the time. And I think that’s a really good trend that we have and it’s interesting because it seems like we’re talking about is that our challenges kind of have changed and that in the old school, the factory days, whatever, our challenge was, basically, security around meeting our physiological needs. Our challenge was we need food, we need water, we need shelter, and how do we make sure that we don’t feel any degree of insecurity? And now we’ve transitioned to, especially, as you mentioned, the internet, an era where our challenge is around meaning and anxiety and it reminds me of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs where at the base is the physiological need, I need water, I need shelter, I need food right now, and security, and then the next level on that is belonging, kind of belonging, community feeling, some of that social interaction which is where I think a lot more of our stuff is now because the internet opened everyone up to everything and so now it’s incumbent on us to figure out, “Where do I belong?” It used to be you had your community that you lived in, your geographical location and you found a way best as you can to fit in, to belong in that, whatever that geographic location was like, and if you really couldn’t do it, you moved and found a way to move. But now, there’s just so many other options and I think one of the things that, at least my generation is trying to do is process all those options and say, “How do we bring in all these options?” Which gives us a chance to bring something better because it gives us individuals more choices as we go through that journey. There’s just so much information right now and you do a Google search and what you get is just whoever paid for the AdWords or whoever put in the right keywords into their SEO stuff, it’s not necessarily the best way to get you the thing that you need at this moment in time or what you’re looking for and hopefully we find a solution to that soon.
Yes, of course. I’m feeling the same about psychotherapy and self-reflection and this kind of thing becomes more popular and just a casual kind of thing. It’s good to understand yourself. It’s good to understand what you like and what you dislike because, if you don’t think about yourself and don’t self-reflect and just during old time, before that, people just weren’t thinking about it and it’s just good to understand who you are, what you like, how can you work, what’s important for you, and now we have also a lot of opportunity that I can say people can, I don’t know, start their podcast if they want or just be a blogger and make some videos on TikTok and earn some money from it, or just be blogger on Instagram, and it’s very cool. But, again, all these things, it provokes not only these positive things but just, unfortunately, again, you try to just compare themselves with this picture that someone successful, someone has beautiful body, someone has this life and I want it too and it means that I’m miserable if I don’t have it. And it’s another one side of the coin, and because of that, it’s good to understand yourself and just to understand that you don’t need it.
You’re another person. You have your potential in something else. Share on XMaybe you’re a good painter and you didn’t try even to paint and to draw something. Or you can be a good singer or you’re a good product manager or you want to create a company not because, I don’t know, to prove somebody that you are cool and the best and you can achieve everything by yourself but because you really want it, because you like it. And psychotherapy, I think, helps in this case just to unleash potential of a lot of people. If you understand yourself and just stop comparing yourself with someone, I think that it’s more a possibility and likelihood that you can do something really cool, like nobody can do, only you and I can say that it’s very cool that now we have this opportunity and it’s good to have these questions. It’s good to live your life like you really want, not because somebody said in the past that you need to do that and you try to do that.
Yeah, because I think the moment that passes around 1905 in US folklore, that Henry Ford and a couple other people basically said, “Eight hours’ work, eight hours’ rest, eight hours’ play,” and that’s pretty much how most of our work standards up ’til today have come about. And so I really am hopeful for this kind of new way of thinking where we trust employees or the people we work with to care without us having to have a heavy-handed, micromanaged, constantly monitoring type of thing. And way more efficient. I think some of the least efficient economies historically have been ones where people monitor their citizens and spend up to 15 to 25 percent of their national resources monitoring their citizens and those economies, whenever that happens, have kind of always been shown to not work quite as well. Before we wrap up, Irina, I just want to give you a chance to give my audience a way of contacting you about Weljo, if anyone out there is in a remote work situation, starting a remote work team and wants to find a way to bring some of these challenges, some of these kind of group camaraderie building activities into their workplace, what will be at the web address or email, best way to get some more information?
Yes. Our website is welljo.io, but, of course, they can just text me on my email if it works, it’s irinabgatova@gmail.com.
And that’s weljo.io, correct?
Yeah. Yes, thank you.
And then your last name is, for those of us in the US, B-G-…
B-G, yes, B-G-A-T-O-V-A, yes.
B-G-A-T-O-V-A, and then @gmail.com.
Yes.
All right. Well, thank you so much and, Irina, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes and sharing some of your insights about how our work culture is transitioning and how we can kind of look at where we are now and come up with a way to address some of these negatives of the remote work. We all love the positives. I love being able to cook a meal in the middle of the day. I love being able to take a bike ride in the middle of the day. But, obviously, the isolation can be a little bit of a challenge for people, depending on what situations they have, and I know that there’s a lot of people in some organizations that are concerned about how well their employees are building relationships with each other, building the camaraderie with each other. So, thank you so much for sharing all those ideas with us. And I would also like to thank all the listeners out there for tuning in to Action’s Antidotes, for listening to the episodes, and, hopefully, you all are getting ideas about how you can introduce new habits into your life, introduce new ideas, figure out who you are, figure out what you want to do, and then go out there and actually get it, tell the world, the universe, God, whatever you believe in, that you are worthy of having this life that you really want as opposed to what I refer to as living by the script, which is what the people in the past told you you should be.
Yeah, thank you very much and I hope all this information was really helpful for everyone who listened to it. Thank you for listening. Yeah, wish you good luck.
Yeah, thank you so much.
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About Irina Bgatova
Irina Bgatova, product manager at Weljo.io. A team challenges for improving engagement, collaboration, and avoiding burnout at remote work. In the past, she was creating her own startups and helped companies with investments and partnerships. Originally she is from Russia but lives in Tbilisi, Georgia.