I am the founder of remoteworkadvocate.com, the go-to place for both companies embracing flexible work and individuals willing to thrive in the remote world. Within the past few years, having worked with various international clients, I created a Remote-Ready Audit as a tool to guide companies through the remote work implementation process. Through the years, I’ve had the pleasure of hiring hundreds of candidates for various remote and hybrid companies and created long-lasting business relationships around the world.
Biggest Takeaways You Don’t Want To Miss:
What has changed in our attitude towards working within the past year?
Nadia describes the major shift she has witnessed in companies culture and work environments in regard to remote and flexible work. She explains how this change stems from mindset and attitude in order to make everything work.
How can companies benefit from implementing flexible work models?
We all know there are benefits to remote work and Nadia breaks each of these benefits down showing how changing from a traditional workplace to remote and flexible work can help companies achieve the growth they want and the lifestyles people desire.
Where should companies start if they’re willing to embrace a scalable and transparent remote work model?
Our most valuable resource is time and Nadia provides the steps needed to take in order to start saving your time. From automation, cloud storage, to onboarding, and more you’ll be surprised to learn all that can be embraced from a remote work model.
Why have you decided to advocate for remote work in the first place? What’s your mission?
Nadia is someone who likes to challenge things. She always questions “why is that so?” Working remotely for the majority of her career Nadia questioned why the workplace didn’t offer more remote work opportunities. You’ll want to hear what she discovered in her search of why we work the way we do and why she is so passionate about companies developing a remote and flexible working style.
Show Highlights:
We’re always resistant to change as human beings [3:12]
The pandemic left no choice but to adapt [3:20]
The pandemic has torn us out of our comfort zones [4:16]
You don’t have to be located in a skyscraper in order to have a great career [8:11]
This particular industry can definitely benefit from automation [9:13]
We can go digital with anything we basically want [9:28]
70% of onboarding is repetition… [10:03]
How did Nadia become Nadia? [11:40]
Why is the workplace the way we see it these days? [12:42]
Who gets to determine what the workweek is? [14:14]
There are a ton of means that can help us become more human [16:32]
Link:
www.jumpconsulting.net/mastermind
Downloadable Offer:
Feel free to visit www.remoteworkadvocate.com
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Transcript:
This is episode 236 of Bella in Your Business. Hi there, I’m Bella Vasta from Jump Consulting. You might know me from CBS, NBC, Fox, Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, or maybe you’ve seen me speak on stage or read my book, The Four Dogs That Every Business Owner Needs. In any case, get ready because you’re about to get your hashtag Bella Butt Kickin’ in this next episode of Bella in Your Business.
So what do you say? Let’s get ready and jump. Welcome to another episode of Bella in Your Business. My name is Bella Vasta and today I’ve got a really special guest for you. You guys, she was such an amazing person in the mastermind. She came in and she did this amazing presentation that I just kind of had to share her with all of you guys as well. Now we can’t give away all the secrets that she did in the mastermind because that’s reserved for the members. And if you’re not a member yet, why not? But she is so fantastic that we’re going to actually blow the lid off of another topic today.
Today we’re going to be talking about the new era of work and how that looks like as a business owner and trying to hire people and just all the different things that you probably aren’t thinking about because you’re trying to get your business back. Our guest today is Nadia and she is all the way over in the UK right now. She is the founder of Remote Work Advocate and the go-to place for both companies embracing flexible work and individuals willing to thrive in the remote world. Within the past few years and working with various international clients, she has created a remote ready audit as a tool to guide companies through a remote work implementation process.
Throughout the years, she’s had the pleasure of hiring hundreds of candidates to work with various remote and hybrid companies, creating long-lasting business relationships around the world. You guys, this is important for you as pet sitters and dog walkers in local areas because the more that our society changes, the more that business changes. We are incorporating more and more virtual ways. This could be virtual hiring, virtual training and onboarding, or ongoing virtual trainings for your company and not actually having to get together in a physical place. So I want you to just open up your ears and your heart today and think about what Nadia is about to tell us and see if you can apply any of it to your business.
So without further ado, Nadia, welcome to the show. I’m really happy to be here and thanks for all your kind words in the very beginning. I’m truly flattered. And well, you know, I can just say that that’s a topic I can talk about endlessly because I’m just so passionate about it. So I have hope and I deeply trust that I’m going to add value today. I trust that you are. I only bring on people I know that will add value. So buckle up, you guys.
Nadia, I kind of alluded to the fact that things have been changing. So can you elaborate on that? Like what has changed in our attitude towards working within the past year or so?
The short term, we’ve learned things I believe we should have opened up to before, but we’re always resistant to change as human beings. So here we had an external factor, which was the pandemic, and it left no choice but to adapt. Suddenly, everything that we believed in—that that’s the way it is, it can’t be changed—and I know what I’m talking about because before the pandemic, I was working with remote-first and hybrid companies, but not only. Sometimes there were companies that reached out to me because they were interested in what I was doing. And then they listened and said, you’re really a cool person, but no, that’s not for us.
Now I see these companies months later adapting flexible working and starting to think about changing the working habits that they have in their environment. So all the things that they said were not possible are suddenly, like magic, becoming possible. So how can that be? One of the major takeaways is that we need to change our mindset and our attitude in order to make everything work. That’s the hardest part. But I believe that the pandemic has torn us out of our comfort zones and that has partially happened.
So I think that we should really get ready and move on and start an amazing journey of creating change ourselves these days. Wow, how inspirational is that, you guys? Are you inspired? Because I’m inspired. As you’re talking, Nadia, I’m thinking back to 12 months ago in the mastermind where I brought in Marcus Sheridan, who’s an incredible salesperson. He blew the lid off and gave our mastermind members a step-by-step process of how to do a virtual consultation with a new client.
When you talk about changing your mindset and saying, “No, I can’t do that,” pet sitters and dog walkers were terrified because they were like, “I need to meet the dog. There’s absolutely no way that can happen, Bella.” Fast forward a year later, and a lot of the companies that are killing it right now and got back faster are the ones that offered that solution. Because at one point, pet sitters and dog walkers coming into people’s homes were a threat. It was like, “What are you coming in with? What germs?”
People didn’t want to see you. So it ended up saving a lot of the bottom line. What Nadia is saying is absolutely true to our industry. So I want to continue on and say, how can companies benefit from these flexible work models?
There are tons of benefits, but tons of risks as well. One may say I’m full of bias because I am a remote work advocate, but that doesn’t mean I’m unaware of all the risks lurking out there. We should do it wisely and remember that too much of anything is unhealthy. Always try to keep the right balance.
Talking about all the great things we can benefit from if we start implementing either remote work or flexible work—number one, time. Time is the most precious thing these days. Imagine if you lose a lot of time because you have to commute somewhere without reason. If you have a meaningless meeting and nothing comes out of it, at least now you did it at home—you didn’t have to commute for an hour or two. So number one, it’s time. Number two, it’s obviously cost-efficient as well.
Now, in the beginning, if you’re talking about interviews with people, things like that—but for the long run, it’s the cost efficiency for companies that sometimes consider hiring experts who are not going to be pet sitters, but people to support their businesses. There’s a lot to do behind the scenes. You don’t have to rely on the local talent pool anymore. You can hire great experts from distant places. So sometimes companies say they want to expand and need cool people to do that with.
That’s where flexible or remote work comes in, because you can get people from the place where you want to be. That’s amazing. If you’re willing to grow or expand—or even if you want to save costs or help the environment—remote work allows that. We can cut unnecessary car fumes and reduce office space. We’re seeing an exodus from big cities like San Francisco and New York. People don’t want to live that way anymore. You shouldn’t have to be located in a skyscraper to have a great career.
You can be somewhere else and have a sustainable business, add value, and design your professional lifestyle the way you want it. That’s the biggest luxury of flexible work these days.
How could companies start to scale and have this transparent remote work model? How does this work for pet sitters and dog walkers? How can we incorporate this into our business? Is it for internal office staff—and not necessarily thinking we always have to take a dog walker off the street and bring them into a physical office? How could this work for our listeners?
I think that this particular industry could definitely benefit from automation. Here we could work on saving a lot of time. All the things we do manually—filling out tons of documents, printing, signing—we can go digital with everything. That’s the great thing. We can keep everything in the cloud. It helps with filing, keeps everything more transparent, straightforward, and accessible for all the team members we want to share it with.
The second thing is onboarding. That’s one of the major takeaways. There are so many times you have to repeat yourself, so you must have a human touch—treat everybody individually—but 70% of onboarding is just repetition. Even if you’re passionate about what you do, if you repeat the same thing 200 times, you lose the passion. It’s time-consuming. Sometimes new hires join on different days, and you can’t onboard them all at once.
So automate whatever you can automate. How to start? Everyone has to answer that for themselves because there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. It’s not like I’m telling you, “Do this, and it’ll be great.” The first thing you have to ask yourself as a business owner or decision maker—or even if you just want to create change—is why.
Why do you want to do this? What can be the benefits? Perform a simple SWOT analysis: what are the strengths of this idea? What are the weaknesses, risks, opportunities? Then make a decision: “Hey, it can improve our processes in these areas; let’s go for it.” Everyone has to treat this individually.
I love that so much. So how did you get involved with all of this? Why did you decide to start advocating for remote work in the first place? How did Nadia become Nadia in all of this?
Wow, that’s going to be a deep one. Definitely I wasn’t born—or rather, my idea wasn’t born—during the pandemic. Absolutely not. I believed in it long before anyone else did. And I’ll tell you why. I’m a person who likes to challenge things. I’m not usually the one saying, “Everybody does it this way because that’s how it’s done.” My question is, why?
Somebody tells me, “You have to do it this way,” and I ask, “What does it influence? Is it really necessary?” I know it’s probably not the approach everybody likes to hear, but it shapes your mindset. You start analyzing things. Then I started evaluating different workplaces. I’d already worked with companies around the globe, literally. I’ve been remote for the majority of my life—working with companies who said, “We don’t care where you are. Let’s just get this done.”
And I thought, why can’t it be that way everywhere? Why is the workplace still the way we see it today? Then I started looking into work history a bit—where did this structure even come from? It turns out that in the 1920s, it was Henry Ford who said, “People work too much. I’m going to minimize the six-day work week to five days, forty hours.” And that’s the way it’s been.
Dear listeners, a hundred years later, we still do the same. The only problem is that back then, industrialism was growing rapidly. Today, it’s the digital work era. So how does that resonate? Well, it doesn’t.
That just blows my mind, Nadia—and it blew my mind in the mastermind when you said that. You said you like to challenge things, and it’s not one-size-fits-all. If you think about it, we have that traditional forty-hour work week. Does anyone actually do it? No. But we still apply that principle. That blueprint lives in our heads. If we work more than forty hours, it’s like, “My God, you’re working too much.”
But this is hard for pet sitters and dog walkers because our business doesn’t follow traditional hours. It’s often supporting clients before and after they’re at work—or on weekends when they’re traveling. So who gets to determine what the work week is? Who determines the hours?
What I’m hearing from you is: if we can challenge that traditional work schedule, that opens the ability for more remote work. They don’t have to be in our time zone—they could work while we’re off. It could actually support our business even more.
And the other thing I hear you saying—and correct me if I’m wrong—is that automation is key. You get tired of repeating the same thing, you lose the passion. But also, if you’re going to delegate, if you want to scale or grow, you want to make sure it’s streamlined. So you’re paying someone for two hours of work instead of ten hours for the same result. Am I on the right track?
Absolutely, yes. That’s part of it. It’s about automating repetitive processes. Some people say, “Oh, so robots are replacing people?” No, that’s not what I’m saying. Everything repetitive and time-consuming that doesn’t require creative thinking—those are the things we can automate.
Every business owner works on marketing, getting new clients, and managing internal systems—communicating with staff, keeping track of things. How do you know who your best pet sitter is? Who’s most responsive? Who has the best rating? You can automate that with a tool. Then you can say, “You’ve been the best last month—congrats!” That person feels appreciated and motivated to stay.
There are so many tools that can help us become more human—by dedicating our time to meaningful things instead of repetitive ones.
That’s beautiful. You guys, I want to challenge our listeners right now. Take an inventory. Think about three things you’re doing daily or weekly that are the same over and over again. How could you automate them? Automation does not mean no personalization. If you’re in the mastermind, post about it—let’s talk about it.
I’d love for you to think about that. What are you doing over and over again that you could automate? One example is accounts receivable. People are sending out 50% before service starts, 50% after—it creates multiple invoices. Or charging clients every day instead of once a week. There are so many things we could automate in the business.
Nadia, I know you have a lot of awesome resources out there. How can people learn more about you and get connected?
Well, I’m more digital than real these days. You can find me anywhere—on my website, remoteworkadvocate.com. You can find me on Instagram, @RemoteWorkAdvocate, on LinkedIn as Remote Work Advocate or as Nadia Harris. I’m also on Facebook and even Clubhouse. I co-host The Leadership Outlook Podcast, available on every platform. If you want to boost your performance and think outside the box, you’re more than welcome.
Awesome, Nadia. Thank you so much for being here today. I encourage you all to go cyber-stalk her, as I lovingly call it, at remoteworkadvocate.com—or like she said, anywhere on social media. If you have questions, reach out to her. Or if you want to challenge her and say, “Nadia, you don’t understand our business; we can’t automate”—yeah, we can. She showed mastermind members lots of ways that we can.
So I dare you guys: reach out to her or jump in the mastermind and check out the training she did—it was phenomenal. Nadia, thank you so much for being here with us today.
You’re more than welcome. Like always, thanks a lot for inviting me, and I’m excited for the release.
Absolutely. You guys, remember—when life gets you down, always keep jumping. Bye now.
So what did you think? Did you love this episode? I sure hope you did because I put a lot of love into this for you. And the best way you can show me that is by going to iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcast and leaving a review. I just might read it on the next episode. I also want to remind you that when life gets you down, remember to always keep jumping. Thanks for listening.