Work From Home

Speaker 0 00:00:01 Hi, I'm Erin Swarovski and I'm Austin. This is between the key frames. We're going to talk about work from home decor, the do's, the don'ts the nevers, how to have a success practice. So look Speaker 1 00:00:21 Like what should you know that you're probably don't know that nobody is home. Okay. So today we're going to talk about do's and don'ts of working from home. That's a specially become relevant because of COVID. Cause we are all working from home, but, um, I don't think people, many people know this Austin, but you've been working from home for a very long time Speaker 2 00:00:46 For many, many moons. Uh, yeah. Yeah. I think I S I think 2006, 2007, I think when the internet was offensive. Right. But the dial up modem now that I've been working as a in-house freelancer kind of PERMA Lancer in New York, uh, for bunchy years at that point, and wanted to see if I could kind of do the same thing from home. Speaker 1 00:01:15 Well, now I think it's interesting because when I think about bringing in, um, a remote freelancer, especially post COVID where they're actually going to be on our server and be a part of our team, it's a much different kind of vibe. It's less of a self-contained unit being sent out and more just how do we like impart company culture on them and make them integrate them into the system? Yeah. So we use a lot of tools, like digital tools, like we're not just Gmail and G chat anymore. We have integrated slack. And that helps a lot just with communication and for banter about the job on the job, just like up to the minute kind of stuff, and posting and posting work in progress absolutely real time. Also, you can do phone calls and video sharing, and screen-sharing on it as well as you can really be with a person all day, if you just call them up. And it's just like, listen to each other, breathe, like you're next to each other in your studio Speaker 2 00:02:23 Back to like, you know, 2007, 2008, it's like, what did I, what was I using email and FTP on my site? You know? So literally like having to like manually go into my website, like go into the right folder, put up a, like a compressed Speaker 3 00:02:41 Link and then send that Speaker 2 00:02:42 To the client. And then, you know, I was able to deliver some stuff through FTP, but you know, that there was really a throttle limitation. Then I made the move down to Savannah. I started teaching and moved to Savannah. I had already, and I just kept doing remote. Right. So I spent 10 years in Savannah doing remote. And then as Vimeo came out, that became a new tool where I could basically post a link, put a password on it, send me a link with the password. And we transfer. That was another like big change for delivering files. Um, it's pretty rare that I need to send a drive or have a drive sent to me. It happens if there's a really dense footage heavy, but mostly, but also the other side of like H 2 64, everyone sees 2 64, right. Sometimes they want to pro for, you know, archive. So then I can, we transfer that, but you know, sometimes I'm delivering projects via text on my phone and I'm like, how's this look? And they're like, great, we're done. And I'm like, Speaker 4 00:03:44 Okay, that's Speaker 1 00:03:46 Not how it goes at our studio. Speaker 2 00:03:53 What was it like for you all in your studio when COVID hit? Right. So COVID heads, everything starts shutting down. Like, how did you guys, like, how shocking was that reality? Speaker 1 00:04:05 It was devastating. You know, at first it was just like, it's just going to be a couple of weeks. We kind of told ourselves that while it was preposterous, you know, China was shut down for fucking months. And here we are thinking, it's just going to be a couple of weeks. We were as a country, just not prepared. And honestly just a month notice would have been amazing because we would have had time to really pricings out and put plans in place and talk to our employees, tell them what it was going to look like. But it was just like tomorrow, Chicago is not allowed to go to work and everywhere not allowed to go to work. And it was just like, what, like what, like what just happened? We work of course, with our it team closely. And we had been experimenting with some charity to stuff earlier, but just in case somebody wanted to work from home or just because he's smart. Wow. That's Speaker 2 00:05:10 Fortunate. Wow. Just to have done that already. R and D a little bit. Yeah. Speaker 1 00:05:15 A little bit. So we at least knew where to start, but we didn't know the cost implications or anything like that. So they were definitely not as high as they could have been, but they were definitely high. So, and, you know, everybody had different systems at home and we had to do an inventory of what people had at home, but we knew they would be working on their in studio computers. Like we just didn't know what they still had to connect to the studio computer. So they needed something, whether it was just a tiny little, you know, laptop with a couple of monitors attached to it. Or most everybody had desktops at home, some kind of a system Speaker 2 00:05:56 Dairy Tara DG works for those who are unfamiliar. Speaker 1 00:06:01 Oh, that's a good point. So Tara DJ is like a card that is attached to your computer as a studio. And so the real thing is, is like, you need another computer to have internet connection to connect to that. But ultimately you are working on the computer in the studio. I don't like really helped because most studios and I know ours, for sure. Everything's collaborative from development and all the way through production. It's very rare that one person touches a job. Like excrutiatingly rare. So we had to kind of keep that collaboration going, working Speaker 2 00:06:42 Remotely, you're working on a computer that is networked locally in your studio Speaker 1 00:06:49 Locally at the studio. Yeah. It's like they never left from a technology standpoint, Speaker 2 00:06:57 Like two weeks to take classes that had never been taught online or remotely before and convert them to online. Then it was like, okay, I need to start making pre recorded lectures and demos. And like, I made a welcome my very first video. I spent two hours creating a six minute welcome video. Cause I kept like wanting it to be perfect and do takes and editing. And I added like lower thirds. And then it was just like, all right, like this is not going to work like, and so I had to embrace like the ed style, remember the end where the director who was famous for like, wanting to takes because he had no money. So I was just like Edward style, like one take, like if I mess up, just keep going. Speaker 1 00:07:40 You just got to get over that. This is how you look. Speaker 2 00:07:43 And he's talking about my video chat. I'm not anymore, but I would just stare at myself if you like drawn like a deer ahead late. And, um, I had to get over all that stuff. Like I was just not comfortable with the whole screen video interface. And I mean, I worked probably harder than any other quarter. Like I went way above and beyond, but it was, um, for the students who were engaged, like I was surprised, like we were able to create a culture, you know, it was different, but it was, it was meaningful and yeah, Speaker 1 00:08:19 It's exhausting at the end of the day. I'm just like super disoriented by the whole thing, you know, because now I feel very engaged in what's going on. But then every once in a while I look around me and I'm like, oh, Malone. So strange for somebody like me, that likes to be in the mix and likes to talk and have fun and about being bright and laughing. And, you know, I think like typically like with us, like if you're on the phone, it's going to be, again, all of those words, like a fun call, like, so having my big thing has been like making sure that my personality isn't diminished by the technology. So when I still have snarky things to say, when I'm still being sassy or something it's coming through. Speaker 1 00:09:11 Yeah. I think it's interesting, like working from home, like I think for the artists, it's essential to be able to collaborate and to communicate real time. For me, it's essential to be able to still maintain personality and a presence and ability to kind of still see everything that's going on in the studio without just walking through the studio. I think what we need to do better is to do more kind of social things. And so we have people at the studio kind of figuring out ways to engage with everybody and what the best times to do that are. And I think like the hard thing is that, and at any given time, and I know I speak of course about my studio and what's going on with us, but I imagine it's the same everywhere. Like we're going to have four to 15 projects going on and in one week deliver three or four things, but nobody sees that. They just see the work that they're on. So for us it's been like, how do we show the work and really express gratitude for all the people that worked on it and their contributions and kind of give them a floor to talk about it and to say specifically what did work well and did not work well in the remote construct? You know, so that it's not just a learning experience for like those four or five people on that job. It can be a learning experience for everybody. Now Speaker 2 00:10:33 That remote freelancers are becoming, everybody's using them and I can get these opportunities to work with studios in that capacity. It's a refreshing thing for me because all of a sudden it's like, I'm not just a solo artists working direct to client. Like I'm in the mix. I'm seeing everyone else's posting work in progress. Um, it's a real, it's inspiring. It's I mean, and I've had that as a professor, you know, I mean, that's sort of a different, but you know, that's an educational capacity. So to have that in the, you know, professional engaged in it is, is really fun. You picture like having, you know, full-time people who are not even in dance, Speaker 1 00:11:16 That's the new thing. Yeah. That's the thing that's kind of come up out of this that, um, was unimaginable before one, the idea that we could have freelancers anywhere in the world, collaborating in the studio before that was hard. Cause you'd have to file jockey Dropbox or our FTP, or like whatever tool you're using Google drive. And then you need the producer to have to manage that and make sure they're getting files. And how do you work collaboratively, collaboratively with other team members now they're just working on the server. So it's just like, keep your slack group going. Like you, you got at that point, once you're in the studio, you're going to have to make sure whatever set out loud was set in slack. Right. Like it's not just because so-and-so is in Portugal and so-and-so is in London and so-and-so is in Austria. Speaker 1 00:12:07 And so, oh shit. Like we gotta make sure the whole team knows it. So we're going to, it's going to be about keeping those things going and not getting lax about it, but I absolutely could see having a full-time person, um, offsite completely where before I did not see that as an option, I do think in that construct, it would be nice to have them come into the studio like one week, every two months or something like that, just to meet everybody and like come in for the holiday party, do all that kind of stuff. So then Speaker 2 00:12:42 I've done for years, right? So I've been doing remote for, you know, years and, and, and I have my clients and I can do everything, phone, email, text, but I make a point like, I want to go visit, I'd make a point. Like I go to New York, I take them to lunch. I gave them that FaceTime. It might not be that regular could be once a year. It could be, but it's that I want to make sure that they're like, I, they Speaker 3 00:13:04 Remember having human face, Speaker 2 00:13:07 Like, yeah, I'm a person, you know? And I, I think that that's, you know, and I think this goes back to the us being on that sort of cusp of the analog digital revolution, right. The hybrid thing. Right. The blended. And I just feel, you know, I always feel really grateful that it's like, yeah, that I, I have really roots and foundations in both, you know? Cause I can see the strengths and the values of both. Speaker 1 00:13:33 Yeah. I mean, like when I look back on those, how do I think that this is going to have a affective me one, I'm going to think like, oh shit, we are resourceful. Like, wow, we pivoted hard. We got there fast. We had like, no struggles, really switching, like switching. That's amazing. Like that's amazing. And I think, and I think if you look at the landscape of like, even like all the studios and agencies and the production fidelity facility is, and everybody's adapting, everybody's figuring out some like, did it like on a dime and some were like, oh wait, we, we don't exactly know what to do here. It's going to take us a minute. Right. But everybody did it. We're all kind of figuring out our way of doing it. That works for us. And I think to your point, I have some preconceived notions uprooted as a result of working from home, especially working from home with a three-year-old in the mix, like the way my day flows is so different than it does as a studio. Speaker 1 00:14:42 Like as a studio, I have like on a rip on interrupted like eight 30 to like, whenever I leave, you know, here, like until she's out in the, how out of the house, like I'm in the mix with her. And then she gets home at like 3 34. And that puts me out of commission for about a half hour, 45 minutes. And then at a certain time in the evening, like at 6, 6 30, sometimes a little earlier, she'll be like, I need your attention. And then I put her to bed, you know, that I can go back to work and then I put her to bed and then I could go back to work. But if she doesn't go to bed, which she doesn't, sometimes she's like a maniac. Like it wrecks my schedule, but I'll just wake up early the next day or offset or figure out how to get my work done. And I think those are things that you just would have to trust your employees to be able to manage and do. And because of this, that's what we're doing. That's what we're learning how to do what before scared me. I was like, oh my God, how am I going to deal with this? It's going to be constant nonstop. It worked out ultimately, you know, I Speaker 2 00:15:49 Mean, I think there's a couple of things that some pro tips that having done this remote thing for as long as I have that I've learned in that, I think I probably take for granted because I had to learn these the hard way. I think the first one is probably like just boundaries. Right. And I was really bad at this for awhile. Right. I think I'm much better at it now, but I've had a long time to do it wrong and self-correct, but that, you know, when, when is work off, like when you, when his work over, right. When you stop, when you start, like how do you clearly detach in a healthy way so that you make sure you're recharging? You know, even if it's like, you know, physically having a space, maybe you don't. Right. Maybe you don't like, but how do you, like, when do you stop replying Speaker 5 00:16:33 To messages? Like, right, right. You know, and then Speaker 2 00:16:37 I think the other, another one and I guess, well, maybe before I jump to the next one, but just, um, you just having that clear sense of like how to switch your mind and your, your sort of, you know, executive function where it's just like, okay, like I'm off. And now I'm in a different room in my home and you know, and, and I'm recharging or I'm engaging with my family or, you know, watching Netflix or whatever that might be. Or the other thing I was going to say is, is, uh, just being responsive. That's something, another thing that I've learned to do is like, and this is pre COVID, right? It's just like, whenever a client sends me an email, even if it's just, you know, a quick receive big thing, right. Just letting them know you saw it. Confirmation of receipt is, is really helpful. I think you're Speaker 1 00:17:25 Often the ether. You still have to feel an instant away, but it doesn't mean you have to respond just saying, received to an email is going to be received. We'll tackle first thing. Perfect. Speaker 5 00:17:39 Perfect. Now I know they got it. They're Speaker 1 00:17:43 Going to get going in the morning, which is why I sent it now to begin with, you know what I mean? That is the best advice you could possibly get. The other thing is like, if you're working remote or whether you're working in a studio or remote, like you have to get the sense of where you're working, like how they have their files, how they like to communicate, how, how they do their thing, ask questions and you assimilate to them. They're not going to change. She, you, you have to kind of bend to the way the studio is Speaker 2 00:18:16 Interesting. Cause that's the, it's the same idea. It's like that learning how to interface. And I talk a lot about this with students, as far as like learning software. I'm like, if you can learn how to interface, you could more or less learn any software. And it's the same thing with a studio star, right? If you learn how to interface with that studio, with how they structure their projects, then you can, you can adapt, you know? And, and I think you have the longer I've taught, the more I see that as a real value, that ability to learn interfaces and adjust. Adapt. Speaker 1 00:18:48 Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well just like real life. The baby is up. She's not a baby. She's three, but I hear her in the background getting here very soon. So I think that was a good place to end. Um, our talk about the studio life from abroad. So everybody Speaker 0 00:19:08 Thank you for that. This was fun. Let's do it again in two weeks. Hope your day is easy. Ease.