In the latest episode of the ‘groCTO: Originals’ podcast (Formerly: Beyond the Code: Originals), host Kovid Batra welcomes Jörg Godau, Chief Digital Officer at Doctorly and one of the founding members of The EL Club in Berlin, Germany. His vast experience includes valuable contributions to renowned companies such as VRR Consulting UG, Nortal, and IBM. The discussion revolves around ‘Leading with Empathy & Compassion’.
The episode kicks off with Jörg discussing his hobbies and life-defining events before delving into his role and daily challenges at Doctorly. He emphasizes leveraging user insights and business understanding for software development and aligning individual career aspirations with organizational needs during team scaling.
Furthermore, Jörg explores measuring engineering team success both qualitatively and quantitatively. Wrapping up, he shares his final thoughts on remote work.
Kovid Batra: Hi, everyone. This is Kovid, back with another episode of Beyond the Code by Typo. Today with us, we have an amazing guest who is the founding member of the Engineering Leadership Club, Germany. This is a group of empathetic leaders who believe in supporting and mentoring other engineering leaders to lead with compassion. He has 20+ years of engineering and leadership experience himself. He’s currently working as a Chief Digital Officer at Doctorly. Welcome to the show, Jack. Great to have you here.
Jörg Godau: Thank you so much, Kovid. It’s great to be here. Just to be clear, one of the founding members, not the only founding, don’t want to take credit for everybody else’s great work as well.
Kovid Batra: All right. All right. My bad there. Perfect. So, Jack, I think before we get started and have a lot of things to learn from you, I would first want you to introduce yourself with some of your hobbies, some of your life-defining events, so that our audience knows you more.
Jörg Godau: Sure. Yeah, I can do that. And, my name is Jack, but actually, my name is Jörg. I was born in Germany, a long, long, long time ago, and then immigrated to Australia as a very small child, and I lived there for about 30 years. And the umlauts and the pronunciation were not possible. And, people in Australia don’t have umlauts. They don’t have it on the keyboard. It’s not compatible with the Australian way of saying things. So I gave up and said, right, “In English, just call me Jack.” Um, lived in Australia for almost 30 years. Got married there and then moved to Berlin for one year in 2006-2007. I plan to register at some point with the Guinness Book of Records for the world’s longest year, because I’m still here. And now I have, I have two kids, and live here happily with my wife and kids in Berlin since also a long time now, when I think about it.
As far as like hobbies, relaxation, I very much like going for hikes. So like long distance walks. So we’ve done the Camino, we’ve done the Tour de Mont Blanc, also with our children, both. And, this year we’re going to do the Fisherman’s Trail in the South of Portugal. So, and that’s two weeks where you like, we carry all of our stuff. So it forces me to not carry a laptop or other things. So I, in that time, I also can’t work. So it’s a, it’s a very good way to switch off and have a bit of digital detox.
Kovid Batra: Perfect, perfect. What about some of your life-defining moments? I mean, anything that defines who you are today.
Jörg Godau: I think I really like this move to Germany and this plan to like, you know, travel around Europe and do random things for a year. That was a big difference. Obviously as a parent, like having children, you know, every parent will tell you like children change things quite a lot. I think most recently, like probably actually joining Doctorly and having the chance to really almost build something from scratch in a startup environment and really like be able to very directly shape the organization and shape the way things move. These are all like, and they’re on different levels. No one is like.. Personal, travel, seeing the world, experiencing different cultures. One is more like the family life and the other is, is certainly the work life.
Kovid Batra: Great. I think, I totally relate to it. I personally love to travel. I though don’t have a kid right now, but I definitely feel so that it changes your life completely. So I totally relate to that.
Jörg Godau: Yeah. And for us to Australia, like my wife is also like, was also an immigrant to Australia. And, for us, Australia is very far away, right? Like, it’s far away physically. It’s far away in terms of its involvement with world politics. Like in Europe, like world politics is like two hours drive away is the next country, right? Like in Australia, two hours drive away, like that’s a trip to see your friends, right? It’s not like, it’s just not the same.
And also in terms of cultural access. Yes, like people go to Australia with art exhibitions and cultural exhibitions and concerts, but even for those people, it’s a lot of effort to go. So it’s less accessible. Right? In Europe, if you want to see anything, like cultural concerts, ballet, art, it like, there’s just so much here that it’s, I think actually impossible to see it all, which is a different approach.
Kovid Batra: Yeah, absolutely. I agree to that. Great, Jack. I think thanks a lot for sharing that with us. And now, moving on to our main section where we would love to learn a lot from you, but keeping the time in mind, let’s start with something very, very basic. Like you are currently working as a Chief Digital Officer at Doctorly. So, tell us what does Doctorly do, what is your role there and what are your daily challenges?
Jörg Godau: So, Doctorly’s vision is to enable people to live healthier lives. This sounds beautiful and like, you know, cloudy, but like, okay, how? And so, when the founders of Doctorly originally started the company, they looked at what are the real problems in healthcare and in Germany and probably in many other countries. So the problem, one of the problems is the communication and the digitalization of healthcare. In Germany, patients become data mules. You go to a doctor, they give you a piece of paper, you carry that piece of paper to somewhere else, they give you more paper, you carry it back, and you end up with like these massive folders of paper which you probably don’t understand and don’t want. If you lose it, they get very angry at you because you have, they have to print it again or something. So, this process is terrible. So we thought, okay, let’s build something for the patients to improve it. But you can’t because it’s not the patient’s job to put this data. The doctor has to put it and the doctor has to get it. At that point, we realized that the source of the issue and the core of the problem is doctors are confronted with very old-fashioned software. The software that doctors use in general in Germany today started to be built in the 90s, the 2000s. If you’ve been around for a while and you can recognize a Delphi application by how it looks, this is how they look. They look like Windows 95 Minesweeper. Gray bevels. Push the wrong button, it explodes, right? Like, it’s really, really bad. And they run it on computers in their office. So, backups, security, any of these topics, super, super challenging, right? Because like, while they do do backups, they never test the restore. If you don’t test the restore, you haven’t done a backup, right? Like, it’s like, so all of these things led us to start building the core Doctorly product, which is Practice Management software for German doctors, fully cloud-based. They don’t have to worry about anything. They get updates every night, like, they get, like, data backups. We do it. It runs on a professional data center, with professional people supporting the machines. And so, they just don’t have to care. So they can concentrate on the patient. But now already, the data is digital and the data is somewhere central. So we have the first step in being able to transfer the data. And in the next, in the next period of time, we’ll start also building the patient app and a platform and a marketplace so that the patients get control of their data and can say, Hey, I want to send it to this other doctor, but we have to start with the doctor first. That was the real core of us.
Kovid Batra: That’s great. I think that’s a good finding there. Yeah. Please continue. Sorry.
Jörg Godau: Sorry. My daily business, I run everything to do with technology. So the CTO reports to me, the developers, scrum masters, QA, architecture, cloud, all of this is my responsibility. And it goes a little bit further. And as the Chief Digital Officer, I’m also responsible for security, data privacy, and topics like this. So it’s managing all of the software development, delivery, and running of the software for the doctors, but also making sure we’re doing it in the right way that it’s compliant with regulations. And it’s Germany, so we have many, many, many regulations. I think if you print the regulations and the source code, the regulations will be bigger.
Kovid Batra: Yeah, that could be possible. One interesting question here. So, are these doctors ready to use your software immediately or there is an adoption challenge and like, do they pay for it?
Jörg Godau: So the doctors pay for the software, yes. Our prices are very similar to the prices that they normally pay for what they’re used to at the moment. A lot of doctors are ready for this because if you go to a doctor’s office and ask them, “Do you like your software in Germany?” The answer will be no, but they have very little choice. There’s not very many companies that do this. And some of the big companies actually have six or seven products. So the doctor can switch from one product to another, but it’s actually still the same company in the background.
Kovid Batra: Yeah.
Jörg Godau: And one of the things that these companies also do very badly is, you know, updates we’ve seen, they send like not floppy disks, but CD-ROM disks to the doctors and the doctor then has to install the update. Or like some of them you can download the updates. But if somebody accidentally clicks ‘update now’, then the practice can’t work for two hours or three hours. It’s like, and you’ve got all these angry patients who want their like treatment and your computers are just effectively broken.
Also, terrible customer support is another problem. Like, we have very good customer support. We have people who actually used to work in doctor’s offices working in our customer support. So they know, like when somebody calls up, they know what this is. They know, like how important it is and they can actually really help these people. So, doctors are ready. There is an adoption challenge because we have to get the data out of these old systems into our system. That’s the biggest challenge. So lifting the data from, like in the physical office. And if the doctor has, we have it sometimes hundreds of gigabytes of attachments that they’ve kept over the last 20 years, and a very bad internet connection. It takes a long time to upload. Yeah, but that’s just the feature of Germany and its internet providers as well.
Kovid Batra: But as you said, like, doctors are not very adaptive or receptive of the new tools. First of all, uh, I really appreciate the fact that you bring in a lot of business side information, user side information to your job, being a digital officer, a technology officer, I really appreciate that you have that business perspective in place and what exactly do you think you do with all this information and understanding of your user when you build your product, because that’s very important. Like, when you’re building technology, if you have that level of empathy, that level of understanding for the users, I think you can do a tremendous job at building the software right. So can you just give me some examples? Like, yeah.
Jörg Godau: So, we actually have partner practices which we work with and they work with us even before we’d launched. We worked very closely together with our partners and our product owners, our designers were able to go to this doctor’s office and sit with them and watch how they work and watch what’s not working in the old software or watch what is. And the old software is not all terrible, right? It’s old, but it’s not all terrible. It works. And some things are actually quite good. So they were able to go there and see what are the processes in the office of the doctor and where can we have the biggest impact. So our aim is to actually reduce the admin of the doctor like by building systems that reduce the admin by 40-50% so that they can treat faster and the limited time they have, they can focus on the patient Average German doctor’s visit for a normal patient- six minutes, including ‘Hello’, ‘How are you?’, ‘Goodbye’, ‘Here’s your medication, take it three times a day.’ And in that time, the doctor also has to write down all of the billing information. So, making all of this admin stuff easier means that in those six minutes, at least the doctor then can concentrate on the person in front of them and what they need. So this is super important.
Kovid Batra: Makes sense. So, what are the biggest challenges you see today in your role that you are tackling and has the biggest impact?
Jörg Godau: Right now, organizationally, we’ve reached a point where we are now focusing more on scale. So, having great software that does the right things. That’s certainly like an essential first step, but now we have to focus on scale. So, instead of adding 10 customers a month, adding a hundred a month, adding a thousand a month, what processes do we need to make sure that each of those also gets the same great support that the first 10 got? Yeah. Like, so, because if you have 10 customers and you have one customer support person, okay, he can talk to all 10 every day for an hour. Like, and it’s fine, yeah? But if you have a hundred, a thousand, 10, 000, it becomes much more about processes for scale, giving people access to their own support. So, self-service support, really clear instructions, or even better, building applications where you don’t need instructions for. And this is super important that it’s really intuitive, that it’s very easy.
On the other side, as we’re thinking about platform, integrations, marketplace, how do we enable somebody else to build plugins for our product? Like, I don’t want to build everything myself. There are, like different medical image formats. People have built great viewers for this that display all information with different colors and everything. It works. They’re really, really good. How can I enable that company to build a plugin that integrates with my software so that it runs, and the doctor can go to like a marketplace page and say, “I want to use this viewer.” “I want to use this telemedicine thing.” “I want to use this prescription stuff.”? And they have a choice then, but they don’t have to use 12, 15, 20 different products because they don’t like that because the products don’t work well together. So this integration and scale challenge, those are the biggest topics that we’re working on this year.
Kovid Batra: How do you exactly tackle this problem? So, if you could give me an example, I think I would be able to relate more here. Let’s say, we talk about having integrations, right, with third-party software. So what kind of challenges do you really face on the ground when you go about doing this? And you as a team leader or the like the whole organization, technical leader, what, what steps do you take to enable your team to do that efficiently?
Jörg Godau: Yeah. There’s all of the usual challenges, like when you integrate with a third party, like, how do you exchange information with them? How do you actually, like assure that the data is travelling in the right ways, that the data security is met? This is something where we have to be very careful when we’re integrating with third parties that, like, they don’t do things in a way that is against German regulations or against data privacy regulations. So for example, even if you take something as simple as appointment booking, right? Like, the patient wants to book the appointment. The doctor wants the patient to book the appointment. But, which data is shared? So, if you book an appointment with a psychotherapist, this already gives quite sensitive information about you as an individual, right? Like, you know, because somebody can, from just the calendar entry, understand, hmm, Jack has booked an appointment with a psychotherapist, maybe there’s something, like, wrong with him. So, we have to be very careful about those regulations. And then, it’s all of the standard stuff. How can we secure the communication? How can we, like make sure that the data is transferred accurately? How can we keep the systems reasonably decoupled? Yeah. Like, you don’t want to be reliant on somebody else and they don’t want to be reliant on you, like building these principles of decoupling. And then, those are the architecture challenges. And then you have on top of that, how do you share authentication? How do you validate the users? Where’s the primary source? Like, is the primary source our system, the other system, how do you match? You know, many people have the same name, right? So like, and even the same date of birth. And Germany has a population of like 80, 90 million people. A lot of those are double ups, right? We have a lot of like Müller and Schmitz. Yeah. And like, so you have to be very careful, like how you, like you don’t get the wrong appointment with the wrong person. So, some things that seem simple, become then bigger challenges at scale.
Kovid Batra: Makes sense, totally. When you encounter these challenges, these are some things that are to deal with the product and technology, right? Along with that, I’m sure you’re handling a big team there. There are people challenges also. So, this is one important topic that we usually discuss with the CTOs and other engineering leaders who are on the show. While you’re managing people, it is very important to see as your company scales, the people progress, right? And when you’re enabling a team, you need to make sure that people take the right career path. Like, you wouldn’t want a person who is aspiring to be into management or let’s say, Engineering Manager, you push them towards taking some technology role. So, you need to find that alignment. How do you enable your.. And you can’t go to each and every person and then talk to them and understand everything. When you are at scale, you have hundreds of developers, team members working with you. How do you impart that thought into people so that they make their decisions consciously of what do they want to do? That makes your job easier. But I think that’s very important for them to understand themselves also to align better.
Jörg Godau: A lot of this comes from company culture and values. If you set up the right company culture, the right company values, then you are actually in a very good place to allow people to grow in the right way. Doctorally, even though it’s a startup and I think altogether, we’re about 70 people now. Development about 30, 35 or technology, let’s call it technology, 30, 35, a lot of other people in sales, customer onboarding, support, you know, like these other organizational roles. So, we have four values. ‘Excellence’. People should strive to do great work. Yeah, like, fairly normal. ‘ Integrity’. You must do what you say that you’re going to do, or try to do what you say that you’re going to do. And if it doesn’t work, you must tell somebody and not, like, just hide it, yeah? It’s fairly normal as well. ‘Kindness’. Yeah, this is super, super important. And this is not just kindness to the employee, but kindness to the customer, kindness to the patient who is sitting in front of our customer, like kindness to each other, how we talk to each other and how we, like behave if you make a mistake or if you accidentally, like talk to somebody the wrong way. Go and say like, “Hey, I’m sorry.” Right? This is part of it. And, ‘Ownership’. So taking ownership of the work that you do, being responsible for the things that you do and accountable for the things. And using these four values, we talk about them all the time. I refuse to let them be written on the walls. I think once you start writing them on the walls or putting them in pamphlets, values are no longer useful.
I did this actually, we had a, I went to a, like a presentation and gave a talk in front of a bigger group of people and I asked, you know, “A show of hands, does your company have, like values?” And most people put up their hands. I’m like, “Okay. Do you know the values?” And like, half the hands, they go down. At Doctorly, every single person knows the values because we try to refer to them always and we try to use them in our daily business. So we say, “Thank you.” Thank you for taking ownership. Thank you for like, you know, doing this work. Thank you for like, you know, being kind, to like help me. And that’s really important. And when people feel comfortable and safe, then you can talk about personal growth. Do you want to become a better technical expert? Do you want to become a manager? Are you happy doing what you’re doing and we don’t, like need to move you anywhere? It’s also people, like sometimes they’re just happy doing their job. You know, like, and sometimes people don’t want to be something else. They just want to be good at their job and do this. Of course, in technology, everybody must still continue to learn because the technology changes, so you can’t be completely static. But if somebody is a great backend developer and they want to continue to be a great backend developer, and they have no vision for themselves for leadership, why should I force them? It just hurts them and hurts me in the end. So, this is really important And then, taking the time to talk to people, you know? Those are the secrets. Like, I think we all know them. It’s the doing that’s, that’s harder. Yeah.
Kovid Batra: Exactly. I mean, I was just about to say this, that even though every time you mentioned, that, okay, this is the value, pretty common, but the important point that I took away is that you are not putting them on the walls and you are bringing them into the discussions on an everyday basis when you’re working. And I think that’s how the human brain also works. Like, you have to do that reinforcement in the right way, so that people live by it. So, I think that’s pretty good advice actually.
Jörg Godau: It’s like learning a language. If you don’t use it, you can’t learn it, but you can study it and it’s okay. But if you don’t use it, if you don’t live with the language, it’s not possible to really learn it. And if you have values that you don’t use, what’s the point, right? Like..
Kovid Batra: Absolutely, absolutely. Perfect. So I think with this, one question that comes to my mind is that when everything is aligned on the cultural and values part, you’re doing good. You know, you get that feel from the team that they are very integral, they’re putting down their best, right? How do you exactly measure their success? Like, for an engineering team which is basically enabling the product, how as a technical leader, you define the success of an engineering team so that they also remain motivated to achieve that, right?
Jörg Godau: It’s super difficult, right? Like, metrics, measurements, super difficult topic. And it’s one that we’re just revisiting ourselves as well at the moment. And we’re considering what do we measure? So, at the moment, we are measuring very obvious things, customer bugs, customer satisfaction. This is quite simple. If there’s no bugs that customers find, it doesn’t mean your software is good, but it means that it’s working in a way that they expect, you know? So that’s one very easy thing. I think all development companies can measure this.
The other thing that we’re trying to do is we’re giving the teams when we ask them to build something, we actually ask them, “Okay, you tell me how long.” And they get to choose. Will it be four weeks, seven weeks, five weeks, eight weeks. And then we measure, did they get that right? So, are they able to deliver at the time when they say they want to deliver? And if not, then we have to look at what causes this, obviously. And this is a big change. We used to work using Scrum, two week sprints, deliver every two weeks something. We don’t do that anymore. Now, because the things that we build are either too small and so two weeks is too much, or too big and it takes many months. If we have a new complicated regulation that we have to implement, you can’t do this in two weeks. And you can’t, like, yes, you can build it iteratively, but it provides no value until it’s finished. And thus, you have the certification. So you can never give it to a customer until you have the signed piece of paper from, like the regulatory body.
So in this sense, we’ve now aligned our development process more to how the real world expects us to work. And that’s been a big change, but I think overall now that it’s been going for a few months, that’s been actually quite good.
Kovid Batra: Anything on the DORA metrics piece that you have seen, being implemented or thinking of implementing in your teams? Like particularly, let’s say, cycle time or change failure rate so that the teams have visibility there, or do you just think that these metrics put in the right process, which you’re already measuring would do the purpose, fulfill the purpose?
Jörg Godau: We do measure some of these things. Deployment frequency for us is not relevant because our customers don’t want the software to change during the day. You’re a doctor and you’re using the software. It should not change.
Kovid Batra: Yeah. Yeah.
Jörg Godau: Oh, they’re like, you know, if you’re Amazon or eBay or something and you have customers 24/7 and you can, like do like different things. Yeah, fine. But for a doctor, if he’s in the middle of making a prescription, and the form suddenly changes and there’s a new box, it’s like, no. So deployment, our deployment frequency is one, once per night. Finish. So then, there’s no point to measure, you know. And, obviously when there’s something that needs to be deployed, but otherwise that’s, so that path for us is useless.
What we do measure is if there is a critical bug. So, something that is stopping a doctor from doing something that’s important for the patient. These ones we want to solve on the same day so that the patient can get his medication or his sick note or whatever they need. And this is something that we track the resolution time on the bugs. So, critical bugs must be resolved within the one day, and that’s working very well. Other bugs, we want them to be resolved within the times that we, like the SLAs that we give. So we track the SLA resolution on this. But, if there’s a spelling mistake, you know, if it says ‘calendar’ with like, double ‘a’ instead of double ‘e’, nobody cares when this is resolved. Yeah. It’s an example that I’m pulling from nowhere, but it’s not important because everybody still understands it’s the calendar. They can find it. They can use it. Everything works. So these ones we don’t care about. So any of the low-level bugs, we don’t track the time on these. They have to be done. Yeah, it’s wrong. Yes, must be fixed, but it’s not such that people can’t work. So, low-level, we ignore in terms of tracking metrics because it just adds effort. Every measurement that you make costs time. Every time you look at the measurements, “Oh, we’re not resolving our low-level bugs in 16 weeks.” Yeah, and? Like, well, what does it matter?
So, this is the important thing. When you’re measuring something, you must determine what are you going to do with the answer? So, if you’re measuring a piece of wood, you’re asking the question, is it big enough to make what I want to make from this piece of wood? Yeah. It’s a very specific question. If you are measuring development teams, it’s much more complicated, obviously, but what do you want to do with the answer? If you have no, like, if you don’t know what the answer is for, you shouldn’t measure it.
Kovid Batra: Absolutely. I think it’s a very valid point that, DORA metrics or in general, any engineering metric that you’re looking at, it’s not going to be same for the other team that is working on a different product, right? Every organization, every team has their own areas where they need to focus. And you have to choose these metrics rightly so that you can make an impact rather than just putting down all those gazillion metrics there and overloading the team with something which is completely unnecessary. So I totally agree to that point and it makes sense. The deployment frequency was a very good example. Like in your case, it doesn’t make sense to measure, right? You can deploy only once.
Cool. I think that that’s really great. That was something on the quantitative part. You’re looking at engineering efficiency here. But another important aspect is the developer experience, right? Uh, you have to be empathetic of your team, trying to understand what do they feel. What are their basic needs if there are any kind of challenges? So, do you do any measurements or pulse check-ins there to understand what they need as a team, as an organization to work swiftly?
Jörg Godau: So we do the usual things like we do like 1-on-1s, we do skip-level meetings. So, managers talk to them. At the moment, actually our CEO is in South Africa. A lot of our team is actually based in South Africa. And he then met personally with all of the people in South Africa.
Kovid Batra: That’s great.
Jörg Godau: We have twice a year we have events where people come together. Our team is very distributed. So we have Germany, East Europe, Lebanon, South Africa. But twice a year we bring people, not all together because we can’t afford flying 20 people from South Africa to Europe or vice versa. But we have one event in South Africa, one event in Europe, and people get to spend time with each other. This is very important for the feeling. And we do, measure employee NPS. So internally every month we send like a very quick survey, like just three questions, you know, NPS-style survey. And then once per quarter, we actually do a feedback cycle, like a proper feedback cycle where people get feedback from their peers, from their manager, from their direct reports. So, and we gather all of this feedback and the managers then look at it together with the people and say, “Hey, this is the feedback you got. Like, your team members are really happy with the way that you work, but not so happy with how you communicate. So what can we do to help you, like communicate better?” Or, ” You’re doing good work, but your colleagues don’t like the way that you like, sometimes don’t write enough unit tests. So, what can we do to help you write more unit tests?” Like, so, like very specific conversations can then happen out of this.
And we also then rate the employees, like how well are they doing now and what’s their future potential. So we have a like a grid system. Are they doing really well now? What’s their potential like in the future? And we reward the ones that are doing really well with extra shares or opportunities to do more work or not more work, but like to like grow in their career in different ways. So if somebody says, “I want to become Senior Engineer.” Or, “I want to become Team Lead.” We then try and look at that with them together and say, “Okay. So, what are the steps that we need to take? What’s the path?” And have very clear discussions with them.
Kovid Batra: That’s really amazing. And managing remote teams like this is kind of necessary now. And if not done well, I think you will not have the right team with the right enthusiasm in place. So, totally appreciate that.
Perfect, Jack. Thanks for sharing all these insights and learnings with us. I hope our audience would love it and thanks a lot once again.
Jörg Godau: I’m very, very happy to have this conversation. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. I think just one last thought on the whole, like remote work point.
Kovid Batra: Yeah.
Jörg Godau: There are a bunch of companies now that are saying you must come to the office two or three days or like some rule for coming back to the office. For me, I think this should be taken under the premise that as a management team, as a leadership team, we cannot support you remotely. It is not about the employees, but it’s about the organization can’t do it. If you force people to come to the office because you don’t trust them, you can’t see their work, you can’t measure what they’re doing, this is not their fault. Now, like you have to find ways to actually be able to do these things remotely. It is much more work as an organizational leader, as a team lead, as a manager, to have a remote team. Because if you have a local team, sure, you walk into the office, you look, “Ah, Mary, she looks a bit sad.” “John, he seems like he’s not having a good day. I’ll talk to him.” Remote team, you have to actually spend time. You have to talk to them. Not every day, maybe if you have too many people, but regularly or in group settings. And you have to provide this. And that means you as a manager have to find somewhere the extra hours to do it. And this is the thing where I think companies are misrepresenting. This is like, ah, we like, need it for collaboration. It’s very good if the people can meet and collaborate, making like, we have it to like, we make hackathons, but the people can participate remotely, so they’re able to collaborate, able to work together or we have these events where people come together. These work, but if you force people to go to an office and sit at their desks, especially if you’re an international company, what am I supposed to do? I make the people in South Africa go to the South African office to have a video call with the people in East Europe. What’s the point? Like, this is like, it’s like at this point because we’re so spread out, it’s now like obvious that it won’t work.
Kovid Batra: Yeah.
Jörg Godau: So, I think that’s super important and we’ve seen a lot of, like news, big companies forcing people back to the office full-time, part-time. I think that this is a failure of people to adapt and not of the individuals, but of the organizations. And this is something that I’m very passionate about, like holding up a flag for.
Kovid Batra: This is a little counterintuitive thought for me, but I think it’s very true, actually. It’s the organization that has to take care of it, not the employees.
Jörg Godau: And if, if I as a manager can’t do it, if I’m not capable as a manager to manage a remote team, that’s okay. But I have to say, “I, as a manager, I’m not capable to manage a remote team. So you must all come to my office.” It’s not his fault that I can’t manage him when he’s two hours away. Right? Like, or her fault. It’s my fault because it’s my job as a manager to manage these people. And some people are not good at remote work. There are individuals who, if they work from home, they don’t perform. Yeah? But you have to either help them to learn how to work in this way or they have to find a job where they go to the office. Yeah? But it’s not like, it’s not every employee’s fault that one manager is not capable. Yeah. It’s like if you think about it this way, like if there’s 10 people and one of them has a problem and nine don’t, which one is most likely have to change?
Kovid Batra: The organization, probably. Yeah.
Jörg Godau: Yeah. Cool.
Kovid Batra: Perfect, Jack. Can’t thank you enough for all the insights and learnings. I would love to have another show with you and share more details on how to manage these remote teams better because that looks like a very interesting topic to me now.
Jörg Godau: Yeah. Thank you very much, Kovid. It was a real pleasure to talk to you and certainly very happy to talk again in the future. Yeah, thank you.
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