Remember February? While it feels like years ago, those were exciting times for me. I had just taken over as CEO of Aternity and was in the process of rebranding the company and recruiting several key members of the leadership team. I was scheduling time to meet with as many people as I could to ramp up as quickly as possible.

Then, there were reports that a deadly virus was causing China to shut down. Then Italy. Then Europe. In just two short weeks, my colleagues and I were ordered into quarantine by local government leaders, and I was being asked to lead a company I had just joined, with a leadership team I had either never met before or had just met, through a historic downturn from the (dis)comfort of my home office.

I had been through the 2008 recession, so I wasn’t intimidated by managing through a market downturn; however, managing a company without the ability to interact or speak with people in person was a new wrinkle to the challenge.

I’ve always relied on a management philosophy built on extreme empathy to fuel my ability to collaborate, build consensus among disparate groups, and provide direct feedback in previous leadership roles. While the circumstances had changed, the basic tenets of leadership didn’t so I had to adapt.

Don’t be afraid to get personal

Good management is personal. The difference between CEOs and effective business leaders isn’t semantic. Business leaders treat everyone with respect at all times – even when their business is under duress. Do you tear people down during a crisis or are you able to unite behind a common cause?

I’ve found that there are a lot of people that long for the celebrity and perks of being a world-class CEO but very few understand the EQ the role demands. Today, business leaders can’t just roll out tech-enabled digital workspaces and a set of WFH policies and expect business to continue as usual.

Employees are living in a volatile world where the health and safety of their family is their top priority, not their career. Be flexible, be respectful of people’s situations, and keep a clear channel of communication open.

This is why it’s important for managers to make time in their schedules for personal interactions with their employees. One of the top things that people miss is small talk with their peers. To duck into someone’s office to talk about last night’s basketball game or TV show. Rather than focusing solely on the task at hand, build in time for people to chat during meetings.

It’s important that things like birthdays, work anniversaries, or other employee milestones don’t go by the wayside because people aren’t in the office. People are under an omnipresent level of stress these days so any type of personal interaction – digital or otherwise – is important.

How can we help you?

Here’s what it boils down to: treat employees like customers. Give them the emotional and technological tools they need to succeed in their remote work environment.

Whether it’s offering free subscriptions to meditation or wellness apps or moving away from traditional 9-to-5 work hours to better support remote workers, a little goes a long way. People are more disassociated from their employers than they’ve ever been, so it’s imperative that businesses remind their employees that they are not only appreciated but acknowledged.

This is why it’s also important for business leaders to communicate the company’s mission, goals, and tactics regularly. The pandemic has forever changed the world we live in and disrupted – if not fundamentally changed – many markets. Business pivots and course corrections are required for many organizations. However, these are doomed to failure if all employees don’t buy-in to the changes.

Not everyone is built for WFH

Walking the line between employee empathy and company culture is tricky in a WFH environment. People didn’t ask to bring their co-workers into their homes so while it’s uncomfortable to ask, businesses should feel comfortable instituting rules, particularly around meetings.

For instance, if someone is forced to work through lunch because of back-to-back meetings in the office, it’s perfectly ok for them to grab a quick bite during a meeting. However, given the proximity and camera angle of most webcams, it’s a completely different matter on a video conference. This is why my team and I have made video optional for all meetings.

Collaboration via webcam is new and foreign to most people. For introverts, it’s a nightmare as they literally have a camera on them for an entire conversation. Others may feel self-conscious or uncomfortable for other reasons. It’s important to respect that and implement policies that enable people to work to their preferences.

It’s important to have a strong operational cadence to ensure the conversation runs smoothly. Given the unique dynamic of talking to your computer, many people won’t feel comfortable speaking up so it’s important a moderator solicit feedback from each participant rather than asking “Anyone have anything to add?” It’s important to integrate proactive measures that help people overcome the limitations of tech-enabled meetings.

Don’t mince words

Similarly, direct and candid feedback must be delivered if people aren’t performing to expectations. Managers are often led astray when they mistake empathy for enabling. Leaders that tolerate sub-par work because they are either afraid to deliver critical feedback or don’t want to hurt people’s feelings exacerbate the situation.

While it’s not optimal to have difficult conversations over a video conference call, avoiding one just kicks the can down the road. Again, because of the lack of physical cues, leaders need to be as direct as possible to ensure employees understand the feedback and can make the necessary changes.

Managing a business environment without personal contact is challenging but not impossible. Using empathy as the foundation for any ‘new normal’ work policies gives businesses the best chance at success. Helping people through these difficult times is critical in keeping them engaged.

5 tips for global software sales my team learned the hard way

As tech companies expand their reach across the globe, it’s inevitable that some assumptions about various markets will turn out to be wrong, if you don’t rely on the knowledge and expertise of those working on this particular market.

At JetBrains, which grew from a small startup in Prague to an established company whose tools are used across 213 countries and territories, my colleagues and I had the early assumption that most developers speak English, for instance. It’s a requirement for developers at JetBrains to have good English skills, and most developers in our inner circle are fluent, so we thought it was a safe assumption to make. It isn’t.

And it’s getting even more demanding when we talk about non-technical decision-makers, which might be the ones deciding on the purchase for their technical team.

Thus, JetBrains had to learn how to localize its product, marketing, and sales strategy as it expanded. Here are the five top lessons my team and I learned from that experience — read it so you don’t waste time repeating our mistakes.

1. Start small

At JetBrains, we had organic growth across the entire globe, which means our tools were being used around the world before we started local market-specific activities. In Mainland China, which has been one of the most challenging markets to expand on, our software was used and sold prior to our local activities launch back in 2015.

That year, as a joint initiative of our Sales and Marketing departments, we launched a pilot program in the country, which is a great way to get your toes in a new market. Mainland China is a huge market, but the culture and purchasing patterns are very different from what we got used to, so we had to adapt our business approaches a lot.

Moreover,  the company was expected to communicate in Chinese rather than in English, and international credit cards are not widely available in favor of local payment methods, such as WeChat, AliPay, UnionPay, along with many other specifics.

That all meant we had to localize not just purchasing methods, sales support, and product info, but even the product itself. Only once we saw positive results from our pilot program did we scale that approach to more markets all around the globe, where we have local teams building local operations with an understanding of local business specifics.

2. Do the math

Starting small through the pilot program is important because localizing your business processes, web site, or a product is expensive and cumbersome — especially when it comes to localizing the product itself.

Our product IntelliJ IDEA is now localized to Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, which requires a lot of investment on our side. And it’s not just the upfront investment, as you can’t localize the product once and then live with it. It requires continuous updates in perpetuity.

Thus, companies need to do the math and make sure the market in question helps you enough to be worth this lift. In our case, we ran macroeconomics research internally and with third-party agencies. Through that research, we curated countries into different clusters to understand where to go.

The first goal for us was to identify low-hanging fruit where the least effort and expenses can grow revenue the most and then start from there, scaling our local marketing and sales operations country by country, while maintaining a global approach to all other markets.

3. Hire locally

Once you decide it’s worthwhile to expand into a certain market, it’s important to not assume anything. Even if you think you know the market, you probably don’t. Thus, you must hire local professionals who understand the local business.

I personally had a lot of assumptions about the Russian market, for instance, because I was born there, although I live in Germany now. But it came apparent I didn’t know how sales and marketing worked there, as I had worked internationally for many years.

Your local team should consist of a regional marketing manager and a regional sales manager to start, and then you can grow the team as required. In Greater China, we also have a developer advocate and support engineers — and we always prefer to expand the team in that order (and it generally corresponds to the market needs as we grow local operations).

In some countries, like South Korea, we also have a distributor who runs sales, marketing, and support themselves. We quite like this approach, as our partners can help us scale the business a lot, but it’s hard to find reliable partners who would be able to cover all the products and a range of activities required, not acting solely as a billing agent.

We have resellers and distributors in many countries, and while JetBrains keeps selling directly on these markets and hiring local teams, too, we rely on our partners to provide a truly local experience.

4. Be prepared for unexpected challenges

In general, the Asian market is the most complicated and the European/USA market is the easiest for us since we focused our operations there from the beginning. But despite that, we still haven’t been able to crack the code in France.

While we expected the market to be similar to Germany (due to macroeconomics similarities and comparable IT industry size), the adoption of our products is roughly four times lower there. Clearly, there are differences in the market structure itself and the way stakeholders learn about products, choose them, and promote them inside their organizations.

Obviously, we’ve made localization mistakes in other markets as well. For instance, some translations don’t make sense in a particular context (that’s why you always need to localize the experience rather than translate, and why you need to have a local team to verify the artifacts).

We had a booth at an event in South Korea with an unfortunate banner saying “PyCharm is the best IDE for pythons!” The local contractor did their best but didn’t understand the software development context well enough to localize the slogan. The lesson here is to always be prepared for challenges to pop up — there will be so many!

5. Create a blueprint

Still, we’ve managed quite some successes too, as most of the target markets we chose for local marketing and sales development are outperforming the average worldwide growth of our company revenue.

As we expanded to new markets, we’ve been able to standardize much of the localization tools, terminology, and workflows. We’ve built out these protocols internally to ensure a high level of quality.

For instance, we noticed paid events (well, at least when we had events before the pandemics) increase conversions to real participants even if tickets are cheap (we normally set a price tag of a couple of cups of coffee, which is quickly returned by the swag we gave out), while free events tend to lead to a high number of sign-ups but low turnout.

The former approach also enables predictable attendance forecasts. This has different effects in different markets, but it tends to apply more or less across the board. Some markets and strategies will be useful no matter where in the world your company is.

The bottom line is that expanding across the globe is not easy — but it can be worth it. The key is to identify the markets where the investment in localization is worth your time and effort. Then, hire local people who understand the nuance of that country.

Doing thorough research and running pilot programs are two strategies that have served us well in numerous countries, but the defining feature of global expansion is not assuming anything and learning as you go.

Still, there is no silver bullet, and you will need to find your own approaches depending on your industry, product, and business strategy. I hope that some of the JetBrains experiences I’ve shared will come in handy.

Do you need to be alone to be creative? Here’s what the experts say

Before the pandemic started, the debate between open office proponents and haters was as hot as ever, with a new day and a new ‘study’ showing favorable results for rubbing elbows with colleagues. And the next day, one professing the evils of the incessant noise machine we’d created.

Little did we know we’d soon all be doing our own unintentional ‘experiment’ into the benefits and evils of working solo.

But now, after close to two years, offices in many parts of the world are asking employees to return to work. Needless to say, this is creating some tension between those who have been twiddling their thumbs of boredom at home and those of us who will be dragging our feet back to the noisy environs of the open office space.

One category of employees who have a lot to say about this are the creatives. Some of the most famous artists, writers, and musicians in history relied on quiet and solitude to get their best work done, so how has this experience been for the designers, video editors, and office creatives of today?

In a joint study by The Drum and Adobe, titled Creativity, collaboration, and culture: the impact of working from home on marketers and marketing , 47% of creatives believe the quality of creative work has improved due to working from home. But the same amount disagreed. While only 16% felt they couldn’t work effectively from home, around 56% expect to work mostly from home in the future.

So is time alone actually better for creativity? Should we drag our creatives kicking and screaming back to the office?

Let’s dive into a few things we’ve found out about creative work:

People who prefer time alone are often more creative

Although famous writers and artists from Thoreau to Walden created some of their most famous works while in solitude, there’s still a lot of stigma facing people who prefer to spend time alone, especially in the workplace.

But, according to this University of Buffalo study , social withdrawal is positively correlated with creativity — as long as the reason for withdrawal isn’t linked to fear (shyness or avoidance).

“Over the years, unsociability has been characterized as a relatively benign form of social withdrawal. But, with the new findings linking it to creativity, we think unsociability may be better characterized as a potentially beneficial form of social withdrawal,” noted Julie Bowker, associate professor of psychology at the University of Buffalo.

Ester Buchholz, author of The Call of Solitude, notes that alone time is fuel for life.

“Life’s creative solutions require alone time. Solitude is required for the unconscious to process and unravel problems. Others inspire us, information feeds us, practice improves our performance, but we need quiet time to figure things out, to emerge with new discoveries, to unearth original answers,” notes Buchholz.

According to the Adobe study, 74% of respondents said that their company’s creative output hadn’t suffered as a result of working from home. If some employees prefer working from home, why not let them? It also helps creatives avoid unwanted distractions.

Context shifting is the enemy of deep work

You know when you’re trying to reach a tight deadline and Larry from sales asks you to draw up just a tiny, small wireframe for a desperate client? (Dammit Larry) Once you finally reconnect with your original task, it’s time for a team meeting (joy). In the end, what could’ve taken you two hours of focused work drags on for eight hours of switching between the task at hand and random distractions being thrown at you.

Cal Newport, a proponent of focused work and author of Deep Work, has a term for this — attention residue.

“Every time you switch your attention from one target to another and then back again, there’s a cost. If you constantly make ‘quick checks’ of various devices and inboxes, you essentially keep yourself in a state of persistent attention residue , which is a terrible idea if you’re someone who uses your brain to make a living,” believes Newport.

Creatives who worked from home experienced less of this. As a consequence, they were able to increase their output. According to The Drum and Adobe study, a whopping 67% of respondents reported fewer interruptions to their work when at home.

Creative work is not linear

According to the study, “For creative people, in particular, their work is not linear, so having the extra headspace and different sources of inspiration has had a positive impact on their creative output and quality of work.”

Scientific research has shown that you’re more likely to have creative flashes when you’re in the shower or doing something monotonous.

The TL;DR version is that while you’re in the midst of a problem, your prefrontal cortex region (part of the brain associated with decisions, goals, and behavior) is engaged, and you have the “default mode network” of your brain switched off. But when doing monotonous activities, your prefrontal cortex is relaxed as you’re on autopilot mode. Your brain goes into a ‘wandering’ mode, making creative connections that your conscious mind wouldn’t have come up with otherwise.

In a panel discussion titled ‘ Creatives reveal their ‘New Era Resolutions ,’ UK-based Jennifer Hayashi, associate design director at We Are Social, noted that less time spent in the confines of the office had helped her work creatively.

“I love roller skating, and I get a lot of my ideas there. During my commute, I could come up with ideas as well, but now I have different inspirations during the day which I didn’t have before, which has been mindblowing,” noted Hayashi.

Creativity can’t be fixed to a 9 to 5 schedule

But these random flashes of creativity don’t always happen during the standard working hours. According to John Mitchell, co-founder, and chief culture officer at Good Culture, bosses trying to mandate presenteeism and control employees’ time are demotivating.

“With the pandemic, there was a lost sense of control with managing people’s time. It turned out as long as they delivered the results, it doesn’t matter how people managed their time. This gave people the autonomy and freedom to be more invested in the culture and the business,” noted Mitchell.

There is a reason for taking the shackles off the fixed working hours in favor of creativity. According to Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire, authors of Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, creative people work best when they work the hours that work best for them.

“No matter when it is, individuals with high creative output will often figure out what time it is that their minds start firing up and structure their days accordingly,” notes Gregoire. Let your creatives be free to decide their schedule as long as they’re on track with work.

But team brainstorming can be fruitful in other ways

We all dread sitting in meetings that drag on for hours. Before the pandemic, this survey pointed out how 67% of employees felt meetings distracted them from doing their actual work. There was no way to avoid that in an office setup. Some have continued with that mindset using Zoom or Teams to “check-in” constantly, much to the annoyance of employees .

But, when it comes to solving tricky issues, bouncing ideas off of colleagues can not only bring new perspectives, but also help strengthen the connection between team members — something that’s been sorely lacking for many during the pandemic.

According to this study by Northern Illinois University: “[Brainstorming] can be used to simply build cohesiveness, which in turn can lessen employee turnover and increase employee commitment,” said David Henningsen, one of the study’s authors. One aspect studied by the authors was ‘piggybacking — building on the ideas of others.’ The study found that team cohesiveness was influenced by increased instances of piggybacking.

The trick for managers here is to find a balance with individual team members between time alone and time with the team and, when brainstorms do happen, making sure everyone feels included.

One of the panelists on Creatives reveal their ‘New Era Resolutions,’ Alice Watkinson, senior creative at Innocent Drinks, noted that organizations have to be structured and prepared to help introverts.

“For introverts, working remotely opens a lot of things. But when you have a lot of people on the call, and you want them to share their ideas and inputs, it’s quite intimidating for introverts to do that on the screen. So we’ve tried to see how we can open that up for everyone, whether it’s via chat or opening up the whiteboard,” noted Watkinson.

An introvert may have great ideas but in a face-to-face context, they may feel intimidated to share them. However, with online collaboration tools such as Slack , Discord, and whiteboards, where communication is text-based, introverts can be more assertive with their ideas. It’s up to the organizations to ensure the right tools and processes are in place to ensure a smooth communication channel.

So should we make our creatives come back to the office or should we continue the remote life?

According to Bart Van de Wiele, the principal solutions consultant at Adobe:

Technology has been crucial in the transformation of work from the office to work from home. However, the study also found that, while many marketers were happy to work from home, around 53% felt that it made collaboration harder. Among creatives, this figure rose to 70%.

It’s clear that hybrid working structures that take individuals’ creativity preferences into account will be the way forward. Whatever form your new work structure takes, you need to have the right processes and tech in place so that everyone’s on the same page, wherever they’re working.