In the face of rapid growth during a pandemic, Teamit’s Remote Performance Academy equipped Bold Commerce’s leaders with the skills they needed to be successful remote leaders.
Company: Bold Commerce
Industry: Ecommerce
Size: 400 employees and growing
Location: offices in Winnipeg, Austin, TX and employees in Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto
About Bold Commerce
Bold Commerce provides innovative ecommerce technology that enables brands to create powerful checkout experiences to unlock more revenue. More than 90,000 brands in over 170 countries trust Bold’s suite of ecommerce tools to power their online stores every day.
A team of 400 and growing, Bold has offices in Winnipeg, Manitoba and Austin, Texas as well as employees in Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto.
The Background and Challenges
At the beginning of 2020, events around the world were quickly taking a turn as the COVID-19 pandemic began to sweep across the world.
For Bold, all their employees were equipped with a laptop and the essential tools they needed to be able to work from home. When the shift to remote work began, they had 20 employees working remotely in Winnipeg and close to 10 employees working out of Austin, Texas. Although technology wasn’t an issue and part of their workforce was already distributed, the pandemic forced a shift from in-office to fully remote for the fast-growing tech company.
“With more than 70 people leaders across the organization, we knew we needed to invest in tools and training that would help them be successful in the transition to remote work,” said Bold’s Chief Human Resources Officer, Chantal Grindle.
As the state of the world was continually evolving, the emotional and mental stress on everyone was in a completely different place. For Bold, it was important to be aware and mindful of the global situation and make any necessary changes.
With the pandemic fueling the ecommerce boom, the Winnipeg-based tech company was also experiencing rapid growth. According to TechCrunch, the pandemic accelerated the shift to digital shopping by five years.
To meet with the growing needs of the business, Bold began looking for talent in Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary. With the pandemic accelerating the growth of Calgary’s tech scene, and a great talent pool that was showing interest in Bold, the pairing was a natural fit. To support recruitment in this new market, Bold enlisted the help of Teamit.
Teamit built a team of five developers and development managers for Bold. It was then that they discovered Teamit’s Remote Performance Academy.
“We were also looking for resources that would help our leaders be adaptable as we all went through this major shift. This is where the Remote Performance Academy came in,” Grindle said.
Bold already equips their leaders with Intentional Leadership Training; however, it was evident that leading face-to-face versus remotely was different and required additional skills.
The pandemic shone a light on not only what they needed to do to equip their current leaders but also what was necessary to prepare for the company’s accelerated growth and future.
The Plan for Improvement
At the early stages of the transition, three main challenges surfaced for Bold:
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How would they keep everyone together while apart?
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How would they keep everyone from feeling isolated?
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How would they support their leaders in adapting their communication style for this new way of working?
And they weren’t alone in considering these challenges, companies around the world were asking the same questions. A study by OWL Labs identified that 82% of managers were concerned about reduced employee focus and productivity in the remote work environment and 75% of managers were concerned about reduced team cohesiveness.
“We knew that we needed to evolve our communication to be successful in this new state of remote work,” said Grindle.
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According to Buffer’s The 2020 State of Remote Work, one of the largest remote work reports, 20% of remote workers found communication and collaboration to be one of the biggest challenges followed by experiencing loneliness.
Now that Bold was looking to equip their leaders with the tools and training that they needed to be successful in the new remote world, they turned to the Remote Performance Academy for a solution. Bold had two primary objectives:
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With the landscape changing, support leaders in understanding how they can be more intentional with their communication style.
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Support and invest in their leadership’s development.
Leaders were now navigating a new environment and needed to adjust how they were leading and communicating to better understand their employee’s needs.
“When the entire organization is working 100% remote, the existing remote employees saw the benefit, not missing out on collision conversations—unintentional meetings that happened when you were in the lunchroom or grabbing coffee. Our learning here will only help us in the future as we look to build out a hybrid workplace,” said Grindle.
“You cannot communicate enough”, added Laine Jubinville, Bold’s Manager of Talent Development. “We need to be very intentional when we ask 'How are you doing' and then the importance of asking coaching questions.”
Talent development also became a focus area for Bold and by investing in their employees, it would help support and guide the company through the growth they were experiencing. It would also provide leaders with self-awareness.
“We wanted to ensure leaders had the opportunity to have additional insight about how to lead differently as a remote leader and for new leaders, who didn’t have any previous leadership training, to begin providing them with tools,” said Grindle.
The Solution—Teamit’s Remote Performance Academy
Bold enrolled 74 leaders in the Remote Performance Academy. Through a custom program, each leader completed a 20-minute online, research-based assessment that identified a leader’s strengths and development needs. Each leader then received one-on-one remote leader performance coaching to review and discuss their assessment and create a personalized action plan with measurable and achievable goals and objectives.
The self-assessments were a pivotal tool for the individual leaders to identify exactly where they could personally improve in order to contribute to the overall performance of their organization.
“One of the biggest wins was self-awareness through the assessment,” said Grindle. “The Remote Performance Academy allowed leaders to become aware and reflect on how they were leading and how they could proactively adjust and lead differently in a remote context. The one-on-one coaching session was also valuable because it provided a safe space for leaders to open-up and discuss their leadership, deficiencies and the challenges they were trying to overcome.”
The assessment also known as The Distributed Leader Profiler, is a unique, empirically based leadership assessment that identifies a leader’s capabilities and predicts their distributed leadership success. Using algorithms that empirically weigh combinations of skills and traits, it predicts thirteen distinct distributed leader capabilities.
“In many of the leadership assessments, it was revealed that the distributed leader skills for meeting management, communication medium match and communication proficiency were the top areas for improvement and opportunities to explore further,” said Candace Giesbrecht, Director of the Remote Performance Academy.
Being an effective communicator in meetings was a primary goal for several leaders and it’s a common challenge we’re seeing because when we’re working remotely, we miss out on those visual cues we would normally see when we’re face-to-face. We addressed this by identifying strategies to better leverage asynchronous communication and collaboration tools in ways that were relevant for their unique roles.”
In Microsoft’s WorkLab insights report, the time spent in Microsoft Teams meetings has more than doubled globally and the average meeting is 10 minutes longer since the start of the pandemic. It also revealed that the average person is sending 45% more chats per week. The shift to a remote world has increased the frequency of meetings and underlining the importance of being an efficient and effective communicator. However, it’s also brought to light an exhausted workforce, the inability to disconnect and the pressure to keep up.
This brings us to another common theme highlighted through the one-on-one coaching, which centered around work-life wellness for not only leaders themselves but also how they could be supporting their employees. “Bold has done an exceptional job promoting wellness and offering employee programs and services to support the challenges that have emerged due to the pandemic,” said Giesbrecht. “Through the coaching we were able to determine which services and needs were best for sustaining each individual’s wellbeing.”
Organization and planfulness were also focus areas for improvement with many leaders making it a top priority. “Theoretically speaking, improving your organization skills in a distributed environment will positively impact meeting management which can also play a role in achieving work-life wellness,” says Giesbrecht.
By equipping their leaders with the critical tools and training, it has helped build a foundation and set Bold in the right direction to sustain and cultivate high-performing distributed teams as they continue to grow.
“Our time with Candace has been exceptionally valuable as she has provided useful tools that we can incorporate into our everyday lives. We are fortunate to work for a company that invests in their employees.”
—Katie Dueck, Human Resources Specialist at Bold Commerce
Looking Ahead
Bold’s 74 leaders have completed their remote leadership training, but the learning doesn’t stop there. Part of building the company’s talent development program will include one-on-one check-ins and the creation of resource kits to ensure everyone is continuing to grow, apply and reflect on the learnings the Remote Performance Academy provided.
“It’s not a do it once and forget it. It’s an investment, and a continuous conversation in development that is critical moving forward,” said Jubinville. “There are tons of tools out there that any company can use but it’s only as good as you put it to practice.”
As Bold prepares for the future of work, they are working closely with their leaders to determine how to adjust as things continue to change, while ensuring they are keeping everyone safe and aligning with all guidelines.
“We’re taking the steps now to assess how we’ll be evolving and looking at the tools and training we need to implement so that working into the next phase will be as seamless as possible,” said Bold’s Chief Human Resources Officer.
For companies considering a remote training program for their leaders and employees, Grindle says, “If you decide to go 100% remote, then you need to assess whether you’ve provided your teams with the tools to be 100% remote.”
“How we started this remote journey back in March 2020 is looking and feeling really different now. Remote work is evolving and the challenges we had back then, we don’t have now. We have new challenges such as Zoom burnout,” added Jubinville.
Looking ahead, as Bold continues to grow, the Remote Performance Academy will become part of their remote leadership onboarding program. Whether an internal employee is promoted to a leadership role or as new leaders join the Bold team, all leaders will be equipped with the skills and tools they need to be a successful remote leader.
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