“Trust and communicate clearly.”
Co-owner of Orchan Consulting, a Kuala-Lumpur based PR firm, Farrell Tan, speaks to WorkRemoteBetter.com about his remote working experience, and what it’ll take to make it work for your organisation. Read on for the full transcript.
21 May 2022
Tell us about yourself and about Orchan, and about The Third Degree.
My name is Farrell. I'm the co-founder of Orchan Consulting which is a communications agency based out of Kuala Lumpur. As of 2020 my business partner and I also started an education platform called The Third Degree. The Third Degree is primarily a platform that we hope will assist research students, primarily those who are embarking upon a post-graduate degree, PhD or Masters, someone like yourself before with their journey.
I guess when you do your masters, I guess it's pretty, I would say just an extension of doing your bachelor's whereby you still get a lot of interaction. This is, of course, for a pre-Covid. You have a lot of interaction with your lectures, and your colleagues and whatnot.
But when you do your PhD is a completely different thing because you are your thesis is extremely niche and therefore, you know, there isn't, I would say, many people that you can sort of like talk to or if you have if you have problems or if you have, if you can stuck in any shape or form.
So what we've done is that we've come up with this platform, whereby we have curated resources for, say, a person who wants to embark on a PhD; first and foremost to understand what is the journey? Like, you don't go in there with a romanticised idea that I'm gonna be a doctor and my life is going to be rosy, but understanding the process of, you know, getting your mindset moving from a bachelor student to a master student and now a PhD student. Or how to even, you know, write a research proposal and what happens if your research proposal gets rejected, how do you pull yourself up?
You know, what are the things that you will need to learn by yourself? That is not going to be taught to you by your universities or your supervisors. Also the mental health aspect of things, of being a bit more, I would say alone, in your journey because you don't have many people to talk to and all of that sort of like [placed] into a platform whereby, you know, with curated content videos.
And I think the USP is that we actually have got academics that we've brought on board from different parts of the world. That would assist a student anywhere in the world with a problem. So to us, what I think we're trying to do is that we're trying to democratise access to quality education for students that may not necessarily have the kind of access that people will assume they have.
So, you know, if you are lucky, you live in a developing nation or you live in a first world country; you have access to good universities, good infrastructure and whatnot. But what if you're a student in Africa or student iin Southeast Asia with limited access to to internet and you know, you you go to class or you're doing your PhDR masters and instead of a ratio of one to 10, maybe it's one to 50 and you don't have or, you know, or whatever it is, or you may not have a supervisor that is able to help you because they are, you know, they're not a 7-Eleven, they have to do many things, they have to research, or mark papers. They have to do administration stuff so they may not have the kind of time that you would expect from a supervisor, right? So, we came up with this idea whereby we want to help those kinds of students with those sorts of difficulties to help them with a journey.
So that they don't drop out, you know. PhD dropouts across the world range from 40% to 50%, depending on where you go. Because a lot of students go in not realising how difficult it's gonna be, not in terms of the work, but the isolation, the inability to to bounce off ideas-- the things they took for granted when they were doing their Bachelor’s or Masters. So that's what we're trying to do and we’ve had the platform up and running for about six months and we are in the process of getting in more academics.
So right now we've got academics from different parts of the world. Mostly from first tier universities. We’re connecting them with students that they traditionally will not have access to, which is what is interesting for them, as an academic. But what's interesting as a student is that you will have access to first-tier academics that you may not necessarily have access to because of where you live and, you know, and your circumstances.
So that's what we're trying to do with the platform.
Tell us about you and your team’s remote working experience.
We’ve been pseudo remote-working, or hybrid working, before it was cool! We've been doing it for the last four years plus now, so two years before the pandemic hit. I'm only speaking from my perspective and it's not reflective of all PR agencies for sure.
The clients that we were representing at the time and even now, you know, of course required us to be in contact with each other to communicate, but it doesn't require us to be in the same room brainstorming ideas and whatnot. So, you know, a lot of the things that we did as a team we were able to do it without having to see each other 24/7, right?
So we made a conscious decision to start doing [hybrid working] bit by bit from 2017, just to test the waters to see whether it worked and if it was okay. And of course there were teething problems at first, people not being used to it.
So, we made sure that we started coming in once or twice a week, just to at least, to show face, right? For people to become comfortable with it. So, from two times a week, it became once a week in the office, and then it became once or twice a week for lunch where we ate and we talked about work.
So, you know, we did it gradually. We wanted to test the waters and we were glad that we did it because when the pandemic hit, we were strapped, we were not thrown into the deep end of the ocean.
Because we were already doing it, right? And I think a lot of people were doing what we did two years before, in terms of like, you know, doing it week by week and whatnot. So I think in that respect it has been quite good.
I would say, for people who had to do it because of the pandemic, the first year, the teething problems were there. But it's harder to generalise because, you know, first of all, it depends on the dynamics of the team. How big is the team? And what kind of work do you do, right?
And if it means that you need to collaborate a lot more together, then it's harder when it's remote, for sure. I think, luckily for us, as I said, you know our clients were the type for which we were able to do things remotely.
We were quite lucky that our staff members, too, you know, were able to change their home dynamics to fit into the work dynamic. I mean, it's harder if you happen to live in a house with 10 people and then you're sharing the network and then there's noise.
But for us, we're lucky that our staff members had their own room, their parents kind of gave them a bit of freedom or they were renting a space so they would not be interrupted in that sort of manner.
So for us, it kind of worked out well.
What were some of the teething problems that you mentioned earlier?
The best ideas [come] when you are having a casual conversation with your colleagues. And those were the times whereby when we were stuck with ideas we would just go out to a mamak stall [Editor’s note: mamak stall are casual eateries in Malaysia serving Indian-Muslim food, usually open 24 hours] downstairs, have a drink and then just clear our minds and then maybe when we're having a conversation that's not related to work, something might spark.
I think that was the part that I think people kind of missed, and found it a bit hard because yeah, we can jump on a zoom call now but it's still the nuances that get lost. We had a couple of team members who joined us, interns we signed on in January that would commence their internships in March.
And then it was the lockdown and we didn’t even have the chance to really, like, sit down because we couldn't do it.
So they were, essentially the main guinea pigs to the [hybrid working] and the first couple of weeks was hard because they didn't know us very well, they didn't know our our style, they found, you know, that they don't understand the difference between our version of banter versus being serious.
So it took them a while to understand it and, you know, but once they got into the whole momentum, it wasn't that difficult for them. They are also, you know, not as extroverted --I wouldn't say introverts, maybe a bit of both. They quite like the fact that they could be more themselves when they talk to us, they don't feel so shy, you know, as opposed to, when you are in close-knitted, sometimes you have a big group, you don't want to air your ideas because you may think that they're not valid or we may put them down.
I feel that the plus side too is a fact that they were more open to sharing. Maybe the screen helped give them a bit of a shield.
That’s a really interesting point you brought up with how some people are more comfortable sharing ideas in a Zoom meeting than a physical meeting. But do you find they are more productive at home working remotely?
I guess it depends on the word productive. And so for us, we've always been the type whereby, we say, “you know your responsibilities”, and we try to treat you as adults.
We always [tell our staff] that everyone has a role to play and if you don't do your work according to your timeline, it impacts everyone else. We always tell them, “we won’t chase you for things you have to do, but if you're given a task within a timeline, you know, just make sure you do it by the stipulated timeline, right?
So, you know, if you want to finish early the day before your deadline and you want to spend the next day rushing through it, that's up to you while some people will prefer to do it bit by bit.
So everyone has their own style. But I think for us, what we tell them is that we believe that we’ve given enough of a lead time for you to plan how you want to do, [and after that] it is up to you. So in that sense, it has not impacted productivity.
We may have had a couple of times whereby they misconstrued instructions, because they asked the wrong question or misunderstood the task. And because they didn't know how to ask questions, and they did the task the way they thought was asked of them, they did it wrong. But once they learn to ask the right sort of questions to get the right answers then it was a bit more smooth-sailing.
That's an interesting point you brought up about what the what is defined as productivity. One of the things that, you know, people criticise about remote work was that, “Oh yeah, people are not as productive when they are being supervised in office?” Do you think that that is a valid reason from the employer perspective? And perhaps you can share with me your thoughts about the trust factor with remote working.
I think you need to have a level of trust with your employees.
And I think it is easier if you are a smaller team than a bigger team, but it's very hard to generalise businesses. Some clients are big, up to 300 people and you know, for them they prefer to go back to office because they feel that because of what they do, where a team thas multi-departments or are a part of a chain, it makes more sense to discuss ideas in [the office], it’s easier to bounce ideas than having 20 people on a Zoom call.
So I understand where they're coming from, but for me, for businesses like ours, where it's a bit smaller, I guess it's a bit more manageable. But I think beyond all that, I think it's just a matter of how well you trust your employees.
Again, you know, if you have a big office, and turnover is high, it's harder to be trustworthy but when you are a core team of maybe 10 or 15 and you've been working together quite a while, I guess it's easier to to have that sort of you know to make sure that things don't get lost in the whole.
Yes, the connection is the key. Now we come to about managing perception about remote work. What’s going on with Apple?
I don't know whether the original plan of being able to work remotely was just lip service or it was just something that they (Apple) had to do given the circumstances, you know. And I think them asking people to come back when they've been so publicly out there talking about the remote working, I think it's a huge PR disaster.
You don't, first of all, announce it and then retract. It's like me inviting you to go to [press] junket and promising access to the VP and providing you a business class ticket and a stay in a presidential suite and then when you accepted it, I'll tell you, “Oh you’re only gonna get the marketing manager, you're flying economy and you’re staying in a basic room.”
Yeah. So, I can understand why their staff gets upset because I think again when they announced it, maybe the plan was to allow it, but maybe circumstances changed in the interim for them to then retract it. But I guess right now regardless of the situation, it's a big boo-boo for them.
You know, for me as a PR person,once you say it, you got to find a way to honour it or else you're gonna get backlash, right? And with regards to Airbnb I think it's quite clever, I think it's quite opportunistic to jump on the bandwagon.
I mean they probably already doing it. It is just them, going on record to go, “You know what? We’re allowing it.” It’s like me going: “I'm allowing myself to work remotely when I've been doing it for the last two years.”
So I think maybe that was more of a PR stunt than anything else.
How do you think the messaging or the tone for any company, whether big or small, should be? Like, the key element they must keep in mind when they're trying to communicate their policies about remote / flexible working.
I think this whole pandemic kind of caught everybody by surprise. So I don't know if any company would have had a manual or like a blueprint for something such as this. It’s like when we had our first ever plane crash, right? [Editor’s note: Malaysia’s airline MH370, which disappeared en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur in March 2014, and has never been found]
Everyone was pointing fingers, they should have done this, they should have done that. Yeah, they should have, to be honest, but it's not as if they've had any experience before. There’s never been a plane missing, and so many were very harsh on them.
So when the second plane [MH17] was shot down, they didn't learn from what had happened, that was their mistake, you know?
There is no way anyone could have had a manual or could have had a blueprint, but I think if they were fast enough. where you have many people having specialised roles, they should be able to turn out a manual. But there is not a one-size-fit-all approach if that makes sense.
Do you think there are any elements employers should keep in mind when they are trying to communicate to the employees about flexible working slash remote working?
Well, as much as I like to say empathy and common sense, you know, at the end of the day corporates are corporates regardless, right? And they are, you know, people are a part of the whole, and just a cog in the whole scheme of things. But I think if they as a company or as a brand, they practise that, I think that will translate to the people working on the blueprints or manual, as it were.
At the end of the day, you may empathise with remote workers, and you may understand where they're coming from,but if you are the only person fighting for it within an organisation, it's going to be futile as well. So ultimately it depends on the dynamics of organisation more so than the people working on the SOPs.
Last question. What are some of your top tips for working remotely?
We have to treat this as if it's a work thing, right? You know, for us, we're business owners. So technically, we work all the time but we do encourage them to have a cut-off time in terms of their work, of course, but again you know, we don't live in an ideal world, you’re a journalist, you know, if there's something important that has to be done, it has to be done, right?
So, you know, for us we try to to tell them, like, whatever it is that you do, have a cut-off time, you know, so that you try to have a bit of a balance.
I mean, it's hard enough when you're working from home, because where do you draw the line between your bastion of privacy versus work, right? So you need to find a way.
I've separated my workspace downstairs so that I can turn off the lights and go upstairs and don't feel like I'm working from home. So you don't really feel like your lives are intersecting, you know, and if you need to ask questions we’re on WhatsApp. We can jump on a Zoom if you want to see my face.
But we also leave them be if they need time to process because nobody likes having someone breathe down their necks. So it's finding that sort of balance where you can do this on your own but if you have a problem, message me and we can talk over the phone or a Zoom call.
So I think it's just finding what works within your own organisation.
There are so many different tools, like Slack, on different project management tools, but we use voice notes often and I guess it’s just to use whatever tools at your disposal; as long as the message is clear and it gets through, the format or the the tools can be anything really.
