Bill Kerr: Remote work is becoming the norm for more and more occupations. So does it matter where a remote worker lives? My guest today argues that it does. Aaron Bolzle is the executive director of Tulsa Remote, a project at the George Kaiser Family Foundation. Tulsa Remote is one of a growing number of public and private programs aiming to lure remote workers away from high price talent clusters. Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I'm your host, Bill Kerr. Tulsa remote challenges the notion that remote and virtual must equal placeless. The highly selective program, which awards individuals $10,000 towards relocation, focuses on creating a supportive ecosystem. The emphasis is on weaving a social fabric among new arrivals and within the wider community. Aaron joins me to discuss the keys to successful remote work, its large economic contributions to Tulsa, and the challenges of fostering community and integration within the local society. Welcome, Aaron.

Aaron Bolzle: Thanks so much, Bill. I'm really excited to be here today.

Kerr: Aaron why don't you just start with giving us a rundown about Tulsa Remote, how it came to be and also tell us a little about yourself.

Bolzle: Sure. Well, those two things come hand in hand. I'm originally from Tulsa. I grew up here and, like many kids who grew up in middle America, I left the state to go to school. For me, that was actually Boston. I went to Berklee College of Music. After I graduated from Berklee, I got a job in New York city. From New York city, I ended up getting a job at Apple in Silicon Valley and spent about 10 years in San Francisco, working at Apple and also consulting. After a few years of consulting, I realized that I didn't need to be in San Francisco—one of the most expensive cities in the country—for my job. And my family wasn't there, either. So I started considering where I wanted to live and I was excited to realize that Tulsa was a really great option for me. I had been able to see all of the development and growth of the community over the last decade as I came home to visit for holidays or family events. And I was really excited of getting back to the city and digging in and trying to provide my own impact into the community. So I moved back and I started consulting with George Kaiser Family Foundation. George Kaiser Family Foundation is a nearly 4-billion-dollar foundation based here in Tulsa, whose mission is to make Tulsa the best place for a child to be born, grow, and succeed. They had been considering a lot of different programs to help make sure that the community was the most vibrant and inclusive place for a child to grow up in. And, obviously, the business opportunities that exist in the community is an extremely important part of that. So I started consulting with them on recruitment and retention efforts. Other individuals within the foundation had been looking at different initiatives across the country and we analyzed what was going on in Tulsa and the obstacles that we had here and came up with Tulsa Remote as a way to bring really talented people to Tulsa—who were excited to find a better quality of life, who didn't have to be sold, not only on a city, but also a job, because they got to bring their own job with them.

Kerr: Aaron, when people are trying to decide where to live in Tulsa itself, do you provide any guidance?

Bolzle: We try to provide exposure for the participants on all the places to live. We really let them choose their own housing situation. We think that's important for a couple of different reasons. When we first launched the program, we thought about building a relationship with a specific apartment complex and having people live there. But as we grew the program, first of all, that became impossible to do at one place because of the program size. But secondly, our goal is to truly integrate the individuals into Tulsa. And if you put them in a place where they're all together, there's less likelihood that they're going to integrate to other locals. And so we have a housing portal on our website that helps give them information about the apartment options. We have a realtor who we partnered with who just gives really great information about the community, but we don't really direct them to one area or another. The only requirement is that they live within the city of Tulsa. We've also worked with a number of apartment complexes in the area to have special terms for the Tulsa Remote participants. We want Tulsa Remote participants to move to Tulsa, feel comfortable in spending some time to get to know the community before they purchase a home. And so a lot of apartment complexes that have partnered with us allow participants to end their lease with 30- or 60 days’ notice on purchase of the home without penalty, which gives, again, people the freedom to come in, live in an apartment, get to know the community and not feel like they have to wait out the entire year before they purchase a home.

Kerr: This sounds like a very innovative policy and I want to unpack a lot of different things about it. Maybe you can tell us a little bit, though, some examples of the “remoters” and their experiences. Let’s bring at least a podcast-esque face to this program.

Bolzle: Sure. So I should probably give you a little bit more detail as well about the logistics of the program. Because I had spent so much time living on the coast and I had been working remotely, and I had moved from place to place. I had firsthand experience on some of the obstacles that came when you transition into a new community. And so we built this program really focused on removing any barriers that exist when somebody chooses to move to a new city. There are the financial burdens of moving, which is what the $10,000 is supposed to help alleviate. Somebody isn't going to move to a city that they don't want to be in for a year simply for $10,000, especially, after taxes and moving expenses. But it does remove the risk for that individual. The other elements, as you mentioned, the community integration and the support as those individuals come into the community, I really do believe are the highest selling points of the program and what's made us as successful as we have been in attracting just really talented individuals. Some of the amazing people that I can talk about who have who've taken it on this offer and come into our community are definitely getting integrated in a way that we just never really expected and involved in every aspect of the community from civic to philanthropic, to just volunteering their own time, to help teach disadvantaged kids debate, and other really fun activities. So one of the first people that I can think of is a gentleman named Obum, who came from California. He was originally from Ferguson and moved out to California. He and his wife wanted to get out of the Los Angeles area because they just felt like the strain of life was so hard that they were really looking for a way to have a positive impact in the community. And it was just so difficult to do that with the strain of day to day life in LA. They came back—and people can talk a good game—but the minute they got here, it was unbelievable how quickly they started going to work on trying to make a positive impact. And I think that anybody in the community who has met Obum has seen him as an extremely positive addition to our community. We've had Harlem Globetrotters who applied and got into the program. We've had doctors. We've had attorneys. We have really just amazing individuals from all over the country. What made this program really wonderful in the first year is just the pool of applicants that we received. We had applicants from every single state and over 155 countries. And with over 10,000 applications in less than 10 weeks, when we shut the application process down in the first year, that gave us an amazing opportunity to be very selective in the types of individuals that we brought in. And we've just really been blown away by the caliber of the individual that's come.

Kerr: It's been said that your program is more selective than Stanford or than Harvard or some of the other sort of schools out there. And I'd like to think a little bit more about how you manage that selection process. What are you screening on? And you talk about diversity—what's diversity at your aiming [for] in your cohorts? Because I think many people, when they first hear about this program will be like, “Oh, what they're trying to do is take a chunk of the Silicon Valley engineer and bring them to Tulsa.” But it sounds like from your examples, you've got a lot of different types of occupations that you're trying to foster in Tulsa.

Bolzle: By creating an ecosystem that hopefully one day will be an organic lead growing ecosystem that's attracting people from all over the world to Tulsa, I think diversity in industry and background in interest is just so incredibly important because it's the environment that people want to be a part of. So the application process has evolved. But when we first launched it, our main focus was to try to remove as many unconscious and implicit biases that existed in the application process. And so we don't ask a lot of questions about background, about traditional pedigree questions. We really focus on whether or not an individual qualifies to work in Tulsa from a company based outside of Oklahoma and whether or not they want to have a positive impact in their community. And that's really by whatever way they define the term “positive impact” and whatever is really exciting to them. And so we have this amazing cohort of individuals that represent different ideologies, different backgrounds, tons of different industries. And that leads to something that I think is really additive to a city, by bringing people in from all over the country, all over the world, you're providing connection to companies and industries that historically haven't existed within the community and potentially bringing somebody who looks like them, who works in the industry that they're excited about and providing a platform for them to connect that will ultimately lead to someone feeling more of a sense of hope that they can achieve what they want to achieve without having to have been born of privilege, and have means to go out and get it.

Kerr: Since this is so important for the program structure and success, talk us through a little bit about how you're assessing—as you're selecting just a small percentage of the applicants—this willingness to give back into the community. And then also, once somebody has been selected and they moved to Tulsa, what do you do to help create that social fabric and help them physically settle into the Tulsa community?

Bolzle: So in the beginning the…every applicant actually fills out an application at tulsaremote.com. And that application, as I mentioned, asks some fairly basic quantitative questions, but then there are some qualitative questions that are asked that that our team really reviews. “What is your biggest question about Tulsa?” “Why do you think you're a good fit for the program?” “Our program is focused on ensuring that Tulsa is the most diverse and inclusive community possible. How would you add to that?” “Do you want to volunteer?” “What kind of volunteer work do you currently do?” “What are you passionate about?” And what I find to be really interesting is just the amazing spread of answers that we received and the amount of attention and time certain individuals took in filling this out. So you can tell pretty quickly whether or not somebody spent significant time thinking of and writing about the things that they're passionate about. That really spoke to our team and made a decision as to whether or not we wanted to take them to the next step. And the next step would be a video interview. So we've done well over a thousand video interviews this year alone of potential participants. So, selected as a semifinalist, they're invited to do a video interview and we do 20-minute interviews. Once those individuals get through the video interview, a group on our team works together to make decisions about who we think would be really great additions. And so those individuals who we think would be great fit are invited to come visit Tulsa. And then we give them an opportunity to get to know us, get to know the current cohort and get to know the city without us holding their hand through it. We really want to talk about the Tulsa of today, the Tulsa of yesterday, and the potential for a Tulsa tomorrow. And I think that it's actually that authenticity and vulnerability about Tulsa's past, the difficult conversations that are happening today, and the real opportunity for what Tulsa can be in the future that gets people excited about coming and digging in and being a part of the positive change. So after that visit our team makes a decision and we invite those individuals to come and join our cohort. We're at a point now where we have a rolling cohort where we bring people in on a regular basis. There isn't just a start date. And I think that that's important because if you're trying to simplify the process and remove barriers for people moving into a city, setting a date for them to start as is a difficult barrier for a lot of people. So you asked about what we do to integrate individuals once they actually come into Tulsa. We focus on supporting through connection, not service. So our team's real focus is understanding the interests and priorities of the participants that come through our program and getting them connected to the right organizations or individuals in Tulsa that helped them feel involved in the community and give them an opportunity to influence the areas that they're really interested in. So that comes to having regular meetups with organizations in town, having one-on-one conversations with the members, providing platforms for the members to get connected to each other, to also help out. So now that we've been running this program for a little bit and we have such a large group of individuals who are already in Tulsa, there's a really wonderful support network built into Tulsa Remote. So we have online platforms for the participants to communicate with each other and give support. But then we also have online platforms that allow the participants to get connected to other local Tulsans. We have had obvious complications that have come with Covid-19 that have prevented us from doing as many in-person events in the way that we'd like to, but we're still finding ways to make sure that those individuals get connected.

Kerr: Let me continue on the Covid theme that you brought up, which there's something very special about how this program is connecting into the community. But this also needs to be successful—just from the pure remote work perspective—and many of us who may one day no longer be remote working or partially remote working are at the moment fully remote working. Any advice as to what you suggest constitutes successful remote work, what does the organization need to have in place or the individual need to have in place to really make this a successful employment model?

Bolzle: Even before the Covid-19 pandemic we were seeing a huge rise in remote work across the world. As far as tips on how to ensure that it's a successful model, it's really like any kind of other infrastructure, you have to ensure that you are being thoughtful about building out support for your employees. And that comes down to communication strategies, empowerment structures, ways to ensure that your team members have good work-life balance. One of the biggest obstacles, I think, that remote teams have when they first start working remote is, is not having a structured communication strategy, understanding the appropriate ways to communicate at different times and on different topics. And also, there being this perception from leadership that the remote team is not working hard, and in reality, remote workers historically work longer hours than those who are working in the office and they have a harder time separating work from personal life. And I think that Covid-19 has exposed a lot of those issues to the average person. So they're now seeing these obstacles that the average remote worker has dealt with for a long time. At the beginning of the pandemic, companies quickly leveraged for remote work in order to keep work moving forward, but it was under a crisis scenario and so there was very little infrastructure built out. It really isn't a great representation of remote work and the possibilities of success through distributed teams. As companies continue to fluctuate between remote work and trying to move people into the office—which I do believe is going to continue to be a fluctuation over and over—those companies that proactively start building out communication strategies and infrastructure to support distributed teams effectively by learning from those companies that have been doing it for years, I think those are going to be the companies that truly succeed and are successful with the major transition that we've seen from Covid-19 with remote work.

Kerr: It sounds like you're moving from a scenario where companies are hesitant about remote work—it's kind of a secondary option—to one where they're going to increasingly play to win in the remote workspace.

Bolzle: I think that remote work has always been seen as something that has some really amazing advantages to it for major companies. First and foremost, you have the ability to attract talent independent of where they live and without having to convince them to move to your city, which sometimes is an extraordinarily expensive move for them, not only in the cost of moving but also with the cost of living. But also, there's other efficiency opportunities and there's other inclusion opportunities that are extraordinarily important. There was a risk for major companies making the transition to remote work and distributed teams. And my experience working at a major tech company in Silicon Valley is a lot of the times leaders are playing not to lose—not playing to win. And so to push for such a huge change brings on a lot of risk for those leaders. Well, Covid-19 removed that risk from those leaders—completely removed that risk. It is now more risky to try to move your employees back into the office too quickly than it is to leverage remote work.

Kerr: And let me ask you now to think about the George Kaiser Family Foundation, who is supporting this work and paying the $10,000 for the remote workers to relocate to Tulsa. How do they measure the overall success of this program and can you tell us some of the outcomes you've achieved so far?

Bolzle: There are a few different ways for measuring success on a program like Tulsa Remote. I think the short-term success is exposure. There are so many individuals that had a misunderstanding of what Tulsa the city was like. Leaders for the last few decades have been working tirelessly to make this city the kind of place that individuals such as myself and other younger talent want to move to. And I think people had a misconception about that. So Tulsa Remote really did do a great job of exposing the world to a city that's been growing in the right direction. With the launch of Tulsa Remote we saw nearly 3 billion in reach worldwide, with all of the media exposure. And without any kind of marketing or advertising dollars spent we had a huge audience and I think that's a really amazing job of telling the story of Tulsa. The mid-term benefit is individuals coming and choosing to stay longer than the year that they committed to living in Tulsa through the program. Because if we are investing in these individuals and supporting them to get integrated and they choose to stay, that has a really huge impact on our community, right? Economically it has an enormous impact on the community, but culturally and socially, these individuals are bringing skill sets and talents and connections that didn't exist in our community before. There are number of companies that never had a footprint in Oklahoma that now do because of Tulsa Remote and because of that they've had to set up tax structure for the State, which means that HR teams list Oklahoma as a place that they can recruit and that's a huge benefit. Long-term, I would say that the continued social and economic push that these individuals are having within our community are going to be felt for decades. These individuals, the vast majority are choosing to stay after their first year indefinitely. A number of them have purchased homes. From the first year I believe we had about 30 percent of the people buy a home in the first year which is pretty amazing. That shows the level of commitment that people are making in the community.

Kerr: You have a selection process that can only take some small fraction less than 10 percent of those that apply. Do you have any that are crashing the party so to speak saying, "You didn't give me the $10,000 but I'm moving to Tulsa anyway?"

Bolzle: Yeah, there are a number of people that we have met who decided to move to Tulsa because they had seen the program, applied for the program, didn't get in, and still decided they want to move to Tulsa. There are people who during the interview say, "If you accept me into the program, I cannot wait to be part of the community, but I've already made the decision that I'm moving to Tulsa." It really does become an exposure thing when people see the quality of life that exists here. It's not about cost of living. Cost of living is a benefit, right? An additional benefit. But what people are really looking for is quality of life and access to really wonderful things and Tulsa has that in spades. And I know that's a surprise to a lot of people. The number one new brewery in the country was American Solera in 2016, which opened just a few years ago here in Tulsa. It was the number two best new brewery in the world. The number one coffee roaster in the country was from Tulsa last year. The art scene in Tulsa is incredible. We have one of the top 15 ballets in the world. We have some of the most amazing museums in the country. We have the largest collection of Native American art anywhere in the world—outside of the government—here in Tulsa. So there's a lot of things that make this city a really wonderful place. And remote workers who have the flexibility to move are honestly looking for a place where they don't feel like they're going to be seen as a negative to the community.

Kerr: Yeah, Aaron, the personal side of this story is obviously dramatic, but it also sounds like you're engaged in what I'm going to call “city branding,” so trying to raise the stature of Tulsa as a whole. There's 330, 350 large metropolitan areas around the country and then there's probably of those, let's say 10 or 20 that are in that Denver, Austin, Silicon Valley type. Any just broader advice about city branding if you're out of that top sort of 20 metropolitan areas and you're trying to do something like Tulsa and raise the profile?

Bolzle: Yeah, I've got plenty of things that I could suggest. First and foremost, I'm a big believer that a rising tide lifts all ships, especially when it comes to this topic. I don't think it's sustainable for people to believe that the true quality of life and the opportunity to effect positive change only exists in extremely expensive cities on the coasts. I think that there are a ton of really wonderful cities and my suggestion to those other cities is really to pay attention to the reality that all we really want is to have a sense of belonging. And our program's thesis is that there is a benefit to communities providing that sense of belonging. And so, if you focus on a transactional aspect of a program, the relationship—first of all, it's going to attract people who are only interested in the transaction—and the relationship is going to last as long as the transaction lasts. But if you focus on something bigger than that and you highlight the things that truly make your community special, then you have an opportunity to attract people by removing barriers and then truly connect them in something that will organically grow. If you focus on cost of living and you focus on transactional and incentives, that's what you're going to get. If you focus on community, making a difference, having a positive impact, that's honestly what you're going to get.

Kerr: Aaron, what's the scale that you envision for Tulsa Remote, say over the next three to five years? How many remoters do you want to be drawing in per year and is there also some point at which you might just be declaring victory, so to speak, and pulling the program back and letting it continue on, just organically?

Bolzle: Well, I think we can declare victory already, in the fact that we've got incredible individuals that are living in Tulsa that wouldn't be living here had it not been for Tulsa Remote. We started this program off very small. We thought we would bring in 20 or 25 people the first year. But after the caliber of individual and the volume of individuals who applied for the program, we thought the best thing to do was to expand the program, and so we grew it to a hundred people in the first year. And I'm glad that we still kept it relatively small because we wanted to ensure that we would be able to live up to the promise that we were giving to not only the participant, but also the community. We wanted to ensure that we weren't developing out a subculture or that we weren't displacing individuals. We were focused on ensuring that these individuals got integrated and understood what we were trying to accomplish with this program.And as we've moved on to additional years, the second year, we grew the program to invite at least 250 people. Again, a relatively small number of individuals considering a metro area of a million people, but still enough that we're building out a community where people can immediately come and get connected. In future years, I think we'll continue to expand the program as we build out infrastructure and process and as we have more and more ambassadors who are individuals who have come through the program before who've chosen to stay here. It just ensures that people get connected more quickly. As far as choosing a time where we don't bring in people anymore, I don't know if that's something that I'm thinking about right now. I think that Tulsa's infrastructure is such that we could support quite a large increase in volume of population without seeing any kind of significant disruption to the existing community. Tulsa has an enormous infrastructure. It is a large city and there's a really amazing opportunity to do quite a bit of infill and re-densify and reorganize the city and if Tulsa Remote can be a part of that, then I would like it to continue to be so. I could see ourselves in five- or 10 years focusing on other aspects of remote work. But our goal is really to create an ecosystem that attracts remote workers to Tulsa, inconsequential as to whether or not they get the $10,000. So I think that Tulsa Remote is going to continue to grow and focus on other aspects of building that remote ecosystem. And to what extent we continue to push the $10,000 to move to Tulsa and the volume at which we do that is always going to be dependent on the signals that we're getting from the community in real time.

Kerr: Aaron, any final advice for city officials and also just the listeners to this podcast that are interested in learning more about your model and also just from your model, things that they can be doing?

Bolzle: I would say that my advice to people, again, is to focus on something more than just the transactional aspect of incentivizing somebody to move to your community. Truly try to focus on building a support network for once that individual gets into your community. If you don't have the resources to support that individual after they come here, don't incentivize them to come in the first place, because there are going to be obstacles that come when they move into your community and they need your support and your help in getting them connected and integrated. So that would be my biggest piece of advice. I would also say that diversity and inclusion are incredibly important parts of any kind of initiative and it's not just about checking a box. It is about understanding, first of all, what's right, and secondly, the fact that the audience that you're going after knows that it's right as well and are very keen to ensure that you have a truly diverse, inclusive, and equitable program. So don't think of DEI as something that's just a box to check. Think of it as an integral part of everything that you do.

Kerr: Aaron, thanks so much for joining us today to talk to about what Tulsa Remote is doing and what cities all across the countries can learn from it.

Bolzle: Hey, thank you so much for having me. It was my pleasure.

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