Being Remote First

What is the difference between remote-friendly and remote first companies?

For ease of comparison, this underlying motivation can be categorised asbeing either remote-friendly OR remote-first. The basic difference isthat in the former we would choose to "allow" employees to work remotely rather than "empowering" them to do so, as in the latter, the case ofremote first companies. Being remote-friendly results in remote teammembers falling to the bottom 😮.

Since, it might not be entirely clear why this would happen, let's try to look at this through anexample of a remote-friendly culture:

Consider your weekly ormonthly in-office team meetings with remote team members joining in oncall. It is very likely that side conversations spring up naturally,with dialed-in members losing lot of context and ultimately gettingmarginalised in the conversations. Haven't we all experienced this atsome point?

This context enables us to put Eric Yuan's (Zoom'sCEO) following comment in perspective, as it is not a simple decision to just "allow" his team to start working remotely from tomorrow.

"If we were to start over I would have built Zoom fully remote. It's too expensive here now."– @ericsyuan CEO of @zoom #Emerge2019 /via @michaelglena

— Andreas Klinger 🏝 (@andreasklinger) November 7, 2019

How do we build a truly remote-first culture?

Building a remote-first culture, as the name suggests, involves designingprocesses that are first inclusive of remote employees, rather than that being an afterthought. Here are some points from experts at remotefirst companies to set the right tone:

1. Be intentional: According to Darren, All Remote Culture Curator at Gitlab, the key forevery company looking to go remote is to be highly intentional abouteverything. It is very easy for individuals and companies to default toprocesses that would work in a typical co-located setting, which can bevery dangerous. Therefore, a conscious and intentional approach toeveryday work is needed to make remote work successful.

You could listen to him share this specific feedback here: Link

From the employer’s standpoint, two things come to mind. You need to beextremely intentional about informal communication. And this is a bigone because when you are in a co-located setting, people tend to crosspaths so they can more naturally develop relationships in and outside of work which generally helps the morale of the company. In a remotesetting, you need to be intentional about this. So you need to weavethings like coffee chats, group social calls, team social calls, company calls. You need to weave that into the culture and carve out timecompany-wide to make this a thing.

- Darren Murph, Head of Remote at Gitlab

2. Default to videoconferencing for meetings: Justine Jordan, Head of Marketing at HelpScout, put it beautifully in a report prepared by Trello. She essentially suggested that if even asingle person is remote for a particular meeting, then everyone elsealso moves to a remote approach. This ensures a level playing field forall, where ideas and information can be consumed in an equal fashion.

Unless every person is in the same room, all meetings are held over videoconference. We’ve all been that one person dialing into a call only tohear a room full of noise, echo, and side conversations on the otherend. It’s a terrible experience. So when one person is “remote” for ameeting, everyone is.

- Justine Jordan, Head of Marketing at HelpScout

3. Team offsite bonding: It is important for remote workers and in-office employees to get tomeet each other outside the digital setting. Apart from actually getting to know people's personalities and forming personal bonds, this allowsfor them to also exchange perspectives. This naturally improvesproductivity and collaboration in remote-first companies as nowindividuals can relate to the people they are working with at a muchbetter level.

The Retreats are huge. If wedidn't do that, we would have lost a lot of people. But because they got to know me, my co-founder, their teams, the managers, developers, eachother - it brings out a sense of belonging. It is only for a week, butit is really big!

- Dave Nevogt, Co-founder & CEO of Hubstaff