If ‘Software is Eating the World’, your office is also on the menu

March 2020: Companies like Salesforce, Stripe, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and others are having their employees cut travel and work from home in reaction to a possible pandemic. Nine years since software started “eating the world” (Marc Andreessen’s oft-quoted essay), your office is now also on the menu. With companies leaning into distributed work as a precautionary measure, will we be able to get the remote work genie back in the bottle?

I’m Nate McGuire, founder of Mayven, a 100% remote design and engineering agency with over 50 people, where we help Silicon Valley brands and startups scale. To support our team, we also built our agency’s operating system, Buildstack, which helps remote services teams run their business. I’ve been working remotely for 10 years and see companies of every size struggle in silence because they don’t realize that they are, in fact, a remote company.

Darren Murph, Head of Remote at GitLab, the world’s largest and fastest growing all-remote company, joins me in this discussion. He’s worked remotely for 14 years in all stages of remote. In his current role, he works to empower more people and companies to go remote, implement better ways of working, and equip his team with the tools and processes they need to thrive in an officeless environment.

Here, Darren and I explore strategies to create a remote and distributed culture based on our observations spanning across companies sized from 1 to 1000+.

When we talk with friends who have to go into the the office, what do they complain about? The commute. People want to be working remotely in a digital economy because it eliminates one of the worst parts about work — the commute. Many employees would work remote in a heartbeat if only the company and culture supported the transition to go remote.

The average American employee commutes the equivalent of 19 full working days per year.

Remote teams:

• Save overhead on offices
• Have higher worker productivity
• Better voluntary retention
• Are inherently more diverse

So, how do you create a remote first culture?

Build the foundation: Company size, 0–50

Start by building good habits. When the company is small, it’s important that the foundation is strong as it is the base from which your company’s remote culture will grow. So, it’s most important for founders or early team members to:

• Focus on excellent written communication
• Establish company norms on async versus synchronous communication, and when each is preferred
• Make it easy for new team members to be remote by supplying equipment and providing an office stipend if they don’t have a good spot to work from home
• Document as much as possible about processes and customers in order to onboard new team members quickly and easily
• Find a way to meet in real life! We’ve had big meetups and we’ve also flown around the world to see our team. The point here is to meet, share a meal, and finally see each other in person.

Starting to scale: Company size, 50–1000

As companies grow, especially those that didn’t start remote, there will be opportunities to foster a remote first culture that meaningfully benefits the company’s bottom line, as well as team morale. By incorporating a few small changes, the company can enable their workers to work how and when they want, without sacrificing productivity.

• Group meetings should be fully remote if one person is remote. No 10 people in a conference room and 1 person on Zoom. Everyone on the meeting should zoom into the meeting.
• Document norms around time zones and when the team will respond to notifications. If Luke needs to pick up his daughter from school at 2pm PST every day, know that he’ll be back online later to respond.
• Use remote as a competitive advantage. When hiring remotely, the world is your talent pool. Not only is the talent enormous outside of typical tech hubs, but Remote-first is a highly sought after benefit for knowledge workers.
• Move away from the mindset that everyone needs to be at HQ. In fact, maybe get rid of your HQ — you’d probably save $$$$$$$$$ lots of money. IRL Offices are expensive and the costs saved can be spent on retention or a new hire.
• When meeting in real life, focus on creating experiences for small teams within an org, to keep logistics and costs manageable.

Remote at scale: Company size, 1000+

In general, a company seeking to transition to remote should actively avoid or remove common hybrid-remote pitfalls by whatever means necessary. Moreover, it’s important for leaders to put themselves in the shoes of a prospective job seeker who will ask very specific questions to determine how prepared a company is to thrive in a remote setting.

Much of it boils down to changing whatever elements are needed in order to become the remote company that you would want to work for. This requires old habits to be left behind, and intentional effort to be made on areas such as documentation, informal communication, and working well asynchronously.

Given the relative newness of all-remote, many people wonder if a 100% remote company works well at scale. This is largely due to unfamiliarity with the concept, and it overlooks a different question — does colocation work well at scale? (Narrator: “No… no, it does not.”)

GitLab believes that all-remote is the future of work, and that it not only works well at scale, but works better at scale than antiquated colocated models.

• The quickest way to send the clearest signal that remote is the future is to start at the top of the organizational chart. Remove execs from the office, and you’ll quickly figure out what gaps you need to fill with tools and process.
• Maintain a team devoted to helping people acclimate to remote, answering questions about workspaces, workflows, conflict resolution, etc.
• Reinforce values daily, not just once during onboarding. Consider implementing discretionary bonuses that are directly tied to exemplifying values, and share each one granted with the entire company.
• Scaling and transitioning are processes, and you should approach them with a spirit of patience and iteration. Expect bumps along the road. As with any significant business transformation, it’s wise to communicate proactively to team members, customers, and investors that obstacles will emerge. Transitioning a company to fully remote, while still running the business, is not easy. It’s a long-term bet that the short-term pain will be worthwhile.
• Work handbook-first, always. Documentation isn’t enough — you need a universally understood single source of truth. If it’s not there, it doesn’t exist. This forces work to occur in the place where it needs to end up, rather than splintered across channels.
• Asynchronous communication works best when there is companywide alignment on how and where to input communication. Leaders should carefully select their tools, aiming to direct communications to as few channels as possible. The easiest way to enter into an asynchronous mindset is to ask this question: “How would I deliver this message, present this work, or move this project forward right now if no one else on my team (or in my company) are awake?”
• Above all, a company which intends to begin hiring remotely (or allowing existing employees to optionally transition from colocated to remote) must structure the company as if every single team member were remote. No shortcuts, no exceptions. It’s remote-first for everyone.

Remote for life

We shouldn’t have to wait for public health crises to make changes in how we work for the better. In a world where we’re always connected and can work from anywhere, why don’t more of us make the conscious choice to actually do it?