The secret to setting up a global remote team | OnDeck Top Company 2022
Over the past few months, I have been asked about setting up a remote team on numerous occasions. In 1-on-1s, Twitter DMs, and meetups.
🏘️ Are you more or less productive in WFH?
🏗️ How do you set up a remote team?
🤔 How do you stay aligned? And make decisions?
At Chronicle (Notion for presentations), we’ve been remote & globally distributed from day one. Our team is spread across the US, India, and Australia. And we’ll soon be expanding to Europe.
Even my co-founder, Mayuresh, and I have met only for a couple of weeks in-person since first ideating on Chronicle more than a year ago. And our remote working experience has been delightful. But not without our fair share of learnings.
Today, I’m planning to share a personal account of why we decided to go remote, how we’ve gone about implementing the vision, and what is our process of iteration when something doesn’t go according to plan.
This is for you if you are:
- 🏗 ️on the fence about building a remote org OR
- 🌐 considering joining a remote company halfway across the world OR
- 🧪 wanting to experiment with these learnings at a hybrid company
A. 🏝 ️What should you consider BEFORE setting up a remote team?
Right off the bat, one thing is clear: There is no one-size-fits-all process for remote work. It depends a lot on the founder’s philosophy, size of the company, and company objectives, and will transform along with the company.
While it is easy to attempt to classify a company as remote or in-person, the IRL implementation is not that simple.
It is best to think of remote work as a 2x2 grid.
On one axis is the extent of distribution of the team across time zones and on the other is the level of concentration of key functions. (Easy in the image below 👇)
At Chronicle, we’ve been remote & globally distributed from day one. Although we’re largely asynchronous (everyone can work according to their preferred time), we’ve observed that in our early stage of product development, we require a few synchronous calls throughout our 2-week sprint cycles to align and make decisions.
But we have several no-meeting days through the sprint to focus on implementation. Slack (and sometimes Loom) is the preferred mode of communication on these days. 1-on-1s still happen as and when required.
Our design and engineering teams are concentrated in a time difference of ~5 hours which helps fast decision making. Nine months ago it was ~12 hours, leading to fewer concurrent time slots and slower decisions on the product.
B. 👼 Early advice we received from our angel investors and fellow founders about remote work
“Remote is NOT for everyone. But for those who appreciate it, it is truly game-changing”
1. 🤔 Remote work is NOT for everyone: When hiring someone, always try to understand if they’ll enjoy working remotely. Remote team members need to have strong intrinsic motivation (side projects, freelancing, and founding team experience are some of the indicators), be comfortable working independently (manager of one), and possess strong writing skills (a lot of communication happens in written form even if you aren’t async).
2. 🌎 You CAN’T hire from anywhere in the world (in the early stages): Managing time zones is tricky when you want to be more nimble. Most distributed teams try to be within a narrow time zone of 5–7 hours to be able to iterate fast (in the early days). However, as you start to grow the team, it is advisable to establish asynchronous practices early if you want remote-async to be the future of the company.
3. 🏡 DON’T be hybrid (at least in the early stages): If some team members are co-located while the others are remote, you’re more likely to have differences in context and bonding. Decisions might be made ‘centrally’ while those working remotely might feel they’re ‘out of sight, out of mind’.
4. 💜 You SHOULD come together at least once every year: This is magical. You can be remote for 350+ days in a year but you should come together for at least a week (every year) to get to know the full team on a more personal level. And then you can back to your ‘personal HQ’ with richer context, silly pictures, and tons of memes.
What other advice have you heard?
C. 🌏 Why we decided to go fully remote from day one and other benefits we observed over time
- 🗺️ Understanding users: We wanted to walk in the shoes of our potential users. My co-founder and I had some remote work experience. But building a presentation experience for co-located and distributed teams alike required a better day-to-day understanding of remote life, workflows, and tools.
- 🤩 Hiring globally: As we set out to reimagine a tool that has been stagnant for the last 30 years, we knew we had to tap into a global pool of builders and operators. Building a world-class presentation experience requires people who understand storytelling deeply, are excited by the core engineering challenges, and think about the user experience from first principles.
- 🏃♂️ Flexible schedules: In addition to being remote, being async means everyone in the team can plan their own schedules to a higher degree so that they can pursue their hobbies, find more active time with family, and even do some mid-day exercise. A few of our teammates have recently started learning to swim on the weekdays 🏊♂️
That’s not it. We also saw some non-obvious benefits over the past few months:
- 🏡 Family time: We are able to support teammates who want to/need to stay close to home/home-city to support their family
- 🚙 No daily commute: Leading to 2–3 hours of daily time saved (incl. getting back in your rhythm once you’re back home). This combined with flexible schedules means you can find more time for things you want to do: daily walks, meditation, reading, and binging Netflix.
- 💰 Individual cost savings: I’ve heard multiple instances of daily cost savings from the team. Savings in commuting, cost of living (no longer tied to major cities), food (more likely to stick to your home food schedule), and office attire (PJs 24x7 🤣)
- 🏝️ Work from anywhere: 3 of my teammates moved to a new place during a three-week window earlier in 2022! More control over your personal work environment means more comfort.
D. 🚩 Red flags you should keep an eye out for AFTER you’ve set up your team
- 🌃 Constant super early morning/ late night calls (esp. for globally distributed teams)
- 🧯 Always waking up to a flurry of urgent messages (from teammates in other time zones)
- 💻 Pressure to always be online on Slack (and even during lunch hours)
- 😫 Always extending your day to fill the ‘time-you-spent-traveling’ earlier
- 🙋 Constantly feeling that your efforts are not ‘visible’ as you’re out of sight
- 📝 Poor documentation (which forces you to ask around for everything) + Not knowing whom to reach out to for the right info
- 🤷 You (unknowingly) haven’t changed out of your PJs by end of day
At Chronicle, everyone has complete visibility over our long-term vision, our quarterly goals, and our plan for the next two weeks. And this is documented extensively (in Notion and Figjam) for later reference.
We track our action items for the sprint in Linear, so that the team knows how their tasks contribute to longer-term goals and has context on how user insights led to the development of a particular feature/experience.
E. 🤝 Setting up a remote collaboration stack
Communication is everything. Remote forces you to be 10x more thoughtful about planning and communication. Be it sync or async. This helps everyone on the team manage their personal schedule throughout the day.
First things first:
1) Nobody likes traveling to work for hours everyday 🤷
2) At work: Information FOMO > Social FOMO 👀
No one wants to miss out on what’s happening at work. In an office setup, people check in with their neighbors or walk over to their friends to know more about what’s happening, product updates, and any policy questions
But when companies are NOT intentional in remote communication, remote team members tend to:
1) Stay always online
2) Attend more meetings than necessary
3) Work increased hours as they are ‘available at all times’
Remote forces you to be 10x more thoughtful about communication. Be it sync or async. From the very beginning.
Here’s how we have been doing this at Chronicle (always iterating around it):
🙌 Over-invest in communication
1) Plan before a meeting → Everyone comes prepared with their views and you avoid going over-time
2) Document everything including research and decisions → No need to ask your ‘neighbor’ and you can refer to the team’s thought process
3) Record all meetings and share summaries → Everyone is up to speed
4) Adopt tools that make communication simpler (around.co is one such savior)
🎉 Bring the best of the in-person environment
1) Come together in-person 1–2 times a year → Everyone from across the world meets at one place for 7–10 days. Work together and explore the new city
2) Intentional informal chats → Planned chats every few weeks to catch up on everything outside of work
3) Frequent leisure time → A lot of game ‘nights’ playing everything from Skribbl and quizzes to Clash Royale and Bomb Squad
Here are the tools that enable us to communicate effectively at Chronicle:
F. 🪴Building a remote culture like you build a high-quality product
Building culture is a multiplayer game. It isn’t just team lunches, ping pong tables, and VR headsets.
Most early-stage organizations let the early culture shape itself. And while it might sound ‘more natural’, it frequently leads to an imbalance as the team grows rapidly before one realizes it. New hires might steer the culture in a whole new direction.
Would you let a new hire completely redefine the core of the product you’re working on? Similarly, you need to set guardrails early on and use them in hiring your early team members.
Applying product thinking to culture:
Research → Plan → Test & Iterate → Implement
(and this cycle continues)
Step 1: 🌱 Research
The first phase involves understanding what kind of a culture you want to build and what will help your product the most. Setting up a remote team when you haven’t been a part of one can be challenging. But there’s a lot of deeply researched and IRL implemented material to help you out. Companies like GitLab and Doist (parent company of apps like Todoist and Twist) have been remote for a long time now and have published their ways of working.
Step 2: 🪴 Planning/Definition
Next, you define your shared values and ways of working. They largely help shape an organization’s culture whether remote or co-located. These should be well documented (the devil is in the details), distributed (shared with all team members), and deployed (refer back while making all big decisions). At Chronicle, defining our shared values was one of the first tasks we did.
Here’s a link to our values and ways of working.
Step 3: 🌴 Testing & Iterating
Testing with users is paramount to building any product. Similarly, it is important to get feedback on how your values manifest in your daily ways of working. For instance, does (the cliché) ‘Collaboration’ as a value translate to more cross-team synchronous discussions, or does it manifest as small teams working together asynchronously?
Poor culture = Poor team experience. At Chronicle, we do a full ways-of-working retrospective (retro) on Figjam every 2–3 weeks.
Step 4: 🏞️ Implementing
First, you solve via iteration and then grow via repetition. The final step is putting everything into action. Once you know what works for your current team, you go ahead and use that benchmark when hiring more teammates. Globally distributed teams (especially ones building for a global audience) also have to ensure that they are well represented at all levels. Else they might skew the company’s culture. And eventually, have culture conflicts.
But remember, just as in a product launch, culture is not set-and-forget. It needs to be continuously revisited and updated as the company grows.
This has been our journey in scaling to a team size under 20.
What have your learnings been in a similar team size? What are the other challenges you face once you start growing the team beyond 50 people? 200 people?
Excited by what you’ve read till now? 🎊
If you have a passion for building delightful products for a global user base, check out our careers page: chroniclehq.com/careers. We’re hiring for multiple roles! ✨
We’re building Notion for presentations. Here’s a quick demo:
