How do we work remotely between US and Europe? And why is it still a learning journey…

When we decided to create a subsidiary for Sush.io in the US, we were facing a recurring problem for European entrepreneurs.

What could be the best solution, if there is one, in order to keep the team motivated when the founders are 10,000 kilometers away. Not even talking about the decision of having only one of the cofounders moving instead of both. This question really depends of your business and to our opinion, should be motivated by your partners and customers location.

Back on the main topic of this article, it is important for us to keep the team motivated and excited by the product and our vision. Sharing the roadmap and involving the whole team in features designis key.

After a couple of weeks in San Francisco and a technical team in Paris, this is our first insights:

Prepare the team workload in advance

Even more when you are not at the office, you have to do it, and share it as soon as possible.

Share your ideas, answer to questions to each others and involve the team in the roadmap definition. Awesome tools like Blossom or Trello, help a lot for simply giving an overview at everybody on what is happening in the company.

Communicate a lot, even asynchronously

It’s a common issue: how to keep the link with each member of the team when you have 9 hours time difference?

Do not underestimate the need for each employee of having a direct link and be able to talk with the management team. For this purpose, we use Slack, an awesome tool. Now, we can chat directly all together, or in private, we can share ideas, launch a video call or share a screenshot, a nice web site. Even asynchronously.

Sometimes we need to share our screen and interact with each other, so we found an awesome tool, screen hero. Certainly one of the best tools of the market for that.

Plan useful meetings, avoid to miss any

Back to the roots.
What we really wanted to avoid, is the lack of overview on what’s happening in the US for the guys based in Paris and vice versa.
When you do not see people in real life, the risk is to imagine that they actually are not busy. This is obviously not true 95% of the time!

Furthermore, you are much more efficient when everybody shares the topics on which they are working on. Obviously, when you don’t find a solution to something on your own, maybe you could sort it out with someone else!

So we decided each day to put in place a standup meeting, at 5pm Paris time / 8am in San Francisco.

We launch a google hangout at both locations. Everybody can see each other, and believe me, during 10 minutes, we are as if we were all together in the same room. Technology is awesome for that.

We also have monday’s meeting, same hour, with general topics such as Marketing, Sales, Product, Customers, features…. It is a very important meeting where we discuss not only day-to-day tasks, but also strategy and vision.

There are plenty of other topics around working remotely with a team that this may require an additional blog post. But please, feel free to give us your feedback, that will certainly help us improve again our remote organisation so far!

__The Sushio team