Steve Jobs said “have faith in your people”. While I share the sentiment, I believe faith alone is insufficient. You need faith and a conscious effort to develop people. At Ergeon, one of our core values is to invest in people. Despite the extra challenge of upskilling an all-remote team, I am proud to see team members who have been promoted 3x+ since they started. It has been a fascinating challenge to apply upskilling in an all-remote environment and I would like to share strategies that have worked well for Ergeon.
Start with the growth mindset
Have faith in your people and stop thinking that all-remote workers are freelancers who are not looking for career growth. At Ergeon, we have promoted many hourly workers to full-time leadership positions. We have had the pleasure of seeing individuals start as hourly ‘taskers’ become team leaders and senior managers. Everyone regardless of their starting skillset, the hours they have available to work or their geographical location deserves an opportunity to grow. At times, this means you need to encourage your team members to dream bigger, to believe in themselves, and open their minds to learning. Structurally, we have built career ladders very early in the company even when not all levels are filled to help people see how far they can go.
Adhere to management best practices
When you are not co-located with your manager, it can feel harder to ask for or offer help. Luckily, HR best practices already exist and there is no need to reinvent the wheel, but there is a need to take them seriously. At Ergeon, we encourage over communication to compensate for the difficulty to remotely monitor energy levels, conducting bi-weekly anonymous feedback surveys and eNPS readings. In addition, every full-time staff member gets weekly or biweekly 1–1s with their manager to discuss how they are feeling and what they need help with. Instead of annual performance reviews, we conduct quarterly reviews to ensure the longer term discussions are happening with a meaningful frequency. These check-ins help everyone stay on track of their day to day work and long term career goals. By adhering to these best practices, the expectations are clearly defined and coaching is given regularly.
Build a living wiki
One clear challenge with an all-remote team is how to teach them about the company when they don’t have the typical immersive onboarding experience. We created an Ergeon Wiki where it’s the single source of truth about the company and function specific processes. We simulate “in-person” onboarding by having new hires watch pre-recorded videos (combined with live Q&A), as well as shadow existing team members. To ensure we make the wiki a living document, we encourage our new hires to add things they learnt through Q&A in the Wiki. As a tech company, we find even experienced hires may not have been used to data based performance management or making engineering requests at their prior jobs. We give training sessions around data and product, then record them and store them in the Wiki so that the are available for all.
Create transparency across departments
When you’re remote there is very little ad-hoc exposure to the other departments the way you might have in co-located companies through water cooler chats. We use recurring All Hands, business reviews and newsletters to provide an overview of different functions for all. We also schedule regular fireside chats where one department shares what they’re working on with another department. We even created shadowing sessions between teams to help staff from disparate departments understand first hand the work of another function. We have intentionally made transparency and shareability of information a priority. This exposure allows staff to better understand the goal of the company, have opportunities to contribute beyond their own function and consider the impact that their work can have at the company level. Transparency also exposes multiple growth paths for individuals who may be interested in expanding their skills in various areas.
Build leadership skills remotely
One of the hardest things to upskill is preparing someone to become a manager for the first time. There is a huge leap from executing a project as an individual to doing that with a team of people. We break it down into 3 sets of responsibilities: people management, process improvement and cross-functional support. We have created leadership workshops that address all the above. Topics include: how to give feedback, time management, how to design dashboards, how to create accountability, etc. We often pair staff from disparate functions to do the exercises together in order to help them understand the perspective of another function. This is then reinforced with ongoing 1–1 coaching on live situations. Of course, being an all-remote company creates several unique needs in terms of ongoing performance management, which is important training for all.
Many tech start-up companies focus on growth of products, users, or market share. Growth of staff members can be overlooked as a metric, but not at Ergeon. We believe our success is directly related to how well we can upskill and scale our team.
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