Why Feedzai was ready for full-time remote work in one day! 6 pieces of advice to go full-time remote.

I am currently a software engineer at Feedzai and I have worked in 3 kinds of remote companies:

• Startups, from Portugal and the UK, that were full-time remote and you could work wherever you liked.
• Companies with 10k employees where it was impossible to work from home, even if it was an emergency.
• Remote-friendly companies, like Feedzai, that allow you to work remotely whenever it is needed, possible and desired.

Until March 11th, Feedzai was a remote-friendly company. We worked from home whenever we wanted. My teammates took an average of 2 days per week to work from home.

On March 12th, we woke up to a full-time remote company. All of us, in multiple continents, C-levels, managers, developers, marketing, sales, etc. started working from home. There isn’t anyone in our offices right now. It was all done in one day, because we were prepared.

Why were we prepared?

Since Feedzai was already a remote-friendly company, we already had the support that allows people to work from home, namely:

• Feedzai gave us all the tools we needed to do our jobs. We know that chairs, monitors, keyboards, etc. are not mandatory for most people to be able to work. But it sure helps and boosts productivity by allowing people to have better posture and a good work environment. Feedzai gave people the ability to take home every piece of their office setup that was needed. Also, an allowance was given to help with additional costs associated with working from home.
• The internal infrastructure that all employees connected to in the office is the same one we use at home. This means that, before the company became fully remote, we already knew that the infrastructure could handle all of us. Feedzai tested the internal infrastructure to make sure that it was able to ensure the continuity of our operations and the support to all our clients and partners while 500+ employees were going to be at home.
• Internal tools and protocols that were all based online. Our meetings were online. Almost nothing in the company relied on paperwork, from expense reporting to hiring to internal communications to project management.
• We were all used to having meetings online since we have 9 offices on four continents (Lisbon, Oporto, Coimbra, Silicon Valley, New York, Atlanta, London, Hong Kong and Sydney), and other Feedzaians working in markets where we don’t have a physical space — Brazil, Singapore, France, Germany. It worked perfectly then and it continues to work perfectly now.
• Our company culture was built for this situation to be just another challenge. Everyone had enough grit to face this, starting from our leaders that were able to change a full company to a remote setup because it was the best for the people. The communication improved and the company gives periodic and transparent reports and updates on how we are facing this stage and the plans for the future. I could give more examples on how our values helped us but I’ll let them here as they speak for themselves. Learn more.

• We were all committed to making this work. Teams continued to work, coffees with colleagues were still happening only in different places. There were several initiatives from our amazing People department to bring us closer together, like TeleKaraoke, remote trivia days, coffee roulette, and chat rooms for us to show our new co-workers (dogs and cats) or just to share about this new Life at Feedzai: Remote Edition.

What are my thoughts on this transition?

Is it impossible to do this? Far from it.

Is it difficult to do this in one day if you are not prepared? I imagine it is not an easy task, but there were companies with 100k employees changing everyone to full-time remote work in 3 weeks. Funny thing, if it wasn’t for the current crisis, it might have taken months or years but they did it in 3 weeks. So, it is possible.

Be prepared:

1.Give your employees the tools they need to work from home from day one.. Laptops are mandatory, but keep in mind all the tools that they need to do their work from a different place besides the office. When moving to full-time remote work, the perfect scenario is for their setup to be as proficient as the one in the office.

2. Create an infrastructure to support your employees.

3. Start moving your daily activities that are still reliant on human presence to online tools, as much as you can obviously. You might need it eventually.

4. Start thinking about meetings where you don’t necessarily need everyone in the same room and do them without actually occupying a room. It will have at least these improvements:

• Increase work efficiency — Save time booking conference rooms, in some cases even eliminating catering and those aspects.
• Flexibility and geographical advantage — Geography stops being something that you think about when you don’t need to wait for a colleague to be at your office two weeks from now.
• Conference/meeting rooms are limited and have limited places — we had presentations with 500 people listening in.

5. This advice is more general than the others but, in my perspective, mandatory. Have a set of company values and a culture that are able to guide people on how to handle though or different times. They gain more importance when people are far away from each other.

6. Build a company that is able to stay together when far apart. Create a friendly environment where people can promote new initiatives for the entire company or just within a smaller team. They will continue to happen when you have to be remote full-time. You’ll be surprised. We definitely were.