From remote to work from anywhere: our road to a decentralized organization

I often like to say that when I met Raphael & Benoit, what convinced me to join their project above all, was their vision of the organization they wanted to build.

They were both truly convinced that remote was not the “future of work”, but something we have to embrace as evidence.

Moreover, they were really willing to build this decentralized organization, that would operate as the most rigorous and smart platform possible, to create the largest space of flexibility and ownership possible for individuals. So yes, even if that can sounds scary or dangerous to a lot of founders, they wanted to be really outrageously bold, and lead this evolution of work as a powerhouse.

So we are in December 2019, and Raphaël, Benoït, and I literally hand-check and commit to this vision for the company.

At this very moment — behind this ambitious vision — we were still a team of +30 french people stuck in a too-small-for-us office in Bastille, and pragmatical occasional access to “home-office” when people needed it.

I joined the team a few weeks later. We were young and ambitious, thinking nothing could stop us… until you-know-what hit the world with the same overwhelming breath as the one who must not be named.

So, you know the story, Covid happened… and forced us to make a few trade-offs. At the same time, we have started to hear more and more about flexible working, hybrid working, etc… as an answer to the pandemic situation.

In a way, I am pretty enthusiastic that this terrible pandemic at least forces bunches of companies to climb on the bandwagon.

But at Luko, I have to proudly say this movement is really a philosophy and we would never want to go back.

Nor remote-first… neither “remote-friendly” : Flexibility as a philosophy

The fact is it’s quite easy to say: “we are remote-friendly” but it’s way more difficult to act in consequence in real life. As a B-corp company, we deeply wanted to be a real “remote-friendly” company, and not to fake it… but we also already knew it will really aim time, energy, and humility to make things happen the right way.

Therefore early 2020 — and a few months before covid, we have decided to tackle that by deeply reshaping our organization. If I had to set the scene, we have mainly worked on 3 main core aspects of it :

1/ We have worked on our knowledge :

• To proudly say “we are remote-friendly”, you have to create an environment where treatment is fair between people working remotely or not. You have to have the same processes, tools, work environment, perks, communication, and of course by extension the same access to information.
• Knowledge is power so that you have to give the largest access to information to everyone within your organization, in order to allow everyone to contribute and grow. More than ever we made sure to make all the information properly available on Notion, which we use as a knowledge base.
• This comes with fewer oral meetings where only people within the room can really get involved and more English asynchronous written content. Whenever there’s a decision to be made with several stakeholders, we open Gitlab tickets and centralize our decision-making process on the ticket (we call them “Lukissue”).

2/ We have worked on our vision, mission, as well as our performance management.

• You can’t give freedom without compromising with ambition and excellence if you do not spread a solid vision and bring the framework of the expectations behind it. This is why we decided to first implement the OKR method to design a collective framework and provide the vision of the ambition, align everyone and materialize everyone’s contribution. Then we went further with quarterly cascading individual objectives, therefore each individual has full autonomy and responsibility to work on their objectives from wherever he wants with flexibility.

3/ And we have worked on our behaviors :

• A remote organization comes with trust and ownership, and consistent behaviors. Great liberty comes with real responsibility as a corollary. This is why we have trained all our managers to develop their positioning as coaches and facilitators, and push their teammates to embrace their ownership.
• At the same time, every individual contributor has been given tools to proactively manage their projects, report, and gain autonomy. In a way, they became their own manager, which alternatively led them to propose more initiatives and really embodies an owner attitude.

From remote working to working from anywhere

If 2020 was the year of remote working, 2021 will be the turning point to working from anywhere for Luko.

We have decided to go even a step further and push our limits in terms of culture, talent acquisition, and engagement, by opening our opportunities to people all around the world. From now on, you can now join Luko wherever you are, with the only pragmatical limit of 3 hours of timezone between you and our headquarter in Paris.

People can both decide to stay where they are locally, to move wherever they want, or even to relocate to Paris.

This led us to hire people that were based in South Africa, Germany, UK, Romania… but also the US or India. Some of them have decided to stay in their current location, some others to move to France (we provide relocation packages to live the transition to France with serenity)… or another country.

Far from being only a constraint, it has open us to an unlimited pool of global talents, has created a flourishing international culture, develop our inclusivity, and “forced” us to become more and more accurate in our processes, communications, and business management.

So I will not lie, it can sound scary to open the Pandor box and open the doors to new uses that you are not even sure to control, because you definitely lack market best practices to validate your decisions. It is way more comfortable to wisely follow other companies’ uses and consider it is just the “future of work”.

But the fact is at Luko we deeply believe it’s not the future, but a prerogative to be rooted in the present and meet the expectations of workers.

In a way, being decentralized serves more than ever our willingness to create that rigorous, smart and performant organization we want to create.

Covid or not, we would move backward for nothing in the world.