Becoming a remote-first company: lessons learned from an unexpected reality

Published in

tb.lx insider

7 min readSep 1, 2020

What does it mean to be a remote-first company? And how can companies transition into this (new) concept of working? Our company (tb.lx) went to fully remote from one day to the other in March 2020 and transitioned into a remote-first approach ever since. We started with research to understand how the leading remote tech companies on the market manage their reality and then developed our own guidelines based on our reality. We tried many initiatives to keep up our culture, keep employees engaged, and maintain a healthy work environment. In this article, we share our remote-first guidelines, as well as some of our initiatives, so that you can adapt those to your reality.

My improvised remote setup in the living room

Brief History of Remote Work

Remote work has been earning its space as a trend in the last five years in the IT sector. [1] Suppose you work in the IT industry, especially in the last couple of years. In that case, you might have come across the wish to work from anywhere, for an international company, in a more flexible work environment with all the financial perks associated with it. But a lot has also been said about the cons of working in this model. Loss of social connection, the hardship in maintaining the right balance between work time and family time, among other essential factors.

Fast forward to 2020, the majority of the world was forced to work from home with no regard for the business area or sector. Whereas in the past, remote work was something more related to the technology industry, during the pandemic of Covid-19, every company had to adapt to the new reality.

It might have been easier for some organizations due to the nature of their business and their employees’ digitalization. For others, not so much.

Remote-first not remote forced

When we dig into the literature, we might come across a significant difference between remote-first companies and remote-forced companies. Remote-first companies are those that have always been remote-first independently of the context. They share remote principles in their DNA. Remote-forced, on the other hand, is a new terminology that appeared due to the lockdown and pandemic situation the world was forced to live in.

One might even say that most of the companies would never have looked into this reality if there hasn’t been for Covid-19 in the first place. Some companies struggled during this time while others strived. What did they do right that we can use as inspiration?

There are also bigger companies with large organizations that are now claiming to be remote-first, will this work? Can remote become part of their DNA?

By taking all of this into consideration, when we address the remote reality, we should first take as guidelines the companies that have always been remote. Use them as inspiration and understand if their reality fits our scenario as a company without compromising our culture.

So, let’s focus now on what we, as tb.lx learned during this transition, that you could also take home and try to adapt to your reality.

Implementing a Remote-First approach

What is Remote-First?

Firstly, it is important to clarify what remote-first means. Stack Overflow defines Remote-first as “working remote is the default. It means making sure your remote employees are as much a part of the team as those in the office”. From our research into the topic, some companies took this measure to some extremes, meaning that face-to-face meetings would stop taking place, period. If two employees were in the office, they wouldn’t be advised to have an in-person meeting, only a web call. Because if, for some reason, another employee might need to join — and since this employee could be working remotely [2] — the conditions had to be equal for everyone. The remote employee shouldn’t compromise on any bias promoted by the face to face interaction.

Although we can understand the rationale behind this, it didn’t fit our definition of remote-first and our DNA. Let’s just stick to the first sentence on Stack Overflow’s definition and elaborate from there.

Since one of our primary goals as a company is always to aim for transparency in communication and expectations alignment, we created a common approach on the definition of Remote-First for tb.lx and communicated it in an All-Hands meeting with the entire company:

“tb.lx is a Remote-First company.
What does it mean for tb.lx to be a remote-first company?
1.1. What remote-first is not:
It is important to clarify that tb.lx being a remote-first company does not mean we are a fully remote company. Once the pandemic situation is over, we intend to come back to the office — at least for some days during the week. The goal is to keep our great culture, which is different from fully remote cultures. We believe one of the the main reasons we are striving in this context is because we have built up this culture pre-pandemic.
1.2. What remote-first is:
Remote-first is a mindset: it means that we always think about how we integrate our remote workers at tb.lx. Our remote employees are as much a part of the team as those in the office, and the experience should be the same, whether you’re in an office one day a week, five days a week, or never.”

Thinking about the future, we elaborated a guideline for remote meetings and how we should organize ourselves to be even more inclusive and maintain a healthy long-term remote-first approach. For example, all of our weekly company events are now done remotely, and we must continue to focus on fostering moments of human connection between and within teams.

This would have to be a conscious effort since with some people returning to the office a couple of days, it would be easy to go back to our “old ways” and neglect the employees working from home. Our management and People team are always aware of what it means to be remote-first and we actually feel we are following one of the major principles of a good leadership: practice what you preach.

The takeaways

This situation allowed us to grow as a company and become even closer as a group. It made us focus on what really matters and created a space for more flexibility and trust.

We felt that everyone benefited from having a more flexible, balanced work lifestyle in the long run. Not being constricted to work in a specific location, would allow our international employees to visit their families more often, embracing the freedom of managing their own time. Less time spent in commuting means more time for yourself, your family, your hobbies.[3]

We broke some “limiting beliefs” (e.g., “1on1’s should be held in-person to be more empathic and effective”) and came out even stronger. All of us developed extra levels of empathy. By over-communicating and keeping a flexible mindset, we were able to adapt smoothly and faster.

By also having a physical office where people can still interact and spend time face-to-face, and even for some people, get away from home, to see a different scenario, is something that most of our employees also truly value.

Bottom line: Trust is everything. By having the best people with you and trusting that they are doing the best they can and working towards a common goal, you feel safe that no matter what you face as a company, you can always accomplish all the hardships.

The HR team in the office setting in January 2020, pre-remote and pre-remote-first

Sharing is caring — our guidelines

Before we set up our remote-first principles, we prepared the company for the remote-forced reality by introducing Remote Work Guidelines which you can find here [4]. Transitioning into a remote-first reality, we defined Remote-First Guidelines which are available here [5]. If you need some inspiration on some initiatives to maintain the culture you built up before, we shared some examples here [6].

In the end, what was our secret recipe to come out stronger than ever as a company? We put it here [7] for you.

Last but not least, please share your thoughts about your journey and some hardships you might have faced during this time. We are more than willing to brainstorm on ideas on how to successfully overcome them!

References

[1] For more insights, visit “Toptal, The History of Remote Work, 1560-Present (with Infographic)”: https://www.toptal.com/insights/rise-of-remote/history-of-remote-work

[2] For more info behind the rational, visit the Stack Overflow blog post from 2017 “What it Means to be a Remote-First Company”: https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/02/08/means-remote-first-company/

[3] For more inspiration, I advise you to read this article in Forbes, “How Remote Working Is Reshaping A Future New World Of Work”: https://medium.com/forbes/how-remote-working-is-reshaping-a-future-new-world-of-work-2b1e03ed360b