When and How to Grow Your Business Via Remote or Dispersed Teams

Among the leaders at high-growth companies that my team and I work with, a recent and persistent hot topic has been the challenge of building remote and distributed teams. Our community of 155 companies employs 33,000-plus employees across the globe, so many of our members grappled with when and how to recruit team members in different geographies, and with finding the right model for their respective cultures.

To address this topic, we hosted a members’ event which featured execs from member companies like Cockroach Labs, Cater2Me, PolicyGenius, and ALICE, who shared first-hand experiences on how they decided on whether to build a remote office or focus on recruiting a distributed team. They gave examples of what worked for them, considerations, and tactics for fostering collaboration and communication when expanding to different team styles.

Venwise CEO/Founder Erik Schreter facilitating the roundtable

Some key highlights:

Be clear on your company goals. They’ll dictate your direction.

• Lay out your company’s goals for expanding. If it’s to access more talent, consider locations near universities and colleges (ex: Austin or Durham) since those are feeding pools for talent. If your goal is to reduce costs, consider hiring for remote roles to eliminate additional real estate costs.
• A strong leadership team and company culture is important before expanding beyond your 4 walls. Knowing who you are as a company and having a clear cultural identity are important in informing your hiring process for any new locations.

If you’re considering a team outside of the US, ensure you’re compliant with local laws and respect local cultures.

• Do your due diligence to understand the legalities of different policies and practices when hiring employees in different countries — from the length of a working day and maternity leave to the number of vacation days. A number of members described using a global professional employer operation (PEO) to ensure they had a partner with deep understanding of local HR and cultural norms.

Don’t forget to keep your current team in the loop.

• Make sure you have buy-in from your local functional teams on plans to hire remotely or set up a new office. Bring people in early on so they feel invested in the process to avoid any surprises and to keep things appropriately transparent.
• Provide an open door for feedback via polls and focus groups, prioritize the people who work with you.

Once you make the decision…

Invest in hiring the right talent to execute on your chosen direction.

• The majority of Venwise members put great emphasis on hiring for culture fit. That’s especially key when hiring a remote or distributed team, so investment in a dedicated in-house recruiter with this as a focus can make a huge difference. Many members say they opted to partner with an outsource contractor (we’ve heard the name terminal.io a lot) to take on much of the heavy lifting, from recruiting to managing a physical office space.
• Think carefully about the seniority of the people you want to hire and the needs of your team. Remote workers need to be more self-reliant and accustomed to independent work whereas more junior employees often benefit more from having a physical office space where they can rely on guidance.
• Constant communication with head office is important and you don’t want technology to get in the way. There’s lots of fancy tech out there but at the bare minimum, quality laptops, webcams and speakers can make all the difference in keeping everyone connected. Once new employees are on-boarded to a new city or remotely, have that tech ready Day One so they can hit the ground running.

When recruiting engineers, don’t underestimate the importance of having a strong tech brand.

• Brands are key to attract customers but also important in recruiting in a highly competitive tech talent marketplace. If your company is fully distributed or hires remote workers, get that word out so you can attract the right type of talent. Tactics that have worked for other companies are tech blogs, sponsoring highly targeted events (see 5 seconds in) and targeted ads.
• Pay attention to other channels that showcase your company’s brand and culture such as LinkedIn and Glassdoor reviews. An in-house recruiter can devote their time to ensuring all of these mediums are optimized for recruiting.

Once you have a remote or distributed team…

Document everything.

• Record and share all-team meetings and other important strategic meetings both visually and through notes. Make sure these meeting agendas are tight to maintain the attention of everyone involved. Some companies even encourage all employees to take meetings from their own computers so that everyone is joining from the same medium.
• Maintain up-to-date product documentation any other team-specific documentation so that all team members have the information they need to do their jobs, no matter what time zone they’re in.
• Create guidelines on etiquette and lay out your expectations on communication. When remote or distributed employees are added to the team, there will be some level of training and behavior change that needs to happen but having everything written as a reference can be helpful. For example, some companies opt for having all team communication reside on Slack to keep the relevant employees in the loop. Many Venwise companies have updated their employee handbooks and wikis to ensure they also accommodate a distributed work environment.

People crave human connection. Build that into everything.

No matter where or how someone chooses to work, feeling a strong human connection is a driver for satisfaction and motivation. Here ways some Venwise members do that at their company:

• During onboarding, bring remote and distributed employees to HQ. If that’s not option, make sure HQ teams are actively involved in their onboarding.
• Visit other offices often. Nothing beats physically being present and getting to spend face-to-face time with remote or distributed employees. One company even set up a reward system where each month, the employee who best displays their company’s culture gets to travel to one of their other offices.
• Optimize the amount of working time overlap across time zones. One company shifted their NYC office’s working hours around Eastern Europe’s time zone so the teams on both sides of the globe could spend more working hours connecting online. Another split the work day into three parts: catch-up time for getting through emails, collaboration time for meetings, and focus time for working on individual projects and tasks.
• Maintain a healthy balance of asynchronous and synchronous communication and set the expectations for communication up front.
• Lean in to Slack or online chat tools. Venwise members take advantage of Slack apps like Hey Taco and Donut; they create channels for peer acknowledgments and share pet photos and workspace photos to build camaraderie.
• Invest in opportunities to get the entire team together. Whether this is an offsite, annual company conference, company-wide hackathons, or holiday parties; face-to-face interactions are important.

Continuously connecting remote or distributed workers is an ongoing effort. Creativity, experimentation, plus baking in connection and collaboration are key to success in unifying your company’s culture across offices or countries.

For more on the conversation, email community@venwise.com, or check us out on the web to learn more about how Venwise’s communities help leaders of fast-growth companies solve their toughest problems