The practical guide to having a remote company.
Would you believe me if I told you I had not met my CFO for the 8 years we worked together? In fact, I barely met more than a single-digit fraction of my team.
In 2006 I had a dream of having a business that I could operate from anywhere. Who wants to be cooped up in a booth anyway? Not me. Not even for free kombucha and a climbing wall.
The remote business I founded is called Mad Mimi, which in 2014 sold to GoDaddy.
My company operated with over 50 remote full time employees and a number of remote contractors, working across countries, continents and time-zones, with no physical shared space. Ever.
Here’s a glimpse into how we did things.
The culture.
Culture is based on talent and the way people communicate. Let’s start with talent and we’ll get onto communication shortly.
Unusually talented people can influence your culture profoundly because they’re inspiring and brilliant. Recruiting this uncommon talent requires an uncommon approach.
For engineers, my favorite place to probe for talent is the world of open source. This is a talent pool. Most common disciplines — like development, marketing, design — have talent pools, and they’re not hard to find. Engineers that contribute a good deal to open source repositories are usually self-motivated and love to code. They consider themselves craftspeople. The same goes for other disciplines like design and marketing.
Since the world is your oyster — you’re remote, remember — you can identify interesting contributors, read their blogs, and judiciously solicit their help on your project. If you’re smart, you’ll learn about them first, reference that you know what they’re about, and choose locations carefully (see later in the article). 9 out of 10 of these notables will ignore you, but you won’t come away empty handed if you invest the effort… and it is worth it. This talent can be magnetic in its respective field.
But be prepared. Talent-pool luminaires are seldom looking for a job and will usually opt for limited consulting engagements, if at all. That’s okay because they can do good work (though they don’t always) and they can attract other talent. Mentioning an authoritative name tells a lot about your culture to subsequent talent. For them, it’s an easy way to identify cultural synergies. A third virtue is you’ll get to learn a lot. When you’re engaged and surrounded by uncommon talent, you position yourself to become a heavy-hitter. Your culture just revved its engine. Vroom.
My rules of thumb: always start at the top and work your way down. Be humble but not bashful.
How to keep talented people happy.
Praise.
Sincere, prompt, frequent, praise.
In a remote setting, sincere praise can be delivered without the awkwardness or intensity of being close to the person. This is a plus for people who feel uncomfortable or don’t know how to respond to compliments.
All praise should be direct and articulate. Not, “you’re doing a great job, Joe,” but rather, “I friggin love every line of CSS you write; it’s pure art.” Or, “do you have any idea how hard it is to find people like you!?”
Granted, if you can’t find anything nice to say, you probably shouldn’t be working together.
Speaking is performance. Writing is about ideas.
When you write, you get to refine and filter ideas. While speaking is a superb vector to convey ideas, for ordinary conversation the virtues of writing outshine those of speaking.
Good grammar, dignified and articulate communication standards help make everyone more intelligent. Poorly conceived one-liners, like, “yes do it and also tell jo$e to get me the numbet” will ruin whatever mojo you might have had.
But if I write all the time, won’t the lack of body language and facial expression make miscommunication much more likely?
Because the medium of text lacks the support of facial signals, what is intended as neutral can be construed as austere, and here’s how to fix that.
By applying light-hearted gestures and banter when communicating, you can — and should — set a cheerful tone. It’s similar to always talking with a smile, and this is important — both in customer relationships and also internally. Remote communication can always beam. Why? Because with text, a smile is a mere choice of words. Physically, it’s a facial contortion that doesn’t work when the emotion behind it isn’t aligned. Therefore even if you’re having a bad day, you can still be nice.
But not all messages are beamy. Let’s talk about rebuke.
All criticism should be delivered constructively and with affection. The good thing is that text is on your side. By means of text, you have time to think and be deliberate. Sensitive dialog however, sometimes needs the personal exchange factor.
Pointing out flaws in public.
Delivering a balanced critique or reprimand to a team via chat is sometimes appropriate. Humiliating or shaming team members in front of a group is not. Even making fun of team members’ or customers’ accidental errors can be injurious to your company culture.
Don’t make fun of customers. Ever.
Mocking customers creates an innate disdain for the people who matter most. Once this bad habit starts, you actually start believing that everyone is an idiot except yourself. This is called arrogance and no one likes arrogant people.
Now that we know what not to do, here are a few points to make note when you need to point a finger at something undesirable.
Text beats video.
We try to keep back-and-forth communications in text, unless voice or video is vital for more sensitive matters. Text is asynchronous, searchable, recorded, informative and can be a good reference for others later, especially when valuable instruction is exchanged.
Voice and video are synchronous, and therefore disruptive. This disruption causes a loss of your mental cache and a loss of motivation. Recovery is uncomfortable and time-consuming, making this is a mega-inefficiency.
Speaking of inefficiency, let’s move onto…
Are people actually working?
In a remote setting, workload is most often directed by a backlog. Some teams use Jira, other use tools like Pivotal Tracker while for a less geeky experience Trello is a solid option. Remote work is task oriented. This means that the tasks and their corresponding goals are clear, prioritized and recorded somewhere. Engineers have a backlog of development tasks, customer support has a backlog of tickets, designers have a backlog of components to design. A remote chat doesn’t inhibit banter about tasks and projects. Because your team is capable of communicating well, communication channels quickly become filled with friendly chatter, interesting educational matter and even people from other teams who come to sit in to listen and learn.
Time-zone differences may have a slight social impact but informationally, team members are able to get up to speed on the time they missed by simply scrolling up in the chat channel.
This allows people to happily work from…
Anywhere.
Remote work isn’t for everyone, and while it can be surprisingly fraternal there are those who see no substitute for having a tangible social ambiance, or the literal water cooler. Because people are mostly located in different cities, drinks-after-work and group luncheons, team-building events and parties are impossible. But here’s what is possible:
Marc (our CTO) sits in his garden. Birds chirp. Dogs bark. Marc works.
Rick has a giant comfy chair in a sun-drenched room in his house.
Jeff works from a wood cabin in a remote town in Southern Africa. Luckily he has an LTE backup when his internet dies.
Jamie is an introvert who stays at home with her four small dogs.
Sandy and Themba both have small kids and babysitting help nearby. Being around family for lunch, and early bedtime is positive for them.
Tammy currently works while traveling in Asia. Nearly every week Tammy is in a different city.
I jump around a lot. These days I’ve been enjoying working from a tiny local café. Can you guess where I’m located?
Remote work is suitable people who like to explore, nature-lovers, moms, dads, introverts, people that love location-independence, people who can’t move and are located far away.
Keeping in rhythm across multiple teams.
How do you keep diverse teams informed?
I regret not having discovered this earlier, but once we started daily email based “standups” where each engineer would share what they worked on the day before, what they’re working on today, the challenges they’re experiencing and what their plan is the following day. This gets shared to multiple teams and enables people to respond with gratitude, comments and feedback.
Compensation based on cost of living.
When soliciting a multi-national team across markets, sensitivity to cultural and economic factors can make an impact. South Africa for example, is culturally synergic with English speaking countries with a far lower compensation average, making it economically interesting for US Dollar based companies.
When you’re small, you’re probably using independent contractor relationships if you have any foreign employees. As you grow however, you’ll need to consider authentic employment contracts for full time team members. It’s important to do a little research into which countries to steer clear of. Like Germany for example. When we switched from a contracting to full time employment agreement for an employee, we started paying nearly 100% of their compensation in fees and taxes.
Working remotely had a huge impact on my life, my ability to be flexible with family, location and time. The same is true to many people on my team. And not only that, but the number of team members who came in unskilled and today thrive as engineers, finance leaders, product leaders, marketing and business leaders is truly the biggest badge of honor.
Go remote. Reward yourself.
