Something had to change. As a team of three, 20-something, recent graduates, starting a company, we moved back in with our parents to work remotely. Revenue grew, and now we have the flexibility to work from anywhere – including rock climbing and beach towns. A few employees working remotely might be a good idea for a large company with a central office and an established culture. But is working remotely a good idea for a small startup? Looking at the philosophies that the CEOs and founders of Zapier, BaseCamp, GrooveHQ and iDoneThis have shared is a great place to go for advice. All four companies embraced the flexibility and advantages of working remotely early on, and now, they are leaders in establishing remote work culture. Here are their main lessons:
Lesson 1: Create a remote working culture from day one
Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, said the challenges of working remotely were minimal. Wade, Mike, and Bryan (co-founders of Zapier) lived in the same city, but started working remotely by necessity from day one. They were working and studying, while bootstrapping their startup on the side. Now, their whole team works remotely and they even published everything they learned in a handy remote working guide. The larger your team gets, the harder it will be to convince everyone to work remotely.
Lesson 2: It’s not all or nothing
Creating a remote working culture from day one doesn’t mean everyone has to work remotely, at all times. The most important part of the remote working culture is giving your employees the freedom to choose where and how they work. You can still have a small central office, with some employees commuting to work. Your team can decide to work from home everyday or just a couple of days a week. Jason and David, the Founders of BaseCamp, explain: BaseCamp started in a traditional office. The rent was too high and the space was too big, so they decided to rent a few desks and hire remote workers instead. Now they have 36 employees – most work remotely – and shared all of the highs and lows in a book dedicated to remote working teams.
Lesson 3: Great employees are not always great remote working employees
For his first company, Alex did exactly what all other startups do – rented a fancy office for his employees to sit in one position all day, sipping coffee. When he started Groove, a simple help desk software, he decided to create a completely remote team from day one. Alex writes that you will have access to talent from all over the globe. However, not everyone can adjust to working alone from home, especially extroverts. As a solution, Alex only hires employees that have worked remotely before or that have ran their own business.
Lesson 4: Shape your culture with actions, not a mission statement
One of the greatest arguments against working remotely is the disappearance of culture. Corporate management will tell you if people are not physically together, the identity of the company will fade. BaseCamp founders highlight that culture isn’t formed through social gatherings and nosy co-workers who want to know everything about your life. Culture is shaped by actions. When you work remotely, the way the decisions are made, the type of communication that happens within a team and even the tone of voice team members use all add up. As a remote working employee you can’t default to “but the people are super fun to be around”, and you focus on the important parts of the company instead – like the team’s ability to get stuff done.
Lesson 5: Encourage “water cooler” conversations
While some employees find Friday beers daunting and water-cooler conversations an unnecessary productivity killer, light-hearted chats are still essential to cultivating transparency and closeness within a team. Walter Chan, CEO of productivity app iDoneThis, shares that using tools like Slack, HipChat, GoogleHangouts, Skype, and ScreenShare is just the beginning. His team started working on iDoneThis as a weekend project that quickly grew to a small full-time distributed team, with one central office in New York.
Lesson 6: Practice the art of time-zone syncing
The best part of working remotely is the fact that you can work from anywhere – the beach, the mountains, a cozy European city . With your team spread out across the globe, working the same hours can prove challenging. Your team just needs to make sure that everyone is available to do a quick update call for at least 1 hour a day. Walter, CEO of iDoneThis shares: BaseCamp’s founders add: Ask yourself – does everyone on your team want to work remotely? And more importantly, can everyone really pull it off. Image Credit: Flickr/krzyzanowskim
