Working Remotely
140 companies answer 6 questions
Working remotely comes with unique day-to-day challenges. From the initial step of implementing remote policy to nurturing company culture while operating remotely, we ask leading remote companies to share how they approach running their distributed teams from an operational level.
How did you implement a remote work policy?
It was completely organic; our very first employees were remote.
From the very beginning, our founders (Damien and Derek Hoffman) knew that we would be a completely virtual company. Most media companies are based in…
Our remote work policy has evolved organically. As we built our core team and internal processes, our policies have been created based on the work-life…
Can a remote-friendly company have a healthy culture?
Our remote workforce is global. This means that we are able to take the best of all talent and culture and create a humanist company…
Absolutely! The most important thing is for the leadership to actively discuss and decide what the company values are up front, and then act upon…
Definitely. FlexJobs has been a remote company for over 15 years, during which we’ve developed an award-winning culture recognized by Outside, Quartz, Entrepreneur, and many…
How do you nurture your company’s culture in a remote work environment?
We train our new employees on our company culture, which is based on Accountability, Visibility and Respect. We have weekly onboarding meetings for all new…
We make sure to all get together as a company on a regular basis. For example, we have two team members that live out of…
We have an incredible Director of Culture and Development who is focused on developing a strong culture in a remote work environment. Examples of some…
What advice would you give to a team considering to go remote?
The key to a successful remote workforce is in the hiring. You must recruit highly skilled, professional team members who have demonstrated that they can…
If you’re considering it, just try it out! The worst that can happen is that you find out it doesn’t work for your team, in…
The best advice would be to ensure that you have a plan prior to establishing a remote workforce. Whether it is one or two people…
What challenges have you encountered building a remote team?
One of the biggest problems is finding a team to build the application with the right skills at the right cost who are available when we…
One challenge was developing a project management system to provide clients with information about work that their virtual assistant performed. We ended up developing our own…
Probably the biggest challenge was hiring extraordinary people…but who had no remote experience yet. This requires you to invest a lot of time, mentoring and…
What are the most effective tools for remote team communication?
The easiest ways are through Slack, Basecamp, and email with a splash of Zapier (if you don’t know Zapier…please look it up now!). These tools…
Slack! I couldn’t imagine communicating as well as we do today without Slack. Our systems (finance, servers, schedules) all integrate with this communications tool, and…
Skype chats – we have tons of chat groups. We have project-based ones for each project, location-based ones for each region (wherever there is a…
What has changed about how your remote team operates?
We have implemented OKRs because at the beginning everyone just “worked hard” when we were a startup. But as we got older, people burned out,…
With remote work, there’s a lot less verbal communication than before, and a lot more written communication. This communication happens largely in our project management…
We’ve grown at such a rapid pace that adapting and scaling has become second nature. Because we are now spread so widely across the globe,…
How does your team address different time zone challenges?
We offer some flexibility in work schedules so that team members can have somewhat of a normal schedule, but we also require work hours to…
Slack and JIRA—the platform we use to track development tasks—are asynchronous tools, allowing us to manage communication even with different time zones. Of course, sometimes…
This is likely the largest challenge we face as a remote company. I don’t like making people stay up late or get up super early…
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