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 happened organically as a reaction to the work preferences of the first two hires. From then on it just seemed like the natural way…
Bitovi started with remote work from the beginning and the rest is history.
Remote work has been part of Collage.com’s company culture since starting the company in 2007 as a college hobby project with my friend and co-founder/co-CEO…
Can a remote-friendly company have a healthy culture?
Yes. While our employees work in different states and alone from home, no one feels like they are working alone because they see each other…
Yes. Our company culture is based on shared values. We have a company full of independent people who love making the web a better place.…
This all comes down to hiring. It’s critical to hire like-minded folks who genuinely want to work together. For us, we have way too much…
How do you nurture your company’s culture in a remote work environment?
Constant communication with all team members. We also use Slack for sharing “water cooler” discussions. Another important aspect of our culture is our Corporate Social…
It all starts with the hiring process – we put a lot of time and effort into hiring people who embody our values, like taking…
Everyone in the company is encouraged to provide ideas, suggestions and contribute to initiatives that they’re interested in and are excited about. Decisions are laid…
What advice would you give to a team considering to go remote?
We succeed at making remote work by being deliberate about our communication process. We have work-related communication tools, like Slack and Google Hangouts, as well…
If you’re going to do it, go all in. Remote doesn’t work well as an option or as a partial solution. Working remotely is a…
Find ways to let team members feel part of the business culturally, despite being in disparate and sometimes distant locations.
What challenges have you encountered building a remote team?
Probably the biggest challenge is having to deal with multiple time zones. In our case this is as worse as it gets because we have…
Personality conflicts are particularly difficult to resolve remotely. We’ve found that when a team is having a hard time seeing eye to eye, the only…
Remote workforces are amazing, but they have their own unique challenges, just as a local workforce does. While in-person, one-off conversations may work great for…
What are the most effective tools for remote team communication?
Of course we place huge value on audio and video communication at Speak. I think that a lot of remote teams aren’t embracing this to…
We have different levels of communication. For anything that needs to be written at length, we use standard email or we ping each other on…
Phone calls are useful. As are group chat tools like Slack, and email too. It’s a mix.
What has changed about how your remote team operates?
First big thing was the introduction of monthly face to face meetings. Then we introduced open policy for everything, which resulted in opening finances and…
Since we’ve scaled to double our size in a year, some of our processes have needed adjustment. Because there are more people in the team…
The communication has gotten better between the team. We are a very tight-knit “travel family” and our goal is to service our clients in the…
How does your team address different time zone challenges?
Everyone adds their working hours to company calendar, then each team leader knows very well when everyone is on working time. This allows us to…
Currently, we hire only within the UTC-1 to UTC+3 time zones. Our core working time is between 10am-3pm (Berlin time) and during this time everyone…
We make sure everyone coming on board understands the different time zones. We work together to identify when the majority of workers are available and…
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