4 Years Remote and I'm still learning how to manage my team...

I’m Cheney Hamilton, Founder & CEO of the Flexible Working Job Network, FindYourFlex.co.uk and today I’d like to give UK businesses and any other global company considering a wholy remote team, some Food for thought…

Setting the scene

We’ve been remote as a business since our launch in 2017, so you’d think by now we would have come across every ‘stresser’ known to business, when functioning as a fully remote team across the UK… yet Monday arrives and we found that there is still SO much to learn.

Welcome to the team?!

Last Friday we did our usual ‘Welcome to the Team’ social media announcements for a new starter, on Monday she was targeted by scammers posing as me (her boss) via email (they changed their display name to mine), then - hoping that she would be keen to impress, they asked her to drop everything she was working on and ‘help me’.

Magic words for any new starter, an opportunity to impress the boss in their first month within the business.?

A quick request for her mobile number, then a move to 'text' to show that I’m ‘out and about, can’t talk now’ - but if she could help us launch a new initiative by purchasing GooglePlay vouchers from her local Tesco to give to our clients, it would really help “I’m so stressed and need them ASAP – please hurry”.

LOL are you joking?

An hour later.., our new starter was absent from our Monday morning team briefing, I sent a quick ‘where are you’ message on Slack and was responded to with a ‘Lol are you joking?’ message back… curious… her other half then called and asked if I had asked ‘K’ to buy ￡800 of GooglePlay vouchers this morning? To which I responded with a resounding NO!?

One panic attack later, the scammers are still texting her asking if she will now go to a second Tesco store and buy a further ￡1000 worth of vouchers… They had already received the voucher codes from the first ￡800 and had spent them before she even managed to get back to the shop to ask for a refund and to block the vouchers.

Big Business? Little help.

Tesco wouldn’t help, our business insurance wouldn’t help (we weren’t hacked so it didn’t fall under a relevant policy) and her bank won’t help and essentially told her that she was stupid for falling for it.

Fault & Faultier

Now our ‘New Starter’ is not a young girl, she is 40 year old 'Mum of the world' Returner, who had taken her child out with her, to do something she thought was being really helpful for her boss and was expecting to be immediately re-imbursed. For her child to then have to see his mum become incredibly distressed and have a panic attack over losing ￡800 is absolutely awful.

We are a small business, but we work hard for each other and if our relationships hadn’t been what they were, we feel she would never have been dupped or be as eager to help her TEAM.?￡800 is a lot of money to us, yet the whole team here at FindYourFlex have rallied and pooled money to ensure that if the multi-billion pound companies of Tesco, Barclays, Hiscox & GooglePlay don’t step up and help, our little ￡150k a year turnover of a company certainly will.

Lesson learnt

The experience has shown us that Scammers are on the rise and are actively targeting remote teams, that business insurance is not geared for remote teams or these kinds of scams and that big business and voucher companies have a lot more work to do, to limit these scamming opportunities.

As a remote employer, we are instituting new policies for safeguarding and are now including scammer training in our onboarding process.

Change our culture?

Today we are still feeling sick about it. The fact that our culture, values and behaviours within our company have been abused, has left everyone feeling raw and our new staff member feeling ‘silly’ and humbled. But we are a team. We work for each other and we will make sure she recovers and she is made whole.?

A final word...

We hope that this experience helps you protect your teams and new starters as you remotely 'onboard', it really is time for a radical overhaul to they way we all work and how we are supported.

Everyone needs to stand up to this type of criminality and the 'big businesses' who don’t help safeguard us and the majority of UK businesses who are now SME’s, will be shown up and disregarded as a provider.

We want to see true change and solid policies from both Insurance providers & the Government as we move ever onwards towards the Future of Work and true Flexibility.