Five Lessons Learned Fully Remote, while scaling from 20 to 120+

I’ve always been a big advocate of leading co-located teams. The first hand experience has shown me just how effective they can be.?

So now we’re able to venture back into the office, what should we do? Go back to the office? Go fully remote? Maybe hybrid?

At Uncapped we chose to go fully remote. At Revolut we worked hybrid. At both workplaces we did a few things well, but we made mistakes along the way too.

These are the key things I learned:

Lesson 1: World-class vs local-best, the choice is yours

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to remote working. If you’re building physical products, it makes sense to meet and work in-person (as Elon Musk recently told his workforce).?

For fast-growing digital businesses, I believe the right answer is the one that gives you access to the most talent.?

The key ingredient for company success is people. Now imagine how much your access to talent increases once the “1-2 hours from office” boundary is removed.

Are you aiming for the “world-class” team or a “local-best” one?

At Uncapped we grew from 20 to more than 120 people in less than a year. Being fully remote allowed us to quickly hire top-quality world-class talent.

The Uncapped team works from all over Europe - and now - the US too.

Lesson 2: Hybrid creates “second-class” workers

I think of “Hybrid” as a situation where some of the team don’t come into the office at all (or come in very rarely), while others work from the office most of the time. This is the setup we had at Revolut.

Before Covid, we hired Product Owners in Vilnius and Berlin, while the rest were in our London HQ. I did my best to keep remote teammates in the loop and travelled to meet them a few times.?

Nevertheless, it was much harder for them to feel like they were a part of our culture. There were no impromptu chats or lunch breaks to build relationships like our London-based employees did.

Soon I learned what it means to be a “second-class” team member myself. When Covid hit, we all started to work from home. Nevertheless, most of the senior management worked from the office. After a couple of months, I felt like my influence as part of the management team was slipping.?

I moved with my family closer to Revolut HQ so that I could cycle to work, avoiding the public transport system and Covid. This was the cost to be a "first-class" team member again.

Many companies define hybrid as office-working, but with certain days set aside for everyone to work from home. With planning, this should work. In this scenario be aware of the temptation to hire remote team members.? Doing that will drag your team to the issues described above.

Lesson 3: Outcome-focused cross-functional teams excel when working remote

Organise for outcomes

In my recent article “The Million Dollar Question: How do you Scale a Multi-Product Business?” I shared how we organise ourselves at Uncapped and why.?

This structure allows our talented remote teams to be true missionaries, instead of mercenaries. Empowered teams enjoy defining business objectives and key results (OKRs) themselves, and then experimenting with initiatives to achieve them.?

Over-communicate

Because we’re fully remote, we don’t have a chance to meet for lunch. That’s why we focus on communication so much - maybe to the extent of over-communication.

The company's purpose, vision, mission, values, and OKRs are on the homepage of our Notion. Every quarter our founders use our values as the backdrop for discussing quarterly OKRs as part of an all-hands company call.

But we don’t stop there.

Every manager, from founder to team leader, has a responsibility to be a Chief Repeating Officer. We ask them to communicate, repeat, communicate, repeat...?

On top of that, every new joiner has an onboarding process which includes sessions with founders (mission, culture, objectives) and their managers (team objectives, how they work together, etc.)

Write-first, balance sync with async

We also worked on continuously improving our “write-first” principle, which means:

• We write up the context of the topics to be discussed in meetings
• We make sure information on Notion is always up to date?
• We make sure that status updates are done async, via shared dashboards and short Slack messages. We use pre-recorded videos for updates that need a narrative

Nevertheless, we found that synchronous remote discussions are key to high-quality decision-making. So we constantly reviewed what we do sync and what we do async to optimise for the outcomes we’re looking for.

Lesson 4: Remote does NOT mean “we never meet”

The other lesson we quickly learned is that everyone has a different interpretation of how much we should all meet up.

Other than our company annual retreat, we did not have any well-defined in-person events planned.

This taught me something about myself.

When you’re outcome-focused, it’s easy to become transactional in the remote world. Yes, I’m more efficient, but that’s a short-term benefit.

I needed to invest time and energy into relationship building to enable an environment for creativity, motivation and loyalty - the long-term enablers of team success.

That’s why I believe every remote company should make room for these in-person activities:

1. Management teams should have at least 2-3 days of physical working sessions per quarter. With my product leadership team, these proved to be super useful. These help to form personal relationships for the next few months until you meet again. For us, it worked well to align these to our quarterly OKR closing/planning cycles.
2. Teams should meet for 3-4 days of “workations” per quarter. We started planning these, teams were very excited to self-organise. Sadly, those did not launch (yet), therefore I cannot share the outcomes. Nevertheless, I believe this is essential to build bonds and relationships that accelerate the creative work we do.?
3. Encourage local teams to organise their own socials. Most fully remote teams have a few local hubs where people live close by. Encouraging these teams to organise their own in-person gatherings helped them build relationships over non-work related things. Like watching sports, cycling, or pints.

Lesson 5: Remote gatherings are no less fun

I was surprised to learn this. But it’s possible to have just as much fun at a remote gathering, you just need practice and a little preparation.

First, find people within your team who like to organise. This is usually more fun than an event that’s organised top-down (you’re 10x more likely to be asked to dress as Santa Claus).

Second, make sure that your remote events aren’t only ‘all-company events’. Those are surely needed, but more difficult to organise, plus participants tend to have fewer conversations than at smaller events that more closely match their interests.?

Third, make sure you have a budget assigned which is easy to access. Giving your teams access to a virtual card to order takeaway pizza is now surprisingly easy. Make sure the team knows they can use paid versions of the online tools - the quality of those matters a lot in the remote.

TL;DR

Remote working is tough but worth it. If you’re building a remote team, you’ll want to keep these in mind:

1. Remote working gives you access to world-class talent, not just ‘local best’
2. Hybrid working is challenging due to “second-class” workers
3. Outcome-focused cross-functional teams are very well-suited to remote work
4. Remote teams must meet up in-person
5. Remote gatherings are no less fun

Does any of the above resonate with your experience? Contradicts it? Supplements it? I skipped many topics of working remote like hiring, tools, day-to-day processes etc. Any/which would be most interested to hear more about? Pls, share in the comments.?