How To Build A Remote First Culture

Being forced to work from home doesn’t mean you’ve embraced remote work.

Right now, many organizations and teams are being forced to work from home for the first time. The first few days it was really fun to put on sweatpants, pour your coffee and be ready to work however, at this stage I imagine many people are starting to feel the pain of working from home in an organization who hasn’t fully embraced a remote culture.

What were minor inconveniences and speed bumps in the first few days could start to feel like insurmountable challenges unless we get back to the office soon. The truth is, remote work is not something you can stumble into. Like everything about your company culture, their needs to be an intentional shaping of how people and processes interact.

When I hired Renga’s first few team members, we tried to get together daily. This worked for a while, but on the days that one of us wasn’t up for a commute, we were far less productive. This is because our systems for communication, tracking work, and just about everything required proximity.

We needed to make a decision on the type of business we wanted to be, what did we want our culture to be? We decided that we wanted to advocate for flexibility and a healthy home life, and we believed that remote was the best way to foster that culture.

At Renga, we have decided to implement a localized remote model. This means that our whole team is within a 2 hour drive of each other. Although we can frequently get together, we knew that we needed to build the organization to be remote first or our culture would suffer.

Here are some of the key learnings we have come across over the last year building a remote first culture:

You need to rethink every system

Project management, file storage, communication, and any other system that you have in your organization needs to be run through the lens of someone who is unable to come into the office. You aren’t trying to make it merely possible for these things to happen, but that there is no distinct advantage to being in person. If you have ever been the only person to call into a meeting, you know how alienating that position can be.

Working in person is a powerful tool that can be used, but it shouldn’t be the default.

We’re talking about building a remote first culture. If there is a clear disadvantage to working from home, it is not remote first. There are some tasks that are better suited for in person and it’s exactly why we have decided to do localized remote. If this needs to happen then anyone who needs to be involved must be there, it’s everyone or no one.

You need to trust your team

The only way for remote work to bring tremendous value to the lives of everyone on your team is to trust them to hit their deadlines and do their best work. If you are trying to get the team to punch a clock or even worse, keep their camera on all day (I’ve heard of this and I still can’t believe it), you will not win at remote work. If you cannot trust someone to complete the task you hired them to do, you either made the wrong hire or need to work on your management skills.

In no way am I suggesting that structure around your day is a bad idea. It is integral to set expectations with the team you’re working on, and communicate where you’re at in case someone needs you to complete their task. We all have a general idea that most of us will be on from 9–5 however, one of our team members generally works 7:30–3:30 so that he could get his daughters from school. You need to trust your team not only to get their work done, but to set a schedule and communicate it with the people who depend on them.

This creates an environment where work can match your lifestyle not the other way around. I will often take a mid afternoon break to walk the dog, and hang out with my family and hop on for a couple hours in the evening. I am able to live near to my family and friends without the dreaded commute. One of our team members just purchased a plot of land in Muskoka and will be building a house he designed up there. Another team member has been trying to live where he can walk or bike everywhere he needs to (this is a lot harder in suburbs than you’d imagine, but he’s doing it!). None of these would be possible if we required our team to travel to an office everyday.

Adjust your expectations

During this pandemic I’ve seen a lot of tweets like the following:

It’s true that you can be much more productive when working from home. This should not mean that your baseline for output rises, but rather you can give more time back to your team to enjoy their life. Encourage the team to stop working, go for a walk, read a book, etc. Our rule at Renga is that if you feel like you’ve done what you needed to do for the day then we’re happy. You must be gracious with yourself and realistic about what you can get done, but if you’re surprised with how effective the deep work was, don’t dive into something else, take time for you!

The flip side of this is that when you have an off day, it can be a real off day. Working from home has it’s own unique rhythm of productivity and you need to be adaptable to how everyone is dealing. Getting a pulse check is a little more difficult by remote so as a manager you need to much more proactive with your team to see where they’re at.

Sometimes people aren’t feeling well but feel weird about calling in sick when working from home. If you can tell they aren’t feeling well, tell them to take the day.

Don’t forget about community

This is imperative if you decide to move towards a remote first culture. You need to be very intentional with creating space and time to be together outside of work. We try and do at least one full team day a month in person because we do localized remote. We will go out for a long lunch and get to know each other better. I also do a monthly one on one where I will travel to the team member. (This is a super small thing that makes a huge difference. A one on one is about the human and not the work, go to them!)

As I mentioned above the best part of our daily call is the conversations that we have before we speak about Renga related tasks. Similarly, create Slack channels around topics of interest and have the conversations about what everyone is interested in.

If you are using Slack, I would strongly suggest that you keep personal pings free from business conversations. If you need to speak to one person about a project or task, try and keep that in a channel dedicated to that. Try and reserve the personal pings for conversations that are personal!

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We’ve experienced a lot of the pros and cons of remote and learned many of the lessons the hard way. I am happy to share any tips, tool recommendations for your specific organization.

You can shoot me an email at [email protected]

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