How Form3 Hard-Coded Remote Innovation & Collaboration Into Its Culture

More than eight months after the UK first locked down, it’s safe to say we’re all well and truly adjusted to working from home (and if we aren’t by now, we never will be).

Clearly, remote working is here to stay. This isn’t something that’ll go away post-pandemic.

But just because we’ve adapted, that doesn’t mean we’re thriving in this new environment. Lots of organisations still have a long way to go to effectively translate the practicalities of office life to the remote world.

Some of the biggest headaches for remote workers are around communication and collaboration. That’s nothing new; remote workers were talking about it way before the pandemic began.

However, it’s definitely become much more high-profile since one in four of us started exclusively working from home. And I know from conversations with people in my network, like Munich Re CTO Jason Engelbrecht, that there are a lot of frustrations around how hard it is to innovate right now as a result of those communication and collaboration challenges. Jason describes the innovation piece as a two-part story: 

1. Internal: The additional efforts you take to keep your team engaged, communicating and aware of what’s going on in the business world.
2. External: The stuff you pick up outside your own business, such as by attending conferences, listening to great speakers, then bouncing ideas off fellow leaders in breakout areas.

Obviously, it’s difficult doing the external stuff right now. And the internal piece can be just as demanding, especially if you don’t have a history of working remotely. But it’s not impossible. Some companies have never let a predominantly remote workforce become a barrier to innovation.

Form3, a cloud-native payment processing platform for banks and fintechs, are a fantastic example of a brand that’s been able to develop a culture of innovation in their remote teams. In a recent episode of Tech Intellect’s podcast The Insider, I spoke to Form3’s Head of Platform Engineering, Kevin Holditch, who told me how they do it.

Form3 are a largely remote company. They started out in 2016 and Kevin, along with a few of the operating engineers, came onboard at the start of 2017. They now have around 80 engineers and are continuing to expand.

Kevin tells me they were really well set up to cope with Covid because most of their engineering was remote already:

“When we got to the point where we wanted to grow the engineering department, we had a bit of a brainstorm on how we could do that because the original four engineers worked remotely quite a lot of the time. We're all within commuter distance of London, so we were doing that commute, say one or two days a week. 

“And then we thought, ‘Well, hang on. If we're working remotely, why not cast the net further rather than going for the same pool of talent that everyone else does? Why didn't we cast the net to anyone within our time zone, maybe plus or minus an hour?’ And we started hiring with that remit.”

Pretty soon, they’d hired people in Spain and Portugal. Now, their engineering team spans over 15 countries, all of whom work remotely the vast majority of the time – which means there’s no divide caused by some people going into the office and others staying home. “I think if you have that, the people in the office – without even meaning to do it – make decisions and leave the remote people out,” Kevin explains. “And then the people remotely don't find out about that and they get left out.”

As you’d expect, all the discussion has to happen on tools like Slack and Zoom. That way, everyone stays involved, which has been a big part of Form3’s success.

So they got the communication piece sorted from a really early stage. But how about innovation? Just because remote workers are all attending the same meetings and catching up with each other on Slack, that doesn’t automatically mean they’re going to feel empowered to innovate.

Creating smaller “teams within teams” and avoiding micromanagement have been big drivers of innovation for Form3. Kevin says:

“We divided the company up into smaller engineering teams and we run standups over Zoom. We encourage collaboration within the team. So generally we like people to work at least in pairs. But we don't really mandate exactly how they work.

“Some pairs might be on Zoom all day and that's their thing. Other people might do an hour on Zoom and then work out a few different problems, both go their own way, and then come back together at the end of the day.

“We treat them as grownups. A lot of our engineers are very senior, so we give them brush strokes of the task and then leave them to go away and solve the problems.”

There’s a huge learning for all of us here.

On the face of things, enabling remote collaboration and innovation sounds like a big, complex task.

But as Form3 demonstrate, it’s really more about a mindset shift than complicated processes.

We have all the technology we need to collaborate and innovate as geographically dispersed teams – we just need to hard-bake it into our culture.

What do you think? Have you struggled with driving innovation in your remote teams, or have you nailed it? What have you been doing to make it work? I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments below!

––

Ben Alexander helps ambitious businesses change the world through the power of technology. He’s Co-Founder and Director of technology recruiter Tech Intellect and AmarTi, a technical consultancy. He also hosts The Insider webinar and podcast series, where he interviews some of Europe’s most influential tech leaders. And he’s even learning Python in his spare time!