How to Win with Remote Work

It seems every day another company announces a mandatory return to the office. The clear subtext is that remote work is inefficient and less effective. In almost all of these cases, I believe the problem was the company’s execution of remote work, rather than the concept itself.

PCM Encore is remote with employees and advisors in 7 states, as were more than 90% of Assurance’s workers. I also serve on the boards of Ontra and Vector- two very fast-growing companies with exceptional cultures built largely around remote work.

Here are the lessons I’ve learned to excel at remote work:

Acknowledge the Fundamental Tradeoffs

There is something special about working together with a close-knit team in the same office. There are unreplaceable watercooler moments and informal collaboration that make an office special. The first step to success in remote work is the understand and acknowledge that certain things will be lost and work to mitigate them to the highest degree possible

On the other hand, remote offers incredible advantages. First and foremost, you instantly gain access to a nationwide and indeed global talent pool. Your employees are happier and there are significant time savings in commutes, parking, and other office hassles. Your engineers can be significantly more focused and less interrupted, and everyone can use the flexibility to have a better family and personal life.

The fundamental key to executing remote work well is to adopt systems to minimize what is lost from the office and to maximize the advantages you gain.

?Go All In

I think perhaps the biggest reasons companies fail at remote work is that they only go half-ways. They insist employees live close to an office and come in certain days. In my mind this gives you the worst of both worlds- you lose the office culture while at the same time constraining your talent pool, which is the biggest single advantage of remote work.

In hybrid environments, managers and employees often favor their in-person colleagues, forgetting to fully engage with remote workers. We’ve all been in hybrid meetings where there is an in-person group (usually in a conference room) and then others that join virtually. Inevitably the conference room audio is bad, side conversations are occurring in-person, and the virtual folks feel like second-class citizens. ?Going all-in on remote work means making sure every employee has an exceptional video/audio system at home and that virtual meetings are inclusive and high-quality.?

Raise the Hiring Bar

When managers are suspicious of remote work, I think the subtext is often they don’t trust their employees and believe they aren’t working as hard and effectively from home. This is despite numerous studies showing work from home results in longer hours and happier workers, a natural conclusion from the time saved commuting.

By unlocking a global-talent pool, remote companies can be far more selective in their recruiting. You can truly focus on A+ employees and find candidates with the absolute most relevant experience and talents. At Assurance this allowed scaling at an unprecedented rate, while at Encore we’ve been able to bring on a higher quality advisor than would have been possible in any one city by hiring across the United States.

I do think remote work is uniquely challenging for young employees and there is a degree of mentorship that is lost. One solve for this is that the global candidate pool often allows you to find more seasoned candidates. You also need to select for self-motivated and organized hires, especially at a more junior level. If you are worried if someone will take advantage of the work-from-home freedom, they aren’t a good fit for a remote organization.?

Align Incentives

All organizations should be focused on aligning employee incentives, but this is magnified with remote work.

Having clear goals and alignment, whether this be equity, bonus’s, commissions, etc. is even more crucial when you don’t have the supervision and behavioral norms that an office brings.

This also means carefully considering what to build in-house and what to outsource. Remote organizations are easier to manage when you focus on the employees that make your beer taste better and outsource to aligned third parties commodity services. Every organization is more effective when it is smaller and flatter, and this is particularly true for those that are remote.?

Nail OKRs and Performance Metrics

Like New Year’s Resolutions, every year companies make a halfhearted effort to set their OKR’s and performance metrics, largely abandoning the effort by March.

One of the best parts about remote work is the focus on results rather than facetime; it’s a true meritocracy. For this to be effective the organization needs to be incredibly thoughtful and meticulous in designing their metrics and benchmarks for success. Dashboards need to be accurate and widely available and drive conversations on a daily and weekly basis.

At times work is tedious, and at home we lack the camaraderie and atmosphere of the office to pull us through. I find in these times having clearly daily goals and objectives backed up by dashboards is very helpful. It’s also a great way to build trust across teams and presents lots of opportunities for callouts and congratulations on Slack and related systems.

Obsess over Systems

Offices tend to foster a lot of tribal knowledge, uncodified anywhere. Everyone hears how the big prospective account is going or if engineering is having a problem.

Remote work forces you to codify and record this knowledge, which is probably a very good thing for any organization.

As a starting point, look to capture as much activity and information automatically and give it to the team. Beyond that, CRM and other systems need to be meticulously managed and updated by all team members. Written rules and norms need to be agreed upon and implemented.

Moreover, oversharing should be encouraged, and clarity of communication encouraged. If email is the default for office organizations, remote organizations should prefer systems like Slack that allow for more frequent, informal communication and share knowledge more broadly with better historical context

In office cultures, it's widely acceptable to show up to a meeting having not read the notes and be up-to-speed. In a remote culture, it needs to be an expectation that everyone (including senior management) is actively looking at the dashboards, using and reading the CRMs, and actively reading and participating in collaboration tools.

Keep the Culture

Offices were designed to make a manager’s life easy. All the employees were in a single place, and it was easy to keep track of folks.

Excellence in remote management looks very different. It means lots of informal calls with employees to check-in and see how they are doing. It means being an active member of Slack and other systems to give informal daily feedback.

There is still something magical about face-to-face human interaction and it's key that throughout the year teams get together. These events should be meticulously planned and involve a combination of fun “team building” events along with the ability to brainstorm and work together. In an office culture, too often these events rely upon alcohol and forced “fun”. In a remote environment this is a chance to get real work done and for every employee to put their best foot forward with the team. ?