The Remote Work Manifesto: Part 1

I've been managing remote engineering teams for over ten years, here's what I think works and what doesn't.

Hiring

Adding headcount to remote teams is more costly than in-person. Each additional person increases the complexity of your communication graph by N + 1. You want to maximise productivity with a minimal headcount. Pay well above market. If you can't afford that, offer your employees clear financial incentives as the company grows. The best way to create burnout among high performers is to surround them with low performers. Ideally, founders should be directly involved in the hiring process for as long as possible.

The main traits that you are hiring for is personality and passion. Passionate people with the right personality (depends on your culture) will create momentum in your company. Unless you have a highly technical product, you don't need to prioritize technical skills. People are usually extremely receptive to feedback on technical skills, and they can be improved easily. Good luck giving someone constructive feedback on personality or passion.

Your goal is to create a positive culture where people are comfortable discussing failure. Anything less than this is going to cause issues down the road. If you can nail this part early, you will have a massive advantage in the market.

Tooling

It feels like there's a rise of companies being super proud of having an extremely lean tech stack coinciding with return to office mandates. That makes total sense to me. If you're all in a room, it's easy to chat your way out of most issues. Sure, it wastes time, but nothing is going to break. Procurement teams get baited by all-in-one tools like Clickup, forgetting that the glue holding these tools together is a subtle increase in meetings across the entire org.

If you're remote, don't do that. Tooling for remote teams is not a solved problem, so a core part of your company culture needs to be experimenting with various tools and finding what works and what doesn't. The cost to tools is onboarding time. The financial cost is negligible. Your average SaaS product costs $10 per user per month. That's the cost of 10-15 minutes of someone's time per month. I get it, none of us like change. Get over it. Make curiosity and experimentation part of your culture.

Hubs vs Global Remote

Global remote means you hire anywhere in the world. Hubs means you hire in specific centers. Start with hubs, go global later. Invest in a specific community and build a presence there. You lose access to global talent, but gain more local talent through investment in that location. You de-risk much of the early issues with remote work because you can always do in-person events if necessary. Naturally, people will move over time. Support them and use the opportunity to set up new hubs. Don't get tempted to turn your hubs into "hybrid work, X days in the office" locations. If you do that, you're no longer remote.

Meetups

Controversially, I'm not a fan of big retreats for remote companies. As soon as you need to justify an expense at a board level, it's probably not going to survive forever. I think local, budget-friendly retreats are significantly more sustainable (both financially and environmentally). Your employees from the EU and AU may never meet each other, so you need to create a strong online culture without needing to resort to global retreats. By all means, if you smash your revenue goals for the year, go nuts.

Culture

I've touched on culture already a few times, but culture building is immensely difficult for remote companies. If you are a founder, you need to lead by example. Like it or not, you are now an online influencer. You need to make your presence felt on slack, teams, jira, whatever. Whatever effort you put in, employees will put in about 50% of that. Go read my post on values, and then represent those values.

I'm not going to tell you what your culture should be, but you should reflect on how your culture would look in an in-person setting. Here's an example of this: Your company doesn't use public slack channels, instead everyone uses DMs or private groups. Imagine what that would look like in an office. Employees sliding their chairs over to other peoples desks to whisper one on one. Sounds pretty toxic.

Location based pay

You should have transparent pay. If it creates problems, you should fix those problems. Not having transparent pay will cause more problems than it solves. I've gone back and forth on location based pay. I don't think location based pay is so bad as long as you're willing to relocate people if they want to move. That keeps everyone honest in the conversation. Sometimes you want to set up offices in an extremely expensive location and you can't hire someone unless you pay more. Make compensation an honest conversation with your employees, not a negotiation.

That's part 1. This list has been targeted to founders at the start of their journey. What would you like to read for part 2?