Why our remote-first culture starts at the top

Leaders, your remote work policy is not your remote-first culture.

I’m sure you’ve heard before that culture comes from the top. If you’ve made it HR’s duty to help your team transition to remote-first work, ask yourself: Why is this an exception?

Remote-first became a tech norm overnight. Many leadership teams (who did have a pandemic to deal with) gave the project of “going remote” to their HR departments.

At Pitch, we think that's a mistake. Our leadership team has doubled-down on living our remote work policy. We believe that’s the only real way to establish a great remote-first culture. If you're seeking to do the same, here’s how and why you should practice what you preach.

Building a remote-first culture: Where to start?

Start at the top. The transition begins only when company leaders fully and visibly embrace remote work. Employees notice — just as they notice when leaders are bad remote communicators, or don’t know how to work the Zoom.

That’s why we leaders have to be intentional about our own remote rituals:

• When should your own work be asynchronous?
• How will face-to-face collaboration accelerate your tasks or create alignment?
• What rules or principles (e.g. hand-raising, refraining from irony or sarcasm) should you set and demonstrate to your teams?

Designing efficient remote workflows that work for your teams starts with you.

Clearing out your corporate culture cobwebs

If your startup’s been around for more than a few years, you’ve likely got some cultural leftovers from your in-person era. After you’ve reset your own working habits to be remote-first, it’s time to clean house, and ditch the traditions that no longer serve you.

• That daily standup meeting that takes up space on your calendar? No need to take it so literally. Trust your team to give their updates async when it works for them. (Recordings?are pretty handy for that, by the way.)
• The weekly brainstorm call, however, will work better on video, with a collaboration tool like Miro.
• What about that mandatory Friday all-hands you used to hold in the office? Not feeling the same magic on Zoom? You might not need it anymore. (We ditched ours.)

As a leader, it’s not your job to protect tradition; it’s to be the first to notice these types of inefficiencies and set up better alternatives. Don’t force your teams into remote-first work; guide them by showing these new approaches simply work.

They won’t miss the Zoom all-hands, I promise.

Champion the policies that do matter

When you work fully-remote yourself, you’ll experience your remote policy firsthand, and you can use your own experience to set policies that make sense.

For instance, our leadership team has learned that time zones matter. Going remote and async doesn’t mean going into individual silos; collaboration is still essential to our culture and our mission.

So, for junior members on teams, we require a minimum of four to five hours of overlap in working schedules. (We’re more flexible with more senior individual contributors who demonstrate self-management.)

Real remote-first cultures are grown out of the actions, habits and working styles that teams actually use everyday. You can’t dictate or cheerlead remote work into succeeding.

The momentum has to come from your own true belief in its power, and your willingness to commit yourself.