From regular office to fully distant work: how we built an effective corporate culture

There is no ideal way to organize completely remote work in the company, but there are some tips that will help to form a bright and successful team.

From the very beginning, at Close.io, the work was partially carried out remotely. In the small office in Palo Alto, there were six of us, but very few people really cared if someone was sitting in the office. We did not have the schedule from eight to five, and we all traveled a lot. Sometimes in the office for months no one appeared - and after several weeks it was exactly the opposite. And once a quarter, we all went on a team trip.

But three years have passed, and we started hiring new employees.

The first was hired by my good friend, whom I had known for fifteen years, - but he lived in Thailand. So we tried a new approach on it, and it turned out great. The next person to join our team was also a well-known person with whom one of our founders grew up together. And this time with remote hiring everything went smoothly.
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The third newcomer also started working remotely - we had never met her before, so we checked our scheme at the same time. By that time, we already understood that remote employees could be a huge advantage for us.

Therefore, in the same year we abandoned the office. Those six of us who lived near the San Francisco Bay have traveled around the world, and we have completely moved to distant work.

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Pros and cons of remote work of the company

Minuses:

• We will have to work on the formation of a healthy, dynamic culture.
  
• Need to communicate a lot.
  

When everyone works in the office, it’s easy to communicate with others, even non-verbally: go into the room and “read” the mood of everyone using only body language. But when working remotely, you cannot allow yourself this luxury - and you literally go blind, because you stop noticing non-verbal communication. That is why all calls, letters and chats should be focused and informative, extremely specific, initiative and farsighted.

Pros:

• At your service talents from around the world.
  
• It's easier for you to keep employees.
  

Many people think that remote work is needed to hire talented employees cheaply, but we have never looked at it from this point of view. Probably, for someone it is a savings - and indeed an incentive, but we always paid our employees well.

The ability to invite people from all over the world to work is the biggest advantage. We can hire great people, no matter where they live. Talent is not defined by city or country - professionals of their craft are everywhere. We like that we can hire the right people, regardless of where they live.

In addition, it helps to retain employees. In Silicon Valley, there is a constant struggle for talents: everyone is constantly changing jobs in search of better conditions. Therefore, it is difficult to retain employees.

But if you hire people from different countries, then for a particular person you can become the best employer in his city: your new employee may well live where people of his profession do not have many interesting opportunities. Therefore, working in your company will be an excellent option for him. And if you treat your employees well, let them grow and develop, they are likely to stay with you much longer.

In addition, you will not lose them even when they move, and this has happened many times in our company at Close.io. We do not have to part with someone just because he moved. We spend so much time on adapting newcomers to the company and building relationships, that we absolutely don’t want to lose people for some stupid reasons, like moving.

Two basic principles for creating an effective remote work culture

Care

We take care of our employees and invest resources in them - we founded the company, but we continue to work for it.

And I want to work in a company with a good culture: to work with happy and satisfied people, with those who give all the best, because, ultimately, I want to be proud of the company that I created.

Communication without omission

If the company works remotely, the main thing is communication. Whenever you doubt whether it is worth saying something - be sure to say.

For this reason, we developed our software: we wanted everything to be as transparent as possible. Everyone in the company can view the correspondence with customers, sales funnels, transactions, incomes. Such transparency is a key component of our struggle to communicate without omission. The more context each has, the less you need to guess. Therefore, we all have complete information about the company.

How it all works

Every Monday, team leaders send a report that includes goals and targets for the week: usually the entire team is given a general access to the Google document. We read all the reports, comment, ask questions and prepare to meet with the teams.

On Tuesday morning, we are going to make a video call with the whole company, where we usually discuss questions on reports sent on Monday. These calls take half an hour, but more often 15–20 minutes are enough. We also record the call so that everyone can see what we were talking about.

After this 30-minute call, we have one-on-one conversation sessions: for 15 minutes, our employees talk to each other about work and / or their life. Sometimes specific work projects are discussed, but often they just chat about weekends or pets. In any case, employees have the opportunity to learn more about each other.

Once a month, teams send a monthly report that summarizes each week, and also sets out plans for the next month. And we send all the data on the financial condition, so that everyone knows how the company is doing.

In addition, every week we ask the team some question, for example: “How effective do you think you are working?”, Or: “What did you read recently inspiring?” We send replies, and we send every Friday survey results. This is a great way to interact with the team at the end of a long work week.

And when a novice comes to us, we ask him to fill out the “Guide about himself” - a short questionnaire of preferences in work and communication. This “handbook” can be read by everyone in the company, and if someone has forgotten something, you can always refer to it.

If you need a healthy remote work culture, you can't do without Mary.

It is important that someone in the company is responsible for corporate culture — so that employees feel happy and know that they are cared for. This does not always have to be an official position - but an energetic, caring and dedicated person with common sense and ability to understand the mood of others is surely needed: joy, sadness, confusion. The team needs someone to trust, with whom you can share thoughts, concerns, problems and questions. Having a man like Mary on the team is very important.

She is also, moreover, the main instigator on team trips, which are an important part of our remote work culture. The team is very large, so every quarter it is impossible to leave, but twice a year, we all get together for a week. If you're wondering how these team trips go, read this article .

Do not forget to have fun

We have a special chat room - “Pranks” - where the team can relax and unwind while working during a couple of minutes. I think it is clear that we have the most active room: there are constantly sharing articles, gifs, videos and jokes. And we encourage this, because when working remotely, it is not always easy to feel social contact. And if you work from home, you can go crazy about constant business talk.

Encourage coworking

We want people not to sit at home. Connect with other people. Attend events, look for new contacts. Sitting in my pajamas all day long is bad, and it makes it difficult to work well. Therefore, we help employees pay for coworking, if they are interested.

Steli, and you are not afraid that employees shirk work?

Many company executives with whom I spoke were worried that if the company started working completely remotely, employees would not do anything. But we, frankly, have the opposite problem.

We spend a lot of time and effort on hiring trustworthy people. Therefore, I am most worried about what they will recycle. Do they have enough breaks? When was the last time they went on vacation? We even set up the system so that if someone was not on vacation in the first four months of the year, you could find out about it and offer the employee a rest.

If you hire the right people, you never have to worry about whether they work.

Company culture is like any other product. It needs to be strengthened and improved. You need to constantly work on it. The world is changing, you, your customers are changing, so you need to be able to assess whether the team you have created is happy and whether employees are set up for success.

If this approach does not please you, it is possible that completely remote work in the company is not for you. But if you read the article and feel the strength to take it, you have a good chance to put together an excellent team that will work remotely as well as us.


About the translator

The article is translated in Alconost.

Alconost is engaged in the localization of games , applications and sites in 68 languages. Language translators, linguistic testing, cloud platform with API, continuous localization, 24/7 project managers, any formats of string resources.

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