Remote Work: What Not To Do

Paving way to employee satisfaction and productivity rise

The transition from office work to remote work is nothing short of an employment revolution. New research suggests 99 percent of remote workers would like to continue working remotely at least part of the time for the rest of their careers, and 95 percent would recommend it to others. With satisfaction numbers like that, encouraging remote work just makes good business sense.

Our team implemented a “work from anywhere” policy one year ago. As VP of People at Springboard Retail, I have seen first-hand the rise in employee satisfaction and productivity since launching the initiative. At the same time, however, we’ve learned some tough lessons along the way. This is what we would NOT have done if we had the chance to start over.

Because remote work candidates can apply from anywhere, and telecommuting is a major job perk, we receive many applications for each open position, making it difficult to sort contenders. We eventually realized that we had to overhaul our entire recruiting process to handle much higher and more varied candidate volume. Through trial and error, we’ve managed to strike the right balance between automation and candidate experience. 

The introduction of technologies such as video interviews (one-way and two-way) and assessments have been key to allowing highly motivated candidates to set themselves apart. We also realized that we needed to update our recruiting process to reflect the changing nature of our remote culture and work - without oversizing our recruiting department.

Remote work involves consistent use of many forms of technology and a high degree of self management. If candidates conduct a successful video interview or complete a written assignment in a timely way, we take these as positive early indicators that the remote work lifestyle will be a good fit. We’ve learned to carefully explain why we ask these things of candidates though - for example, we developed thoughtful content to explain just how important video interactions are in our company on a day-to-day basis. 

Don’t forget about employee onboarding - Day 1 is a uniquely daunting experience in a remote work environment, so everything from home office set-up to introductions to every colleague has to be carefully coordinated for new employees. We experienced some quick turnover early on in our remote days, which was highly unusual for us. We realized that new Springboarders felt lost and confused and this was a direct result of lack of an onboarding program that fit the needs of a remote, distributed team. As a new Springboarder, you aren’t going to bump into people in the elevator or break room.

So, we created a completely new onboarding program with one main goal - make sure new Springboarders quickly develop a strong grasp on who to go to get what they need. We aim to firmly establish comfort with reaching out to anyone and everyone in the company immediately. This is accomplished through official introductions, facilitated one-on-one video meetings, onboarding buddies, and active engagement from people operations and hiring managers.

We don’t leave much to chance - structured onboarding plans have proven to be incredibly useful. Further, achieving our top onboarding goal requires that we have a complete setup for all systems and training documents ready, a slate of video meetings scheduled, and consistently up-to-date org chart and contact directory, including photos, reporting relationships, job profiles and time zones. It’s key that new Springboarders get access to ALL of this immediately on day one.

Don’t just rely on organic communication via Slack; the trial and error of finding tools which unite teams to make work easier is no simple feat. We have learned that, in order to operate a high performing remote company, your People Ops team will need to spend a LOT of time assessing, designing, experimenting with and continually improving how people collaborate and communicate. 

This isn’t historically a natural HR function, so this needs to be an intentional ongoing effort. Finding precisely the right communication tool for each need is key to employee engagement. Over time, we’ve introduced specific tools to facilitate all forms of communication, including interactive all-hands meetings, intimate small group interactions, quick feedback and more. 

Don’t move slowly in adopting an asynchronous approach - remote work requires autonomy and autonomy requires flexibility. This is very obvious in retrospect, but took us quite a while to figure out. We have needed to experiment with different meeting cadence and timing in order to service the broadest range of time zones. If there is a live event where we want maximum participation, this needs to be formally scheduled as far in advance as possible. 

Otherwise, we regularly share recordings of information. We have had to formalize a more intuitive naming convention for Slack channels and introduce an internal knowledge base so that people can easily discover the info that they need. We’ve also introduced new tools that allow for asynchronous stand-up updates and bots that call attention to the most pertinent information.

Our transition to a fully distributed remote team has been worth it and we would make the same decision again. Employee retention is high, acquisition cost per hire is low, and the business results are strong. But if we have learned nothing else, adaptability is the name of this game. The decision to become a remote team will affect every single aspect of your operations. It’s a substantial undertaking, but also a great opportunity to set your company up for future success on many levels.