In the brand new book Remoter: The Why-and-How Guide to Building Successful Remote Teams, co-authors Andres Cajiao and Alexander Torrenegra, who is an investor on Shark Tank Colombia and serial entrepreneur, share their decades of combined experience leading remote teams and helping companies transition into remote work.
According to Remoter: The Why-and-How Guide to Building Successful Remote Teams, some of the main benefits of remote work include access to talent (for companies) and opportunities (for people), the diversity of talent and being able to work with people from different backgrounds, better integration of life and work, and costs (reduction for companies and better income for workers).
The new book is also chock-full of everything business owners and entrepreneurs need to know to successfully build remote-first teams, as well as everything they should consider along the way. A few of the topics that are discussed and demonstrated in detail include:
- When teams should go remote, the best compensation models and legal contacts, and creating rapid and through onboarding.
- The right style of leadership for remote teams, skills required for remote team leadership, and how to motivate remote teams.
- Access to talent, or the ability to reach beyond your immediate city to a pool of talent around the world.
- Diversity, or a variety of perspectives that make your team and its work more resilient and universal.
- The importance of a disciplined and well-structured company culture that requires written communication, asynchronous decision-making, and forces leadership as well as team members to be empathetic towards individual ways of working.
- Work/life integration, which goes beyond a simple balance to include both meaning and growth for everyone involved while working remotely.
In a nutshell, Remoter: The Why-and-How Guide to Building Successful Remote Teams is the twenty-first century, yet most companies maintain a twentieth-century corporate culture.
The book is based on the Remoter Project, an on-going initiative spearheaded by the book’s co-authors that has become the most comprehensive library of content about remote work on the internet today. It’s packed with everything from podcasts and interviews with some of the world’s most successful CEOs, to personal stories and anecdotes from business leaders, and their sage advice and experiences as they’ve traveled the world to learn from those who are amidst their own journey and those who’ve done it time and time again.
The co-authors also recently founded Torre, the world’s largest professional network that compiles remote full-time jobs. Torre itself is a company with the 'remote-first' principle that CEO Alexander Torrenegra applies to all the companies he has founded, allowing the 28 people on the team to be spread across different time zones, passing through the United States, Colombia, Nigeria, the Netherlands, and Australia.
Alexander Torrenegra, co-author of Remoter and CEO of Torre, says: “Despite instant communication and collaboration through wireless computers and tech platforms, employers needlessly rent or own office space and limit their access to the best talent. It’s time for a reality check: the future of business is virtual, and it's going to take more than technology upgrades for companies to transition to a remote workforce."
The trend of remote jobs has been growing considerably in recent years, leveraged by technological advances in the digital ecosystem, and the current global COVID-19 pandemic and rapid transition to remote work has acted as a meteoric catalyst for the trend.
Torrenegra says: “Now that companies like Zillow and Slack are announcing that there will be remote employment positions forever, there has been a cascade effect, due to the change in the rules of the game. Issues such as not having to depend on work visas, allow you to search for the best talent in the world no matter where you are. All of this and more is explained in our new book, and is why we launched our latest entrepreneurial endeavor, Torre.”
With more than 7,000 openings per month, Torre has gained substantial momentum since its 2018 inception and now boasts more than 1.5 million job seeker profiles and a base of 500,000 active monthly users.
More information about Torre can be found here, and the co-founders’ new book can be purchased on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Remoter-why-how-building-successful-ebook/.
