The COVID-19 pandemic came quickly, and the safety of employees needed to come first before any business outcome. Many businesses were left with no choice but to go remote in March 2020. So businesses switched to fully remote work, leaving a lot up in the air regarding timelines, expectations, and what will happen next.
With so much uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, Suzy, a consumer intelligence company, decided to close its office for the rest of 2020. Suzy CEO, Matt Britton, shared that Suzy was one of the first New York tech startups to announce their closure for the entirety of 2020. Not long after, many of the big tech players such as Facebook and Google announced similar news.
More and more companies remained remote as the pandemic charged on. Although productivity wasnât being impacted, many companies were facing similar cultural challenges. Plus, not everyone is well equipped to be fully remote or knows how to navigate a remote work lifestyle.
âAs the year went on, we continued to be quite productive and efficient, but not without a cost,â shared Matt Britton. âThereâs definitely a lot of cultural downsides to being a remote office.â
Matt Britton joined Dan Schawbel, managing partner of Workplace Intelligence. He shared his insights on embracing a digitally native mindset, retaining company culture, managing employee expectations, and how Suzy helped its local community during the pandemic.
Embracing the digitally native mindset
What is a digital native? This might be your first time hearing the term, but youâre likely no stranger to the concept. Many people in todayâs workforce are digital natives. Theyâre individuals who grew up native to a digital world. They grew up with technology as a significant component of their lives.
âWhen I think of the word digital-native, I think of Millennials,â shared Britton. âMillennials are the first generation that grew up with the internet in the household. Gen Z is the first generation that grew up with the mobile phone in their household.â
As companies shift to remote work, they need to embrace digitally-native employees and align their workflows with that upbringing and mindset.
âI think an organization that aligns around those principles are ones that use tools like Slack to communicate, and they’re ones that understand that you need to move at the speed of culture, at the speed of business, and deploy the right amount of training and tools to your teams so they can act accordingly and really thrive,â shared Britton.
âYou need to move at the speed of culture, at the speed of business, and deploy the right amount of training and tools to your teams so they can act accordingly and really thrive.â
Reframing workplace expectations for a digital world
As the world shifted to working remotely, many employees didnât know what expectations were for working fully remote.
âWhat we found is that a lot of our employees didnât know what was expected of them in a remote environment. How late should they be expected to answer emails? What are the response times expected? How do they treat different channels, text messaging versus Slack versus email, et cetera?â said Britton.
To help combat some of that confusion and set clear expectations with their employees early on, Suzy reframed their operating manual to align with their new way of work.
âWe essentially rolled out a completely new remote operating system to our employees, so they understood how we use different tools and what was expected of our team,â said Britton.
âThat was incredibly impactful, getting people to reset to this new world and not making the assumption that they would just figure it out.â
This built a strong foundation for the Suzy team to thrive in a remote world. It also built trust between the Suzy leadership team and the rest of the team, which positively impacted the business.
Increased productivity for the Suzy team
With the new expectations in place and new technology leveraged, the Suzy team was well on its way to being successful in a remote world. In fact, their sales team was performing better than ever before with this new work model.
Pre-Covid, their sales team was only connecting with one prospect per day. They would fly to meet a prospect in person, have one meeting, then fly backâconsuming their entire workday. Now that everyone is remote, in-person sales meetings are a thing of the past. The Suzy sales team can meet with more prospects in one day than ever before.
âI think the biggest benefits have just been productivity and efficiency. I think that our sales team can speak to a significantly higher quantity of prospects than they were prior,â notes Britton.
Suzy enables everyone to thrive
Suzy took all the proper steps in ensuring their employees were set up for success when they switched to remote work âbut it didnât happen overnight.
Now, more than ever, companies need to listen to their employees to keep business running smoothly, keep morale high, and combat burnout. So the Suzy team listens to their employees and solicits feedback on a weekly cadence using a tool called Peakon.
âWe have an amazing chief people officer named Anthony Onesto, who really is a pioneer in this space at making sure that our employees not only feel heard, but we’re extracting data from that feedback to benchmark in a variety of different categories across departments, across employee cohorts, and then we can act on that data,â shared Britton. âIf the engagement is low from a certain cohort in our organization, how do we over-index in that to make sure that we level it off the next time?â
To grow as a company, Suzy relies on the data and feedback from their employees, especially now with the loss of office camaraderie. The team knows that if they didnât solicit this feedback from their employees, employee dissatisfaction could fly under the radar and negatively impact culture and, ultimately, business outcomes.
By checking in with their employees, they ensure that employee voices are heard and remain part of their foundation.
Giving back to the community
Not only is Suzy aligning their internal strategy to allow their employees to succeed in a remote environment, but theyâre also ensuring their local community is able to maintain a sense of normalcy during these hard times.
While every office went remote during the pandemic, schools also had to switch to a remote model. Remote learning, much like remote work, wasnât an easy adjustment for everyone. Not every child had access to the technology needed to attend their classes virtually. So, the Suzy team wanted to do something about it.
In collaboration with a New York tech association, Suzy led the charge in collecting unused laptops and donating them to children in need. There were many unused laptops across New York City offices that the Suzy team put to good use, helping underprivileged students continue their education.
Matt Britton and the Suzy team have built a strong business model and uphold core values that they love to impart to their local community.
Advice for companies embracing hybrid and remote work
As Britton mentioned, there are high cultural and emotional costs to working remotely. It’s the responsibility of the leaders to help employees fight burnout and keep the business running as normal as possible.
For example, in an office, all of your coworkers are just a few steps away, so itâs easier to make connections. But now, you have to be more intentional about how you interact with coworkers, and for junior-level employees, it might not be as easy to get in front of the c-suite as it once was.
âI think people who are embracing remote work have to be really intentional about having an ongoing curriculum of in-person meetups, especially for the more junior people in your organization who have never had the ability to build close personal relationships and are at a disadvantage.â
At the end of the day, success in a remote world comes from listening to your employees, building trust, reinventing a healthy culture, and embracing the mindset of a digital native.
âI think everything is going to be more digitally native, and I think it’s going to continue to become more and more globalized over time. I think your ability to have a global outlook is going to be increasingly important for companies to be able to succeed moving forward.â
Learn how to host the most successful company kickoff: including the biggest mistake companies make, the one question you must answer, and 10 ideas to get started.
The emergence of Covid-19 in March 2020 changed the workforce seemingly overnight. Companies with policies stating employees need to be in the office five days a week were scrambling to develop a plan where business could carry on while their employees worked from home.
But not every business had to face this hurdle. One business that didnât think anything of this change was Sketch, a fully featured collaborative platform for designers. For CEO Pieter Omvlee, working remotely has been the normal routine since they were founded in 2010.
Omvlee is here to share his perspective on remote work, what heâs learned along the way, and how to apply a remote-first methodology to your business — before you lose your top talent.
How Sketch went remote
In 2010, Peiter Omvlee was living in London, and his partner and co-founder, Emanuel SĂĄ, lived in Portugal. From day one, their goal wasnât necessarily to start a big business, they simply had the goal to build an app.
And build an app they did, by communicating mostly via iChat. Omvlee explains, âAs we released the product and it became clear that it was a bigger success than we had initially planned for, we started looking for people to join us. We found that it worked out great for us being remote. We work well together, but being remote also meant finding talent in places where companies traditionally weren’t looking. And that’s been a great thing for us.â
Being remote from the get-go allowed Omvlee and SĂĄ to expand their hiring scope, allowing them to hire the best of the best, no matter where they were located.
How working remote can build culture
Some organizations worry that working remotely will mean company culture will suffer, but Omvlee believes that isnât the case. Being fully remote can help to build a culture that is centered around trust.
According to Omvlee, not having all of your employees gathered and working in one large office means you have to trust one another to get the job done. âI believe that trust is the key element upon which working remotely is built. You need to trust people to employ the right initiatives because you can’t be there all the time, holding their hands,â he explains.
Another way working remotely has helped Sketch build a strong workplace culture is they take the time to write down all information, processes, and procedures. He elaborates to say, âWe do have calls from time to time, but we put everything in writing so the people in different time zones or who have other appointments that conflict can always read back on things. You don’t need to be in a certain meeting to know what is going on, and I think that really helps keep communication strong.â
How Sketch makes onboarding work
A challenge that many companies faced as they transitioned to working fully remote was how to onboard new employees. While the foundation of Sketch is built on trust, it can be difficult for organizations to trust a brand new team member on day one.
For Omvlee and his team, theyâve found that specific tactics work for them to ensure onboarding is as seamless as possible. For starters, Sketch keeps a repository that is constantly being updated with the projects theyâre working on and specific guidelines so that every detail can be looked up when thereâs a question or if a detail needs to be double-checked. Also, when a new hire is joining the team, the information surrounding their onboarding is prepared ahead of time, so nothing’s left to the last minute.
And even if itâs challenging at times, the team at Sketch knows that trust is a necessary building block to make this work. âTrust is something that people respond well to if you give it to them. If in the first days you are too much on top of things, it can backfire on you,â Omvlee explains.
Another strategy Sketch uses during onboarding is that every new hire is assigned a seasoned employee to help them through specific procedures and get them familiar and acclimated with the culture.
Challenges Sketch has overcome
In addition to onboarding, there are some remote-first challenges organizations may be faced with.
Sketch has found that management needs to remember to lead by example and have exceptional communication as companies oversee a remote team. A company’s efforts to have excellent communication can help keep a robust written record of as much information as you can that is constantly being updated and checked for accuracy.
âWhen you communicate something in person, it’s easy to add gestures and emphasis and clarify or soften things up with body language. And, it can be tempting not to say details as clearly as you want to because you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. There’s so much room for misunderstanding in the written word, which is why clarity of communication is really important,â explains Omvlee.
Another challenge of working remotely Sketch has overcome is feeling like coworkers donât have a bond or relationship. A strategy that has worked for them is to incorporate talking about hobbies, shared interests, and life outside of work over Slack to form bonds while building a gateway to trust. They also organize casual sessions where the team can learn skills that arenât centered around work.
“We had a summer photography contest, a cooking session, and a storytelling share, which were not related to work at all. It was simply a nice way for people to socialize and get to know each other.”
Before the pandemic, Sketch also orchestrated a yearly meet-up where the team could participate in social activities, team-building exercises, and get dinner as a group, all to help reinforce culture, values, and foster relationships.
Giving the team a strong work-life balance
One challenge specifically was the issue of having a healthy work-life balance, which became especially difficult during the height of Covid. It became difficult to balance personal and professional lives because they were all suddenly the same.
Sketch tackled this by giving their team enough time to recharge and avoid burnout. âItâs important to make sure employees donât over- or under-commit to work. You always find out when someone isnât really working. One benefit Sketch offers is unlimited holiday paid time off so employees can make time for themselves and recharge. We also offer flexible work hours.â
Measuring the health of remote work
On top of implementing a work-life balance centered around allowing the team to rest and recharge, Sketch takes it one step further to measure the health of the remote-first workplace.
In addition to managers checking in with their team to ensure theyâre taking enough time off, Sketch also sends out surveys asking employees how theyâre feeling, if theyâre happy in their role, and whether they need something else to succeed. Answers to these surveys remain anonymous.
Sketch also provides employees with a mental health program, where anyone within the company can seek the help they need.
Advice from Sketch on transitioning to remote or hybrid offices
For those unsure if they should remain remote or transition to a hybrid office, Sketch recommends being 100% remote, because itâs all about staying consistent.
Omvlee shared a helpful example to explain why he feels like this. âIf you have a team in the office and a team not in the office, I fear that it would lead to sort of two groups of people, where if you’re in the office, you do get more information than if you’re working from home. We experienced this in a very, very small way here at Sketch when I rented a small office in a coworking space together with someone else who happened to live in the same city. And even just us two, you could notice that we were discussing things that we then forgot to relay back to the rest of the team. And I can only imagine it gets worse if you have a large group of people in the office and a large group of people out.
“I think the consistency of just having everybody remote really helps. Everybody has to work in the same way.”
What the future of remote looks like
How the future of remote work looks will depend on details like geography, industry, leadership, the companyâs size, and more. No matter how your company makes a remote-first workplace a success for them, itâs important when it comes to retention.
âIn our situation, we’ve been able to hire amazing people, and people have come to Sketch specifically because they like remote work. They have the right experience, and they donât want to go back to working in an office. And I think we’ve all read stories from small to large companies, where they want the people back in the office, but the employees simply didnât want to.
I think talent retention is the biggest problem for many companies out there, and just adding the unnecessary limit of location into the mix really doesn’t help. I think working remotely is here to stay, and I think it’ll be a shame for a company not to invest in flexibility,â shares Omvlee.
At the end of the day, no matter the organization, if you want to remain competitive, attract top talent, and keep your best employees around for the long haul, a remote workforce is the way to go.
“We’ve hired many people who are married, have children, their entire life is where they are. Why on earth would they move to the other side of the world just to work at your company?”
Workplaces may be remote, but you don’t have to lose the opportunity to foster culture and connect through events and activities. Easily adapt by offering inclusive remote events that everyone will enjoy.
As hard as making the shift to remote work was during the pandemic, remote is here to stay. But making remote-first a reality isnât as easy as it sounds.
While some companies didnât miss a beat, others believe the increase in productivity was fear-induced and cannot be sustained.
Do the pros of working remotely outweigh the possible cons? Is remote better? And why do some companies fail?
Prezly – PR software that helps companies connect their content with their contacts and stakeholders – has spent a while figuring it out. Prezly has been remote since the beginning, with employees from 13 different countries.
Here to discuss his perspective on remote work, culture building remotely, why face time is still essential, and advice for other companies planning to go remote, is Jesse Wynants, CEO and Co-Founder of Prezly, who had a chat with Dan Schawbel, managing partner of Workplace Intelligence.
Going remote: A practical decision to end stressful commutes
âIt was a pretty pragmatic decision. We simply couldn’t find people in the city that had an office. And, we couldn’t find people to commute to the city because it was an hour. Even if you lived on the other side of the country, or just maybe 50 kilometers away, it was a hassle to get there,â shares Wynants.
This was at a time when remote work was being bashed online. Few companies were remote, and Yahoo had even banned working from home.
But when faced with commuter hell, Wynants said:
âWell, let’s just widen our range, and let’s start hiring remotely.”
Prezly made its first remote hire from Ukraine, whoâs still at the company.
Hiring exclusively outside Belgium: A new filter for the talent pool
After the first successful remote hire, Prezly decided not to look for talent in Belgium anymore.
âIt was more of a negative or a downside that they were in Belgium then it was an upside,â shares Wynants.
When youâve got companies like Apple insisting that employees work out of their offices at least three days a week, this might seem like a strange move by Prezly.
Wynants explains the reason. We said, âLet the banks of Belgium and the big corporations fish in that pond of Belgium. Talent trumps everything, so that was the initial reason why we started doing that.â
Leading a distributed workforce: The highs, the lows, and everything in between
Going remote for companies means low overhead costs, increased productivity, and revenue growth.
Employees sign up for remote work to experience freedom and flexibility, financial stability, and location independence.
Wynants also adds, âSometimes [remote] is better.â
But getting here isnât a cakewalk.
Get things right, early on: Document everything + Tech stack
Wynants explains, âYou need to get your shit together earlier in the company, even if you’re small. You need to make sure stuff is documented. You need to make sure that people are involved. You need to have processes in place, regular catch-ups, all hands, stand-ups. You need to get them under control really quickly because otherwise there is zero communication.â
When you examine why remote work fails at some companies, a lack of solid infrastructure is one reason that emerges.
Prezly has a great project management tool to ensure communication and an internal blog so information flows both ways.
Other tools used include Slack, Linear, Figma, Prezly, Zoom, Github, Productboard to create a virtual office.
âPrezly also invites feedback from the team, and thatâs been a benefit because it prepares you to scale later,â shares Wynants.
The introvert vs. extrovert debate
A recent BBC Worklife article stated that introverts are more likely to thrive in remote settings while extroverts prefer in-office or hybrid.
Neuroscience studies back this up. Extroverts are less sensitive to dopamine and require constant interaction, while introverts are more sensitive and over-stimulation tires them.
Is that true at Prezly? Do only introverted people want to work remotely?
Well, it depends.
âIâm not sure if it works like that because if youâre an introvert that wants to become extroverted, you might prefer to work in-office. It is also dependent on the role youâre hiring for. Weâve had highly extroverted people who have always been remote. And, we have highly introverted people who have always been in the office, and it’s their first remote role,â explains Wynants.
But one thing is clear. People that want to work at Prezly are looking for remote roles and arenât considering in-office roles.
Remote is the new perk
Prezly team on a Zoom call
Employees would rather quit than return to office. A Bloomberg survey of 1,000 workers found that 39% of workers would quit their role if their employer didnât allow remote work.
And with the Great Resignation in full swing, some employers are finally listening.
Hiring has gotten a lot more competitive since lots of companies are going remote. What used to be an advantage for Prezly is now a perk that most companies offer.
âWe used to be one of the few companies that offered these fully remote roles, and good pay, and benefits. There weren’t that many before COVID hit, and now, almost all are doing it. That’s a little bit of a challenge that came with that, but at the same time, we do feel that we’ve got some experience under our belt on how to build cultures remotely, and how to deal with that. There’s still a little bit of an advantage for us,â explains Wynants.
Culture-building remotely can feel constructed
Water-cooler moments, lunch with your colleague, or a team outing arenât always possible when working remotely. Teams can use a tool like Airspeed to recreate these moments virtually.
Some things Wynants personally misses the most.
âThe drawback for me as an extroverted person is that you can’t go out for lunch together. In Belgium and other European countries, especially in summer, you go out, have something nice to eat, and then you go back [to work]. And during those informal conversations, actual things are decided.â
These organic moments when youâre building and sharing culture have many benefits on the work floor.
When employees have the space to blow off some steam, bounce off ideas and connect with colleagues, it leads to innovation, collaboration, and cross-team networking.
In remote settings, these donât happen spontaneously and can feel constructed before they start to feel routine.
Prezlyâs virtual watercooler
At Prezly, an open Slack channel called Water Cooler is connected to an always-open Zoom. When someone joins, others can see that and join in too.
Culture starts at the top and itâs a continuous exercise
Culture always starts at the top and trickles down.
Wynants agrees, âYou cannot change the people in the founder team and their personalities. It’s always seeding through in the culture.â
Prezyâs core values
Prezlyâs culture started with a handbook with roughly thought out company values. But culture building is a continuous exercise.
âWe’ve made tons of mistakes there,â shares Wynants. For example, a team member once asked, “How the hell does this thing in the project management tool apply to these company values?” and Prezly realized that it didnât.
Companies need to rephrase certain things in their handbook and constantly ask themselves if their values are things they still stand behind or if it needs changing.
Thinking of culture like lego blocks helps.
âI think the big building blocks pretty much still stand, and probably will remain, but it needs to evolve in how you apply them. That’s where we started, and that’s also where we constantly make tweaks to sentences in how the value is described, or how we can improve, or bring better examples in how to live by that value,â explains Wynants.
Remote Onboarding: Values in action
Remote onboarding is equal parts art and science. You need a sound onboarding plan backed by a robust tech stack and demonstrate your values in action.
Prezlyâs onboarding has that covered. Wynants shares his perspective with new hires and takes them through onboarding.
Thereâs also a mentor-like program where employees take new hires through onboarding in a practical way.
New hires are invited to an internal forum where they can see the company values in action.
âWe have some interesting threads where we talk about diversity, and how we have different discussions about that, and we link to them. The thread can be two years old, but it’s still a very good application of how we apply a certain value,â shares Wynants.
Reading a companyâs values is one thing but seeing them in action is when it starts to click for most.
Most employees look for a person-organization fit – a company that echoes their personal values. Onboarding is a crucial time because it assures new hires theyâve made the right choice.
Meeting 1x a year to improve employee retention
The Prezly team enjoying the annual retreat
A study of over 2,000 employees and managers by Virgin Pulse and Workplace Trends revealed a troubling statistic. â of remote workers are disengaged, and â never get any facetime.
Disengagement leads to poor retention rates. Something Prezly knows all too well.
âWe’ve had a set of people who weren’t able to join [our annual retreat]. There is a bigger chance that theyâre not going to end the year with us. That’s been something that we’ve been noticing, so we work really hard to get them there,â explains Wynants.
Wynants promotes annual events and gatherings because thereâs a clear correlation between face time and retention.
âYou get to connect on a deeper level on the retreat,â says Wynants.
 Other remote-first companies like Buffer and Zapier do the same. They hold company retreats at least once a year and have witnessed similar benefits.
Fun activities, dinners, games, and a few team-building sessions let people across teams connect and have fun together.
The energy that people leave the retreats with has them buzzing for days. âThat kind of energy pushes them forward in their job, and new connections exist between different teams that weren’t there. There automatically will be conversations going on that will benefit Prezly in the end,â explains Wynants.
These retreats have another benefit – making those dreaded Zoom calls better thanks to newfound camaraderie.
Prezly has an all-company retreat once a year and flies in the team twice a year. Before the pandemic, the team met up 2-3 times a year.
And these arenât always employer-led initiatives. Employees often drive these meet-ups.
But what about companies that never meet up?
Wynants doesnât believe that for a company to create collective memories meeting in-person is necessary but it is better.
âIn-person just allows you to really focus on [the moment] or creating [moments] in a more natural way than you can do remotely. We do fun things remotely as well and create memorable experiences.
But, there is something different about being in the same place for four days in a row and spending a lot of time together that’s, for me, irreplaceable by something virtual.â
Holding remote workers accountable and aligning them with the companyâs goals
A common myth about remote workers is that theyâre unproductive and out of sync with the companyâs mission and goals.
One way Prezly gets employees excited about the long-term vision is, of course, the retreats. But thereâs a whole system at work too.
Celebrating wins and owning up to mistakes on the internal blog
Apart from facilitating information flow, Prezlyâs internal blog serves to improve transparency.
âWe are very transparent in where we’re going, what the revenue is, what went well, what went bad, the mistakes we made. I think that’s something that’s in every modern leadership book, as well.â
Wynants is right. Transparency is a top priority for companies trying to gain trust and establish psychological safety.
When companies own their mistakes, it encourages employees to feel safe at work and share risky ideas.
âI think you really need to be open in saying, “Listen, we messed up here. We messed up there.” I basically say this, probably, once a quarter, once a month. I don’t mind saying I’m still figuring these things out. Just help me. Just give feedback. Be open. Be honest,â shares Wynants.
Creating a culture where feedback is appreciated
Prezly pushes people to give written feedback to each other.
Not surprising since feedback is critical for growth. Being able to give and receive feedback is what helps teams avoid repeating the same mistakes and optimize processes.
Slack channel #wins is used to share feedback at Prezly
âWe’re a small company, so there’s not a lot of hierarchy in any role. You can’t become a VP. We don’t have titles, so the only way that we can push people to become better is that we are expecting a lot from each other,â shares Wynants.
Feedback culture encourages learning
Apply the growth mindset to feedback, and you put yourself in a constant state of learning.
âWhere we say, “Listen, this was great, but I think we can do X, Y, Z to do it even better.” Then, you’re growing, because you say, “Okay. He’s actually right. I could actually do that better,” shares Wynants.
Creating a culture of recognition and openness
New hires are encouraged to share positive messages for the person that helped them with onboarding.
âThat makes someone’s day, and I think that’s something powerful that people sometimes miss,â shares Wynants.
Wynants is right. A lack of recognition is among the top reasons employees quit or feel disengaged at work.
âIf you’re happy with someone, share it. If you’re not happy with someone, you need to share it. Basically, we tell you it’s your obligation because otherwise, you’re not working at the company. You’re just doing your own thing, if you hold back,â explains Wynants.
Pro Tip from Wynants: Encouraging introverts to share feedback can take a lot of work, but if you give them anonymous tools and examples of how to do it, youâll be able to push them out of their comfort zone.
Work-life balance: A constant balancing act
Companies that hadnât figured out remote work before the pandemic ended up setting unrealistic expectations inevitably letting work bleed into personal life.
So does being remote from the start give you an advantage?
When Prezly was formed, both founders had young children, and the company was bootstrapped with no VC funding to fall back on.
It was vital for the founders to develop a plan to avoid burning out.
âI’m not saying that this is easy. It’s actually hard, and during COVID when they were home, during the lockdown, it was really hard. But you need to be understanding of that, as well,â shares Wynants.
Just like Prezlyâs culture trickles from the top, Wynants welcomed the occasional kid or pet on Zoom calls as an example to the team that this was okay. But juggling parenthood and your job can get very messy and leave you feeling like youâre failing at both.
âAs a company, you need to empathize and understand that this is the situation and give people some time off if you see that they’re struggling with that. And, be very conscious of these things happening.â
Is work-life balance possible at the top?
On average, an employeeâs mental health is better than a CEOâs.
A CEO has to worry about way more, and when you mix parenting with managing a remote company during a pandemic, itâs a recipe for disaster.
Understandably, last year was the hardest year for leaders. So, reaching out, practicing empathy, and connecting is critical to maintaining work-life balance.
Advice: What should other companies trying remote work know?
For companies trying to increase their chance of successfully supporting remote work, Wynants has 3 strategies –
Become a better writer
Talk to the stakeholders
Learn to communicate in different formats
BTW, if youâre interested in taking your PR team remote, check out Prezlyâs PR Roundtable here.
Become a better writer
Writing makes you a better thinker. And going remote requires a lot of conscious thought.
Wynants suggests, âWrite enough about it, even if you don’t publish the writing.â
Donât attempt to approach remote work by examining how things were before or how other companies did it.
âKeep asking yourself the question, “Where did we go wrong? How could we communicate better?” implores Wynants. Wynants recommends signing up for a writing course, and hereâs why:
âIf you’re good at writing, at bringing over ideas in a short way during these weekly updates, that really helps. If people like reading what you write, and the message that you bring, that does help. I think that’s just a very powerful tool, which is much more powerful.â
Talk to the stakeholders
While convincing someone by talking is easy for an extrovert like Wynants, writing can help you share more concise and less convoluted thoughts.
But before taking the plunge, make sure you talk to your co-founders, leadership team, investors, and employees.
Because sometimes, words can be misinterpreted and lead to non-constructive discussions. Wynants recommends jumping on a call is better than trying to Slack the team. âIt feels like those written communications donât give all the signals that you need or the wrong signals,â explains Wynants.
The bottom line is you need to over-communicate.
Learn to communicate in different formats
Thereâs different etiquette at play depending on the medium you choose – Slack, email, text, or your internal blog.
Learning to communicate in different formats and revving up the writing engine is essential to making sure remote processes stick.
What is the future of remote or hybrid work?
âI think it’s only going to grow. We had to figure everything out ourselves, so it wasn’t that easy. Now, there are a lot more tools coming for remote people as well, and they’re doing really well.â
Take Zoom, for example. Prezly tried five other tools before landing on Zoom because the audio quality was paramount.
But look up video conferencing tools now and youâll find a whole host of options. Setting up the right infrastructure to support remote work is only getting easier.
Even something like a home office budget that was uncommon is now a perk most companies offer.
At Prezly, the concept of office budgets started over two years ago. Borrowed from Zapier, the goal was to create a suitable environment for work.
Remote isnât about cutting costs for most companies, and itâs the same for Prezly.
âFor us, it has never been about cost-cutting. People need to have a good place to type. We don’t like seeing people with bad cameras, or when they’re working from a couch constantly,â explains Wynants.
For work to happen, you need to create the right environment for it.
âYou need a good camera. You need a good microphone. You need a good internet connection. I do think it’s important to create that environment where you can relax and get some work done.â
With remote becoming the norm and most office spaces going away for good, weâre witnessing a disbursement of offices.
Thatâs why home offices have to be equipped with the right facilities and tech to make the future of work more collaborative and equal.
Letâs think back to March 2020, a time that showed the world just how unpredictable the state of work really was, as companies all over the world shifted to being fully remote with very little time to prepare. Most of them werenât ready to do so. They didnât have the right tools, communication strategies, or processes in place to handle such a radical change.
One company that was more than ready? Articulate, an organization that builds creative platforms for online training, has been fully remote since it was founded by Adam Schwartz in 2002. In fact, it was one of the first fully remote companies in the United States.
Here to share her perspective of hybrid work, how they’ve thrived in a fully remote workplace for so long, as well as tips for companies who are still struggling with the initiative, is CEO of Articulate Lucy Suros, who sat down with Dan Schawbel, managing partner of Workplace Intelligence.
How Articulate went remote
While many companies had remote work forced onto them at the height of the pandemic, Articulate has always been remote and chose to do so out of necessity. When Schwartz put his entire life savings into Articulate, he was based in New York City. He quickly realized he needed to hire experts, and he did — one in India and one in Missouri.
For those of us who remember 2002, there was no Skype, Zoom, or Slack. Schwartz and the first two hires made it work through phone calls, email, and yes, even fax machines. While the move to be remote was out of necessity, Schwartz wanted to hire experts in the field, and it didnât matter where they were. What did matter was the type of people a remote-first job attracts: people who are self-starters, who are self-motivated, and who are highly productive workers.
âAdam found that this was a great way to run a company and build a culture focused on doing work that tangibly moves a business forward,â shares Suros. âHe also quickly realized that remote work attracted an excellent caliber of employee: people who were uniquely self-motivated and self-directed.
Itâs all about removing the stigma behind the remote worker and realizing that people want to be remote
Remote first should also be people first
While some organizations questioned if remote work was going to, well, work, Articulate has been reaping the benefits of being a remote-first organization for about 20 years. For Suros, itâs all about creating an environment where people â both employees and customers â can grow and flourish in more ways than one.
âA lot of companies are always chasing the next quarter. One of the reasons we are highly productive and highly successful is we put our people first; we make the effort to see them as individuals and understand what makes them go the extra mile. When our customers interact with us, they see that we really care about what theyâre doing and what theyâre trying to accomplish. We focus on helping people flourish as human beings, not just workers in a machine, and supporting them through their journeys,â shares Suros.
Overcoming remote obstacles
That said, being fully remote does come with its own share of obstacles. It can be challenging to build a human-centered organization without face time and being in an office environment.
Communication
âLeaders need to think carefully about the tools and technologies they use to communicate and collaborate. Then, ensure everyone has complete clarity on how to effectively use them,â explains Suros.
While Articulate started over the phone, email, and fax machine in its nascent years, it eventually turned to the tried-and-true tools we know today — Zoom, Slack, and Trello. And while these software choices can increase productivity, thereâs some fun involved, too. Suros shares, âWe have more than 500 Slack channels, and many of them help our teams connect socially so that we can all stay connected as humans.âÂ
Hiring and onboarding
In addition to overcoming the communication aspect of being remote, there was also the hurdle of hiring and onboarding remote workers in the midst of Covid. At Articulate, leadership is very intentional about how they hire and onboard, with a 3-day âramp campâ focused on Rise courses, comprehensive Trello boards, and Zoom meetings.
When you’re remote, it’s actually a great opportunity to think about things intentionally, like how you communicate, how you collaborate, that if you’re in person you might not be as intentional about.
Articulate took a similar approach to hiring remote employees, as their primary focus was finding thoughtful and trustworthy doers. To do this, they took a look at their star performers in the company, all in different departments, with varying roles and seniority levels. â
My advice to leaders? Look at who have been your star performers over the last 18 months and find the commonalities between them â and search for candidates who share them.
We hire based on these attributes, we fire based on these attributes, and we aim to cultivate these attributes through our training.â
Employee feedback
The company also pays special attention to how they celebrate their employees who go above and beyond and display the companyâs core values. For Articulate, itâs all about continuous feedback and acknowledging those who have gone the extra mile. âWe have a Slack channel called âpropsâ, where people are constantly high fiving each other and recognizing others who have helped on projects and products,â explains Suros.
Training
Finally, itâs common for organizations to be unsure of how to make training effective when working remotely. âPre-pandemic, company training meant you’d have someone standing in front of a PowerPoint with folks youâve brought into the room, flying in from all over the place. It was pretty passive,â shares Suros.
To avoid this, companies need to take the time to rethink their training programs, sorting out how to make online training work while still building a culture of learning. âCompanies need to democratize training development so that folks can share what they know, and do it in an environment that recognizes the whole human. You want your people to have this growth mindset, this self-perpetuating learning culture. Give people the technological tools needed to easily create training, and do it in a way that’s designed for online training. You want to make sure that youâre creating an environment of learning and supporting people with the right creator platforms for training so that anyone in your organization can share what they know,â explains Suros.
The business benefit of a human-centric approach
It may feel unusual to have a business approach centered around building a trustworthy connection with your team, but this approach offers real benefits.
Itâs important for all organizations, especially remote ones, to see people as whole humans so that they feel they can bring their whole selves to work. âWhen people feel seen and when they feel they can be their whole selves at work, they’re not spending any energy hiding pieces of themselves. What they’re doing is spending all of their energy growing and flourishing as human beings in the work that they’re doing,â shares Suros.
When you do this, your business sees the benefit of getting the most out of its employees. As they grow, they have the potential to do things that they may not have ever thought they could do because they now feel seen by their coworkers and by leadership. Suros explains, âCompanies that put this focus on their people will see that it drives real business benefits. And if you’re not doing that, you’re already missing the mark.â
She adds, “Our secret sauce is to create a human-centered environment where you’re paying attention to how people interact and to how you can help them grow. We all have so much in us that is just waiting to blossom, and if you create the right environment, you’ll bring all that potential to life.â
How do you know itâs working?
Once you have these processes and initiatives in place, how can any organization know itâs working? At Articulate, they do this in three key ways.
First, they conduct an annual anonymous engagement survey. The survey provides a pulse check on how their team is feeling and doing, which they then use to develop their roadmap for the following year.
Second, they look at Glassdoor reviews and feedback given by employees. â97% of people say Articulate is a great place to work, and we have a CEO rating of 99%. This lets us know that weâre doing something right,â elaborates Suros.Â
The third tactic the company uses is paying close attention to inbound messages, which allows them to listen to employees in real-time.
Advice for companies
No matter your industry or the size of your company, itâs possible to make remote or hybrid work styles work if you take the right approach. Itâs all about creating an even playing field, no matter where your employees are.
âI recommend thinking about being remote first. Even if youâre hybrid, you want to organize operations as if youâre remote. Think about how you structure your operations, your communications, and your collaboration approach to be remote. Then, if you move to a hybrid environment, you don’t have an uneven playing field and everyone will feel as if they can collaborate and share ideas equally,â Suros explains.Â
Another key point is that companies need to take the time to listen to what their team actually wants and which work style they prefer. â
Your employees don’t want to commute two hours to work. They want that time back. They want to live more balanced lives.
I’ve been talking to other leaders and they are flabbergasted that people want to work remotely. They’re also flabbergasted when they learn that Articulate has been doing this for nearly 20 years. Before the pandemic, people couldn’t believe that we were so successful from both a business perspective and a human perspective â all while being fully remote.
I think hybrid is here to stay, and the most competitive companies are going to be those companies who take that seriously,â Suros emphasizes.
Transitioning to a remote or hybrid remote workstyle can be met with many hesitations. Traditionally, most businesses have worked 40-hour weeks in an office, with very few opportunities to work from home. However, weâve seen a rise in flexible work styles in recent years, most recently due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
While many companies were forced to embrace remote work, many also quickly realized that working from home doesnât decrease productivity as they previously thought. Now that many companies are returning to work, organizations are weighing their options of different work modelsâfully remote, hybrid, or back to the office full time.
One company that has always understood the benefit of having a hybrid work model is PandaDoc. In fact, PandaDoc has always been a hybrid company, mainly through circumstance. Eight years ago, Mikita Mikado, CEO of PandaDoc, moved from Belarus to Silicon Valley while his business partner remained in Belarus. As a result, Mikado and his co-founder had to navigate working remotely and collaborating across time zones, all while scaling PandaDoc from the ground up.
Now, many companies are voluntarily switching to a remote-first work structure, based on what weâve all learned throughout the pandemic, and PandaDoc was eager to join in on that. As a result, PandaDoc was able to make the switch from a partially remote workplace to a fully remote workplace in early 2020.
Mikita Mikado sat down with Dan Schawbel, managing partner of Workplace Intelligence, to discuss how the PandaDoc team went from partially remote to fully remoteâwhile prioritizing their employeesâ physical and mental health.
How the pandemic impacted PandaDoc
The PandaDoc team was no stranger to remote work. Although many companies were initially hesitant to switch to remote work when the pandemic hit, Mikado and his team took a different approach.
Since Mikado and his co-founder were successfully navigating partial remote work for so long, when the pandemic hit in early 2020, they werenât hesitant to switch to a fully remote work model. But first, they turned to their employees for feedback on remote work.
âEarly on in the pandemic, we ran a survey among our employees to see how they felt about he switch to remote and found out that most supported going remote,â shared Mikado. They realized that it was the right time to pull the trigger and move to a fully remote work model.
Navigating the switch
Switching to a fully remote work model can sometimes be tough, but add a global pandemic on top of that, and youâve got an entirely new obstacle to navigate.
Luckily, the switch to remote work didnât largely impact the workflows of PandaDoc employees. Since the PandaDoc team was already working with multiple offices across the United States, as well as the office in Belarus, they were well equipped for remote workdays. They were leveraging tools such as Slack and Zoom to keep up efficiency and work collaboratively across their offices.
From the time the PandaDoc team originally asked employees about remote work to when they were asked during the pandemic, interest in remote work had shifted. âThe first few surveys were showing that most people, 70-75%, were supportive of the move. Then, it started to slide down as people began to feel isolatedâ, said Mikado. âLoneliness is hard. Weâre social animals.â
Since the team was set up for successful remote work, the biggest obstacle for the PandaDoc team wasnât due to the work itself, but rather due to this new fully remote lifestyle and fighting the increased lack of social interaction.
Re-creating the water cooler conversation
Long gone are the days of the water cooler conversation when your whole team is working remote. Having casual conversations through chat is fun, but itâs not the same as physically pausing from work, walking away from your desk, and getting to know your coworkers. But, that doesnât mean your company canât recreate that experience with its own fun spin. Thatâs exactly what the PandaDoc team did.
Rather than simply encourage casual conversion, PandaDoc encouraged their employees to step away from the âofficeâ by creating a competition.
Whether youâre going for a run, going surfing, or simply heading out for a hikeâall you need to do is post a picture to Slack, and your team gets points. âThere’s been a competition over Slack, where the team was divided into small groups, and we counted the number of exercises that each team posted within the Slack channel.â
The team that exercised the most won. Easy enough, right? Well, if your team lost, you had to run a 5K! So, the PandaDoc team got very competitive and had a lot of fun along the way.
âIt’s a way to do something thatâs not work, do something social, and to see each other as human beings outside of work,â shared Mikado.
For those who werenât keen on getting competitive with their workouts, they came up with other creative ways to connect outside of work.
âSome teams organized whiskey nights during the pandemic where they had drinks over Zoom. Other teams organized gaming nights where they played some games with each other online; There were cooking classes! Basically, we were trying to organize different social events that were still remote and brought people together out of the context of work.â
While this started as an initiative to keep the team engaged throughout the pandemic, itâs still part of PandaDoc culture today.
Investing in employee mental health
Of course, encouraging employees to invest in their own physical health is a great initiative. But, the PandaDoc team took investing in employee health even further when they made moves to invest in the mental health of their employees. âWe instrumented a mental health budget that allowed everyone to have a budget for things like therapy or coaching,â said Mikado. âItâs been very impactful, and weâve heard a lot of good feedback on that.â
PandaDoc company values
As many successful companies do, PandaDoc has a core set of values that they strive to live up to and encourage all employees to embody.
The foundational value for PandaDoc is transparency. According to Mikado, it fosters trust. In addition, PandaDoc focuses on four core values, including learning, making a positive impact on the people around you, having fun, and being empatheticâto everyone, especially customers.
âWhen it comes to each of those, we try to build different programs and invest in ensuring that we live up to those values. I think thatâs how weâre different. Because weâre very, very particular about what we want to invest in and how we want to do it.â
These core values havenât shifted or become complicated with the shift to remote work. Thanks to the many tools available online, the PandaDoc team is still able to invest in their core values and incorporate them into their daily lives, both work and personal. âWhile you may not get the level of connection you get to with in-person meetings, events, and support, you can do a lot of different things that could be done remotely or over the internet.â
The future of work for PandaDoc
Although the PandaDoc team saw a decreased interest in working remote throughout the pandemic, the investment PandaDoc made in their employeesâ physical and mental well-being positively impacted their employeesâ views on remote work.
âNow, weâve got a third of folks that want to be completely remote and remain remote indefinitely. We have about a third that do want to go back to the office. And about a third that advocate for the hybrid approach, where they want to go back to the office maybe once or twice a week, but not every day,â Mikado shares. Research from Workplace Intelligence supports these findings, too.
With the way all companies are doing work, itâs no surprise that the future of work for PandaDoc doesnât look like it did two years ago. Remote work is on the rise more than ever before, so when PandaDoc does return to work in the office, it will likely be on an even smaller scale.
Now, offices arenât needed for peak productivity. Weâve all experienced being productive working from home. Truly, the missing piece is the social element of connecting with your coworkers in real-time, in real life, which can be accomplished with flexible time in the office.
âIâm thinking our office strategy is going to be built around that. Around ensuring that people can get together, share their ideas, spend time together, and just become friends,â says Mikado. âOnce thatâs done, they can continue getting the work done over the internet.â
Parting advice from Mikita Mikado
Over the last few years, most companies, if not all, have transitioned to some sort of remote workstyle. For some companies, this transition has been painful and challenging, but the team at PandaDoc hasnât experienced the same level of obstacles. They have set expectations, fostered community, and invested in their employees both at work and in their personal lives.
âI think the number one reason why this transition hasnât been painful for our company is that we embraced transparency, and we tried our best.â
The PandaDoc team ensured that their employees were set up for success, having written plans for not only the current year but the future. They enforced their culture code and provided clarity on the progress made toward KPIs and goals.
âI believe that having all of that ready and internalized before you go remote creates this kind of safety net to fall back on once the in-person interaction is gone. Itâs not unique to PandaDoc; I think itâs pretty universal across the board.â
Mikado believes remote work is positive not only for the PandaDoc team but for everyone.
âIf you think about it, it helps humanity in general because it lowers our carbon footprint, and it increases some peopleâs happiness,â says Mikado. âI think that humanity is only going to win, and I hope that weâll embrace it and continue to grow.â
Digital Disconnect has emerged as a major challenge in our new, post-pandemic digital world. The lack of connection is resulting in significant workplace consequences.
Some people think that work will go back to ânormal.â It turns out, thereâs no going back. The future of work is being created right now, in place-less, digitally native ways.
When COVID hit, we all embraced Zoom as the way to communicate, and Slack as the way to collaborate — but in our race to create a new digital workplace, we forgot something. People need to feel connected if they truly want to effectively communicate and collaborate.
And connecting has been a struggle for most employees in remote and hybrid workplaces.
Youâve probably heard about and even experienced Zoom and Slack fatigue. This speaks to the new problem we all now experience: Digital Disconnect.
And when we are disconnected, we get:
As a matter of fact, Digital Disconnect is worse than you thought. It’s now a leading cause of dissatisfaction — and if left unchecked, it can become the #1 destroyer of company culture and productivity.
Until now.
This is the challenge weâre tackling at Airspeed.
Airspeed is the simple and fun way to connect with colleagues. To add some personal to your professional. To improve teamwork. To build culture. To do all the non-work stuff, that makes work great. To actually get to know the people you work with, and let them get to know you.
Airspeed is the easiest way to connect and celebrate your team.
You can download Airspeed’s suite of apps for free here.
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