The abrupt transition to remote work during the COVID-19 crisis thrust companies all over the world into a new reality. Despite the initial challenges of working from home, businesses are realizing just how valuable remote work can be to their company’s bottom line, their employees’ happiness and well-being, and their overall success.

And as the benefits become clearer every day, many employers are integrating flexible and remote work into their long-term plans. The road to remote work integration isn’t always easy, but if your company has been “temporarily” working remotely as of late, you’re already well on your way.

To help you find your company’s unique path, FlexJobs’ sister site, Remote.co, is an excellent resource for remote work—including valuable tips from companies that have made remote working their norm. 

Here’s what to consider when working on your company’s remote work integration plan, and advice from companies that have already found their way. Furthermore, FlexJobs Founder and CEO Sara Sutton recently co-authored a guide to remote work success for companies that draws upon years of being a leading expert in the remote work environment. 

Why Integrate Remote Work Into Long-Term Plans?

While the emergency reasons for going remote during COVID-19 were non-negotiable, the reasons for remote work integration beyond the pandemic are plentiful. From more successful hiring and improved customer service to increased company diversity and significant money savings, leading remote companies weigh in on their top motivations for going remote.

Access to Top Talent

Offering remote work opens up the talent pool to a much wider group of candidates than if you’re just conducting your hiring in your local area. If you’re able to search for a candidate based anywhere in the world, you truly can find the “best” person for the job.

• Aha!: Remote work also gives us access to a larger, deeper pool of talent. We aspire to make employees’ lives better and inviting them to work with Aha! without asking them to relocate is powerful proof of our sincerity. Remote work means we do not disqualify skilled, values-driven people based on geography.

Improved Diversity

Opening up your workforce to an entirely distributed team enables you to hire employees from many diverse backgrounds and with differing perspectives and beliefs.

• Toggl: The most important reason [we went remote] is because we became too monocultural. Our users are the World, but our hiring-radius was 10 km. We wanted diversity, different angles, and backgrounds. Why hire a consultant to know how things are done in the States when you can hire a person from the States to work full-time and bring the knowledge in the house?

Cost Savings

Companies with distributed teams stand to save a significant amount of money on things like office space, traditional office equipment, transit subsidies, and other transportation costs.

• Toptal: Skipping the costs and commutes associated with physical offices made so much sense that we decided to turn down the typical Silicon Valley approach and practice what we were preaching by being distributed from day one.

Better Customer Service

Having a remote team means that your company as a whole can better serve its customers in local markets.

• 1Password: We were looking to build a customer-focused company. People all over the world use 1Password, so hiring globally helps the people who build and support 1Password get closer to our customers, whether it’s by helping them in their native language or learning from how they use the product differently.
• Buffer: In the early days of remote work, it was quickly discovered that having teammates spread out around the world was an excellent customer service benefit. Customers could be responded to at all hours of the day, and there was often an engineer online if ever there was any trouble that needed immediate fixing.

The Importance of Documentation

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Especially in a remote environment, establishing company culture and documenting expectations is critical. Unlike an in-person office where employees can pop over to their manager’s desk, remote work requires a more targeted, intentional approach to defining values and setting expectations.

Define Culture

Company values drive a workplace culture, and documenting and regularly reinforcing those values helps remote businesses avoid the five main dysfunctions teams may encounter:

1. Absence of trust
2. Fear of conflict
3. Lack of commitment
4. Avoidance of accountability
5. Inattention to results

Documenting and creating your company’s culture must be an intentional process. When an organization clearly defines their culture, and then continually reinforces those values, all team members can incorporate them into their day-to-day. Expert tip from world’s largest all-remote company, GitLab: Whatever behavior a company rewards will, by default, become the company’s values, so be mindful of what you’re rewarding!

• Answer Connect: Our internally developed video training platform, AdaptiveU, allows us to instill our company values in our trainees from their first day, and to continue to communicate our mission and culture to our employees after that. We promote our mission regularly in internal communications, primarily emails.

Provide Clear Expectations

Documenting everything—from quarterly objectives and company values to meeting notes and expectations—makes for a more informed, trusting, and connected team. 

And when you provide employees with clearly written expectations and performance evaluations, you’ll see increased productivity. Setting achievable deadlines or targets gives your remote staff the information they need to effectively manage their time and workload.

Remote work statistics suggest that 65% of remote workers feel they are more productive when working from home than in an office. And 85% of businesses report increased productivity when employees have flexible work arrangements. 

Successful remote businesses measure employee productivity by results, output, client satisfaction, and deliverables—not time in the office.

• 10Up Inc.: In truth, well managed distributed teams are often far more productive than co-located teams, because you’re forced to measure productivity by far more objective metrics than things like “time in the building.”
• Collage.com: With remote work, you measure each employee’s output based on what they actually produce–not how long they spend in the office. This makes it very easy to determine who’s doing what on our team. At Collage.com, we measure results over appearances. 

Remote Work Communication Tools and Protocols

Communication is key to building and maintaining a cohesive remote workforce. Not only does clear, consistent, and timely communication keep employees in the loop on business operations, it’s crucial for helping remote staff feel connected to their teams.

Fortunately, remote organizations have a variety of communication tools at their disposal:

• Virtual offices, like Sococo, enable your employees to interact and collaborate in an online representation of the company’s office. 
• Instant messaging through Slack or WhatsApp is the go-to tool for remote teams because it can often be utilized for real-time (and urgent) communication.
• Email will always have a place in remote team communication and is a perfect choice for long messages that require more in-depth explanation.
• Intranets like Yammer can act as social touch points for your team.
• Project management software like Trello, Teamwork, Asana, and Jira enables teams to communicate about and stay in touch with project steps and deadlines.
• Video conferencing such as Zoom or Google Hangouts helps teams maintain some “in-person” contact, and is a valuable tool for standing meetings.

It’s important to standardize your company’s communication tools to prevent the splintering of communication. Encourage teams to use IMs for questions and comments that are quick and to the point. For lengthier discussions, email or a scheduled video meeting is best. Standing meetings of any type (audio or video) should be productive and intentional.

• Parse.ly: All of our teams have their own channels within Flowdock (similar to Slack) and weekly scheduled meetings to get everyone on the same page. Remote team members take part in these meetings via Google Hangouts.

Asynchronous vs. Synchronous Communication

Asynchronous communication is when people communicate without having to be “on” at the same time. Examples include email, IMs, project management tools, and intranets. Video conference calls, on the other hand, are synchronous communication.

While some synchronous communication is necessary for most companies, it’s vital that remote companies master the art of asynchronous communication. Communicating asynchronously improves efficiency and productivity by enabling employees to move projects forward without having to meet with other stakeholders in order for there to be progress.

Asynchronous communication is especially important for companies working across several time zones.

• Automattic: We operate on a largely asynchronous basis—people are used to working with or needing input from people in different time zones and buffer this into their work accordingly.

Structure and Schedule Building for Virtual Teams

While working remotely is beneficial in so many ways, the “blank canvas” can present challenges to companies if they don’t go about it consciously. If you’re going to integrate remote work, establish expectations with how and when employees should work remotely. As a company, ask these questions first:

• Are there “core” hours where employees are expected to be online?
• Can staff work flexible hours? 
• Do certain teams need to be online during specific hours?

Develop a Remote Work Policy

Although 64% of hiring managers believe their company has adequate resources and processes to manage a remote workforce, only 43% had a remote work policy in 2018.

A comprehensive remote work policy begins with considerations of employee engagement, productivity, cost savings, infrastructure and technology requirements, and security protocols for virtual workers.

• Authentic Form & Function: Our remote work policy is very structured and clearly defined from the beginning. While everyone is remote, we still need our team available during (roughly) the same business hours. Before any new team member is brought on board, we make sure those expectations, as well as the general daily workflow, are understood and agreed upon.

HR Considerations for Remote Work

Although many human resources policies that apply to in-office staff also apply to remote workers, there are some additional considerations to keep in mind with your remote work integration plan.

Providing guidance around when and how staff should communicate availability or schedule conflicts will help keep managers and team members in sync. Prioritizing regular one-on-one meetings helps managers track goals and outputs, and creating measurable performance metrics enables everyone to stay on track.

The name of the game for companies working through remote work integration for the first time is flexibility. Policies should be defined around work output and outcomes, rather than based on in-office norms or time-based performance.

• TeamSnap: The biggest challenge as we’ve grown has been not letting the trappings of traditional office policies creep in. For instance, once we hit about 60 people, we considered whether to implement a vacation, sick leave, or PTO policy. But we realized that it made no sense to track what hours people weren’t working when we don’t track what hours they do work. We focus entirely on what people produce.

Challenges With Going Remote

As beneficial as remote work is on so many different fronts, businesses will encounter challenges they’ll need to face head-on in order to successfully integrate remote work. 

Time Zones

One of the most significant challenges is working across time zones. When team members are communicating from opposite ends of the world, communication delays can be less than ideal. And it’s challenging to plan synchronous meetings over several time zones. Encouraging flexible schedules, providing asynchronous communication tools, and planning for some overlap of team members’ hours can ease some of the strain.

• Incsub: Planning around time zones may be our biggest challenge. When two people are working on the same project, one in Australia and the other in the U.S., it can be much slower to reply to emails, as they’ll probably each just get one reply in per day. Scheduling hangouts for voice chats can be even more of a challenge. It requires flexibility by all to sometimes have chats at odd hours late in the evening or early in the morning.

Culture

Creating an excellent company culture is a challenge that many remote companies have to work through—but every effort to build your culture will pay the business back in dividends. Focusing on communication and transparency is essential, as is “walking the talk.”

• Belay: The hardest part of managing a remote workforce is creating and maintaining a dynamic culture. You must be intentional about setting expectations and over-communicating. Your team will follow your leaders. So, make sure your leaders are transparent and available. Be willing to work together through multiple communication platforms like instant messaging and video conferencing. Accessibility builds trust and cohesion.

Hiring

Remote work isn’t for everyone. Even though a candidate may look perfect on paper, if they haven’t had significant remote work experience or their personality clashes with what typically makes a good remote employee, they may not be a good cultural or practical fit. 

The good news? The majority of candidates have had recent exposure to remote work due to the pandemic, so most applicants will have an idea if they can be successful working from home.

• Groove: The biggest challenge has been hiring; primarily making the false assumption at the start that any talented employee would make a great remote employee. It’s simply not true, and remote work is a skill that you need to look for when you hire.

Other Remote Work Integration Advice From Leading Companies

No matter how prepared you are for remote work integration, you’re bound to hit some snags along the way. These companies have learned their lessons and are sharing their best tips.

Crossover

Stop considering and take the leap! We started out as a remote team, and we didn’t look back. We think the numbers speak for themselves: employees who work from home are more productive and happier than their office-bound counterparts. From the company’s fiscal standpoint, it also saves a lot of money–an estimated $11,000 annually for every remote employee, according to one study. And employees save both time and money by avoiding the commute. There’s probably never been a win-win quite like remote work.

Dell Technologies

Explore if—and to what degree—your organization can support flexible work arrangements. Talk with other companies to gather best practices and lessons learned. Create remote program strategies and policies that will work for your company. Educate leadership/management on work flexibility. Partner with IT/facilities/HR. Build a robust back office that offers training, toolkits, and FAQs. Design regular health checks and progress dashboards to measure the state of the program. Communicate and collaborate with your workforce to develop a program that allows mutual benefits and positive results.

Jackson River

Creating a culture of good communication, mutual respect, and appreciation is the most important thing to be aware of. You need formalized processes and clear expectations, but you also need a culture that supports the kind of communication you want. Many people assume remote work is asynchronous, but most of the time people need each other on a spur-of-the-moment basis, so communication needs to be immediate. It can also be easier to get interrupted when working from home or in co-working spaces, so it’s important to keep an eye on more than the methods or tools of communication. You need to actively steward the tempo, cadence, and quality of that communication.

TNTP

We recommend going all in. Being virtual works for us because it’s embraced by a significant portion of our team–including top leadership. Build a strong culture. As in a traditional office, culture is the glue that holds us together; we just have to be a little more intentional about it. So we define the core tenets of TNTP’s culture for new staff and reinforce them at every opportunity. For example, one of our culture elements is candor: we embrace direct and timely feedback–because, in a virtual environment, you can’t trust that someone can see your expression and ask if you have a concern. We offer trainings on delivering feedback and encourage staff and managers to make time for it in weekly check-ins.

Finally, set clear goals and regularly check in on progress. We set goals at every level–for the organization, for teams, and for individual team members–so we can measure how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go. Our focus as an organization on outcomes gives us all a strong vision of what success looks like, but the individual flexibility to figure out how we want to get there.

Let FlexJobs Help With Your Remote Work Integration Plan

Remote work integration is well worth the time and energy your company will spend developing policies, creating a dynamic company culture, and finding the best tools for your team.

FlexJobs has been a leader and advocate in remote work for over 12 years. We work with companies of every size to provide support and advice for businesses that want to integrate remote work. Furthermore, our job board provides top talent with access to flexible jobs in more than 50 career categories. Whether you’re looking to fill work-from-home positions or learn more about successfully integrating remote work into your company’s long-term plans, we can help. For expert guidance, reach out today!

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