How Remote CEO Alanna Brown grew to $600M revenue with a 11923 person team in 2023.

thanks everyone all right my mic is on and yes uh we I I'm the VP of growth at remote we are a fully distributed company all around the world remote was founded in 2019 by a Dutch guy named Yobe vandervort and a Portuguese guy named Marcelo Leb and so I guess you could say that we are a European startup but today we have over a thousand people in 70 countries um around the world so and as you've probably already figured out by our name we all work remotely and the reason that we can do that is because we are our first customer and yes we drink our own champagne our platform enables companies to hire anyone anywhere and we take care of all of the gnarly details around payroll benefits compliance taxes stock options visas and a lot more we handle the entire Global Employment process and we have an employer of record product for anyone who wants to hire employees abroad and a contractor management platform as well for those who want to pay their International contractors compliantly so that's a quick Spiel and over the next 16 minutes and 42 seconds we're going to be talking about you know the squishy stuff related to remote work which are values and culture and you're probably wondering well like how is this going to help me scale my business and hit my targets right and in my past life I was actually um I did a lot of research in organizational performance and culture in the devops space specifically and I can tell you that there are many studies out there that have shown that there's not only a correlation between culture and performance but there's actually a predictive relationship between those two things so a given my favorite example is there's a sociologist named Ron Westrom and he studied safety outcomes in two very high risk Fields Aviation and health care and what he found was that culture actually had a massive impact on information flows within an organization and that pathological cultures had poor safety outcomes like planes crashing and patients dying versus generative cultures which had positive safety outcomes so culture in my mind isn't just some like woo-woo concept it's actually it can actually have a material impact on your business so underpinning culture are let's see I think I'm on the wrong side uh yeah okay so underpinning culture are your values and Leadership sets the tone for the values of the company in a startup that the founder is typically the one that has the vision right for the kind of company they want to build and in most cases that's a backlash against like all the other shitty places that they worked at before um and at remote our Founders developed our values before they ever even had a product so the values predate me they predate most of the people in the company um and they're What attracted me and everyone else to the company in the first place and those values are Excellence kindness ownership transparency and ambition and I know that's a lot of nice words and it seems pretty obvious what they mean but there's a still a lot of room for misinterpretation within these terms so we further Define each one of them so for example ownership is it's not just I own this area of work or I own this project it's ownership over the desired outcomes for your customers whether those customers are internal or external customers so that's what ownership means to us and it's it's very specific to us kindness is another one it's not about being nice or agreeable and at remote we often say clear is kind and what that means is that um you know we being super clear in our communication because we all work remotely is a way of avoiding communication and wasting time and for us that is a form of showing kindness to the people that we work with and then I'll just touch on one more which is transparency because this is highly valued at remote we default to working out in the open so that everyone can contribute their ideas we discourage emails and private slack channels and we encourage everyone to share their work publicly early and often um so I won't talk about the others but we do have those written out in our handbook okay so now you have a bunch of words right I'm sure all of you have some values too for your companies or at least I hope you do you've probably defined what those mean and now you have to do the hard work of operationalizing those values as you scale your company and I think this is really hard the way that we did it is we started by codifying those values in our employee handbook we call it the remote handbook and it's actually even though it's for employees we make it publicly available to everyone so they know what our values are um and then when we hire we refer candidates to our handbook and what that does is it automatically screens for the candidates that we want to attract so those are the ones that care about our mission are they care about our values and as a proof point we get 10 000 applications every month and then you have to reinforce those values in everything you do and the way that we do that and it sounds kind of silly is we have emojis and slack for each of our values we have a thanks Channel where people thank each other for displaying the values um we have they're they're embedded within our performance reviews and we have awards for example centered around our values so it really is deeply embedded in the fabric of the company's culture and then lastly how do you measure your values like how do you actually know if the things that you want to happen are happening if the values are working and I think that all really comes down to two things are you hiring and retaining the right people and are you incentivizing the right behaviors and if there is a mismatch between the two then your values likely aren't aligned and you need to go back to the starting point and and go back to Step One okay so this is our employee oh this is the wrong version but this is the employee handbook and uh I think this is the wrong one this must have been uploaded before I made all the changes on the plane last night but anyway we have an employee handbook that's online for everyone to view um oh these are the wrong slides oh all right so I'm gonna carry on and just pretend these words are totally different on this slide so I'm going to talk about asynchronous work which is the practice of working on a team that does not require all members to be online simultaneously and in a globally distributed company like ours this is an absolute necessity so how many of you have ever tried to schedule a meeting across multiple time zones incredibly painful like you can never get APAC and Amia you know on the same call it's always you can only do two regions at a time you can never do all three um and so it's it's awful right and if we had to have meetings to get something done or to make a decision we would never be able to move at the pace that we need to move at so we believe that working async it allows for maximum productivity and flexibility for all of our team members but to work async um you you have to be really Relentless about transparency and documentation so the three things that really power async work are excellent written communication we always default to collaborating async in public channels and slack and the fact that it is public actually forces people to be really thoughtful about how they communicate with each other we have a bias towards action we don't wait for decisions to be made we move forward with the best information that we have and we pivot when we need to and then autonomy and Trust I think these are really key to honestly any healthy company but we you know because we screen for our values and we hire based on values we trust people to deliver on outcomes and we trust them to work autonomously um now async doesn't mean that we never have meetings we but our goal is to actually avoid meetings as much as possible and our CEO will even call us out if he thinks we're having too many meetings and he asks us all the time to kill meetings so when a meeting is called for however we do strive to have practice really good kneading etiquette and I think this is a discipline and it's an important one so there's always an agenda maybe there's a pre-read that's shared out the day before the meeting is always recorded and the outcomes and next steps are documented and followed up on and finally we have a really strong culture of documentation and I would say that in a remote environment documentation is really everything right we use notion um because it's really low friction to adopt literally anyone can create a page and that acts as our Collective memory space um the downside of of notion and really any other tool there's no perfect tool for this is sprawl but that's just the trade-off that we're willing to accept in order to improve transparency across the business and our motto is always search first ask questions later so being kind also means trying to find the information yourself and not making someone else do the work for you and if it's not documented you document it so everyone's everyone's responsibility is to keep our documentation nice and tidy and these slides aren't gonna be right so I'm sorry um but the next part is about building culture and um even in a globally distributed company like ours social connection is still really important it's a critical need for us and as Leaders it's really important to be deliberate about creating those social connections amongst your teams so one thing that we did early on on my team is something called a personal share and that's where we had you know we had our All Hands meetings and one person would share something personal about themselves often like a story about their life and what it does is it really helps you connect with that person on a deeper level understand how their experiences have shaped them and it builds empathy with your team members and so it was it's also just really fun because we have really interesting people um at the company and we get to see a little bit of their lives and we also encourage coffee chats so others can get to know each other around the company and we take the time to do social activities as a team this is super hard when everyone is All Around the World in different regions so you do have to be deliberate about it and I think the most important thing is to be inclusive of all the regions like we only have a few people in aipac right now but we always try to make sure that we have something built in for the APAC folks um fostering Community remotely is another key thing we have concentrations of team members in certain cities and some of the bigger cities so they often meet up when we have a lot of digital Nomads at our company for example and they travel and they like to meet up with each other as well I'm going to meet someone for lunch today who I've worked with for over a year and a half never met in person and we're meeting for the first time today but even if you can't meet up in person I think there are still ways to foster Community online and for better for worse slack is kind of our remote office and we have a lot of social channels and it always Delights me to see all these social channels and the activity around them so we have channels for coffee for cycling for music various women's groups and these are where people from all over the place can connect on things that matter to them and then the last thing is we talk a lot about work life balance we want to flip the script on that we talk about life work balance at remote and integrating work into your life and the reason for that is because in a remote first environment it can be really hard to switch off when all of your colleagues are working in different time zones and so as Leaders I think it's really important for all of us to encourage setting boundaries between work and personal life and to model that behavior ourselves as an example and to also continue to be relentless about async work so I want to leave you I don't know if this slide is in here but I want to leave you with um kind of a final thought so there's a lot of debate right now about how to maintain culture in a remote environment and we've seen lots of CEOs of big companies saying they want everyone to come back into the office because it will improve culture and I always wonder like improve culture for whom so we recently launched our remote Workforce report it's on our website and we found similar to a lot of other remote work reports out there that when you have a fully remote company productivity engagement retention and employee satisfaction they all go up in in those companies and we know that remote work can be a huge Boon to your business if you cultivate the right culture and practices around it and so that's part of our mission is to enable people to you know lead Better Lives to have more opportunities and we believe that remote work really enables that so I've got two minutes left now I think I did pretty well with my timing does anyone have any questions any questions with a couple minutes that we have yeah one or how do you make sure without me to owners of producing yeah well we are actively against activity tracking because the whole point of hiring well is to make sure that you are hiring for the the right values right for your company you want people who are truly committed to your mission who share your values of ownership and you know all those things well we we look only at outcomes so we don't track the time spent on the screen we only look at the outcomes that the individuals are producing and so you know we have performance periods for example and we encourage all of our managers to have regular one-on-ones and to make sure that those outcomes are being delivered but in a company like ours there's no hiding you know because everything is so transparent and everything moves really quickly and so if people aren't delivering it's pretty apparent like early on and so that's kind of how we manage it but we don't have explicit employee tracking or productivity tracking I don't think those things really work so again it goes back to are you hiring the right people and are they aligned with the values of the company if not maybe you need to re-look at those values all right thanks a lot Alana appreciate it yeah thank you all right everyone thank you [Applause]