How Remote Runs a 1,000-Person Team Across 70 Countries (SaaSOpen 2023 Talk by Alanna Brown)

Introduction: Remote's Mission and Global Footprint

Alanna Brown

00:00>> Thanks everyone. All right, my mic is on. And yes, we 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 Job van der Voort and a Portuguese guy named Marcelo Lebre. And so I guess you could say that we are a European startup, but today we have over a thousand people in 70 countries around the world. And as you've probably

Products: Employer of Record and Contractor Management

Alanna Brown

00:30>> 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

01:02>> wants to hire, employees abroad and a contractor management, platform as well for those who want to pay their international contractors compliantly.

Talk Overview: Values, Culture, and Business Performance

Alanna Brown

01:13>> So that's a quick spiel, and over the next sixteen minutes and forty two seconds, we're gonna be talking about, you know, the squishy stuff related to remote work, which are values and culture. And you're probably wondering, well, how is this going to help me scale my business and hit my targets? In my past life, did a lot of research in organizational performance and culture in the DevOps space specifically. And I can tell you that there are

Why Culture Predicts Performance

Alanna Brown

01:43>> 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 I'll give it, my favorite example is there's a sociologist named Ron Westrum, and he studied safety outcomes in two very high risk fields, aviation and healthcare. 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

02:21>> 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 can actually have a material impact on your business.

02:40>> So underpinning culture are let's see. I think I'm on the wrong slide.

02:49>> 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.

Remote's Five Core Values

Alanna Brown

03:12>> 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, 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 still a lot of room for misinterpretation

03:45>> 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 external customers. So that's what ownership means to us and 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

04:19>> what that means is that, 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

04:49>> emails and private Slack channels, and we encourage everyone to share their work publicly early and often.

Operationalizing Values at Scale

Alanna Brown

04:58>> 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

Hiring for Values and the Public Handbook

Alanna Brown

05:23>> 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. 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, our,

05:53>> they care about our values. And as a proof point, we get 10,000 applications every month.

06:02>> 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 in Slack for each of our values. We have a thanks channel where people thank each other for displaying the values. We have 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

06:32>> culture.

06:34>> 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

06:58>> point and and go back to step one.

07:03>> Okay. So this is our employ oh, this is the wrong version, but this is the employee handbook and,

07:12>> 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.

07:24>> Oh, these are the wrong slides.

Asynchronous Work: Why It Matters

Alanna Brown

07:29>> You didn't tell me that. Alright. So I'm gonna carry on and just pretend these words are totally different on this slide. So I'm gonna 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,

08:01>> you can never get APAC and EMEA, you know, on the same call. It's always you can only do two regions at a time. You can never do all three. It's awful, right? 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. We believe that working async allows for maximum productivity and flexibility for all of our team

Three Pillars of Async Work

Alanna Brown

08:28>> members. But to work async, 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

09:04>> 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 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. Async doesn't mean that we never have meetings. But our goal is to actually avoid meetings as much as possible. And our CEO will even call

Meeting Etiquette in a Remote Environment

Alanna Brown

09:39>> 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 practice really good meeting 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

Documentation Culture and Notion

Alanna Brown

10:06>> 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 because it's really low friction to adopt. Literally anyone can create a page, and that acts as our collective memory space. The downside 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

10:40>> 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 responsibility is to keep our documentation nice and tidy. And these slides aren't gonna be right, so I'm sorry. But the next part is about building culture, and

Building Social Connection Across a Distributed Team

Alanna Brown

11:14>> 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 our all hands meetings and one person would share something personal about themselves, often like a story about their life. And

11:48>> 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's also just really fun because we have really interesting people 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

12:15>> to do social activities as a team. This is super hard when everyone is all around the world in different regions, so you do deliberate about it, and I think the most important thing is to be inclusive of all the regions. Like, only have a few people in APAC right now, but we always try to make sure that we have something built in for the APAC folks.

Fostering Community Remotely

Alanna Brown

12:40>> 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 gonna 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

13:05>> the first time today. But even if you can't meet up in person, I think there's still ways to foster community online. And for better or 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

Life Work Balance and Setting Boundaries

Alanna Brown

13:33>> 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 wanna 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,

14:00>> 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 wanna leave you I don't know if this slide is in here, but I wanna leave you with kind of a final thought. So there's a lot of debate right now about how to maintain culture in a remote environment, and

The Remote Workforce Report

Alanna Brown

14:30>> 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, 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

15:02>> 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 got two minutes left now. I think I I did pretty well with my timing. Does anyone have any questions?

Nathan Latka

15:29Any questions with a couple minutes that we have?

15:33Yeah, one.

Q&A: Outcome-Based Performance, Not Activity Tracking

Alanna Brown

16:04>> 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 right values, right, for your company. You want people who are truly committed to your mission, who share your values of ownership and Well, all those

16:30>> 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

16:58>> 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.

17:12>> 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 relook at those values.

Nathan Latka

17:24Alright, thanks a lot Alanna, appreciate it.

Alanna Brown

17:26>> Yeah, thanks so much everyone.

Nathan Latka

17:27Alright, thank you.