SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How a $3 billion company leads fully remote teams
01 Jun 2023
Chapter 1: What is Remote and how does it operate as a fully distributed company?
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check it out right now at getlatka.com thanks everyone um 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 yo vandervoort 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 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
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Chapter 2: How do values and culture impact remote work performance?
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 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, right?
And in my past life, 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, my favorite example is there's a sociologist named Ron Westrom, 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 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. So underpinning culture are
Chapter 3: What specific values does Remote prioritize in its culture?
Let's see. I think I'm on the wrong slide. Yeah. OK, so underpinning culture are your values. And leadership sets the tone for the values of the company. In a startup, the founder is typically the one that has the vision for the kind of company they want to build. And in most cases, that's a backlash against all the other shitty places that they worked at before.
And at Remo, 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.
Chapter 4: How does Remote operationalize its values in daily practices?
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 within these terms. So we further define each one of them. So for example, ownership, 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 a, 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 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.
Chapter 5: What role does asynchronous work play in Remote's productivity?
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. 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. 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.
Chapter 6: How does Remote ensure effective communication in a distributed team?
So those are the ones that care about our mission. 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 in Slack for each of our values. We have a thanks channel where people thank each other for displaying the values.
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?
Chapter 7: What strategies does Remote use to foster social connections remotely?
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 go back to step one. Okay, so this is our employee. Oh, this is the wrong version, but this is the employee handbook. And 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. Oh, these are the wrong slides.
Okay.
All right, 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?
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Chapter 8: How does Remote measure the effectiveness of its values and culture?
incredibly painful. You can never get APAC and EMEA on the same call. You can only do two regions at a time. You can never do all three. And so 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 allows for maximum productivity and flexibility for all of our team 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 information that we have and we pivot when we need to.
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. Now, 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 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 up on. Finally, we have a really strong culture of documentation. I would say that in a remote environment, documentation is really everything. 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 to improve transparency across the business. 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.
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 going to be right, so I'm sorry. But the next part is about building culture. And even in a globally distributed company like ours, social connection is still really important. 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.
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