2 Critical Steps for Fortune 500 Managers Going Remote

If you’re a typical Fortune 500 manager (like I was for 14 years at Intel) – your calendar is rammed with back-to-back meetings and you’re basically spending most of your day running from conference room to conference room. Between those ridiculously overplanned blocks of time – you are jumping in and out of your team’s cubicles – providing guidance to help them achieve their quarterly goals (which were probably changed by your boss in your last meeting). 

Other than your weekly staff meetings and occasional 1:1s – most of your management is by ‘walking around’ and collaborating with your team (since you won’t get to your emails until after your kids go to bed that evening). And if you see a couple of team members huddled together – you jump in and join their discussion for a few minutes.

Despite the chaos – for the most part – you and your team are comfortable with your management style. Your boss is happy and everyone is aligned.

But then your company suddenly orders all employees to work from home.  Now what?

Crap.

At first – you rationalize that it will be fine. I mean – your staff travels on a regular basis, you’ve got a few team members on other campuses and you’ve had a ‘work from home’ policy for a long time. Should be the same now right?

Wrong.

Moving to a 100% remote organization is completely different than Bob calling into your staff meeting from the airport. This is the equivalent of moving from on-prem servers to the cloud – EVERYTHING changes.

Focus on Simplicity – Ignore Everything Else

As the fearless leader – simplify to the basics for now. Trust me – during times of dramatic change – your team is more nervous than you are. So minimize the number of changes you need to make today. Punt on anything other than getting your team back up and functioning.

Ignore your annoying neighbor (who works for a 5 person company) that talks about how he’s been working from home for years and it’s easy.

Ignore the thousands of articles in your inbox promising remote work ‘tips’. None of them were tested in a Fortune 500 company before.

And definitely ignore the various remote work pundits preaching a utopian world – where all your employees are more productive in their pajamas, everyone is happy, and all the work they do is suddenly able to be done asynchronously (which is just a fancy word for ‘no meetings’). 

Someday you’ll get to all that fancy stuff.  But for now – just focus on minimizing the thrash and getting your team back up to productivity (as close to par as possible – a bogie is good enough for now).

Step 1: Adopt a video-first culture

You, and most F500 companies, already have video conferencing tools in place. But in most cases – the video is never turned on.

The reason is that you see most of your employees on a regular basis. So the video component is a ‘nice to have’ in building culture and trust.

In a remote world, however, turning the video on for almost all calls is CRITICAL.

Humans are social beings – and the act of ‘seeing’ your colleagues goes a long way towards maintaining trust, having open communication and furthering the culture of the team.

It may feel ‘weird’ at first to see your colleague’s kitchen/bedroom/office or wherever they are working – but you’ll soon realize that those images become a part of the relationship building. Think of it as a better version of their kids’ photos on their desks in your physical office (which were probably taken 5 years ago anyways).

Be open – have discussions about their setup. And when their kids come into the frame or their cat jumps up on the desk – don’t ignore it – have a human conversation and take your relationship to the next level.

For good insights on how to have a great video conferencing setup – feel free to read this article.

Step 2: Set Up a ‘Virtual Office’ to Replace Your Physical Office

The fastest way to get back to productivity is to simply replace your physical office space with a virtual one.

A virtual what?

Yes – a virtual office.

Virtual offices are pseudomorphic representations of your physical office. You can set up a floor plan that resembles your current office – and recreate a majority of the team interactions that occur today.

You (and each one of your team members) have your own offices, meeting rooms and common spaces.

Want to see if Katherine is in her office and available for a chat? No problem.

Want to join that impromptu discussion that John and Malcom are having? No problem.

Want to close your door so nobody can bother you in your office?  No problem also.

A virtual office is obviously not as good as your physical office – but it’s a close replacement for times like these. There is almost no learning curve, they’re integrated with Zoom/WebEx/Hangouts, and they enable you to work largely like you do today.

The best news of all? You can test it out for free and you don’t even need to ask IT for permission.

We use a product called Sococo – and loved it so much – we bought the company. Here is a link to the free trial.

Here is a quick 3 min video of a virtual office and how this can work for your team.

In Closing

This situation was thrown at you. But as a leader – it’s now your job to calm the troops down and get everyone back to being productive.

The remote working world is great – and will bring a ton of additional benefits to your team. But rather than try to adopt all of them all at once – simplify – and get to the ‘advanced’ concepts later. Your team will be grateful that you’ve calmed down the initial storm and recreated their familiar environment first.

If you have any questions – please feel free to contact me at @andytryba.

What to look for in a remote job?

The audio version of the What is an Authentic Remote job? blog post

What the heck is ‘remote work’? Is a job that lets you work from home on Fridays ‘remote work’? Is a freelancer building a website for a client as supplemental income ‘remote work’? Is your designer working in Romania doing ‘remote work’? Unfortunately – the answer is ‘yes’ to all of these. How confusing… We need a better categorization of ‘remote jobs’.

Categories of remote jobs

Not all remote jobs are created equal. To break down the generic term of ‘remote job’ – let’s define 3 classes of remote jobs to get on the same page:

  1. ‘Work from home’ remote jobs: These jobs are pretending to be ‘remote’ – but really they are perks of an onsite job. This is ‘work from home Fridays’ or ‘satellite offices’ or companies that have a policy that simply lets folks work from home on occasion – but it’s expected that they are in the office for the majority of their working career. Companies tend to be trendy and offer this type of flexibility – but in reality – it’s not truly a part of their culture and secretly the managers hate people that work from home too often (they assume you’re on the golf course). This is not the future of remote work.
  2. Freelancer remote jobs: These are 100% remote jobs – but they are freelancers and other ‘on-demand’ roles. These positions are typically considered part of the ‘gig-economy’ and suffer from the friction of a marketplace. In a marketplace, you typically have to bid on jobs, which – on a global basis – tends to depress the price/hour (yes – that person in Vietnam is willing to work less than you are – and be happy with it). The bid/ask system also creates wild fluctuations in your income, has uncertainty and is project-by-project vs a long-term career. The projects also tend to be tactical and low skill roles. This is also not the future of remote work – but as Upwork has proven – there are a lot of people willing to work nights/weekends to supplement their income.
  3. Authentic remote jobs: This is the future of remote work – 100% remote, full-time / 40 hr/w roles, transparent wage rate, career/growth-oriented, all workers use both remote communication & connection tools, goals/metrics are clear, tasks are able to be completed asynchronously and the company has a remote culture. These are the Rolls Royce of all remote jobs – and what we all aspire to get. These roles will continue to grow exponentially and will have a massive impact on the global economy.

Diving into the details of Authentic remote jobs

100% remote

The true remote job has no borders. This isn’t ‘can be anywhere – as long as it’s on the East Coast of the US’. Real remote jobs are global. Let me repeat – they are GLOBAL. And they are this way to find the best person in the WORLD for the position – not the best person in your zip code.

Full time, 40 hours/week

Authentic remote jobs are not part-time nor on a bid/ask marketplace system. I’ve never seen a critical position in a company or a key player be ‘transactional’ and only show up part of the time. Additionally – the best in the world already have full-time roles – and they’re looking to put their entire brain/efforts into the next challenge.

Transparent wage rate

Despite the touchy/feely comments people make about their motivations for a job, at the end of the day, money matters – and the best Authentic remote jobs are transparent on what the wage rate is in the job description. According to a recent study by Glassdoor – money is the #1 motivator for 67% of job seekers. Remote or not remote – wage rate matters – so be transparent and include them in the job description.

Career/growth-oriented

Though money is a motivator – the best in the world are also looking for intellectual challenges that enhance their careers. This is consistent on remote and non-remote jobs – but even more enhanced when the job seeker now has an infinite number or job opportunities available to them – not just the selection in their zip code.

Use remote communication & connection tools

Many companies have video conferencing and collaboration tools – but ironically – companies that are not ‘remote-first’ fail to use them properly. Managers have to ‘remember’ to post that file on Google drive, the team doesn’t use video in the meetings, everything is synchronous, etc, etc. Authentic Remote jobs are only in companies that treat remote workers as equals.

Success goals & metrics

In a typical office job – if a role isn’t terribly well defined – you can walk around and ask your colleagues and manager to help nudge you in the right direction. In 100% remote jobs – this is much more difficult and the definition of success needs to be more clearly laid out. What are the goals, how is the work itself done, what are the objective metrics, what is the expected calendar are all important to clarify. All Authentic Remote jobs have these characteristics – so success or failure is clear and transparent.

Asynchronous

Asynch has also become a bit of a buzzword in the remote world. But the importance of it remains – Authentic Remote jobs have to be able to be done without dependence on synchronization. Unlike everyone huddled in an office – the remote worker needs to be able to complete a majority of the task on their own – in their own time. This doesn’t mean the remote worker doesn’t collaborate with others – it simply means the task itself can be broken down to individual components that the remote worker can complete on their own (with very little dependence on others).

Remote culture

True Authentic Remote jobs are in companies that are ‘remote-first’. This isn’t ‘work from home Fridays’ – it’s a proper understanding of how to build their company structure for remote organization, how to manage and cluster timezones of remote workers, how to understand the power deltas between office workers vs remote workers (ideally there are no physical offices), how to build culture remotely, how to bridge cultural gaps, and how to define roles to be clear/async/measurable.

Examples of Authentic Remote jobs from remote-first companies

Companies such as HotJar offer remote positions and check all the items on our list: they have a remote culture, they are fully remote, employ people from any region as long as the time-zone allows them to be aligned with other team members, offers employment contract for talent in specific countries or contractor agreement for the rest, paid holidays, team collaboration allowance, holiday budget, etc. That is the true remote vision and Authentic Remote jobs.

On the other side – companies like DataDog offer some remote positions, are open to offering 100% remote work, but employees need to live in the US or other areas where the company has offices. It lacks the remote culture, it does not have a fully distributed/remote team. Even if some of the offered jobs are remote, according to the classification above, the lack of remote culture makes those jobs simply flexible jobs, not Authentic Remote jobs.

Conclusion

Going back to the beginning – to get to the end state where the term ‘remote jobs’ evolves to be ‘all jobs’ – we need to be clear on our definitions and what we’re trying to expand. Specifically – employers – develop more Authentic Remote jobs as they are the future of work…