How We Made "Working Remotely" Work

I joined MyBankTracker.com in May of 2017, and barely a month later our CEO, Jason Reposa, came to me with a question--can we take the company fully remote? The management team already allowed employees to work remotely one day a week, but he was looking to explore the possibility of drastically changing the way we operated to open up a slew of new opportunities. We spent the next six months researching and planning; at the beginning of 2018, we decided to become a fully remote company. Now that a year has passed, let’s take a moment to reflect on how we made that decision and how we are doing now.

Find The Value

To make sure this would work, we needed to understand three main areas -- (1) communication among employees, (2) whether we could staff properly as we grow and (3) how this would affect the bottom line.

Most company systems are cloud-based; with video chat, email, phone calls, texting and Slack, it feels like we couldn’t avoid communicating even if we wanted. Add in our business process software like JIRA (to track our development work) and Trello boards (to track our content flow) and we felt confident nothing would fall through the cracks due to the location of our employees. We did need to establish communication guidelines, but I’ll talk more about that later.

Our team is our business, so the second, and probably most important, piece was understanding that we would be able to scale and hire new employees while operating remotely. Up to that point, we had restricted our hiring to New York City, our home base. There certainly wasn’t a lack of candidates in the largest city in the country, but at the same time, we were missing out on millions of potential candidates across the U.S. (or the world).

The last piece to understand ahead of time was how this decision would affect the bottom line. The gains here were obvious to us--we could stop paying outrageous rent for NYC office space. Additionally, with access to the national marketplace, we could hire new employees at salaries competitive to their location, rather than matching the inflated cost of living in New York. We did invest in additional software to help improve communication and workflow efficiency, but the costs were not significant.

Maintain the Culture

At MyBankTracker.com, we put people first. Our philosophy is to create and foster an environment for our employees where they have the necessary essentials to be focused and dedicated to produce quality work. In our Brooklyn office, we offered perks such as free food through a fully stocked kitchen, team happy hours, and “Culture Club” days (small team-building adventures throughout the year). Well-fed employees make for happy teams, right? So we added in a monthly food stipend. We also learned some people like the energy of an office, so we added an allowance for any type of coworking space throughout the country, if they so desired. Other perks like gym and commuting stipends, and our unlimited paid time off policy transfer to a remote workplace fairly easily.

The hardest one to figure out was our Culture Club days. I’m a firm believer that spending time outside the office with your team--doing anything besides work--helps improve the bonds that foster communication, teamwork, and the relationships that would carry us through the months without face-to-face interaction. We weighed a few different options but ultimately decided we wouldn’t be the same company or the same culture, without taking the time and money to have these experiences. Now, we consolidate the multiple Culture Club days into two retreats--summer and winter. We fly the whole team together for four-five days. Each trip includes a few hours of high-level company discussions or planning, but are largely planned around team bonding activities, dinners, or nights out together.

Communicate Clearly

When thinking about taking the company remote, it’s extremely important to think about how and when your employees will communicate. As mentioned earlier, we have an abundance of methods to talk to each other. The real question was whether we could overcome the inability to sit at a table together and hash out the plans for a new project or work through the best way to solve the latest problem. The first thing we put in place was changing our weekly leadership call to a full company standup. Every Monday morning the whole company is on a call that runs through the week’s priorities by department. In our industry the priorities can shift in an instant, so we wanted to make sure everyone was on the same page as things changed.

Additionally, we set guidelines for communication that reflect the values of the organization and allow people to conduct business efficiently. At the top of the list was one of our company values: no BS--communicate clearly and directly--assume the best intentions from your fellow coworkers. Without the ability to tap someone on the shoulder and get clarity on a specific email or message, being direct with positive intention would prove to be worthwhile. After all, we are working together to make the company successful. I always encourage my team to use video chat when possible and that has become our main source of communication.

Scheduled chats also help keep the information flowing. Our CEO has a standing call with each of the managers on his team, and I have standing calls with each member of mine. Of course, we use the majority of the time to update each other on the status of work, new projects/ideas, or any issues that arise. However, we always make time to chat about things outside of work--family life, interests, vacations, etc. There should be open lines of communication about any topic so employees feel comfortable to share work successes or failures, but also personal ones. These are the interactions that keep personal relationships strong and make employees feel appreciated.

Trust Your Hires

Some people are incredible employees in an office setting, but can’t seem to motivate themselves to work from home. That may be fine for some companies, but we needed to make sure our new hires could be productive without someone looking over their shoulder. We adjusted our hiring slightly to have a more pronounced focus on self-motivation, responsiveness, and initiative. We deemed these as essential characteristics for remote workers. Another important piece of remote work is an eagerness to learn. Instead of a traditional setup where you could sit with another employee and learn about a role you might want to step into, each person would be largely on his or her own. We wanted people willing to take the extra time to find and learn the skills needed to advance in the company.

Another major piece is the cultural fit. After a basic review of qualifications, the first part of our interview process is a cultural interview. We want to know about the candidate as an individual--what are her skills, passions, goals, and weaknesses? How does she communicate, problem solve, or seek help? Once we hire someone she is working on her own 90 percent of the time. Before we commit to someone we want to know how she thinks.

The Outcome

We recently returned from our first winter retreat, having taken the whole team to the Bahamas for four days; I think we all look back on 2018 as a great success. We hired four fully remote employees who integrated into our teams and, along with the rest of the employees, produced excellent work. We opened up our candidate pool across the country and have been able to find people when we needed them. The company itself had one of the best years in its history and we were also able to experience significant cost reductions by operating remotely. Most importantly, I feel we maintained the culture and spirit of our company.