How to remote

You are debating if you should hire more remote engineers for your team.  The first person you hired didn't work out so well, so clearly you shouldn't right?  Well, not so fast. There are a number of ways to build a great remote work culture that helps to make your team stronger and richer.  There are a few key things that you need to pay attention to if you want this to be successful.

First off, why would you want to hire people remotely?  The best contributors and leaders for your organization most likely aren't all located within an hour of your office.  The world is a big place and your company is going to thrive by finding the best talent that can make engineering be a core strength to get ahead of the competition.  It makes sense to make sure your strategy for hiring would go to where the talent is, because of this it means building distributed teams and a remote culture.

There are a number of other less important reasons but still relevant for going remote.  You could make an argument that it costs less to hire people (not really always true). Maybe you think you’ll you'll get better night time coverage or that you'll be able to have people in the same community as the customers that you serve.  All of these reasons are less critical than finding the best people to help your team be as effective as possible.

So where do you start?  You need to make sure that your organization is geared to make remote employees successful.  This means having video conferencing for all of your meetings, and not just Google Meet if you can help it.  All hands meetings and 1:1s should all have video chat with dedicated microphones for all participants. A huge part of communication is the expressions and small gestures that happen when you can see another person.  Without solid video chat, both sides are missing a ton of information and connection which will make for a poor experience. This leads to disengaged employees, wasted time, processes that break down and people leaving the organization.

You'll need to have a robust and clear policy around how you will support remote workers.  Are you going to be paying for their office setup? Home internet? How often will they be traveling to the office or some other central location to meet up?  These are not the sorts of things that a full time in person employee is going to be getting from your company but you must do for your remotes to make sure they are connected and have a great experience with your company.  Don't wait for the first hire to start figuring this out. The candidate is looking at all of this as they are speaking with your company and if you don't have a great story for how this is going to be successful for them why should they join you?

When you are hiring someone for remote work, make sure they have some experience with it, especially if this is your first remote employee.  It is a skill just like anything else and isn't just someone with a laptop not in the office. Find someone who excels at communication and takes action to make the work environment better.  I find this to be more common with people who have been working in industry for 5+ years and have a sense of how to be a successful contributor and the key role that communication has in making them successful.

Make sure you have strong support from other key people in the organization.  Is the recruiting team bought in? How are you going to be sourcing candidates?  Does your manager approve of this approach and have clear expectations on what to expect?  Build a plan and socialize it. Show how you'll know if this is succeeding or not. Set achievable objectives like how many hires in what time frames and in what roles so people understand what success looks like.  This will also help you to keep yourself accountable to the overall program.

Communication is a key part of working together, especially so for remote employees.  It is going to be harder for them to learn things from hallway conversations or getting drinks after work with their co-workers.  A few things to put in place here is to make sure all meetings have an easily shared agenda. There should also be notes which can be updated or collaborated on.  You'll find tools like Google Docs to be your friend here. I use it liberally and often end up collaborating through the docs or using them to drive meetings. Make sure all of your meetings have video conferencing by default.  There should be no work on the meeting organizers part to make sure it supports video calls.

Make sure that there is social time for the team.  Often remote work can be overly focused on delivery.  Create fun time where people can have water cooler chat, talk about what they are excited about and get to know their co-workers without an expectation of direct impact on the bottom line.  This creates better connections and makes for a happier team. When there are challenging conversations to be had, these bonds will help the team to move though those conversations more easily as there will be more trust that has been built up.

Starting with these key points, you'll be well on your way of building a strong remote team and culture.