Remote-First Creates Competitive Advantage

Building a remote-first company can create a major competitive advantage in today’s new work age. Many companies like Splice Machine moved to a remote-work model before the pandemic in order to broaden their talent pool, stay ahead of their hiring forecasts within budget, reduce their operating costs, and offer their employees more flexibility. In this post, we discuss some of these advantages and steps to implement remote-first operations.

5 Core Remote First Advantages

Usefyi lists several statistics supporting the following advantages

• Productivity- 72% of companies with remote-work policies believe that remote work makes workers more productive.

• Cost Savings- A remote worker saves their company an average of $11,000 annually.

• Employee Loyalty- Remote workers are 13% more likely than on-site workers to say that they will stay in their current job for the next 5 years.

• Health- Stress and anxiety affecting the productivity of the worker was 35% in the office and only 26% for those working outside of the office.

• Better for Environment- At a major enterprise corporation, remote workers drove 92 million fewer miles, saving 4.6 million gallons of gas, and reducing carbon dioxide emissions by almost 41,000 metric tons.

Early Stage Companies

If you are a founder of a startup or an executive at an early-stage company, now is the time to start building a remote-first distributed workforce. A startup, based in a city where the cost of living and corporate rental rates are high, can quickly burn through a modest capital raise before attaining minimal viable product. A remote-first model can help you offset operations expenses and some labor costs, allowing for more months of run-rate before your next capital fundraise. It can also help you hire more qualified talent and give your company a competitive edge over other companies competing for the same talent that offer less flexibility.

Later Stage Companies

If your company is more mature and has not intentionally supported remote workers or distributed teams in the past, now is the time to start. Odds are that many of your employees worked from home during the pandemic and you have put some good remote-friendly practices in place. Take the next step and commit to becoming a remote-first company. In order to achieve remote-first success, it is crucial that your team thoroughly evaluate all the changes that need to happen within your organization and get buy-in from the entire executive staff to actively support the transition. A remote-first model will not succeed if a company does not have commitment throughout the organization to change how they set goals, manage, make decisions, measure progress, and most importantly communicate.

Be forewarned, there will be a learning curve for everyone in the company but particularly for managers who will need to rethink how they hire and manage remote teams. If everyone doesn’t use remote-first practices, people will be left out of communication and decision making, and the strategy will fail. The executive team will need to lead by example and hold everyone accountable to use remote-first best practices in their daily operations.

Steps to Implement Remote-First

Any company wanting to implement a remote-first strategy should

• Thoroughly evaluate how business gets done.

• Identify cases for change.

• Discuss as a group in detail what operations need to change.

• Outline those changes.

• Make decisions as a group.

• Identify and universally adopt new tools to support remote-first.

• Finalize plans and build new policies.

• Promote and practice these new changes daily.

Communicate, Set Goals and Trust

If you decide to build or move to a remote-first work model, make sure communication, clear measurable goals, and trust remain your key drivers as you build your infrastructure, craft policies, and select tools. These factors are essential to the success of any company but are especially important if you want to succeed as a remote-first organization. You will want to hire people that have either worked successfully in a remote role and used tools to support an asynchronous environment or can demonstrate that they could be successful on a distributed team by using a recruiting and interview strategy that vets for success.

Splice Machine’s Journey

Today our team resides in fifteen US states, as well as in Canada, Germany, Spain, Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia. Recruiting has seen the benefits of moving to a remote-first workforce. We are meeting our hiring goals and are finding that candidates often accept our offer over other offers because of our remote-first work environment and company culture. The team's commitment to regular goal setting, check-ins with managers, use of communication tools to create inclusion and connectedness is paying off. Communication and engagement survey scores are high, people love the flexibility, autonomy, collaboration, and productivity without the commute.

Articles and tips on the topic of working remotely are growing at a rapid rate but there are few posts from companies like Splice Machine who describe their move from an on-premise work model to a fully remote model, especially before the pandemic.

While we wouldn’t recommend relying solely on Splice Machine’s journey to base your decision and implement remote-first at your company, we believe that by the time you have read through our 12 posts or ebook, you will better understand the options, challenges, and advantages of building a remote-first company.

Watch for our next post which will describe how remote-first helped Splice Machine's overcome some significant growth obstacles. You may also view all of our posts on Splice Machine’s career page or download the Splice Machine Journey From Office to 100% Remote ebook that our posts are based on.