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 moved to a 100% remote work environment before the pandemic. In this post, we discuss the steps Splice Machine took to put a remote-first plan into action and avoid common points of failure.
Devise a Remote-First Plan
Like any significant business operations change, implementing remote-first operations requires planning, commitment, and adoption to succeed. After compiling our research on remote-first use-cases and survey data, Splice Machine’s People Ops team drafted a proposal identifying our perceived advantages and risks of moving to a distributed remote-work model, along with our recommendation to proceed. In our proposal, we listed many of the common reasons distributed teams struggle or fail, and described our detailed plan to introduce policies, programs, and new tools designed to minimize these potential risks or to avoid them altogether.
Our plan to support a distributed work environment required updating our communication infrastructure, revising our work processes and decision making, replacing existing work tools with better-suited global-friendly tools, setting clear expectations with our current team, implementing new interview tactics to evaluate future hires, and updating our business goals to measure engagement and productivity.
Common Reasons Remote-First Fails
Communication gaps. Companies lack the proper communication tools or people don’t use the communication tools effectively, leading employees to feel disconnected, disengaged, isolated, or lonely.
Employees depend on water cooler conversations to feel connected because other communication outlets are limited or don’t exist.
Supervisors are not given enough training or tools to manage distributed teams effectively making it easier to manage local teams.
Supervisors don’t assign measurable goals and lack visibility to their team’s productivity resulting in a lack of trust.
Employees and supervisors don’t establish core working hours for an asynchronous environment and work longer hours.
Vet Plan to Gain Buy-In
Splice Machine’s People Ops’ proposal to move to a fully distributed remote-work model was presented first to the CEO and CFO for their review and input. After getting their feedback, discussing their concerns, and eventually gaining their full support, the proposal was put in front of the rest of the executive staff. They were asked to read the proposal in advance and prepare for a thorough discussion that would lead to voting on moving to a distributed work model or not.
Vote on Plan to Win Commitment
Most of Splice Machine’s executive team has worked in companies with multiple offices and co-located teams, and they were aware of the growing success of distributed work models. People Ops’ proposal addressed many of their concerns, so much of the meeting was spent discussing, debating, and elaborating on details like “what constitutes core working hours”, “what time zones should we rule out”, “where to memorialize tribal knowledge”, and “should compensation be adjusted based on geographic location”. This leadership discussion was one of the most important steps we took because it required everyone at the table to participate in the discussion, share their opinions, and ultimately commit to a successful rollout.
Commit to Change
If your company has operating policies in place like Splice Machine did, your leadership team will need to identify which policies must change before moving to a remote-first model, commit to making appropriate changes, publish the changes, and put the changes into action daily. If you are in the process of building your company or do not have core company policies already in place, invest the time to create them now and start by defining what remote-first means in your organization. A global perspective minimizes the chances of leaving someone behind when new policies and programs to hire, onboard, train, and measure performance are implemented.
Steps to Implement Remote-First
Define what remote-first success means to your company. Why are you doing it and what needs to change?
Describe how and when changes should begin and should be completed.
Map out a plan and select tools to support the rollout.
Provide training to managers and to employees that cover communication, how to use new tools, and adapt goal setting, continuous feedback and performance, and measurement.
Get feedback from the team during the rollout to correct blockers before they become problematic.
Memorialize decisions and publish them for company-wide transparency.
Everyone Must Participate
One of the key reasons why Splice Machine experienced a successful transition to remote working is because our entire team engineered remote-first operations practices into all aspects of their routine. They adopted the new tools we introduced to support a remote-first work environment and use them daily to communicate with their team on Slack and email, record meetings when the whole group can’t attend, and trust their teammates to act and operate in similar transparency. This additional layer of transparency and trust has elevated our work environment to a new level of productivity and comradery.
Watch for our next post which will describe 3 critical remote-first communication expectations to establish. 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.
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