Cracking The Code Of Remote Working

Building and managing remote teams is not easy. Andreas Klinger the Head of Remote for AngelList shares lessons learned.

Remote work may be the future, but how do you do it?

Jan Schulz-Hofen, founder and CEO of Planio, wrote in a blog for Toptal: "If you ask me, working remotely rocks. I am currently writing from a small beach bar located on a remote island in southern Thailand. Looking up from my laptop, I see nothing but the endless ocean and its crystal clear blue waters."

It sounds idyllic, but what should aspiring beach bums/company founders be thinking about when it comes to building a remote team? I spoke to Andreas Klinger about what he has learned building and managing remote teams. Klinger is the head of remote at AngelList a website for startups, angel investors and job-seekers looking to work at startups that employs over 200 remote staff.

Why remote?

Attracting talent in cities like San Francisco, London and New York is challenging. Recruiting top talent in these places is expensive and loyalty is fleeting, at best. As Klinger noted, "Hiring remote means you are able to hire the best possible talent anywhere on the planet, and allowing those people to choose quality of life over the rat race is a serious draw for the person you are looking to hire."

From the business's perspective, Klinger explains, hiring remotely has a wealth of benefits: increased productivity, higher staff retention, and the ability to easily keep in touch with people working from home or in far flung locations.

You need a lot more process than you realize

However, remote working is not an instant holy grail for efficiency and productivity. A ten-person remote team requires the same systems and processes as a 50-person company, and leaders of hybrid or co-located teams do not usually understand this. Take something as simple as a meeting: in a co-located team, you can get a group of people together for a meeting in a matter of minutes, especially when the team is small. Even in a five-person remote team, you need to be better organized and disciplined from the outset.

Klinger explained that you need to plan and announce a remote team meeting in advance, an agenda needs to be shared, notes need to be taken, the meeting needs to start and finish on time and you need to follow up with communication regarding further actions resulting from that meeting.

Hybrid-remote is challenging

Running a remote shop is harder to do in what Klinger calls the hybrid model, where you have a small percentage of your team working remotely and the majority of your team is office-based. The biggest challenge is typically that people working remotely do not get the level of investment in systems and processes that they need and consequently can end up feeling like alienated second class citizens in the company.

Klinger believes that to be successful in a remote environment you need to act like a bigger company from the outset: "A five-person remote team requires the same systems and processes as a 50-person company and leaders of hybrid teams do not usually get this."

Think about the type of work you do

Effective communication is critical in any organization, but it is especially important in remote companies. When communicating via Slack or Zoom, many elements of the conversation that would be present if you were face-to-face can be misinterpreted, ignored or lost.

As Klinger believes, "Creative or innovative work is better when it is done in person and process-driven, or iterative work, is where remote comes into its own."

So, what do you need to consider if you are embarking on building out a remote team?

First and foremost, make sure you hire the right people. You need to be rigorous in the recruitment process because you will not be working next to your team day in and day out, which means you will not know what type of person you have hired for quite some time.

As Klinger explained, "You have to be able to trust your employees from day one fully." You also need to ensure that they suit working remotely – not everyone who thinks they will enjoy it does.