As Warren Buffet said, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”

The majority of CEOs who ran office-based businesses before the pandemic are currently butt naked. That’s because they relied on their office space to develop their company’s culture, and now they’re finding it’s all falling apart remotely.

The human proximity, camaraderie, ‘water cooler moments’ (or beer on tap moments if they’d drunk the WeWork kool aid) and Friday drinks were enough for them to assume they’d built something resembling a culture.

But with global lock down/quarantine forcing the transition to remote work, these ‘culture isn’t critical’ leaders are finding that what happened naturally in the office environment will require a lot more focus, thought and effort in the coming months.

Running a remote work environment effectively requires amongst other things a deliberate approach to culture development. If the employees of a company like Buffer, a fully remote business founded 10 years ago, have issues with burnout and still struggle with their remote culture, then you can expect companies that have only recently been forced to transition to remote to be in for a rude awakening.

Leaders who are not experienced in remote working will face many new and ongoing challenges, so it makes sense to try to understand what the best practices around remote work are.

Looking at the commonalities amongst the companies that have been remote for years and do remote working well, companies like Gitlab (1200 employees,) Basecamp, Hotjar, Zapier, Buffer etc. you find that there are nine fundamental best practises that these companies work on. These practices unsurprisingly match up with a lot of the challenges being experienced by CEOs leading remote teams for the first time due to the coronavirus.

Analysis of Gitlab, Basecamp, Hotjar, Zapier, Buffer and others reveals 9 Remote Working Best Practises

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1. PROCESS-IZE YOUR BUSINESS

‍2. BUILD SOCIAL CONNECTION

3. FOCUS ON COMMUNICATION

‍4. DOCUMENT EVERYTHING

5. CREATE A STRUCTURE

6. DEVELOP TRUST & ACCOUNTABILITY

‍7. FOCUS ON RESULTS & OUTPUT

8. CUSTOMIZE YOUR HIRING PROCESS

9. BE DELIBERATE ABOUT YOUR CULTURE

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I will be hosting two webinars on 4th June 2020, the first at 2:00pm BST and the second at 9am PST discuss and explore these 9 best practices.

What you'll take home:

• Best practices on developing business processes for hybrid/remote working, documentation (transitioning from a speak first to a write first mentality) and adding the necessary structure to your business  
• Ways to adapt your communication (synchronous, asynchronous & informal), how to rethink the recruitment process and social connection  
• Actionable insights on avoiding knowledge leak/loss, developing accountability, and strengthening and embedding culture in a hybrid/remote environment.

You can sign up for the 2:00pm BST here or the 9am PDT here.

Below is a Twitter taster of what I will be covering.

UK / EU: 2pm BST on the 4th June  

- HOW TO TRANSITION TO A REMOTE OR HYBRID WORK CULTURE

USA: 9am PST on the 4th June

- HOW TO TRANSITION TO A REMOTE OR HYBRID WORK CULTURE

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