"It's very important for you as a leader to make sure your team members feel included for them to be able to succeed." - Alexander Torrenegra. Episode 4 compares and contrasts the pros and cons list surrounding 'remote-first' and 'remote-friendly' companies. We have our own opinions on what's more successful, but at the end of the day, it's a matter of positioning. How one prioritizes and structures processes will determine how well one approaches a remote-first or remote-friendly work environment.
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A big thank you to our post-production wizard, Vanesa Monroy.
[A moderately paced, trip hop song that is best described as chill and cruising. Synth and techno drums are the primary instruments in this track. This is our podcast background music, it starts playing at the very beginning]
Andres: 00:00 Hi, I'm Andrés.
Josephine: 00:03 And I'm Josephine. Welcome to the Remoter Podcast.
Andres: 00:07 Follow us in season one of this journey as we cover anything and everything you need to know in order to successfully build and scale a remote first team. As someone who's been working remotely for over a decade or CEO, Alexander Torrenegra shares his personal experiences, lessons learned, and advice for those of you who are curious and interested in exploring the future of work.
Josephine: 00:33 This podcast is brought to you by Torre, the end to end recruitment solution for Remoters. Get our free AI powered sourcing and processing tools, or let Torre recruit on your behalf at Torre dot co, that's T O R R E. Dot. C O.
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Josephine: 00:53 So Andres, what are we going to be covering today?
Andres: 00:55 So today the plan is to cover remote first versus remote friendly companies. What is the difference and how do they work? Clarification for the audience that doesn't want to hear the entire podcast- too long, didn't read it. The too long, didn't read would be remote companies are ones that are focused on building a team that you know, it's first and foremost remote. So you'll hear a little bit about, about how that works. And then remote friendly companies are the companies that are mainly office-based, but they allow for some remote work and there's differences and it's important to understand how to embrace that. And I think that we can, we can hear a lot about that on this on this podcast.
Josephine: 01:33 So are you saying that remote first would be the way to go if you had a choice but, remote friendly isn't necessarily the one we want to focus on?
Andres: 01:43 Yeah, I think we can hear more from, from Alex. But in a nutshell, I don't want you to think about like, if you have some people that have to be in an office, then you're remote friendly, no. You can be remote-first and have some people that have to be in an office or in a, you know, a store in a shop or in a physical space. It's just a matter of how you prioritize and structure your processes so that you first think about the people that are remote. So that's, that's what remote first would be. And then the companies that do not think that way have a mindset of, okay, okay, I'll let you work from home. That's a remote friendly company and it's different and it's very important to establish the differences and the consequences as well.
Josephine: 02:23 Got it. Okay. Yeah, no, I'm looking forward to this episode because I had that meshed in my mind as one. All right, let's go.
Alex: 02:31 So in the previous episode we talk about how we ended up shutting down our offices and migrating from being office based to being remote. Now I was one of the first ones on that transition. I went to work from home while there were still people working out of of our offices and I remember vividly one Friday when the team was celebrating, I believe not one, but two birthdays that had happened that week. And of course we wanted to be inclusive. So the head of HR, she organized a party in the office. She invited all of the remote members of the team to the party as well. They place the screens in the area where they were going to celebrate the birthdays. They placed a central microphone and speaker so that the people that were joining the birthday remotely could hear what was happening and they could also speak and everybody was able to hear them as well. She organized the timing so that it would work for different time zones as well. So the logistics were well-prepared.
Erik: 03:40 So say you had a party in Bogotá and everybody was invited using all the technology. Sounds great.
Alex: 03:45 Yeah, so we were I think like 30 people in the Bogotá office and remotely, like 15 or so. So the party started by singing happy birthday and a, and a couple of wishes. But very quickly after they started cutting the cake, and this is like seven, five, seven minutes into the event, the group in the Bogotá office started to break up into different groups and they, of course, each group started having their own conversation. So now the ones that were remote, we couldn't really hear what was happening in the Bogotá office because we were just listening to a lot of mumbling from all of the conversations happening around. But it was loud enough so that we couldn't even talk amongst ourselves. We couldn't mute the microphone of the office in Bogotá. We couldn't talk about ourselves and even if we could, like if we muted the Bogotá microphone, we are isolating ourselves from the rest of the company anyway. So very slowly the people that had joined the event remotely, they started dropping, not saying bye because they couldn't not being able to wish the person, the two people that were having birthdays, happy birthday as they wanted and eventually after 10 minutes, I was the only one there and and I did the same. I ended up dropping. This was supposed to be like an hour long event and they had some other activities in there. But yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't good for us. I realized that even though I was the CEO of the company, I was feeling like a second class citizen of the culture of the company. And if that was me as the CEO, imagine what the other members of the team, of the team, that were remote were, were feeling. After that, I started researching to into the topic in, in more detail and I realized that that happens quite frequently- pretty much all the time when you have a remote-friendly company, where you mix people working remotely with people working out of an office and here is something that most people have experienced for example. And that is when you have a video conference with four people total, you're one of them. Two of them are joining remotely, the conference, and two of them are working or joining out of the office. So what they do is they both go to a conference room. They connect to the video conference with just one computer or the video system in that conference room. And then the other two people, they connect from using their own laptops.
Erik: 06:11 Okay.
Alex: 06:12 It's very common and the more people you have in the office, the more this is going to happen that the people in the office, they have side conversations and at a volume that the people that are joining remotely cannot hear. They can see that there are two people in the office are talking to each other, but they cannot hear that. And again, the more people, the more likely this is going to happen.
Erik: 06:34 Right? And then they pass the donuts.
Alex: 06:35 You don't even need the donuts for you to feel that you're being excluded from the conversation. And whenever there is someone saying, something funny, especially when the funny thing happens in the office, most people working remotely, they don't get the joke. That's a very common way of making people feel like second class citizens and many of them don't even realize it. But the longterm consequences of that, which are very important, is that people that work remotely, they feel that they don't have the same opportunities, the same professional development path that people that are working out of the office may have. They feel that they are not participating in as many important conversations as they could, or as they should, and they might be actually doing it. I mean even if the company, the company might be organized enough for them not to be excluded from important decisions. But one thing is how you feel and another thing is what actually happens. And it's very important for you to make sure that as a leader, make sure that all of the members of the team feel that they can do something and that they are part of something for them to be able to succeed. How would you feel that your leader feels about you is one of the most important factors in the professional growth of our, of our person. And when you feel that your leader is considering you as a second class citizen, that's going to limit your chances of growth a lot.
Erik: 07:52 And you're going to be demotivated and demoralized and yeah.
Alex: 07:56 So there are several things that you can do. In this case, for example, a policy that that we implemented that I've seen since many other companies transitioning into remote work are doing is, whenever a single person is joining a meeting remotely, every person joins the meeting from their own computer. They don't go to a conference room, they all go to booths or they join from their desks so that you don't end up having multiple communication channels. You have only one and everybody is on the same level, on the same playing field, right, that, on that meeting and that's the difference between being remote friendly and being remote first, right? Being remote friendly is allowing people to connect remotely to a meeting. Being remote first is making sure that all of the policies that you in the company implement think first about how is the experience for a remote person, give priority to that, and a potential secondary priority to people that are working out of an office space.
Andres: 08:55 What about birthday cakes? What if instead of having a single party, you would send birthday cakes to the entire company on the birthday of one person?
Alex: 09:03 Well, I've, I've seen something like that. I listen to the story of a company that they do pizza Friday parties and what they do is that at 5:00 PM, they happen to work on the same time zone, so it's not as such, such a big deal for them, but every Friday at 5:00 PM, every member of the team gets a pizza delivered to their place.
Andres: 09:18 That's cool. We should implement that.
Erik: 09:20 And so the guy who wants Canadian bacon and pineapple, he can get it. Nobody's going to complain.
Andres: 09:27 Are you... Are you the type of guy that gets Canadian?
Erik: 09:28 No, no no.
Andres: 09:28 I'm never eating pizza with you. It doesn't make sense to me that you mix sweet with pizza.
Alex: 09:41 It doesn't make sense for me that you mix remote work with office based work. That's why you shouldn't be remote friendly. You should be remote first.
Erik: 09:48 You heard it here first. It's the Hawaiian pizza of companies.
Alex: 09:51 Now remote-first doesn't mean that you cannot have members of your team working out of an office environment. As I mentioned, in my team, I have many people working out of coworking spaces, but it's their choice. It's their choice which coworking space they pick. It's their choice, which level of membership they want at the coworking space. It's their choice whether they want to work from home or out of that coworking space. So I understand why many people can't necessarily work from home or don't want to work from home. And now more than ever, it's easy for companies to subsidize or to pay them for that office environment that they might want to have, which doesn't necessarily have to be set up by the company that is, that is hiring them.
Andres: 10:34 Isn't it easier to just, you know, hire a single office for everyone than having to hire- than having to have, I don't know, 30 contracts with, for each individual member of the company?
Alex: 10:43 It is easier. Yeah. To some degree, it's one of the drawbacks of having a remote team. But in many instances you can just delegate that to each member of the team. They can handle their own memberships and just reimburse them for whatever coworking space they're paying for.
Andres: 10:58 Well, it goes a little bit against the Google-ish idea of, you know, providing everything for your employees and doing everything for them and they don't have to care about laundry or something like that.
Alex: 11:07 I think that Google is the, what Google has been doing for over a decade now is the ultimate level of office environment, right? I mean, like that's not how office... Offices started. It took a hundred years to get to what Google is being able to do today, where they give you all of the food you want and they have people clipping your nails in your desk if you want to and whatnot, right. I think that with remote work actually we are going to see even more interesting and potentially extreme things in the future as it becomes more common. Last week I saw a company launching that is offering remote companies a monthly delivery of a package globally to all of the members of the team with whatever goods they want to have on that box. Call it tee shirts, call it, uh swag whatever you want to put in there, you can send it and they send it anywhere on earth for a flat fee. Right. Okay. I can see how there are going to be more and more companies that offer global benefits, whether it's health insurance, eventually food delivery to your house, free Uber rides wherever you want to go, et cetera, et cetera. It's not happening yet on a larger scale, but, but I'm sure there's going to be even more extreme that what we get to see with Google.
Andres: 12:20 You know, it seems like Google has to do all these things and pay a premium on their talent because they're forcing themselves. Like, I don't understand what Google forces themselves to continue being an office centric company. And I don't mean just in the U.S., like their big campus here, but also like other offices I've visited in other countries, they are very office centric. Why is it that a company like Google, so innovative and so on, seems to force that too much? Having to pay a premium for like you know, clipping your nails and whatnot, but also having to pay a premium for salaries and so on.
Alex: 12:54 For one, they started when remote work wasn't that viable. They started in 1998 when audio chatting wasn't really a thing, so the culture that they created from the get-go coming from academia, and this happens to all the many, many companies that started before the 2000s in the Bay area, but that's the natural way of, of working and many companies when they experiment with remote work, it fails. Why it fails? Because of many of the reasons I mentioned. Because the people they send to work remotely end up being union employees, or the last person that goes, that goes to work remotely tends to be the CEO and if you want to do that, you actually, the first person that has to go and work remotely is the CEO. We are going to talk about that later. But if you start experimenting with remote work and the people that are doing the experiment feel that they are second class citizens, you're never going to be able to prove that remote work is better than office based work and then you're going to cancel the experiment and forget about it. And again, I've seen many companies follow that route.
Erik: 13:52 But on the flip side, I mean Google is going to some fairly big extremes to prove that the office environment works. Doesn't that prove that you have to go to extremes for the creative input?
Alex: 14:03 I mean, I don't know if Google is like passionate about office work versus remote work. It's that it's so ingrained in so many people already that it's difficult to think otherwise. I mean, I know that a few companies that are really betting into that, like, like Stripe for example, they have offices in four cities. Their fifth office is fully remote. So from management to union employees, they're all going to be remote. So they're taking that experiment in a very serious way and in a very systematic, more than serious, in a very systematic way because they know that, that's where the future is going to be. It's much easier to start a company that is remote from the get go, remote-first from the get go than to take a company that is office based, and then make it remote because when you're doing it from the get go, you're building the culture from scratch. When you are transitioning, you have to unlearn your culture and learn a new culture. That's very difficult to do.
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Josephine: 15:08 All right. No, I totally see where Alex is coming, in terms of remote first is the way to go if you have the opportunity to go that way. I totally see where he's coming from.
Andres: 15:18 Yeah, I mean if you're getting started with your operations, you're going to have to set up processes any way you want. I mean, the thing about going remote first is that it forces you to establish processes from the get go that are already optimized for scaling. If you want to scale your business and you're not thinking remote first, it's going to be really hard for you to do it once you're big and once you're getting big. So you may want to start investing in that early on.
Josephine: 15:44 And I just want to ask to our listeners out there actually, if you work in a remote based team, what do you guys do to keep up team culture? We'd love to hear get some ideas from you guys too so we can share it with our team and also with other listeners of the remoter podcast.
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Andres: 16:04 Thank you so much for tuning in. A few last words, if you enjoyed that episode. Please...
Josephine: 16:09 Follow us on social media at remoter project and let us know what you think about the latest episode.
Andres: 16:13 We'd love for you to join us as we continue building the Remoter Library on our website, remoter dot com. That's R E M O T E R dot com.
Josephine: 16:24 If you want even more resources, sign up for our free Founding and Growing Remotely online course. You can find that on our website or check the description for links. Don't forget to follow and subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Andres: 16:40 And remember, we're here to make work fulfilling. So I'd like to ask you, what part will you play in shaping the future of work?