Echometer works "remote first" - how and why (you should too)

Building a globally competing startup requires hiring across borders

Building a company is hard. For startups in early stages the main focus is product-market-fit and generating early traction. Once you’re in a position to accelerate your growth, you’ll face the next challenge which is building a scalable company with employees and processes around your product.

In 2021, we at Echometer reached this phase. We are now screening the market thoroughly to find the right talent to join our team. Everyone who is interested in startups should have heard about the Guy Kawasaki’s “Bozo Explosion” have heard of it. Basically, he says: If you hire “B employees”, they will hire “C employees”, and in a year you will be surrounded by “Z employees”. Of course, every founder wants to avoid that.

We firmly believe that in a global B2B SaaS market, we can only survive if we can attract the best talent. And the “best talent” is, in most cases, not to be found right next door.

Therefore, we aim to build a company that is remote-first.

What does “remote-first” mean?

Many companies switched from “no home office” to “partial home office” and called it “remote-friendly” (see a general definition right here). When we researched remote-first pioneers like GitLab (the biggest remote company of the planet) or Doist, were looking for, we realised that it is dangerous to only be “remote-friendly” by simply allowing remote work.

Only allowing team members to work from somewhere else (while everything else remains the same) is not a good operating mode. Still, Corona forced many companies to do so. The rushed transition is probably the reason why many claim “remote working is not working for us”.

If your company wants to work remotely, you have to be serious about it. And that brings with it a (partially) drastic change in the way all your employees work - even those who continue to work on site.

“Remote-first”, as it is for example as defined by for example VMWare, therefore refers to changing all aspects of work for remote working. This entails changing internal communication, decision-making, team building and sometimes also compensation.

Why remote-friendly is not enough

You might ask yourself: “But what’s wrong with being remote-friendly? Do you really have to change everything to make remote work work?”

We believe so. Don’t get me wrong, we know that working in the same space has its advantages: As our founding team was working and living together in one flat in the beginning, we know about the benefits of working on-site: Quick communication, informal team building etc.

But these advantages are also part of the problem of why “remote-friendly” doesn’t work. If you don’t adapt the work processes, you create a two-class society: employees on site receive information earlier, are better integrated into the team and are more closely involved in decision-making. In such situations, it is very difficult for remote employees to keep up and become part of the team.

What can you do to make remote work work?

Well, it’s easier of course if you just go remote-only. Our friends at Frontastic, another Münster-based start-up, did that and call it “Remote Native” . For us at Echometer this route seemed too extreme as we still love the idea of building a HQ office. This leaves us with the same challenge that most corporates have: How can you transition from on-site to partly-remote without disadvantaging fully remote employees?

The answer is: Both remote workers and on-site workers need to adapt. While working remotely during Covid in 2020, we identified the following rules to be invaluable to make the split work:

• Document everything
This may sound aggressive at first, but once your team has a well-defined documentation structure, it will feel quite normal. The benefit is enormous: If all processes can be looked up, people can get familiar with processes much more independently and you can use more time in your calls to actually get to know new hires instead of looking through outdated documentation together or explaining stuff that’s not even documented.

• Write down news before it is discussed
Before you talk about an event with a colleague in your office, write it down in your defined digital team channel. Otherwise, when new information comes up, you only talk about it with your on-site colleagues and then forget about it once you are having the next team daily. It may feel a little strange at first, but it’s definitely worth it.

• Please ask on-site employees to participate in online meetings separately
It is common for all on-site employees to participate in a call together, while remote employees are dialled in separately. The result: on-site employees can hear each other well, but nobody can understand them well - especially when they start having one-on-one conversations with each other. This can easily be prevented by having everyone follow the same rules and participate in conversations separately. Your remote employees will be happy, believe me.

• Asynchronous communication first
  Especially (but not only) relevant if you’re working across timezones. In remote work environments you cannot see if a colleague is available for a chat or in the tunnel. To maximize the effectiveness and respect your colleagues’ time, the first way to go is to communicate asynchronous. Decide in your team which communication channels you’d like to use and maybe even create a ruleset on how quickly those channels should be responded to.

There are probably many more things you should watch out for. But these are the ones we think you may find surprising.

Of course, we’re just at the beginning of our journey, and we’re sure that there will be many new learnings in the next months.

In the meantime, we are open to your experiences with working remotely - what were the most important insights for your team? Let us know!

Before I forget: Echometer helps your team work remotely

Did I even mention what we’re doing at Echometer? Echometer is a team development & health check tool that enables a continuous improvement process. Especially, if you’re navigating your team through a transition from on-site to remote working, you should really book a demo of Echometer here.

We’ve helped many teams – for example at C&A – to go through this transition successfully and we’d be happy to help you and your team(s) as well!