Katie Evans-Reber, SPHR, SHRM-SCP, is the Vice President of People and Culture at Wonolo, the leading in-demand staffing platform.
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Lower costs. Enhanced productivity. Increased access to talent. Alignment with your brand and mission. Better work-life balance. Less turnover. Healthier environmental outcomes. Stronger brand differentiation.
Each of those phrases represents a valid reason to become a remote-first company. All are reasons my company, Wonolo, raised when explaining to our board, leadership and employees how becoming remote-first would help future-proof our company. But only one of those reasons really matters. If your company is considering going remote-first permanently, there is one critical thing you should focus on.
I should start by saying if you are feeling overwhelmed with making this decision, just know our own process of becoming a true remote-first company didn’t happen overnight, and it shouldn’t happen over the course of a pandemic. The founders talked about becoming remote-first as early as our founding in 2014, and it’s something I’ve spent years researching. Late last year, as we started to outgrow our office space, we knew decision time was approaching.
Still, the pandemic helped us recognize further challenges we’d face.
For me — and I say this as someone who is obsessed with culture — it was really hard to know how people were feeling. It’s not as though, as the vice president of people, I can just throw a Zoom meeting on an employee’s calendar, ask, “How are you feeling?” and expect someone to divulge their feelings. Yes, my colleagues know me well, but an unexpected invitation to speak with the head of “HR” is likely more scary than helpful.
And, if you’re the sort of person who needs to hear this, OK, I’ll answer what you're mentally asking: Why should I care how people are feeling? For one, I just care. Two, because how people feel is a good barometer of the health of a company’s culture. And, though I shouldn’t need to say it, yes, your culture is your company. But you should also care how people are feeling because a dissatisfied employee in an office means one thing, but an employee who is dissatisfied and at home, alone, is quite different.
So, I had to find other ways to gauge the health of individual employees and our culture more broadly. At first, I looked for the wrong signals. I tried to do companywide events over Zoom and was eager to know who showed up and who didn’t. It was a bad metric to look for; there are too many good reasons someone might not show up to a companywide event.
So instead, I combined companywide surveys that people could take at their leisure and games that involved the whole company but not at a specific time (such as a game of tag over Slack). I paid close attention to when smaller groups got together for culture building and doubled down on helping foster smaller gatherings. What’s more, I’m crowdsourcing more regularly for ideas — a lot of people are good at helping build connections, be they engineers or marketers.
Here are some examples of organic connections that happened: I didn’t start a Women of Wonolo event but was invited to one, and I could tell who was struggling with what. And, I didn’t launch a Slack channel dedicated to parents with twins (or employees who are twins), but I know it exists — and, yes, it’s cute multiplied.
I didn’t account for the fact that just because we’re in a pandemic doesn’t mean more bad stuff can’t happen. The death of George Floyd tested our culture at a time when many of us wanted instead to be together to talk and process his brutal death. But I was heartened to see that in a remote-first environment, common empathy overcomes physical distance. Various teams formed to think about our public response, our internal communications and our long-term plans about what we as a company were going to do to change our own behaviors.
Ultimately, when considering becoming a remote-first company, what you need to ask yourself is: “Will this align with our brand and mission?” If the answer is yes, it will drive the decision home.
Here are four takeaways as your company considers becoming remote-first:
• Make sure the decision aligns with your mission as a company. And, if it does, I’d encourage you to talk to leaders at companies that have succeeded — and failed — at going remote-first. Having these conversations can be incredibly valuable.
• Test being a remote-first company. The silver lining of the pandemic is it is helping business leaders identify some challenges of being in a remote-first environment and solve for them. Consider identifying a group of employees who’d be willing to experiment with being fully remote for a few months and share their experiences.
• Change how you measure the health of your culture. Getting everyone together will be harder, and keeping everyone engaged will be harder. Be creative, and look outside your people/HR team for advice and feedback.
• Prepare for challenges. You may lose some employees. Your culture might suffer at first. You might have frustrating technology glitches such as Zoom not properly working. Do not be discouraged. Every obstacle will force you to improve and get better.
And on that final point, while it is always sad to say goodbye to colleagues and friends, remember that people need to focus on doing what's right for themselves. I’m confident that some voluntary attrition will be outweighed by new teammates who are attracted to your mission and the idea of getting to work from anywhere.
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