Why did you establish Remote as a fully distributed and remote company? And why do you believe that remote work is the future?

I think that's the best way to build a company. And I think that's how companies in the future are going to be built. It solves an incredible amount of problems that companies have in scaling and becoming successful, the primary one being access to talent. In tech, for example, the first thing many companies do is open an office in San Francisco, where the price of talent is incredibly high, and they’re fighting with other companies over every single person. If I open any job and say you can work from anywhere, thousands of people will apply. They’ll be happy because I can pay them way more than they can earn locally. And I’m going to be happy because I don’t have to pay a San Francisco rate. And I’ll have somebody who works hard and is just as good as anybody else. But going remote from the start also gives you an opportunity to build a company from scratch, according to first principles. That's why you can create a much better company.

At a high level, how is it working out?

Really well. People are incredibly happy to be working remotely. Many of our employees did not have access to similar kinds of options, as in an interesting career and interesting job that pays well. It also allowed us to scale really, really quickly. In 2021, we grew from 50 people to 650 people. That was doable because we didn't need office space and because we would get literally thousands upon thousands of job applications per month, even when we only had a small number of vacancies. The demand for remote work is incredibly high.

Aside from your ability to tap a global talent pool, what other benefits have you found?

Remote work is a reinforcing function for better behaviors, for working more efficiently. You cannot have meetings all the time, because some people you would want in a meeting might be sleeping. You have to learn to work asynchronously. That means that you primarily work by writing things down. You transfer information. And you only have meetings when you actually need them. There’s so much data on how meetings get in the way of people’s productivity. So working asynchronously most of the time is significantly more efficient. Also, remote work goes hand-in-hand with flexibility on when to work. That’s highly valued by employees and translates into high levels of motivation and engagement.

So how many meetings would an average Remote employee have in a typical week?

For somebody who does not manage people, they may have, at most, two meetings a week. They are 30-minute meetings, which is our default length. (Attendees are also asked to pre-read the agenda, so they can use the time efficiently.) For people that manage others, it will be a bit more. And that means that the rest of the time these people can just work. People work incredibly hard. When they're done, they don't have to commute anywhere. And so, they're incredibly thankful for their jobs.

OK. But meetings can play an important role in exchanging information, making decisions, etc. How do you work around them?

There are two parts to it. One is transparency. As you work, you write stuff down that might be useful for your colleagues to know. You do it in a place where everybody can find it. And instead of asking somebody for information, the first thing you do is you search for information. The other one is ownership. We expect people to be self-driven, and to try to unblock themselves rather than going to others first. And to be able to do that, we give them a lot of freedom and space to do their job and to make decisions, rather than wait for a meeting or something else. Then people write it down. They may Slack colleagues saying, “I could go left or right and I decided to go right.” And they go on. We may have to reverse that decision later, but we found that the overhead of trying to find consensus first, or to get together with colleagues, is much greater. And that's it.

Do you use special tools for all this communication and record-keeping?

We have the most straightforward setup ever. We use Slack or Zoom to communicate. Notion to write things down. And we use Loom to record videos and share with each other. It’s a very simple app. You press a button and it records you and your screen or just your screen. It’s easily shared with anyone you want, and they can comment on it. We use that a lot, a lot, a lot.

Would you say Loom is your primary replacement for meetings?

No, it really is the mix of things. We have a policy that if you have a meeting, you have to have an agenda. And what happens nowadays is many people say, \"Well, let's do it async.\" Then they all go into the agenda, and they just comment, or they just write, line by line, to each point, depending on whatever needs to be discussed.

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve encountered?

The biggest challenge is overcoming time zones. If you are working during the day, even if everybody's working asynchronously very happily, it's nicer to work in an organization where there's activity, even if it's just on Slack. So if you are far away from your teammates in terms of time zone, you'll feel like there’s nobody to chat with or hang out with. So you have to be super intentional about how you structure your teams across time zones.

After being remote or hybrid during the worst of the pandemic, a lot of big companies are pushing workers to come back to the office. They say remote work makes it harder to communicate, to build culture, to manage and mentor workers. Do you disagree?

I think they're all solvable issues, but I don't think that they're easy to solve for big organizations that have thousands of managers that have only been managing through being in the office and in meetings. The way that they operate is by being in an office. And so, to change that is really hard.

OK. It’s hard for them to change. But let’s talk about the specific challenges people face. We’ve addressed communication and collaboration. What about culture?

The interesting thing is that in the office, you sort of get culture for free. It just develops when you put a bunch of people together. In a remote setting, you don't get anything for free. You have to be very intentional about your values and the kind of culture you want. So, in performance reviews, we align with our cultural values. Kindness is the first one. So, if you're not kind, you have no place in this organization. And that gives us a shared foundation of values. But you also want to make the barrier threshold to talking to people as low as possible. A lot of people use Slack huddles to drop into conversations with colleagues. When you start at the company, we make sure you actually end up speaking with a lot of different people that are not working in your same team, that are not in your same department. You start to form some loose connections throughout the organization. But beyond that, we create opportunities to match up with random people. It’s not that hard. If you give people a little bit of a push, they start to self-organize. Almost every day we see people, somewhere in the world, meeting up with a group of colleagues, either because they're traveling or they just live close enough or whatever else. We encourage it. We provide budgets for it.

What about mentorship? A lot of younger employees learn things by watching their more senior colleagues work.

All the tools exist to make that very easy. You can look at what somebody else is doing. We also make sure that you have a good manager who can mentor you. We give you an onboarding buddy. There's nothing magical about being together physically in person. You could do it all online.

What are the top do’s and don’ts for fellow founders who may be thinking about being fully remote?

Work as transparently as possible. Over-communicate, which links up with being transparent. And give people significant freedom and ownership. You can't micromanage people remotely. Don't measure performance by availability or attendance or activity. It should be measured by output, and you should be really, really clear about that. And don't expect to work in the same way that you do in the office because it is different. And maybe you don't like it. Some people will always prefer to work from an office. But eventually, most people will work for companies that work remotely, fully or partially, because it's solved so many obvious problems that are not solved well in another way. The primary ones are talent, housing, and the availability of great jobs. It is an immediate solution to those problems.

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Q&A

Job van der Voort: The future of work is remote

The CEO of Remote makes the case for bidding the office goodbye.

For somebody who does not manage people, they may have, at most, two meetings a week.”Job van der Voort, co-founder & CEO, Remote

At a time when companies like Amazon, Apple, Goldman Sachs, and many others are asking employees to return to the office, van der Voort has emerged as one of most vocal evangelists for remote work. In a recent broad-ranging conversation, he made the case for why remote work is the future and discussed how to succeed at it.

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Job van der Voort: The future of work is remote

The CEO of Remote makes the case for bidding the office goodbye.

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