Must-read article for any startup with a remote culture (or thinking of building one)

I’m a big fan of a remote work culture. Ten years ago it was a challenge to pull off, now it’s becoming the new norm. Thanks to tools like Slack and Zoom, teams can now be distributed and still connect up, look at each other when they talk, and easily share and communicate in realtime. The result is less time spent sitting in traffic and more time getting real work done.

We started moving to a remove culture at Bold Metrics last year and the result has been increased productivity, a happier team, and my favorite, parents that get to spend more time with their kids while also being incredibly productive members of the team.

I recently read a really interesting interview with the CEO of Zapier who runs an 100% remote dev team. He shared some very interesting insights about building a remote culture and why some startups are still afraid of making the move:

I think there’s probably two pieces. One – most people are used to going to the office, that’s how they’ve done all the work before. That’s a pretty classic way to work. If you paint for a living, you can’t paint remotely; you have to be at the canvas, you have to be at a certain location. There’s no other option for this type of work. In tech, however, not all people realize that’s not necessary anymore. (Source – YouTeam.io)

If you’ve been thinking of going remote I encourage you to talk to your team. Learn about their commute, understand the sacrifices they have to make to come to the office every day. Also remember, you don’t have to instantly go completely remote, we started with “work from home Wednesday” and grew it from there. Now I can tell you, I don’t think I could ever run a company that required people to come to the office daily, I know too much about the benefits of letting employees avoid the commute and focus on what matters.

You can read the full interview with Bryan Helmig, the CTO of Zapier on YouTeam.io here.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton