During the health crisis, teleworking appeared to be the ideal mode of operation to deal with this exceptional situation. What was initially only a temporary solution has finally taken root in work habits: today, 78% of employees prefer to work from home. However, half of them had never experienced this way of working, indicates a report published by HubSpot in 2022.
While instituting a remote work policy has many benefits, it does mean rethinking collaboration and corporate culture. Gilles Bertaux, Co-founder and CEO of Livestorman engagement platform for managing meetings and webinars from A to Z, reveals the secrets of setting up this mode of operation.
A group of investment funds offers Zendesk for 10.2 billion dollars
Was working remotely obvious? What were the main steps in its implementation?
Not at first no. Livestorm was founded in 2016 and we started implementing full remote in 2018 with the arrival of Laurent Schaffner, our Head of back-end development, since he was working from Chile. We first opened up to remote tech professions because it was easy to hire without being limited to the city of Paris. We realized that there was fierce competition to hire in the French capital. In order to be able to recruit the best talent, regardless of where candidates live, we have become one of the first “remote-first” companies.
It also contributed to the international DNA we have today. We also have an entity in Boston to help us focus on our presence in the United States. Today, all positions are offered in full telecommuting, with sometimes a preference for the CET time zone. We have more than 160 employees in 17 countries, and 70% of the teams work remotely.
After a few years, what is your feedback on the implementation of 100% telework?
We had to adapt, and we still continue to do so. We grew very quickly: from 30 to more than 160 people in the space of two years.
The first feedback is that despite the distance and all the optimizations of our daily communication, it is imperative to see each other regularly. Every quarter, we encourage our managers to create team micro-seminars over a few days in order to get together. To do this, each Stormie has a semi-annual budget to travel and meet other members of their team or another.
The second feedback is that asynchronous communication is as important as live communication. The “zoom fatigue” is real and it is important to create a framework on what must imperatively be a call. For the rest, we try as much as possible to work thanks to our collaboration tools and in particular our internal documentation.
Finally, it is common to fall into the trap of managerial over-control. This is why we make intensive and rigorous use of OKRs to determine the quantified objectives of each team each quarter. From then on, we no longer look at the way of working, but at the end result. It’s a manager’s way of forcing trust in their relationship.
Is telework a hindrance to the corporate culture or can it, on the contrary, improve it?
I don’t think that’s a hindrance, but an additional challenge, something even more important. I think a good remote business is one that has created an appropriate corporate culture around remote work.
To make sure everything runs smoothly for all your employees, you need to invest in tools that allow you to work asynchronously. Ensure that your communications are grouped together in the same space, available at all times and easily searchable.
You should also think about employees who work in different time zones. They may feel disengaged if they work in different time zones than their manager or other team members. It is therefore important to ensure that they are offered a virtual space to share information. Also, make sure you have strong leaders who understand the situation from a distance and avoid micro-management.
I also recommend keeping the chain of command small and light: good management means that your team has a lasting and healthy relationship with its manager. To do this, they need time to manage and work quickly on decisions. Hence the size. Telecommuting is synonymous with agility and working on smaller “nacelles” contributes to this.
We’ve redesigned the onboarding process so it’s the same for all employees, whether they start in person or remotely, and regardless of their time zone. We ensure the same follow-up for all employees with the monthly 1:1 and our meetings are, as much as possible, organized at times when everyone can connect.
It is always better to write to avoid distorted messages: document everything, keep track of your discoveries, keep track of your projects. The more you write, the fewer questions or communication issues you raise. Keep things neatly organized in a documentation space and escalate these writings whenever the topic arises. Keep a good balance between asynchronous and synchronous: we are often tempted to accumulate live meetings when a pre-recorded video, a collaborative document or a discussion thread would suffice.
Provide a full work from home facility to ensure they work in the best possible conditions. For example, at Livestorm, we provide all our employees with a MacBook and all the necessary accessories such as a mouse, a keyboard, a second screen, a laptop stand, headphones and some goodies in the colors of Livestorm. In addition to these accessories, a budget of €1000 is available for each employee to buy a new desk, an office chair or what they need to have an adequate installation to work well from home. For employees who wish to work from a coworking space, Livestorm also allocates a budget of €300 per month.
What are the best practices and rituals to put in place to maintain a distance link?
Working remotely will certainly take you away from that colleague from another team that you used to bump into at the coffee machine every morning. So working remotely can create silos between teams, especially those that don’t work together. Hence the importance of building a real culture around remote working before deciding to move to full remote working. That being said, you still need to make sure that you create space and time for employees to meet randomly, whether it’s for virtual coffee or virtual games.
It is indeed important to create rituals to break down silos: find times when your “pod” can meet the rest of the team or even people from other teams. Every team should have at least one team-wide ritual (e.g. weekly kick-off, virtual breakfasts) and one company-wide ritual (e.g. weekly meeting).
Also, each person at Livestorm has a budget per semester to meet other collaborators wherever they are. Many Stormies use it and it allows them to strengthen the bonds between collaborators.
We have also set up Donut to facilitate meetings and exchanges, and this is very much appreciated by Livestorm.
What role do technological tools play in promoting remote work?
As I said earlier, Donut is a very interesting tool for promoting meetings between employees, especially those who are not required to work together.
We also use other tools to simplify remote collaboration:
- Notion, for all that is asynchronous communication;
- Figma, as a collaborative design tool;
- Slack, as internal messaging;
- Café, which allows everyone to register when they want to go to the office, to see who will be present, but also to be sure that there are not too many of us;
- Miro, to draw up a map of employees via a collaborative organization chart or simply to outline processes or projects;
- Linear, for the management of engineering, IT and even marketing tickets.
Remote work requires the use of different tools to improve collaboration and not lose the link, but it can also have an impact on productivity if you are constantly disturbed by email or internal messaging notifications. I therefore advise turning off or deactivating notifications so that you can concentrate without being distracted.
After an hour, which is normally when you should take five minutes to take a break and clear your mind anyway, you can then turn them back on to check your messages and reply to your colleagues.
What are the advantages of a 100% teleworking policy over the long term?
We are a flexible company that allows us to offer our employees the freedom to adopt what they want: come as they please to the office in Paris or Boston if they are based in the US, work 100% from home, or benefit from a coworking space. This strategy has allowed us to hire the best talents, all over the world, and not be restricted to a single city or country.
Despite the fact that we grew from 30 to more than 160 people in two years, we did not have to change premises, we just opened one in the United States, in Boston, to be able to develop. Offices are flexible and people who want to work in the office sign up on the Café app. If too many people register, we provide them with a coworking space to complete. For the company, it’s very positive to be able to focus on recruiting on a much larger playing field instead of having to worry about the capacity of your office.
The financial aspect therefore comes into play, but if it is only a matter of working remotely without paying any fees, the financial gain will be offset by negative impacts on many other aspects.
Offering flexibility to employees only works if they are given all the keys to having a work environment as complete as that of the office, beyond the positive aspects of remote work itself in terms of personal organization.
This implies covering certain costs, such as those related to the internet connection or equipment, but also offering them the possibility of benefiting from a coworking space if they wish to have a work environment separate from their home.
It is also necessary to think of an organization in which the teams have the possibility of meeting physically on a regular basis, by having accessible premises, or by proposing a travel budget.
Finally, from a recruiter’s point of view, being ready to welcome this type of teleworker profile is also an advantage for expanding your horizons and accessing a larger pool of candidates.
And beyond these costs, it is also necessary to rethink the way of working and to propose new tools to facilitate communication and collaboration.
Without these elements, the company can make financial savings, but this will have direct repercussions on its organization and its teams. Not offering employees the best working conditions, whether in the office or remotely, will not allow them to fully develop professionally and move forward together and with the company.