The concept of a traditional office has been upended over the last two years and the tech industry has found ways to adjust — but your status as a remote worker doesn’t have to be temporary.
The Covid-19 pandemic forced companies across the world to transition to a virtual workforce and many professionals found that after some adjustment, their productivity and work-life balance thrived under a more flexible working situation. A 2020 study by Growmotely found that 97 percent of employees do not want to return to the office full time, with 61 percent preferring to stay remote long term.
Fortunately, all trends indicate that they’re in luck — 74 percent of professionals said they believe that remote work will remain the norm post-pandemic. With increasing numbers of multinational companies announcing their intention to stay hybrid, flexible working arrangements as a long-term standard appear to be the way the winds are blowing.
But transitioning to permanent remote work comes with challenges — and maintaining connection with coworkers who live miles apart often requires more than a little creativity. Built In Los Angeles sat down with six industry leaders to talk about the culture of their remote workforce and how they keep their teams engaged, motivated and connected while working from locations all over the country, or even the world.
Tell us a bit about your current remote workforce. What plans do you have to expand it?
There have been a lot of shifts in the workforce over the last couple of years, but FloQast has prioritized the skills of each employee over where they are physically located. Earlier this year we moved to an employee choice policy, where we allow employees to choose how they work, whether that be remote, in the office or hybrid — whatever best fits each individual’s needs and lifestyle.
From a recruiting perspective, remote flexibility has allowed us to hire top talent from across the U.S., which has helped us onboard some of the best and the brightest from the industry. This has also allowed us to have more adaptability and diversity in our workforce, as well as pay based on experience rather than location. We plan to almost double our headcount in the upcoming year, and with all this growth, we will continue to have remote roles open across almost all of our departments!
We allow employees to choose how they work, whether that be remote, in the office or hybrid — whatever best fits each individual’s needs and lifestyle.”
Describe your remote work culture. How do you help remote employees feel connected, engaged and supported?
I joined FloQast as a remote employee and have felt included and connected to the company since day one. Despite being remote, we have a very collaborative environment and are able to seamlessly stay connected, whether it be through Slack, all-company Zoom meetings or regularly scheduled virtual events. My personal favorites have been our “Flo-Lotto lunches”, where we get randomly selected to have a virtual lunch with colleagues across different departments, our “Flo-Chats” where we get company-wide updates such as promotions, new hire announcements and anniversaries, and our virtual socials, like a recent truffle cooking class that I took with my team.
Tell us a bit about your current remote workforce. What plans do you have to expand it?
As of today, we’ve got just south of 100 employees working remotely from over 27 different states across the U.S.! While we retain our headquarters and office here in Los Angeles, our current hiring strategy is completely agnostic to location and timezone.
In terms of expansion, our small-yet-mighty people and recruiting teams have remained very busy during 2021, as we nearly doubled our organizational headcount alongside committing to and building out our thriving remote-first and dispersed work environment. Equally core to our agile operational success is our information technology team, who continue to provide a best-in-class technology suite including the latest Apple equipment, home office accessories and task-management, and collaboration tools to keep us connected and working together seamlessly — no matter where we are today or where we might be in the future.
As we start off 2022, we’ll continue to grow across all areas of the organization with a particular focus on building out our existing engineering, product and growth teams. Anyone in these areas looking for a change in the new year — check out our open roles!
The well-being of our employees is our North Star.”
Describe your remote work culture. How do you help remote employees feel connected, engaged and supported?
At any given moment, we are considering multiple trajectories and narratives of engagement and connection. To inform these, we try to keep in touch with surveys and polls to ensure that our programs are aligned with the needs of our employees. Day to day, we stay connected via a very active and diverse Slack community — the #cats channel is the most active, if that tells you anything. Weekly, we have 30-minute company-wide meetings where we welcome our new hires, share updates, learn about each other’s work and celebrate milestones. On an ongoing basis, we’re hosting a buffet of engagement events and initiatives.
Just before we wrapped up 2021, we even pulled off a company-wide virtual white elephant gift exchange, where over 75 of our employees joined together across time zones to unwrap and steal each other’s gifts. We have a lot of fun!
More than just fun, we aim to provide a full offering of traditional health and welfare benefits, bolstered by both lifestyle and career-enhancing offerings. These include an EAP, unlimited PTO, lunch deliveries and professional development courses or certifications. The well-being of our employees is our North Star.
Tell us a bit about your current remote workforce. What plans do you have to expand it?
We’re hiring more than 100 new employees in 2022! We have openings in production, technology, streaming TV, social media, marketing, operations and more, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Minnesota, London and New Delhi. We welcome candidates to work in any of our offices, but you also have the opportunity to work from home.
With team members spread across the world, Trusted Media Brands is truly a global company that understands great talent can come from a wide variety of places. Fresh off our August 2021 acquisition of leading digital media company Jukin Media, Trusted Media Brands is approaching 2022 with plans for continued growth, and we’re looking forward to bringing dedicated professionals on board to help propel the company forward.
Establishing and fostering open lines of communication is key to building a community amongst a global workforce.”
Describe your remote work culture. How do you help remote employees feel connected, engaged and supported?
Our philosophy on remote work culture revolves around consistent and transparent communication — this is key to building a community within a global workforce.
Besides having technology solutions that allow employees to direct message, voice call or video-chat one another, we put out newsletters detailing company initiatives and maintain a robust company intranet site with resources and up-to-date news and information. We have employee-led committees — like our diversity and belonging committee — that allow employees to connect with one another and help tackle important company issues that are key to a healthy culture.
We offer a mentorship program and a speaker series called “Trusted TALKS,” which highlights speakers from different areas of the company. Finally, our leadership team, led by our CEO Bonnie Kintzer, holds regular virtual company town hall meetings to share company performance updates and allow employees to ask questions that the executive team will field during the discussion.
Tell us a bit about your current remote workforce. What plans do you have to expand it?
Sketchy had an amazing year! We are thrilled to announce that we hired 45 employees in 2021, bringing our total full-time headcount to 64, and we aren’t slowing down. We will continue to hire across all departments with a heavy focus on engineering, product and sales. We have employees located all over the United States from Hawaii to Massachusetts and we look forward to adding more states in the near future. As we embrace a remote workforce across different time zones, we will continue to provide the flexibility and tools needed to support our employees.
Because we’re a remote-first company, work-life balance is crucial.”
Describe your remote work culture. How do you help remote employees feel connected, engaged and supported?
All-Hands: Sketchy employees stay consistently informed on all areas of the business through bi-weekly all-hands meetings.
Communication and connectivity: As a remote-first company, we know that Zoom fatigue is real! Sketchy uses a range of communication tools for both work and relationship building.
Fun: Sketchy knows the key to success is balance, so we prioritize team-bonding, learning new skills and creating awesome memories, with events including trivia, company retreats, art classes and game shows.
Employee engagement: Sketchy conducts an annual employee engagement survey (EES) to identify our focus areas for the coming year, as well as quarterly pulses that track our progress.
Meetups: Sketchy provides exciting opportunities for the team to connect in real life throughout the year, like happy hours, team hangs and regional meet-ups. This year’s company-wide retreat was a huge success.
Recognition: Sketchy recognizes hard work and the embodiment of our culture in our #kudos channel, which reminds our employees that they’re our greatest asset.
Remote together: Because we’re a remote-first company, work-life balance is crucial. While employees are encouraged to be online during core hours, Sketchy offers flexible working hours based on each employee’s location.
Tell us a bit about your current remote workforce. What plans do you have to expand it?
Most of our workforce operates in a hybrid capacity depending on the nature of their role. Our hardware team works in the office more than not due to the nature of prototyping and testing equipment, but we offer them flexibility when engaged with tasks that may be done remotely. The same can be said of our software engineers — although most of their work can be done remotely, a portion of testing requires them to come into the office. We are focused on making sure that our team feels they have all the tools necessary to do the best work of their career and a big piece of that is the work environment.
Miso prides itself on keeping some physical presence and having opportunities to connect in person, as this preserves the culture of cross functional teams being familiar with each other. However, we also understand that individual comfort levels and preferences may allow some people to feel more productive and safe working remotely and are open to keeping that flexibility whenever possible.
As an organization, Miso is particularly focused on expanding our software and mechanical engineering teams in both infrastructure and design capacities.
We are focused on making sure that our team feels they have all the tools necessary to do the best work of their career.”
Describe your remote work culture. How do you help remote employees feel connected, engaged and supported?
Miso has a strong remote work culture that’s centered on keeping a personal connection between employees who may not otherwise have the opportunity to frequently interact in person. It starts with a company-wide weekly virtual meeting, where we encourage everyone to have their cameras on to increase engagement as each department gives a brief update on their progress for that week. We also have an employee recognition program integrated with our Slack channel to make sure that employees’ hard work never goes unnoticed, even when not physically in the building.
In terms of daily operations, each team also has a daily or weekly scrum to be able to stay updated on the tasks at hand, as well as any short term goals so that no one feels they are working alone or uninformed. Our company-wide communication style incorporates ad-hoc virtual meetings to resolve issues, as opposed to relying on emails or messaging alone to be able to have a deeper understanding of the cadence of priorities.
Tell us a bit about your current remote workforce. What plans do you have to expand it?
One of the brightest silver linings that resulted from the pandemic shutdowns was the opportunity for us to bring on talented professionals across the entire country, as opposed to only those located in specific demographic regions. Transitioning to a fully remote team has its challenges, but as a result, our culture of trust and accountability actually became stronger. Our team members are truly passionate about the work we do and proved that successful remote work is possible when you have the right people on board.
We are ramping up for tremendous growth over the next few years and are currently looking to add to our growth and development teams. We’re extremely excited about several senior hires we made in Q4 who will play a strategic role in finalizing these growth plans.
Employee feedback is essential to ensure that we continue to give our team the tools and support they need to be successful.”
Describe your remote work culture. How do you help remote employees feel connected, engaged and supported?
One of the ways we help our team feel connected is through virtual events. These events usually last between one or two hours and have included activities like cook offs, pumpkin carving contests and general hangouts. We also have coffee meets via Slack where anyone can jump into an open channel and spend some time just hanging out!
Another way we help keep our employees engaged is through targeted surveys. These surveys are either sent through an online tool for anonymous feedback or conducted via phone by our HR and operations teams. As a small growing company, employee feedback is essential to ensure that we continue to give our team the tools and support they need to be successful.
For recognition, we partner with Bonusly, a rewards platform where employees can publicly recognize each other’s individual and team successes while earning points that can be used towards cash and gift cards. This platform allows the entire company to see which projects certain teams are working on or have accomplished, which they otherwise wouldn’t be aware of. We keep a record of these to highlight them at the end of the year.
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