The best resources to help you adapt to full-time remote work

Over the past weeks, many companies shifted towards a remote model in the light of the global health crisis we are experiencing. This means rethinking how teams communicate and collaborate, processes are run, new practices get formed, and overall priorities.

If you're part of a tech startup, you're likely familiar with flexible schedule, the quick Hangouts/Zoom catch up and the occasional working from home days. Running a company fully remote is a different type of game – specifically considering how different business functions are structured, information shared, and the industry you are part of (not all businesses can run on a digital only infrastructure yet and logistic centres are still very much needed).

In addition to the remote model challenges, employees are now spending the majority of their time at home. This is great to avoid a stressful commute, spend more time with family, and cultivate hobbies – but, unless you live in a mansion, it can put your mental wellbeing under pressure. This coupled with today's uncertainty and the massive stream of news we're experiencing, can drastically impact the work life we're familiar with.

We're not new to remote work, and talked about this our blog in different occasions. We interviewed Andrew Gobran at Doist for our People Talks series and analysed pros and cons of remote vs distributed model.

Below we put together a list of resources we feel are valuable with the hope you can benefit from the insights of experts that are a step ahead with remote work.

Remote onboarding

Range invited Robert Walters Managing Consultant of People and Talent, Faye Tracey LifeLabs Learning Director of Recruiting, Leadership Trainer and Coach Megan Wheeler, and Webflow VP of People Heather Doshay to share practices and playbooks to help business create a great onboarding experience while operating away from HQ.
You can watch the webinar here →

Doist on building trust

Doist shared insights on how they built a culture of trust over the years while running their business fully remote. Transparency and autonomy are key ingredients part of their process. The article is a very well structured piece covering plenty of detail.
Read it here →

Stay sane, focused and productive while WFH

I didn’t know Benedikt Lehnert (Director of Design at Microsoft) until this week. He put together a list of best practices and tips to stay sane, focused and productive when working from home. This is a well rounded BS free write up covering many aspects that can help employees keep doing amazing work and collaborate effectively. I loved this piece and I’m sure you will enjoy it too.
Read here →

Dealing with difficult conversations remotely

Judy Rees talks about tricks and tips that have worked for distributed-working pioneers, and ways to apply them to your companies.
A great watch for your Sunday afternoon →

Front on keeping a great culture while remote

I love Front. And I love how Mathilde Collin (co-founder and CEO) is leading the company and promoting an amazing culture. She summarised in this article 25 things they implemented to keep their culture great while operating remotely. She is talking about how they communicate, their new structure for employee benefits, culture events and how to keep people inspired.
Check this out here →

Elad Gil on health and financial precautions for startups

Elad Gil is an entrepreneur and investor in many well known startups (AirBnb, Stripe, Coinbase, and more) and author of the popular book High Growth Handbook. It goes without saying that the startups ecosystem is close to his heart and he put together an insightful write up to help companies navigate the current landscape.
Definitely worth a read →

InVision on remote work for Design teams

This might be a bit specific, particularly relevant for product and design teams, but InVision is another great example of company that scale to ~1,000 people with a remote first approach. In this book they share valuable insights for product teams but also ideas that can be adopted by the entire organisation.
Check this out here →

Full guides

Plenty of guides are popping up right now on remote work. A safe bet would be to check out what companies doing this for many years have written about it. Here is a solid starting point:

• GitLab: learnings from the largest all-remote company on the planet.
  Download the guide here →
• Zapier: 180 pages with lessons from a company with over 200 remote workers.
  Download the guide here →
• Basecamp: we all know the opinionated Jason Fried and DHH. They wrote the book on remote work in 2013 and it's still super relevant today.
  Check it out here →
• Doist: best practices for starting, managing, and scaling a remote team from the world’s most successful distributed companies.
  Get the guide here →

Bonus

Julie Zhuo – former VP Design at Facebook – shared in her newsletter tips on working from home during lockdown. Julie is an inspiration as a design leader and thoughtful with her suggestions on how to interact with others, run remote video meetings, design a functional work environment at home, stay active and improve focus.
Check it out here →

Some of these resources were shared in our weekly newsletter a few days ago. If you enjoy our content and want to be the first to get it right in your inbox, subscribe below 👇

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