Remotely working has become much more popular lately, with more and more people taking advantage of it. Regarding a survey from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, little over one-third of private-sector companies increased options for working remotely during the epidemic, and over 60% plan to maintain those policies (BLS).
Liam Martin, co-organizer of the annual Running Remote conference and writer of Running Remote: Master the Lessons from the World’s Most Successful Remote-Work Pioneers (Harper Collins, 2022), calls the change the “biggest workplace transition since the Industrial Revolution.”
He claimed that although the Industrial Revolution took eight years, the transition to remote labor just took a month. “Everything you could think of underwent a full change,” the author said.
Traditional management concepts necessitate various skill sets than managing virtual teams. A rising number of businesses are introducing a new position to their management: Chief Remote Officer or Head of Remote, to enhance the remote-working experience.
Early adopters of the term included the open-source DevOps platform GitLab, which in 2019 appointed Darren Murph as its first head of remote. Since its establishment in 2011, the entire staff of the San Francisco-based business has operated remotely.
In other to ensure hybrid and remote work equity, guide teams through the changing workplace norms, enlist new tools as necessary, and maintain an overall positive work culture, designated facilitators or managers of remote have become vital, according to Murph. Only with the deliberate effort from corporate executives can distributed work unlock talent and productivity.
Who Requires a Chief Remote Officer Anyway?
According to Martin, a Chief Remote Officer should be employed by businesses with over 100 workers. Martin said, “There’s a sociological idea called Dunbar’s number.” He explained the maximum size of a company in which everyone knows every other person is between 100 and 250 individuals. “Beyond that, you essentially become a number, and employers don’t want employees to feel like a number.”
Chase Warrington was appointed head of remote at Doist, which manages the productivity software Todoist, in September 2021. Located in Palo Alto, California, the business employs roughly 100 people.
The way we conduct business and the items we offer are both fundamental components of who we are as a company, according to Warrington. We want to be one of the most outstanding remote teams out there, so even though we’ve been a remote-first firm for nearly 15 years, we felt we needed to step it up and ensure we’re continuing to provide a quality remote-first experience to our workers.
Tech firms like Doist and GitLab have taken the initiative in establishing the job. Because the tech sector employs many skilled employees and is more likely to embrace change, there has been a significant push toward remote employment, according to Murph, who also noted that the job is now beginning to extend to other industries. “I expect this to grow outside tech as more leaders focus on how people operate than where people are. I’ve already seen hospitals, like Cleveland Clinic, and industrial firms, like Cimpress [a customization and publishing company based in Ireland], hire remote leaders.”
According to Murph, creating this role signals that a company is consciously fostering a remote work culture and substantially redesigning its workflow.
It sends a clear message to job seekers that an employer will support remote workers in addition to allowing them to work from home.
What Qualifications Are Required?
A head of remote will initially set the tone for the behavioral and cultural changes necessary to accept new methods of working, according to Murph. He continued this position as a blend of those and is not solely focused on human resources, operations, or communications. “If it’s to be successful in stewarding a re-architecting of corporate values, culture, and workflow to line with new workplace expectations, it also must be a senior function with executive backing.”
Warrington claimed that he divides his time between employer branding, highlighting what it means to be a remote-first team, and the remote infrastructure.
It’s “moving past the knee-jerk reaction that happened during the epidemic for a lot of teams,” he said. His team figured this out for the short term and has a remote infrastructure. Now they’re sorting out the kinks and optimizing for what their normal will be.
The first of three objectives that chief remote officers should focus on is creating effective internal communication channels. Martin advises using a pyramidal approach to understand how people communicate. He claimed employees preferred face-to-face communication over video, audio, instant chat, and e-mail. In order to interact with individuals, you should start with e-mail and work your way up if necessary. In-person meetings should take the least time because they are the most expensive.
Process documentation, which fosters an atmosphere that values openness and independence, comes next. GitLab, for instance, keeps a database of process documentation. When someone asks a question, they will receive an answer with a link to the solution.
Martin remarked, “They train people to be able to answer their questions. “The platform takes over as the manager, enabling you to move as an organization quite quickly.”
Martin concluded that the head of remote should create specific measures for people based on evaluating performance. This step allows managers to observe employee behavior personally no longer.
According to Martin, it doesn’t matter if you use Zoom or Slack for remote work. Chiefs of remote have to deploy at scale and train people. It’s genuinely a civilizational transformation. It’s about altering your management philosophy.
