CRM Giant Salesforce has announced that it is going to make parts of its business functions and certain roles fully remote, with the option of a hybrid model as well.
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Salesforce is a billion-dollar company and has scale advantages in its processes and culture — where the business is in acceptable inertia at all times. For a company of its size and scale, it is definitely setting a precedent.
In addition to Salesforce, many Indian companies such as Infosys, Dell and Tech Mahindra have also announced that 25-33 percent of their teams are planning to go fully remote. Startups such as SpringWorks, Wingify and Haptik have already gone remote during the pandemic.
Sahil Lavingia is the founder of Gumroad, a startup that allows creators to earn money by helping them monetise their work (with ‘only 25 employees’ it clocks about $1 million in ARR with 85 percent Y-oY growth). He has written about his company’s fully remote operations and here is what comes through:
- Employees mostly work as ICs (Individual Contributors), and cater to different aspects of the product, mostly based on core strengths. They are all contract workers being paid by the hour, with the idea that they can work at their own pace and focus on their individual goals and ventures parallelly.
- Lavingia admits to a few things: Gumroad does not provide healthcare or any infrastructural support (laptop, phones or internet) to its employees, or even competitive pay at par with FAANG companies. And it would be wrong to compare the two as well, given the different scales and capacities they operate at.
- With a lot of such nuances, another element stands out rather sharply: employees of Gumroad are self-reporting, know exactly how and what to work on and are highly specialised. They’re the dream team, the A-players that startup fairytales are made of.
Which leaves us with one takeaway: not every organisation in the world has the ability to hire or retain A-players the way Gumroad has. Sometimes the business itself doesn’t support a germinating environment for the same, and this is again evident with Gumroad.
In his blog, Lavingia says that Gumroad isn’t on an aggressive product roadmap and doesn’t offer long career trajectories to its employees. It’s a nimble team working on a B2C product that grows exponentially by nailing a few things, such as managing supply, demand and the ease of transactions in such marketplaces.
Gumroad, therefore, is an exception and a business run completely on the internet. In the real world, to go ‘fully remote’, a lot of ‘terms and conditions’ apply, especially in the case of various geographies, where standards of living, economic / business constraints and capital runway / managing capabilities largely vary across the spread of business lines.
To sum up, here are the obvious caveats for the remote-first model to be successful:
- For remote-first to work, the way we work must change
- It works where there are high levels of trust and radical ownership
- It only works for a few industries and even fewer business types
For remote-first to work, the way we work must change
In India, the remote-first model (at scale) is fairly new. It requires bold decisions from the management and a buy-in from the rest of the team. Everyone in the company has to embrace a new work model and also require training. Remote-first is never an overnight decision and it has implications on how companies will hire, onboard new employees and also account for innovation and mental health of their distributed teams. While this sounds simple, adopting a tech-first approach from hiring-to-culture building is no mean feat.
Augustus D’Souza, who founded Clergo, a startup that helps remote teams replace most meetings and ad-hoc discussions with contextual threads, has observed: “In the all-remote model, there has been a lack of context in conversations and no workflow to turn conversations into actions. And Slack & team chat create endless conversations with lots of back and forth and meetings that have been the bane of recent times.”
He believes that while multiple integration tools exist, what is missing is a seamless workflow and none of the pre-pandemic products fit the bill.
The pandemic caused some noticeable disruption in the world of micro-SaaS, or indie-makers from the realm of Product Hunt who managed to build some interesting tools to help ease remote work life:
- Remote.com calls itself the local HR team on every continent, especially since the pandemic opened doors (and minds) to enable hiring across the globe, with many prominent startups opting to go fully remote. Another alternative is remoteOK, which is a great hiring tool used by some of the world’s leading companies. By extension, even insurance is being covered for remote workers, via SafetyWing.
- Do you think scaling up culture across your remote team might be a task? There’s kona, and standuply for digital scrum management, available on Slack, that help solve the culture problem.
It works where there are high levels of trust and ownership
“The two most important themes of remote work are: communication and ownership,” said Kartik Mandaville, Founder of Springworks, an HR-tech company that has gone fully remote. Communication can be asynchronous but it has to ensure that there is continuity in tasks. Example: after a Developer has completed her task, he/she notifies a team member to peer review and there is a feedback loop accounted for. Currently, that does not come to people intuitively.
The task ends when a person has completed it and not when it has been notified to the next rung. Employees working in larger teams find it tougher to find continuity and feedback against individual contributors who are only responsible for their own tasks. Even managers have to change the way they communicate and ensure continuity of tasks for the entire team.
Another hidden aspect of ownership and transparency is managing company hardware and notifying the team on time. Imagine this: if a laptop gets damaged and the employee is working from a small village in Kerala, repairing or shipping another device takes at least 3-4 days and there is loss of productivity, which would not have happened in an office setting.
Of course, all of this comes with a level of trust that the Management has in their employees to get work done without supervision.
It only works for a few industries and even fewer business types.
We cannot forget that businesses are customer-first and not employee-first. If your client wants to meet you in an office, you then have to meet them in an office (even if that is a co-working space). Also, sensitive roles such as Finance cannot be fully remote.
Another aspect to consider is company type, stage, funding (for a startup), number of employees and the kind of customers they serve. It is highly unlikely that a hospitality business will go fully remote or for that matter even a hospital. There are segments of each business that can be internet-first (example: cloud kitchens or telemedicine in the aforementioned cases), but are they reason enough for the entire organisation to go fully remote? I think not (yet).
Consider the case of blue collar staff: janitors, labourers and office boys. Their livelihood depends directly on the physical workspace, and if everyone chooses to go remote, it will impact a significant portion of the unionised workforce. In some cases, this also affects the lifestyles of entry-level roles earning entry-level salaries in startups.
Now that remote is pushing them back to their hometowns, some are finding it hard to acclimatise given the low internet speeds, lack of social environment and fatigue from working in isolation. Some corporate cultures haven’t translated well for such people either, leading to poor and highly biased performance reviews and favouritist games played by managers.
This is only the beginning and we are yet to see the true outcomes of a remote-first world once some of these companies have gone fully remote for a year or two. However, we are already hearing murmurs from credible sources that many companies are already rethinking this decision and might zero in on a more likely hybrid or remote-OK model. Only time will tell. You heard it here first, though.
This is the second and concluding section of a two-part series on ‘The varied shades of remote work’ by Nisha Ramchandani, Writer, Future of Work and Outreach, Axilor Ventures, and Varun Choraria, Product Marketer, Vymo Inc.
