Summary
Chris Dyer explains why remote work does not destroy company culture and can instead expose problems that were previously hidden in office-based environments. Drawing on his own experience leading a fully remote organisation, he argues that remote work forces leaders to redesign how work gets done, improving transparency, fairness and performance.
Dyer shows how remote work reveals weaknesses in processes, measurement and management, and why organisations with poor cultures struggle more when they go remote. He concludes that strong culture depends less on offices and perks and more on effective managers, healthy teams, clear communication and supportive ways of working.
7-minute watch
One of the biggest surprises when Chris Dyer took his company remote was discovering that an employee they thought was the best in their department was in reality their worst while the worst employee at that time – and someone they considered letting go – was actually their best employee.
“Can you imagine that sort of shock? You have it all totally wrong and it's because of the poor process, the poor way in which things were structured,” he says.
This is just one of the issues Dyer uncovered when he made the move to becoming a remote-only company in response to the financial crisis of 2009. In this video he talks about the challenges he faced when taking the company remote and why leaders should be aware of anyone saying that remote work kills company culture. And as author of The Power of Company Culture and Inc.com’s number one rated speaker on company culture for 2020 he knows what he’s talking about!
About Chris Dyer
Chris Dyer is the founder and CEO of PeopleG2, a background check and intelligence firm based in California, where he manages 30 full-time remote employees and 3,000 independent contractors. PeopleG2 is routinely ranked one of the best places to work and has been listed as one of Inc.’s 5000 Fastest Growing Companies. Having made the transition to remote during the recession in 2009, Chris is now a world-renowned expert on remote leadership and productive company culture. He is author of The Power of Company Culture and his latest book, Remote Work: Redesign Processes, Practices and Strategies to Engage a Remote Workforce , was published this year. He is the host of TalentTalk on OC Talk Radio and iHeartRadio and speaks at events around the world on company culture, remote workforces and employee engagement. He is also a regular contributor to Forbes, Inc., HR.com, the Society for Human Resources Management and many more business publications.
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Transcript
Why we went remote
So in 2009 we decided to go remote because of the financial crisis. The housing market had crashed, a big recession and we needed to save money. And so going remote was a way that we could save money and we didn't do it for all of the wonderful reasons that we discovered that remote work could bring us.
It was purely a financial decision in 2009. And that, along with me making the decision that I was going to focus on my people as my number one job as the CEO, not our P&L, not our products and services, not all the other things that I had been doing up to that point, that I was going to spend all my time: how do I help them work more efficiently? How do I get out of their way? How do I give them more empowerment and those things. So it was sort of a hand in hand process. For as well-known as we have become for remote work and for as much that we do in the remote workspace, I always find it quite funny that we only did it to save money to start with.
Why remote work forces you to redesign work
I think that one of the biggest challenges was we had to redesign how we were going to work. We knew we liked remote work so within two weeks of going remote every employee had called me and said, I absolutely love this. I don't ever want to go back in the office, can we keep this permanently?
We weren't sure at that time if this was going to be a temporary fix or this was going to be a permanent thing. And so we allknew right away that we love this, that we had deep time to think, we had this wonderful space to get our work done. Flexibility - we all could control our own thermostat, we weren't arguing over if it was too hot or too cold in the office. We all could take control of our workspaces in really unique ways. But we had to redesign how to work together. Suddenly if you're sending more emails, when you used to just walk out into the cubicle farm and just talk to people, now you had tosend 15 emails, that's a really inefficient process, it's a really negative part of it. So we had to find new ways to meet, new ways to communicate and new ways to move information around the company and make decisions.
What remote work reveals about performance
One of the biggest surprises was us discovering that one employee who we thought was our best in that department was actually our worst and our worst employee at that time in that same department who we thought we might need to get rid of was actually our best employee.
Can you imagine that sort of shock? You have this totally wrong and it's because the poor process, the poor way in which things were structured allowed this to happen. So to give everyone context who maybe hasn't read the book, we do verifications, we call and do employment verifications and education verifications or references, and in the old days we used to just put these files in a big box on a table and people would come and grab a handful and they would go and work on them. As it turns out the person we thought was our best employee was cherry picking, was going in there and taking all theeasiest ones out of the basket.
And because she was this really well-liked person who brought baked goods for everyone and everyone really liked her, no one ever complained that she took all the easiest work out of the basket. And we had another employee who was, because she really liked doing a good job, she really enjoyed the satisfaction of getting the really difficult ones done, she was taking the most difficult. But when you look at that on paper, you say this person's doing 20 verifications an hour, and this one's doing five an hour. On that basis alone you would say one is good and one is bad but we didn't have the clarity to understandwhat was really happening.
So when we went remote we started handing those out digitally but very democratically, right? They weren't given to anyone for any particular reason. They were randomly assigned. And all of a sudden that person went way down and the other person went way up and we went wow! The democratization of work, having better ways to measure people, was reallysomething that we needed to have to help us be more successful.
Why remote work exposes culture problems
Be aware of anyone saying that remote work is killing company culture because that is absolute crap. We've never had better culture and in fact if you look at organizations that are using remote work well their cultures are fantastic. I could certainly give you a lot of examples. So where we're seeing people struggle is their culture already was terrible, was already having a problem. Remote work will actually exacerbate that. So going remote makes culture a little bit more obvious. So if your culture before was ping pong tables and beer Friday and your boss holding you prisoner inside meetings all the time,which for a lot of people that's the reality, going remote undoes a lot of that. But if you don't replace it with something positive it can really hurt them.
So there's a lot of companies that went remote because they had to, they weren't planning on it, they didn't do anything to help their people and that suffered. And the other thing to remember is that for most people, how you feel about your team, how you would rate your team, the people that you work with on a day-to-day basis, is often a parallel to how you would rate your company. So very, very infrequently do we ever see anyone say, I give my team, I give my manager a 10 out of 10, but my company's a two. That just doesn't happen. If they're really happy with their boss and they're really happy withtheir team they're really happy with the company overall.
How leaders should build culture in remote teams
So if organizations think that their culture is any way suffering or having a hard time, they need to just go back and focus on the micro teams that people are in and help those teams be more successful, help them be more productive, help them with better communication strategies, often help them to set boundaries on how much they're working and then they'll seetheir culture reviews or all that go.
I will say one last thing. I have seen a lot of organizations intentionally saying all of these really inflammatory things about remote work, because they don't want to be remote and their employees do. So they went remote because they had to and then they said, okay, everyone it's time to come back and they went, hell no, we don't want to come back and so they were like, what are we going to do now? We have this giant office space and we all wanted to be back in the office. We as the senior leaders want to be back in the office, but our employees don't.
And so they begin this well remote's bad for culture, it's bad for this, it's bad for that and you can see, if you look at these articles, where there's been anything negative and you look at the people who they're getting quotes from, these are people who have been very vocal about not wanting remote work or wanting to come back to the office.
About the author
