CHRO Nadia Vatalidis on why and how to take a remote-first approach to hybrid work

Nadia Vatalidis, people director at tech company Remote, says the way most organisations are working now is not remote first, it’s remote forced. Having worked in HR at some of the leading remote-only companies, including the world’s largest all-remote company GitLab, she’s the first to confess she doesn’t like the hybrid model. But, if you are determined to go down the hybrid route, she has some great advice in this video.

Her top advice is that you must take a remote-first approach, regardless of how you are structuring your hybrid model. And, she believes, you can get there relatively quickly. The key is asynchronous work – to put it simply, work that doesn’t happen at the same time and place for everyone.

About Nadia Vatalidis

Nadia Vatalidis is the director of people at Remote, where she works on all things people and continues to enable Remote to be a great place to work. She is exceptionally passionate about the onboarding journey in a remote-first environment and creating a self-enabled culture to ensure everyone is set up for success. She came from GitLab, the world's largest remote-only company, where she led people operations and experience, people engineering and International expansion, helping to scale GitLab from 75 to 1,300 employees.

Transcript

The difference between remote forced and remote first work

I think I would define remote work as truly a remote first environment. Even so, if you look at what we currently going through, that's not remote first, right? That's remote forced. And I think a lot of people are seeing this experience as the only experience of remote work, which isn't true. And it's sad that we're experiencing it in this way. But for organisations like ours and from my experience, even if you are an organisation that haven't been remote first from the start, you can certainly get there relatively quickly.

Why asynchronous working matters

And by remote first, true remote work is about asynchronous work. It's about reducing meeting time, making sure every meeting that you will have has a very clear agenda and is recorded so people can contribute to it, whether they're attending the call or not. And it's also about not letting time zones interfere with your productivity. And a lot of people see that as a massive challenge and potentially a blocker, but it really isn't. You can create this amazing journey where you have follow the sun, where no one physically has to follow the sun and burn out, where you hire intentionally across the world. 

And for companies that has a customer journey, that's an amazing experience for them. Or for companies that have to onboard globally, that creates an amazing experience. So I certainly think it's all about truly working asynchronously, being remote first, even if you're hybrid and specifically making sure everyone is joining a call from their own laptop versus sitting in a massive boardroom and a few folks from home. 

What companies can go remote first?

I think there's a lot of companies and industries that can adopt a remote first environment. And I'll give very basic examples like small audit firms are very able and very, I nearly want to say very enabled to go remote first. A lot of the things that they require is on a computer and it's not necessarily like a filing cabinet, et cetera, that they need with also the digital world to scaling so quickly. think a lot of companies haven't considered that opportunity of going remote and potentially also then tapping into global talent and not always hiring in one location, but hiring amazing talent across various locations. 

And I could add any industry that adapts this model should think about self-enablement. That's a huge part of remote work and making sure people that you're on board in a company like this are completely self-enabled across any industry. you create self-enablement and a really sort of strong trust environment, I think it could work really well. There's obviously industries where it can't work like manufacturing is tricky. I'm sure there are small companies that are manufacturing things in their garage, but that's very different than a massive manufacturer trying to go to remote work.

They could potentially consider a hybrid model where their office or operational staff have the opportunity to work remotely and in different locations. not a huge fan of hybrids. I'll call that out. I'm completely biased towards remote work, but I think if you are going to go the hybrid route, because you have to, whatever the reason is, maybe you can't get out of a lease agreement or that was a building that was an investment and you prefer working from there. 

Making hybrid work by acting remote first

I think if you go the hybrid route, it's incredibly important to be still remote first and basically still work asynchronously. I've seen that work really well in hybrid. So to give you an example, that also means that every, you act like everyone is remote, right? Regardless of where they're located, you make sure that conversations are still happening in public spaces. For example, if you have a Slack application or something similar where you can, where you're handling all your communication that a lot of that communication still happens in public channels or public spaces versus indirect messages or in the boardroom. 

And so I find that going this remote first route also then means that you document every meeting regardless of who's in the office and who's unable to attend. And those become really healthy habits to enable a hybrid model. But you also make sure that everyone's enabled to attend those calls regardless of where they're located, it's hybrid and whether they're in the office or not. 

How leadership behaviour shapes remote culture

But I think that the key thing here is the leadership. If you are going to have all your leaders to be office located and not co-located or remote located, you'll sit with this genuine concern where people constantly wants to be in front of those leaders. So I think this is something that you'll have to do across the entire organisation and make sure even leaders are working remotely and embracing this remote first model, hybrid setting. So I think that can be quite intentional and can work well. I would move away from a typical hybrid where organisations just continue as norm and let the remote folks just work on their own. I think that can create a nearly against inclusivity and potentially also harm relationships and engagement overall.

Avoiding proximity bias in distributed teams

You've got to train your leaders to watch out for those biases based on out of sight, out of sight, out of mind. Cause that's not true. You can have an incredibly productive team members sitting out in Japan and you could have an office in the Netherlands. And now just because people are working with you in the office, it's very easy to recognize them. But I think that's where the organisation needs to be super intentional about the way they train and develop their leadership team and recognizing when those things happen and continue. I mean, I want to say continuously coach away from that. If you're recognizing someone that deserves it in the office, that's also fair. And you will have high performers that want to continue working in an office in some instances. But I think, yeah, this comes to me, this comes down to, making sure that everyone is equal, that you're treating everyone nearly that they're on the same, in the same environment, even if they're not. And again, that means basically acting like everyone's remote, even if they're at office. 

Rethinking pay and fairness in global remote organisations

Yeah, when it comes to global pay, you can't punish someone for wanting to work remotely. And so I don't think I'm for producing someone's salary if you're going to allow them to work from home. Yes, they'll certainly have loads of additional benefits like potentially commute, the cost of commute, if they travel with a car, there's fuel costs.

And it's also insurance, like your personal insurance can be reduced significantly if you're traveling quite a bit on the road and all of a sudden don't do that. So there's awesome benefits, but that's what it is. It should be a benefit. shouldn't be punishing an employee to then earn this. I think what organisations should do is looking into sort of how do they create a global fair pay model? That's much harder. If they are an organisation that all of a sudden have employees in different locations.

I'm quite for the idea of having geo models versus very like segmented locality models that city specific. think that can create an unfair pay scenario over time where you have a leader in one country and potentially an individual contributor in another country and their pay is vastly different. The leader could potentially be way lower depending on their cost of living. And so I think it's, I think using geo locations combined with cost of living as a factor

When you make compensation decisions, super important. I think it's still something all organisations are trying to do well, but I would never encourage an organisation to reduce comp based on remote work. I don't think that's fair. And I also think that's going to become a weird competitive approach where the employee might always then strive to go back to the office because they feel that they're unfairly paid. So I won't encourage that are still working on our compensation philosophy. So we're actually looking into those things right now. We have a minimum pay globally. And that is to ensure that in countries where it's exceptionally low income markets, quick example could be a country like Colombia or Romania or India or the Philippines is to not let cost of living influence what you should pay that person so much that they are significantly under the rest of that team. So we have a minimum pay across the world where we want to bring some wealth to those very low income markets and create nearly a minimum fair pay across the world. And that's created a great way to hire amazing talent. 

Practical steps to support remote first work

The first thing I think an HR professional needs to think about to support an organisation that wants to go remote first is are we documenting things today and where are we going to document it in future? So do we have a good application to document processes where we can work asynchronously in? If that's not set up.

I would set that up right away. I would also reduce. So if you have multiple communication or chat systems, I would always aim to reduce that down to one and only use one space for social communication and daily back and forth chat. A lot of organisations that are very traditional might have some technical dates and now that they're remote, they might have added additional applications, reduce that down to one and only use that. 

And I think as a third aspect I would really make sure employees are very well supported in terms of economics. You have to make sure your employees are set up with the right tools. They cannot be using a sort of kitchen table as a desk. They need the right economics to work in. So setting them up with a good height adjustable desk or just a good desk or providing a stipend towards that or an expense as well as an economic check.

And the necessary hardware that they would have in an office environment. For example, I hope they have company laptops as they're already working from home, if they're going remote first company laptop, good second screen. And this makes such a big difference in a remote environment and all the necessary sort of tools and quirks that comes with that. So the benefits to the employer and to the business is, is amazing. You get to work with talent from across the world. You get to hire people that are incredible and not in one location. If you weren't remote before, you would have had one sort of demographic that you could choose from. So this really expands fresh eyes on the business. It expands fresh talent. And it also brings opportunities to people that are absolutely incredible that companies should do and should consider.