Being completely remote at GitLab, we discovered that there weren’t any good tools or services to find talent worldwide, hire these people, and manage their full employment life cycle. As we believed in the rise of companies becoming more and more remote, we wanted to come up with a solution for this. So we did.
First of all, starting. That’s the first step. After that we were lucky to go through several funding rounds to be able to roll out to a lot of new markets, and now basically cover the globe. Also practising what we preach: we have been remote since the start and now have over 1,300 employees globally. And last year we added Remote Talent, a marketplace for matching global talent and companies looking for them.
What companies are realizing is that talent truly is everywhere and that they can engage it meaningfully. Prior to the pandemic, there were less obvious resources for how to hire and pay globally in a compliant and effective way. That’s changed — businesses can now do this process themselves, which can be costly in terms of time and money, or they can work with global HR platforms like Remote to handle hiring and payroll, which gives more time for decision makers and HR teams to focus on driving their business forward.
Professionals are also realizing that they too can benefit from this global-first climate and can work for great companies without having to move. What will give them the confidence to engage with international companies is the knowledge that they are being hired and paid compliantly and will face no administrative issues in their careers.
Innovation is a key part of fostering community and belonging in a remote work setting. It’s really also about intention. You need to consciously create opportunities for team bonding and social interaction. This could be done via virtual 1-to-1s, between teams, and across the organization, where the point is to learn more about each other and connect socially, rather than just about work.
Companies could also use tools like Slack to create social channels, to discuss anything from music to sports. It’s also important to establish clear team expectations and goals and ensure that everyone is aligned and feels included, regardless of their background or identity. To do this, the culture of communication in your company needs to be open, transparent, and accessible.
Growing a business really, really fast means that you have to take a lot of risks. And if you take a lot of risks, it means that you often get it wrong. Then when you do, you just need to keep moving forward. One example was our pricing plan. It started differently from what we have now, and while we did make a lot of money with it, it was really hard to scale, so we had to pivot to a new plan. I can’t think of any huge mistake we made, but it’s all about looking ahead and moving forwards.
The time difference can sometimes be a challenge in setting meetings if they are needed, especially as companies increasingly work with globally distributed teams, meaning they might happen at unusual times. The easiest way around this is to cut out the noise and reduce the amount of meetings you hold because you’ll find that they’re mostly not necessary anyway. Another way is to use a standard timezone across the organization to set meetings — at Remote we use UTC.
Separately, another common criticism of remote work comes from managers who say they don’t have a clue what their team is doing. But that isn’t valid criticism; it’s bad management.
Discussions around efficiency in remote settings are widespread. On a pragmatic level, how do you keep your teams productive? What tools or operational frameworks do you find most effective?
It has to do with the right mindset. If you are running an inefficient business in an office, for example by having tons of meetings, you will remain inefficient when becoming remote — it’s very likely you’ll also have a lot of Zoom meetings. For a start, it’s good to broaden the definition and expectation of what flexible and remote work means.
We don’t track working hours; we look at results and outcomes. These are great indicators if someone is performing or not. Also, our communication is asynchronous yet open and transparent. We use public Slack channels so everyone can see what is going on and easily search for information should they need to.
Remote’s mission from day one is to give every person the opportunity to do meaningful work for a good salary, regardless of where they were born or live. It’s really fulfilling to see our mission come to life. We’ve built such a diverse company, where many of our colleagues live in areas where tech careers are rare, and on top of that, being able to propel their careers while working remotely and flexibly. For me personally, running a company fully remotely gives me the ability to spend a lot of time with my family and I want the same for the people working with me as well.
I love getting together with other founders. You can learn a lot from other people and it’s very fun to be around people that are excited and ambitious. I think that’s one of the coolest things. I love to hear what people are working on in general, that’s always really interesting, like what kind of businesses are growing nowadays. The world is constantly changing and I love to see how other people decide to do business within that dynamic.
Remote wants to be there for companies of all stages, and I believe that you can build a business much better if you start being an international company from day one. But it’s really bureaucratic and really complicated to do so and that’s why Remote exists. I really hope that we can help all of these start-ups and scaleups truly scale internationally, and I believe we can. So the partnership is interesting for Techleap for Scaleups, its community of scaleups, and for Remote.
Techleap is a non-profit organisation, funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, helping to quantify and accelerate the tech-ecosystem of the Netherlands. Constantijn van Oranje is Special Envoy of Techleap.
