Five Lessons From The Mistakes Of A Remote-Work Early Adopter

Blogosphere

- Gilles Bertaux

While the pandemic didn’t cause the shift to remote work, it certainly accelerated it. It also greatly expanded the number of roles being performed from out of the office. But working from home isn’t a new phenomenon, and as such, there’s a lot to be gleaned from those of us who’ve been doing this a while, because we’ve already made – and learned from – all of the mistakes.

When I founded my company back in 2016, I had no specific plan to hire remotely. Like most startups, I got an office in a nice neighborhood of a major city (Paris, in my case) thinking it would help in recruitment efforts. For some roles it was enough. But for engineers, the competition was too intense. We simply didn’t have the budget to hire candidates with the level of seniority we were looking for, and as a startup, we had zero cachet to leverage. We had to look elsewhere to find the talent we needed at a price we could afford. Eventually we made our first remote hire, a digital nomad who was residing in Chile.

We learned the first lesson pretty quickly:

Resistance to time zones is futile

Our first instinct was to make our engineer in Chile adapt his schedule to French working hours. A six hour difference may not sound that bad, but starting your day at 3am sure does. He was a good sport and tried to make it work, but after about 2 months, we gave up and, instead, embraced asynchronous communications.