Remote work best practices — a CFO’s perspective

Nine-ish months into the global Covid-19 pandemic, remote work culture has truly taken hold by the sheer necessity for many organizations. It’s been challenging for many to navigate, and now there are new at-scale remote work challenges to solve. The novelty wore off about six months ago; at this point, it’s just reality. In many ways, however, it has opened our collective perspective on how to work more effectively. We convened a virtual roundtable discussion with several CFOs from companies in the Storm Ventures portfolio to see how they’re meeting these challenges, specifically from a CFO point of view.

Making relocations permanent

Foremost on everyone’s mind is the issue of relocation. With no office requiring a commute, many employees are relocating to places where they want to be, whether it’s because of family, lower cost of living, or other personal reasons. In many cases, these relocations are temporary, but there are a lot of people winding up in new places that are now becoming home. As more and more businesses shut down their offices for good, the question naturally follows: How do you go from office culture to a distributed one while supporting your remote workers specifically with respect to location and compensation?

Location is still everything

Remote work is sexy now — and obviously the practical reality we all face. But for CFOs, there is a reality to making it work. The details can get complicated.

Very few companies early on have the infrastructure in place to support employees in each state, let alone around the world. If employees want to go where you’ve already established a presence, it’s relatively straightforward. Is there a satellite office in Denver? Seattle? If you’ve expanded to another locale previously, that should mean you’ve worked out all the necessary tax and compliance issues, which is a huge logistical hurdle already down. An employee moving somewhere you’ve never operated before means new tax and benefits questions to answer. Yes, there are service providers ready to take these details off of your hands — but it often comes at a substantial cost. The collective experience with New York, for instance, has been inconvenient and burdensome from a tax perspective. Obviously, many companies make it work there just fine, but clearly, there are substantial differences and details that need to be understood. It requires some real work to do it the right way.

Time zones were another hot button. While abandoning the daily commutes was easy to welcome, dealing with teams in disparate time zones is a new challenge for many. Is it reasonable to expect people to be working in the middle of the night because of a choice of location? Should others be expected to accommodate those choices? How flexible does the organization need to be: changing workflows and all the other ways to get work done? These are all challenging questions.

Adjusting compensation

The cost of living varies from city to city, so many take the point of view that there ought to be adjustments to compensation based on location. Others also have a reasonable opinion that the same work ought to be rewarded with the same compensation, and the location is a choice. Questions are easy, but answers are more challenging, especially as we’re forced to think about the answers at warp speed. Compensation policy is critical to communicate clearly, as this will factor heavily into employees’ decisions. It’s vital to be upfront about compensation adjustments and policies when someone expresses the desire to move, especially if they’re going somewhere with a lower cost of living — and it needs to be clear to everyone at the company. It would be a mistake to make exceptions and ad hoc decisions.

Over the long term, it’s possible that the software industry may need to revisit compensation adjustments in truly remote work culture. Market forces will always exist, and companies need to be competitive. For instance, an employee could accrue a unique set of skills and experience over time that make them highly sought-after. If there are only a dozen people in the world who can do what they do, it doesn’t matter where they live: you may have to pay them a certain rate just to make sure they don’t jump ship. You might also find that it’s advantageous to reward loyalty: someone who’s been with the company for a long time might see a smaller adjustment even after moving to a cheaper town. But then what do you do about hiring the same role in the same location for the same work?

Establishing your remote work culture

Shutting down your office should free up some money. Use it to help establish or reinforce company culture in the new world of remote work. In our experience at Storm, those companies with distributed teams generally invest almost as much money as they save in making the remote culture work. Give everyone a stipend to use improving their home office setup; it could be one lump sum or a smaller amount spread over a few months as new needs occur to them over time. Surprise treats can help morale; brainstorm a few fun things to send people. Before the pandemic, many companies got the entire team together once or twice a year at an industry conference, or sometimes sponsored “offsite” events in exotic locations, even with families. It makes sense that events like this will be important when we’re past the pandemic as well.

Problems and solutions

Some common patterns of remote work challenges have also emerged over the past six months. People who are fresh out of school and at the start of their career need more support as they enter the workforce; they’ve never done this before, much less entirely from home. In general, new hires need more help onboarding to a remote culture no matter their level of experience. We’ve discovered that more meetings in a wider variety of contexts can be very beneficial: schedule more frequent 1:1 check-ins during the first month or two, as well as some occasional informal meetings with the new hire’s team and other groups. These gatherings won’t fully replace the spontaneity of the office watercooler moment, but they go a surprisingly long way toward recapturing the spirit behind it.

Welcome to the new normal

Remote work is here to stay in the mainstream: while many of us will go back to offices, few of us will go back to work-life as it was before the pandemic. It feels as though things have changed and we’re not going back. No one misses the two-hour commute time. No one misses being away from their school-age kids all week for a questionable business trip the boss said was important. What’s important is execution; many have found working remotely is possible, and in plenty of cases even more effective.

The first few months of the pandemic have been strangely productive. Email and Slack volume have gone up as people log in earlier and leave later. It makes sense: if your office is in your house and you can’t leave, where else are you going to go? It’s also dangerous: we see a lot of burnout on the horizon as the home and workplace continue to blend unhealthily. Encourage your employees to take breaks, enforce strong boundaries between work time and home time, and actually use their PTO.

Good luck establishing your permanent remote work culture; please feel free to share with us any best practices you’ve found helpful. It’s here to stay, I think — and we all just need to get comfortable with the new normal.

This post is based on a roundtable discussion between CFOs from AtScale, GuideSpark, Logikcull, SalesLoft, Sendoso, SignalWire, TalkDesk, Tekion, and Workato, hosted by Ryan Floyd, co-founding MD at Storm Ventures, and Chris Seidensticker, partner at Attivo Partners.