Remote work isn't going anywhere

Welcome to 📈🧠 Scale Smarter.

Forwarded this email? Sign up here.

🔗 Jake’s Picks

Must-Read Resources for Founders

🚀 Scaling Startups

• From startup to market leader: Scaling strategies from the UAE’s fast-growing E-hail ride sector (Entrepreneur)

🧠 Founder Self-Development & Mental Health

• Don’t underestimate the power of self-reflection (HBR)

📈 Productivity Hacks

• This 60-second productivity hack is the best way to avoid procrastination (New York Post)

🛠 Tools for Scaling

• Wise launches invoicing tool for SMEs  (Finextra)

💡 Hiring Insights

• AI job application rise ‘risks hiring incapable staff’ (BBC)

👀 ICYMI

• Hiring within or buying your next leader (Scale Smarter Newsletter)

🎨 The art form that is high performing remote teams

Hiring great people is only one component of a list of things needed to build a remote all-star team.  Clear systems, strong communication, and a culture of accountability is all required to build the foundation for how your remote teams work.

Without the right foundation, remote work can quickly become messy, inefficient, and isolating.

Many companies either create too much structure around their remote teams or too little. In either scenario, employees feel like management is misaligned with their work.

It’s about creating a clear understanding for remote teams of when they need to be close to the core of your company and when they can be a bit more distant.  And also understanding that this balance will have to stay flexible for remote work to successfully happen within the business.

Focus on outcomes, not hours

Tracking hours of remote employees only tells you a superficial story.

To better understand how your employees are doing, and also to keep them on track, give your employees clear OKRs, which can then be tracked and checked-in on regularly.

Async status updates are also helpful.  Within these updates have teams provide: accomplishments, current projects being worked on, and where they are blocked.

And instead of waiting for updates, create deadline-drive workflows where teams and employees can manage their schedules themselves, focusing on just ensuring they make the deadline.

‘Chaos-less’ communication

When communication is standardized across all teams, it makes life easier for everyone, especially if they aren’t working together in person.

Teams should create single sources of truth documents, using tools like Notion, Google Docs, or Confluence, so that key processes and decisions are easy to find.

You can also define expectations around response time within these channels.  Perhaps they don’t need to be strictly adhered to but rather, this gives people an expectation from when they can hear back from someone.

Gitlab’s culture of transparency

Famous for being one of the largest fully remote companies in the world, Gitlab lists everything they do to maintain their remote culture online with their publicly available handbook.

From things like “E-group” offsites to promoting a culture of self-learning and providing all the resources necessary to make these things happen.  Having all employees on the same page digitally on all aspects of the company has helped Gitlab continue to grow and scale without ever needing a physical footprint.

💻 Becoming a remote leader

When you lead teams that you can’t be physically present with, your actions may not always necessarily speak louder than your words.  A heightened level of empathy is needed with your employees in order to understand how to best connect with them.

As your employees are dispersed across cities, countries, and even timezones, being a “present leader” takes on a whole new meaning.

The art of creative communication

You don’t have the time to schedule a meeting every time you need to explain something to teams and so get used to text based or video/voice based notes that can be shared quickly with employees.

Loom for key messages instead of long-winded emails.

Slack or comment sections in tools like Notion to provide clear and contextual feedback.

And write “decision docs” which clearly outline the problem, the options considered, and the final decision why.

Guardrails that build trust

No one likes a micromanager and it really doesn’t work stylistically with remote teams anyway.  Transparency and reduced oversight is what will enable your employees to do their best work when you aren’t around.

Create public workflows in tools like Notion, Asana, or Figma so that teams are well aware of the work going on, especially for anything that you might deem a priority.

And then establish structured feedback loops at a cadence that makes sense based on the project with the goal being for these meetings to be outcome based to better understand how work is progressing.

Hire by trial

At Automattic (Wordpress and Tumblr) employees complete a paid trial project before they are hired to prove that they are self sufficient.

Automattic looks for new hires who demonstrate a true self-starting mentality paired with clear communication that can be shared async with their teammates and management.  Given all employees work this way, Automattic is able to gauge how well someone may perform within the company through these trial projects.

The company functions heavily on sharing through Wordpress blogs and Slack meaning effective communication within the hiring process is one of the biggest factors the company looks for.

Without the structure of a physical office, companies that succeed with a remote-first model are the ones who create their own structure digitally.  This goes for being the leader in this environment as well.

Block time, limit notifications during certain parts of the day, and establish clear shut down and log-in times with your teams.  Given the state of technology these days, when you manage remote teams, you’re not just managing people, you’re managing yours and your company’s energy and focus.

🎬 TLDR — Your Actions For The Week:

• Scale Your Team → Consolidate work into specific tools for a single source of truth

• Scale Yourself → Build a hiring process that tests candidates on real work to expedite seeing candidate skill sets

Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help:

💼 Hiring? I built an expert bench of recruiters from companies like Uber, Amazon & Spotify to run the full recruiting process for you. We’re on-demand, can flex up & down, and there are zero commissions or hidden fees—Learn more here.