Three different ways to do remote work

The pandemic has triggered seismic shifts in how we work, causing many companies to transition from an office-centric culture to more flexible ways of working. This shift is largely still in the experimental phase, as businesses try to conceive of and test effective post-pandemic working models for their operations and staff.

Of course, no one knows what the ‘right’ answer is. What works for one company may not work for another; business needs will vary depending on sector, size and structure. Many organisations, however, are doing their best to make working more flexible – as well as less burnout-prone, thanks to recent conversations about mental health, work-life balance and burnout.

Some companies are going fully remote, while others are opting for different visions hybrid work environments. Here’s what four companies in four different countries are choosing to do.

Chargebee: Switching to fully remote

Before the pandemic, Chargebee, an India-founded subscription-management company, used to have offices in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Chennai. Today, it’s gone fully remote with a completely decentralised work structure that allows employees to live and work where they want.

Chargebee had been moving toward an asynchronous working model before the pandemic, anyway – meaning the focus wasn’t on everyone working the same hours, but on having teammates overlap a few hours to facilitate communication. But “like every other company during the pandemic, we had to adapt to the realities of the world and shift to a fully distributed model faster and more completely than we had originally planned”, says founder and CEO Krish Subramanian. 

With meetings kept largely to overlapping hours among teammates, employees have a lot of flexibility around when they work – though meetings, of course, still need to happen. To help reduce Zoom fatigue, on ‘Focus Wednesdays’ meetings are kept to a minimum so staff can attend to their to-do list. In case projects are staggered across time zones, the company has an intranet that’s “up to date on all activities”, with conversations, meetings, documentation, meeting notes and decisions open to everyone. There are also apps, including Wingman, where employees can access customer calls and channels on Slack where employees can post questions – making “as much information as possible accessible to our employees”.

Subramanian says that giving employees the freedom to manage their time is aimed at reducing remote-work stress and helping them disconnect from work. But with no set hours comes the possibility that people will have a hard time logging off, too.

“We found that many employees weren’t taking advantage of the unlimited PTO [paid time off] programme we offer, especially during the pandemic, but no one should stay plugged in all the time – even if they are just taking a ‘staycation’,” says Subramanian. To help protect wellbeing, employees get the first Friday of each month off to recharge, and there’s a mandatory two weeks of PTO each year.

The company is sticking to a fully remote work model for the foreseeable future, now that it’s their standard operating procedure. “With this transition, [upper management has] learned a lot about the value of empowering our employees,” says Subramanian. “The more traditional model of having an HQ and a manager who works in the same office as employees and having set hours and a lot of meetings just isn’t the most efficient model for most people.” 

Instead, “as we have allowed our employees more freedom to work when it is optimal for them and reduced the number of meetings, we have found that their productivity has grown exponentially,” he says. “Additionally, people are generally happier and more motivated because they have more control on how work fits around their personal lives.” 

Codility: Mostly remote, with hybrid hubs and sponsored workspaces

Based in Warsaw, but with major hubs at WeWork spaces in San Francisco, London and Berlin, Codility, which helps engineering firms hire talent, has more than 150 employees in 30 countries. Before the pandemic, the company was already flexible with structure: employees could rotate among these hubs and work from home when needed. Others were already hired to work remotely, and even CEO Natalia Panowicz was splitting time between the Bay Area and the offices in Europe. But in March 2020, Panowicz made the final shift to a remote structure.

As the company transitioned, Panowicz and her team “simply asked” employees what they wanted to do their best at work and tailored policies accordingly. Using their feedback, the company has adopted a work structure that’s both completely remote and gives employees the chance to work in a hybrid format.

Some staff, for example, decided to move cities or even countries. So, to facilitate their free movement and help them remain productive, the company gave all employees WeWork access to any location of the co-working company’s 800-plus outposts, so they can have a desk to work at anywhere.

“We're monitoring closely how our team uses the dedicated office space so that we can scale up or down accordingly,” says Panowicz. “In the cities where we have a high concentration of people, 30% of staff would come to the office each week (but not each day), and the rest occasionally for workshops and get-togethers.”

The company has also chosen to set salaries across one salary band, so what you’re paid is based on the role versus your location. In the US, all employees are paid a “San Francisco salary”, while UK and EU employees are paid at a London scale. 

“It's up to the individual to decide where to live for their best life,” says Panowicz. “With freedom comes choice, this immediately opens our talent pool to a much wider net and more importantly, gives our existing talent more freedom. We focus on performance and output – the talent creates the lifestyle and structure that works for them.”

TomTom: Activity-based working

When the pandemic hit, TomTom’s leadership made a conscious decision to reshape how their 4,500-plus employees worked, rather than just copy-and-pasting the workflow to a virtual setup. By October, the location-technology company gave its W@TT programme a test run – a model that places the focus on the actual activity of work and not where it’s done. By January 2021, its new hybrid-work structure, in which employees decide if they want to work in an office or home office, officially launched.

“A lot of companies are mandating how many days an employee is allowed to work from home, while others have decided fully remote is the way to go; we believe that decision is best left up to our employees,” says Arne-Christian van der Tang, TomTom’s chief HR officer. He says this “complete flexibility” is the most important part of the new working model. To that extent, the physical offices are still part of the company, though they’re being transformed or rebranded into “hosting centres”, where employees can collaborate and surroundings are designed to support how they’re working.