How to be Remote-First When You Still Have an Office

Communication and collaboration best practices for hybrid or "remote-ish" teams

Illustration by Margarida Mouta

Most companies are not fully remote and have no intention to be. In reality, most companies embracing remote work through work-from-home policies have dedicated headquarters in cities like San Francisco and people working from home across multiple cities, countries, and continents.

Most remote teams have both headquarters and home offices

Unfortunately, remote-ish teams confront even more communication and collaboration challenges than fully remote ones. In these hybrid teams, information gets siloed in offices while remote employees are left in the dark. The result is an unintended hierarchy where office workers are naturally heard, recognized, and promoted –– while remote workers are left out.

Unintended hierarchies form when remote work is not intentional

The solution? Remote-ish teams need to adopt remote-first policies that put everyone on equal footing.

An even playing field is established when remote work is intentional

This article will provide guidance for adopting remote-first principles and policies that put everyone on the same playing field.

This is an excerpt from our Twist Remote Work Guide Remote-ish: The Remote-First Solution for Hybrid Companies. Read the full-guide to learn optimal ways for remote-ish teams to communicate and operate as a team, so everyone does their best work. You’ll walk away with advice for structuring a distributed team, implementing remote-first policies, communicating across country lines, and working together regardless of location.

As companies recognize the benefits of being a remote-ish team and begin introducing remote hiring and remote work policies, the single biggest mistake they can make is opting to be remote-friendly instead of remote-first.

In this section, we outline the difference between the two modes of operating.

Remote-friendly vs remote-first companies

Though remote-friendly companies allow remote work, they don’t optimize for it. Instead office employees and remote employees are not properly integrated and exist on two different, often unequal, tiers.

When these are the defaults, remote team members get left behind while their office counterparts have their presence rewarded with resources for key projects, promotions, and recognition.

Remote-first companies intentionally optimize for remote work.

Everyone has an equal voice and promotions can be awarded more fairly on the basis of the strength of one’s ideas, contributions, and output.

Remote-first is the gold standard for how remote-ish companies should operate. Without this operational framework, distributed companies simply have offices with isolated and distanced employees working invisibly from home. Not a good way to retain top remote talent.

A remote-first mentality extends to how a company operates, communicates, hires, and promotes, creating an environment that puts everyone on equal footing.

Remote-ish teams function best when the entire company optimizes for remote work. When remote team members are an afterthought, hearing about lunch-time decisions days later, it’s hard to achieve a cohesive distributed organization. Successful hybrid teams are inclusive of their remote workers and set up processes to help them thrive alongside their office teammates.

First, leadership must acknowledge the different challenges remote workers face and meet those challenges with solutions. Sometimes this means overcompensating and leaning towards policies that specifically elevate remote team members.

This section will lend advice on making remote-ish work function well for everyone –– whether they’re in the office 9-5 or working on the other side of the world.

Even though remote workers might be hundreds or even thousands of miles away from headquarters, it should feel like they’re fully connected and not missing a thing. Remote-ish teams should enable remote-office connections that build rapport and enable effective collaboration and camaraderie across locations.

Here are a few different ways that remote-ish teams can build bonds:

While these opportunities are costly and require a lot of coordination, they pay ongoing dividends by helping remote-ish teams function as a unified unit moving towards the same collective goals.

On a remote-ish team, it’s easy to see team members as “office employees” and “remote employees”. Admittedly, this is the dichotomy we’ve described throughout this guide. However, it’s important to allow flexibility for office team members too.

Create an explicit work-from-home policy for office employees that extends the benefits of remote work beyond remote employees. Clearly outline expectations of people working from home in documentation or a company handbook. Ensure your guidelines answer these questions:

A flexible policy for office employees helps retain office team members and reduces any friction between remote teammates and their work-from-home colleagues.

While treating both remote and office-bound colleagues fairly should be a priority, that doesn’t necessarily mean they should be treated the same. Depending on your remote setup, some team members may be full-time employees while others might be contractors. This often creates a legal need to differentiate how teammates receive salaries and benefits.

Legal reasons aside, there are also practical considerations for different policies for the two classes of workers. One is providing relevant and helpful perks. While paid team lunches can create bonds in an office setting, this perk isn’t particularly pertinent for at-home employees. Instead, an internet allowance for remote team members is a great perk to create a high-productivity remote work environment at home. Instead of crafting your perks and policies with exact equivalencies in mind, consider the unique needs of each group and create policies and perks that address them. The chart below shares ideas of perks that could be extended differently to each group:

Differentiated perks for office employees vs remote employees

Continuously evolve your company’s understanding of remote work challenges and work to actively address them in meaningful ways. Consider annual engagement surveys that ask meaningful questions about your remote-ish setup so you can refine it with new or revised policies that seek to address both remote and office team members separately and together.

On a remote-ish team, a 1:00 PM board room meeting at headquarters in New York City is a 7:00 PM conference call for a remote team member in Madrid. While a meeting for both is possible, it certainly isn’t ideal. While one group gets back energized from lunch, the other is working late into the evening with their personal time disrupted. On the other hand, missing the meeting might mean exclusion from key decisions and a greater sense of isolation from the wider team. For team members in Taipei or Singapore, there’s no real choice to be made; it’s 1:00 AM and they’re fast asleep.

If you hire globally, time zones are the single biggest issue to overcome when it comes to operating as a remote-ish team. However, there’s a simple strategy that eliminates this hurdle and keeps team members collaborating effectively while they’re distributed across the world: asynchronous communication.

This section will discuss why asynchronous communication, a culture of documentation, and strategic synchronous communication can help remote-ish teams stay in sync.

Synchronous communication, conversations where a quick-back-and-forth is possible and participants are present at the same time, falls short for remote-ish teams for the reasons illustrated in the hypothetical example above. Working synchronously across different time zones favors the critical mass in the office. It puts remote team members at a disadvantage, scrambling to make early morning and late evening calls or missing out on them entirely.

It also negates one of the biggest benefits of working remotely in the first place: a flexible work schedule.

Alternatively, asynchronous communication, where participants communicate as they’re available and discussion is punctuated by intermittent gaps, serves remote-ish teams well. Team members don’t need to be online at the same time or in the same physical location to respond to emails, create conversation threads, or collaborate in cloud-based software apps like Google Docs. Instead, they can choose their own productive working hours, default to deep work, and answer messages when they’re open to being interrupted.

Remote-ish teams should adopt asynchronous communication as the primary source of correspondence to put all team members on equal footing. This means being asynchronous-first. The following table outlines some of the differences between an asynchronous-first culture and a synchronous-first culture:

Synchronous-first vs asynchronous-first companies

To move your team toward async, start culling synchronous communication like recurring meetings and re-imagine each of your gatherings from first principles:

Asynchronous-first teams don’t only benefit remote team members. For office-bound team members who are on vacation, take sick days, or simply miss a meeting, there’s a trove of written communication on asynchronous teams that anyone can refer back to. Asynchronous communication also benefits future employees who can examine a company’s communication archives and get up to speed on all things work and culture.

Product Tip: In Twist, conversations are searchable, forever. Use the search function and query keywords to find threads dating back days or years. Alternatively, navigate to find what you need by looking through channels where conversations are easily organized and scannable.

When individuals and teams are striving for an important goal, it’s crucial they’re all heading in the same direction. On a remote-ish team, where close collaborators may be spread across countries, shoulder taps and quick check-ins aren’t feasible. Instead, it’s important to build a culture of documentation where everything is written down to help our future selves.

Clear and concise documentation allows remote individuals to work more independently without having to wait on an answer from their manager on how to do something. On team projects, documentation can serve as both a source of truth and a living document that’s improved upon by a group.

Here are a few important areas where centralized and accessible documentation should exist:

Aside from official documentation, that’s often stored in a precise location for reference, it’s important to also document decisions and next steps in writing. Sometimes in-person chats and quick Zoom calls are unavoidable. In these cases, it’s crucial to maintain an asynchronous-first mindset and document decisions clearly and concisely afterward, particularly if they were made offline.

Product Tip: In Twist, use close threads to highlight a conclusion or document a resolution with the “Closed Threads” feature. This creates transparency and lets everyone know when and how a decision was made.

Become a company where most questions can be answered by linking to an online thread and unknown answers are found and documented straight away. Build a culture based on writing, where concise remote writing and strong communication are highly valued.

While we recommend asynchronous-first communication, video calls and other forms of synchronous communication have their place. In these cases, make synchronous communication available asynchronously to help remote-ish teams function their best.

By adopting remote-first practices, like asynchronous-first communication and building a writing culture, remote teams can sidestep the challenges that come with time zones and find ways to collaborate effectively across continents on work that matters.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Twist Remote Work Guides.