As the tech industry strides boldly into 2022, it’s clearer than ever that remote work is here to stay.
Precipitated by the pandemic though the global pivot to virtual workspaces may have been, company leaders in various spheres have since discovered significant upsides to upending the traditional workplace model. Across two years of working from home, employees have generally remained as productive as they were previously; and in many cases, productivity has increased, as has employee satisfaction.
This year, remote work will continue to cement its place as the tech industry’s new normal, given how quickly top employers have moved to embrace and maximize the value of this shift in working and living conditions. We spoke to three tech leaders whose companies have made particularly exciting moves to lean into a remote work culture — and who are currently hiring to expand their virtual operations.
CirrusMD is a telemedicine company, operating a chat-based virtual care program that allows patients to securely text, send photos, or video chat with a live, licensed doctor.
Tell us about your current remote workforce and what plans you have to expand it.
While CirrusMD’s headquarters are located in Denver, Colorado, we currently have a distributed workforce across 22 states. Thirty-six percent of our current employees work fully remote, with the remainder working a hybrid schedule. We follow state and local guidelines, and our Denver office remains open for anyone who would like to go in, but there is no requirement to do so. We plan to continue to hire remotely across the United States as our teams continue to succeed in this way. Hiring remotely allows our employees more flexibility and also allows us access to a larger pool of diverse, specialized talent. This increase in talent is reflected in our current staff as we’ve increased diversity in our workforce year over year. We will continue to grow across many departments this year with a continued and heightened focus on expanding our engineering teams.
Describe your remote work culture.
As a virtual care company, CirrusMD recognized early on during the Covid-19 pandemic the need to not just survive but also thrive in a virtual environment. Remote work is changing the way we interact, and it is imperative that we help our employees stay connected, engaged and supported.
We have many engagement offerings in place for 2022, including companywide monthly events, both virtual and in person when possible. Virtual events we hosted in 2021 included a magician, canvas and cocktails, an escape room, trivia, yoga and holiday events. Additionally, we have health and well-being virtual events, department-specific events and consistent one-on-ones and team touchpoints. We encourage video usage in company virtual meetings, and we’re dedicated to offering professional development opportunities for employees.
Among our other engagement offerings: hackathons, monthly company meetings, Summer Fridays, employee engagement surveys, employee swag gifts, optional culture and book clubs, and one companywide in-person event annually. Our central communication forum is Slack, and we offer recognition shout-outs for standout work performance — which we call “giving out tacos” — as well as randomized three-person virtual lunch and coffee sessions that are arranged via Slack’s Donut app.
Nylas is a provider of productivity infrastructure solutions for modern software developers.
Tell us about your current remote workforce and what plans you have to expand it.
In the past year, we’ve more than doubled our headcount and are still expanding in other countries outside of the United States. About 270 full-time employees currently spread across the U.S., Canada and the U.K.
We’re continuing to grow rapidly this year in all areas of the company and in multiple regions, including building out entirely new teams. We are projecting to be above 400 international employees before the end of this year. We’ll look to expand our regional footprint outside the U.S. with additional hiring for our U.K. and Europe team; we will also be building out a technical presence in the Asia-Pacific region.
As a developer-focused company in the SaaS space, we’re always looking for curious and talented folks who like to solve tough problems. We especially gravitate toward artificial-intelligence and machine-learning (AI/ML) engineers, developer advocates, technical marketers and sales representatives, but we are hiring for pretty much every team.
Describe your remote work culture. How do you help remote employees feel connected, engaged and supported?
We’re a remote-first company and have been officially since March 2020, though we have always been very supportive of remote work.
One of our company values is “output-focused,” meaning it’s not about when or how work is done. We give employees the autonomy to focus on the end result while respecting individual working preferences and giving accommodations for our employees’ needs and personal schedules. The outcomes we achieve together will always be more important than the physical location.
Operationally, we support remote work by having a healthy Slack and documentation mindset, as written communication is great for visibility across time zones. We record all important companywide and team meetings, for future reference and for those who couldn’t make it. And we offer flexible schedules to folks who need them, as is especially important for our working parents.
To help folks stay connected and engaged, we offer teams a quarterly remote bonding budget that they can use toward virtual events and team outings. We also have various internal non-work Slack channels for common interests, like fitness challenges, video games and musicians.
GigSmart is a software development company focused on providing modern solutions to meet the needs of the growing gig economy. Its hiring platform provides on-demand staffing solutions to connect businesses looking for labor with skilled workers.
Tell us about your current remote workforce and what plans you have to expand it.
GigSmart has been an advocate and supporter of remote work since our founding. Currently, we have team members all across the U.S. and around the world in countries like Brazil, Serbia, Pakistan, Nigeria and Nepal. Our philosophy has always been to find the best talent you can, regardless of physical location.
We’ve been fortunate enough to experience rapid growth throughout 2021, which means we are hiring for many positions in several departments, including sales, customer support, product and development. Right now, we are looking for account executives, customer support representatives, product owners, product designers, developers and software engineers.
Describe your remote work culture. How do you help remote employees feel connected, engaged and supported?
With the pandemic requiring the entire team to be remote, we had to adapt our practices to better support a remote work culture. We introduced a “coffee chat,” an open Zoom meeting that runs all day with breakout rooms, in which team members can collaborate and socialize. Giving people the ability to collaborate with each other in real time throughout the day has been highly effective and more productive than coordinating meetings and meeting in person, as we had been doing before.
We organize social events and games across departments, like trivia and happy hours, to encourage team members to meet and spend time together in non-work-related ways. Lastly, we focus on making remote employees feel like they are part of a team, not just individuals on some remote island. We heavily emphasize team standup meetings, huddles and sharing “hot news” across the organization. We truly preach that we are all in this together, and our overall success is driven by all of the departments working in unison to achieve our goals. We have found this to be highly impactful; it allows our teams to stay connected, even across continents.
