How to start the transition to a remote company

How to start? The answer to that question depends highly on your actual company. How old is it? How many employees in how many locations does your company have? Which industry is yours? What kind of work are you conducting?

But there are a lot of advices, which fits them all. There are 2 possible ways, I like to show you:

Possibility 1: You will start a new business right now

Start completly remote. Other words for that are ‘100% remote company’ or being a ‘remote-first company’. You will save a lot of money for office space, furniture, hardware, electricity and cleaning service. Even if you have just planned to rent some desks in a bigger office building – save this. Hire the best talented people for you endevour and participate in all the benefits explained in ‘Why your company has to go remote‘.

Posibility 2: You have a running company and should transform

Start small. Send your staff to the home office for some days a month, i.e. every Friday or two days a week, whatever fits to your projects. To be clear, you should not ‘send’ them home, you should ‘let’ them work from home. There will be some characters or some home situations (i.e. loudly kids or housemates), where the home office is the second best solution.

After that trail for some time, adjust you processes, tools and regulations if needed (read ‘How to prepare your company for remote workers‘) and increase the remote portion of the remote time. Please don’t forget to consider the feedback of your employees about that topic.

Only after all that improving start to hire fully remote workers. And further on track the mood inside your teams. Try to avoid any unequal treatment of onsite and remote workers.

If you want to jump into the cold water with your existing company instead, try it only with a separated project. The topic and the depending work should be as discrete as possible and should not overlap with the work of the onsite employees much. After getting through that project do the lessons learned accordingly and transform the rest of the company. Don’t allow a separated firm inside your company for too long.

What is always helpful on the way of the transition of your business is to be accompanied by an expert who has the knowledge about all the common stumbling blocks which will pop up.

Do you have other experiences or additional advice? Please let us know in the comments!