Remote yet Connected: moving to a distributed organization in response to COVID-19
COVID-19 is forcing many leaders and employees to make tough choices about remote work by urgent necessity. We appreciate everyone who is confronting this new reality, making courageous decisions without the benefit of experience nor practice. We want to share what we’ve learned in building a distributed company to help you through this transition.
A little history...
In 2012, after months of searching, my cofounder Mark Ferlatte and I finally recruited our third cofounder, Jen Leech. We were looking forward to accelerating the development of our first product. Before we could fully celebrate, we got an unexpected message from Jen. “I just learned I’m going to be out of the US for the next 18 months and located in 20 countries. Can we make that work?”
We did. Eight years later, Truss is a fully distributed company with nearly 100 employees working in over 20 states. Deciding to have a “remote” cofounder might have paralyzed our fledgling company. But it didn’t. Instead, it accelerated our creativity in building a sustainable organization.
Deciding to be a distributed company continues to be one of our best business decisions. We’ve evolved through many iterations of software infrastructure, communication platforms, video products, meeting protocols and especially, cultural norms, to enable us to scale our company.
We’d like to share what we’ve learned about distributed work to help you make great decisions in this difficult time. We have pragmatic playbooks, cultural connection practices, technical infrastructure, company policies, and business frameworks that we’ve amassed over the years. Most importantly, these practices can support your employees to do their best work on behalf of your customers, clients and citizens. We are mindful that this is a stressful time for all, and we offer this to help you navigate these tricky waters...and perhaps emerge a stronger, more resilient company.
Our most salient practices for the current COVID-19 crisis are following posts:
How to meet, collaborate and coordinate in a distributed environment
Facilitating an all-hands meeting in a distributed environment
If you want to dive deeper, we have our full Truss playbook here. We’ll also be adding more content later under the Remote yet Connected heading.
What else would you like to learn about? Put it in comments!