Corona Daily 332: Chief Remote Officer (CRO)

The coronavirus pandemic has given birth not only to new words, but to new job titles. Companies have started advertising for a “Head of Remote Work”. Quora, the Q&A social platform is seeking one. Sixty percent of its employees confirmed they would rather work from home after the pandemic is over. HP (printers that don’t work) with 60,000 employees, has established a team of ten senior executives to handle this job.

Facebook has posted an ad for: Director, remote work. Facebook has offered the choice of working from home to all its employees. As I mentioned in an earlier article, FB will adjust their pay depending on the cost of living of the location where they are physically based. Director, remote work is an important strategy post. It will transform the company into a remotely working one.

The person must be a strategic thinker, perhaps with an HR background. Must be a skilled communicator, and adept at technology. The strategy may include writing guidelines for reducing the number and duration of meetings, managing time zones, coordinating with legal and tax people to resolve issues for digital nomads, planning online events to keep the company culture alive. Should the company have set working hours? Should there be an online gym?

The FB ad expects the person to understand distributed and virtual teams, to be an outstanding relationship builder, and a change agent. 15+ years experience in leading people teams and remote workforce is required.

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GitLab is an interesting case study. With 1304 employees in 68 countries, GitLab has been a remote company since 2011. It doesn’t have an office as such. Darren Murph, its Head of Remote, has created a Remote manifesto.

The company hires from all over the world instead of from a central location. The traditional recruitment usually happens on nationalist and racial lines. GitLab has no set working hours. It focuses on work and results, rather than the hours put in. It has replaced verbal explanations by writing and recording knowledge and processes. Most communication is expected to be asynchronous (emails, voice mail) and not synchronous (phones, zoom). Fast and reliable internet is generally all that is needed.

GitLab is worth studying in detail for people who wish to apply for a Head of Remote job.

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GitLab or Facebook are essentially technology companies with young employees.

I feel there is a key difference between the pandemic related work-from-home culture, and the Remote Working culture. They sound similar, but they are not.

In the last six months, most companies are trying to convert the physical workplace into a virtual one. Older employees above 40 have experienced the corporate environment of well-dressed people, water cooler gossip, the daily ritual of commuting, and a sense of a corporate family, with all attached joys, stress and shortcomings. Yes, they may enjoy avoiding traffic, more time with the family, but on the whole, converting them to remote workers is not easy. Just like the Eastern Europeans who grew under communism found it difficult to alter their mentality after its collapse. Tomorrow, I will talk about why many workers-from-home are suffering currently.

Remote work is here to stay. It will probably be the single most dramatic transformation caused by the virus. As technology advances and spreads further, working remotely will become the norm. In one hundred years from now, office buildings will not exist. That revolution will happen with the young. Those who are happier to stare at a screen and interact virtually.

Ravi