Remote Team

A remote team is one where employees work from locations outside a central office, often distributed across cities, time zones, or countries. The operating model has existed in various forms for decades but grew dramatically as a standard practice during and after the 2020-2022 period when COVID-19 forced remote work and many companies discovered it could work better than expected. Running a remote team requires deliberate operating disciplines (written communication norms, asynchronous decision-making, intentional culture-building, structured collaboration tools) to function well at scale. It is one of the major operating-model shifts of the 2020s and a structural decision that affects every other aspect of company building.

The variants of remote operating models:

Remote-first: company is built around remote work from the start. No central office (or office is incidental, not central). Operations, hiring, communication all assume remote default. GitLab, Zapier, Automattic are canonical examples.

Remote-friendly with HQ: company has a central office where some employees are based, with others remote. Operations sometimes prioritize office-based people inadvertently. Common transitional model.

Hybrid: company has offices but employees work from them part-time (typical: 2-3 days/week in office, others remote). Currently the most-common model at venture-backed companies.

Fully co-located: traditional model with everyone in offices. Increasingly rare for software companies but still common at companies with physical work requirements.

The advantages of remote operating:

• Talent pool: access to talent regardless of geography. Critical advantage in competitive markets.
• Cost: lower real estate costs, sometimes lower compensation (geography-adjusted).
• Employee preference: many employees strongly prefer remote work; offering it improves recruiting and retention.
• Productivity: research suggests remote employees often work more hours and are equally or more productive on many measures.
• Diversity: removes location bias from hiring; opens roles to candidates who couldn't relocate.

The challenges of remote operating:

• Communication overhead: written communication requires more effort than verbal; misunderstandings happen more easily.
• Culture development: cultural norms develop more slowly without serendipitous in-person interactions.
• Onboarding: new hires take longer to integrate; structured onboarding programs become essential.
• Loneliness and burnout: some employees struggle with isolation and work-life boundaries.
• Coordination across time zones: scheduling, decision-making, and collaboration are harder.
• Visibility into performance: managers can't observe casual work; performance signals shift to outcomes and written artifacts.

What makes remote teams work well:

Written-first communication:

• Decisions documented in writing rather than in meetings.
• Detailed status updates, project documents, decision records.
• Async communication norms (don't expect immediate responses).

Structured operating cadences:

• Regular team check-ins (weekly or biweekly).
• All-hands meetings at predictable cadences.
• Quarterly planning processes.

Intentional culture-building:

• Periodic in-person events (offsites, team gatherings).
• Virtual social activities (team lunches, virtual events).
• Strong written communication of culture and values.

Tools and infrastructure:

• Synchronous: Zoom/Meet for video, Slack/Teams for chat.
• Asynchronous: Notion/Confluence for docs, Linear/Jira for tracking, Loom for video updates.
• Documentation-heavy operating culture.

Compensation philosophy clarity:

• Single global pay scale vs location-adjusted (significant strategic decision).
• Different companies handle this differently; the choice has major implications for recruiting and retention.

What founders get wrong: Defaulting to a remote or hybrid model without deliberately building the operating infrastructure (written communication norms, structured cadences, culture investment, tooling) that makes distributed work effective. The right discipline: choose your operating model explicitly (remote-first, hybrid, co-located), invest in the disciplines appropriate to that choice, and recognize that hybrid is often the hardest model because it requires both office and remote operating infrastructure without fully committing to either.

Related: Distributed Team · Async Work · Company Culture · Hiring Plan · Employer of Record

FAQ

What is a remote team?
A team where employees work from locations outside a central office, often distributed across cities, time zones, or countries. Operating model has existed for decades but grew dramatically post-2020. Requires deliberate operating disciplines to function well at scale.

What are the main remote operating models?
Remote-first (built around remote from start, no central office), remote-friendly with HQ (mix of office-based and remote), hybrid (employees work from office part-time, others remote), and fully co-located (traditional, everyone in offices). Hybrid is currently most common at venture-backed companies but often hardest to execute well.

What makes remote teams work well?
Written-first communication (decisions in writing, not meetings), structured operating cadences (regular check-ins, all-hands, planning processes), intentional culture-building (periodic in-person events, virtual social), strong tools infrastructure, and clear compensation philosophy (single global pay scale vs location-adjusted). The disciplines compound: companies that invest in all of these operate remote effectively.