The job description
Figuring out remote work has been a challenge for employers, whether they opt for a hybrid-working pattern or fully distributed teams. In response, some companies have created new positions to help navigate the changing work landscape. This has notably been happening in tech, which has a predominantly higher share of remote workers and firms that embrace digital-first processes.
One such case is Atlassian. The Australia-founded collaboration-software company, with nearly 10,000 employees across 13 countries, has been fully remote since the pandemic began. However, it created a new executive role in March 2022 to formulate its longer-term plan. “Building a transformation team around remote is often reactive: it’s looking at it as a problem to solve,” says Annie Dean, who leads the company’s global distributed workforce strategy, based in New York City. “But because we’ve resourced a team and taken this seriously, most of my work is proactively solving challenges for the future.”
Dean oversees a 100-strong collective scattered throughout Atlassian to fine-tune its remote processes: from the workplace experience team operating the office development and design for whenever workers choose to be in person; to the recruitment team shifting hiring policies and procedures in line with a fully distributed model, such as global recruitment; to the product team flagging issues with remote working generated by day-to-day collaboration tools. “How I prioritise work for these teams is focusing on the biggest challenges and opportunities in transitioning the organisation to a distributed-first model,” she adds.
Among these challenges is enabling synchronised work among employees based around the world. “Businesses used to co-locate everyone together in the same space,” says Dean. “To be effective in ensuring teams get tasks done no matter where they work, we have to design teams on a time-zone basis, and have at least four hours overlapping between teams every day. Baking those processes into the daily operations of the business is a huge focus.”
With colleagues no longer regularly collaborating in person, establishing a cohesive workplace culture is another priority for chief remote officers. “We’ve introduced a programme for intentional togetherness,” says Dean, “where employees gather around the globe with their immediate team. The goal is for teams who’ve never previously met in person to connect, then solve thorny business challenges best suited to in-person environments.”
Not every organisation appointing a head of remote is necessarily in the tech industry. Even employers that require some in-person working have created the role. Paul McKinlay, based in Boston, US, leads the remote-first transition at Ireland-headquartered printing company Cimpress. Its 14,000 employees include those based at manufacturing plants as well as 2,500 distributed workers across its finance, communications and software engineering departments.
Alongside heading up the organisation’s remote-first leadership team, McKinlay says his strategy is shaped by the results of a quarterly employee survey. “I bring together functional leads from real estate, HR and tech – all those who have an impact on remote working – to devise a remote agenda in response to feedback.”
As a result, McKinlay has been quick to appoint full-time staff to specifically tackle the biggest challenges arising from a distributed model. “It was clear we needed specialist roles to deal with issues like onboarding,” he says. “We didn’t feel that it should be a side job for someone to balance alongside their existing workload. We wanted someone to wake up every day and have the creation of a great remote-first onboarding experience to be their sole focus.”
Through this process, Cimpress now has a small remote-first department, who report into McKinlay, centred on knowledge management, collaboration, onboarding and learning and development. He says the early results of the teams’ work to improve the remote experience have been promising. “We have a collaboration centre open in Boston for in-person work: out of 700 employees who still live in the local area, there are only around 20 people there a day, with only seven or eight regulars.”
