Remote working and what we have learnt

Work has changed, and never more so than in the last 2 years. Many businesses are reporting that they are struggling to cater to changes that come with being Remote.

At Paysend, we decided to lean into the changing landscape of work so we became a remote-first company. Of course, we too have faced challenges, but in the spirit of growth, we wanted to share some of our insights on how you might create a successful remote working environment where employees can thrive and the business can deliver. 

Why are we remote?

When COVID hit, our offices, based in London and Moscow were closed to ensure the safety of our teams and larger communities. At the same time, this was a period of impressive growth in our company where we more than doubled our headcount. Fortunately, we already had good practices working collaboratively between our offices so we were able to quickly adopt remote work and started hiring people globally. This allowed us to find the best team members to join us regardless of their location. We chose to keep our current offices, and use these for a meaningful purpose. Rather than use this for ‘traditional’ work, our teams go in during important moments that matter such as when they need to solve problems together, have in-person planning sessions, and celebrate achievements.

Currently, at Paysend we have more than 500 people working from over 30 countries to help us save time, save money, and serve millions of customers across 125+ counties. It’s important for us to create and continue to build on our culture to represent who we are  - a culture where everyone feels valued, is empowered, and works together to help us build money for the future together.

Communication, communication and... communication 

When businesses or managers hear remote working they might feel immediately overwhelmed and anxious that staff would feel isolated, unproductive or unconnected to them or even to their respective teams. Similar concerns were echoed by both our leadership and managers: "How can we communicate effectively when our employees/team members are located all over the world and not in some office?".

It has been an important step simply in recognising these concerns. Equally important, we found that holding frequent and informal talks with our employees and colleagues has paid large dividends. As such, we developed a 1 to 1 meeting format with managers where we encourage a simple structure: Informal wellbeing check-in, progress updates, and collaborative problem solving. 

Of course, we have also embedded frequent and regular communication from our executive leadership team. We call them our Monthly Voice, and this is where our executive teams share important updates, achievements, and upcoming plans/activities so that we can all work towards the same goals and know how our work impacts Paysend.

Although it may sound trivial, we have found that finding time to explore topics outside of work have helped us all maintain endurance in a remote setting. Instead of the classic ‘Did you have a good weekend?’ which involves a generic reply like ‘yeah, was nice. You?’, we have heard ‘how is learning the guitar going? ‘Has little bobby started nursery yet?’. These rich conversations creates a sense of belonging to our colleagues even if they are half way across the world.  This, from a business perspective, is useful as those who feel they have good friendships, and a company that cares are more likely to be loyal, enjoy their jobs, and work harder.

Having a proactive and informal communication culture has created opportunities for better team collaboration, cohesion, and friendships. We have found that policies and processes have helped us to formalise our company culture. We embed our values into them to ensure they are a part of our everyday language and that they drive specific behaviours. 
We've also found that using the right tools allows us the ability to effectively share knowledge, project manage and work together asynchronously, across locations and time zones. This includes matching the right approach to sharing important information, policies and company updates. At Paysend we use confluence to enable an internal intranet so that anyone can find the right information at the right time, such as policies, key functional resources, company updates and also employee social groups.  

This past year, we made big steps to reach out and explore new ways to connect with our colleagues across the world and celebrate all that we achieved together.

Continuous Improvement

We are of course still working out how best to support our remote first team, but we see this as failing forward. Although failing isn't always fun, nor nice - it’s a learning tool and a part of being human and growing.  

One good example of this came from Q4 of this past year. Despite our onboarding experience survey giving us strong scores we found out not all new hires were truly set up for success. To share one of our findings; we had made a false assumption that new hires would feel comfortable utilising slack to reach out to Paysenders from day 1. However, we quickly realised that this was not true for all, especially those who may have moved from a corporate or non-remote company. To tackle this, we created simple, easy to remember guides that help our new joiners adopt our tools and use them in healthy ways. These have all been collected in one central space we call our "Paysenders Guide to the Galaxy." 

Although there is no such thing as a quick remedy. Our guide to the Galaxy was designed to allow new hires to navigate our company successfully throughout their entire lifecycle thereby setting them up for success beyond day 1 or week 1. This embodies our culture and is of course a constant area of refinement. 

Alex's overall takeaway

Remote working can enable an innovative and dynamic workplace where employees can not only work productively but also establish great relationships.  In some instances, remote working can lead to an environment where quieter people can flourish, without the pressure to be the voice of the office. However, in order to reap these benefits, we have found that you must consciously engineer such an environment so that you have the correct principles, policies, and tools working together in unison. 

If this environment sounds interesting and you find yourself connecting to what we are trying to achieve then join the future of work!

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