What is the vision behind Running Remote conference?
We found that there were a lot of people talking about how to become a digital nomad or an individual freelancer but there were no conferences discussing how to build and scale a remote business. Our software companies TimeDoctor and Staff.com are both completely remote and we wanted to get the playbook to get to 100, 1000 or more employees; so we decided to start a conference on just that.
What is the key topic you will be addressing at the conference?
We will be going as in depth as humanly possible on how to build and scale remote teams. Shopify is discussing how they manage their remote support team of 1500+ reps all over the world. Doist and Help Scout will discuss asynchronous vs synchronous communication. We will have a panel on remote first friendly VC firms. How to legally hire remotely. How to build a design team, dev team remotely and a dozen other talks.
Can you tell us more about your firm Time Doctor?
TimeDoctor is a company focused on empowering people to work wherever and whenever they want, we build conferences like Running Remote and our Time Doctor software measures how productively remote employees work.
Co-Founder & CMO, TimeDoctor
Do you encourage remote work culture at your firm? How efficient is it?
Yes we do, remote work is literally our only way of working and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Outside of the obvious cost savings the impact on employee happiness is so high that even if we had to pay more for talent we would still have a faster team.
What are the advantages behind enabling remote work for both employees and the organisation?
Organisations have the ability to save on costs and improve retention to employee happiness. Employees have increased freedom of movement and in a lot of cases better work life balance than their on premise counterparts.
What are your broad views on the future of remote work?
Last year approximately 2% of the US workforce was working full time remotely and almost 55% were working remotely some of the time. I believe that the corporate world is currently experimenting with remote work and in 20 years you’ll see the majority of the work force work remotely.
How supportive are organisations to remote workers?
It really depends on the organisation. It appears as if the tech industry has adopted remote work and the rest of the world is a few years behind but event at Running Remote we have fortune 1000 companies that are attending the conference trying to get their head around this new way to work which makes me very hopeful for the adoption of remote work.
From your standpoint, What is the kind of impact conferences such as Running Remote can have on the industry?
The goal of the conference is to build a playbook of best practices on building remote teams. We need a few more of these types of events to really enable remote work as the normal way to work. So at this point our impact is small but I’m hopeful our conference will inspire others to develop the movement.