You’ve probably heard a lot about remote working lately, and that’s because it’s becoming more common around the world. According to a survey conducted in 2018, 56 percent of companies around the world now allow some kind of remote work. According to data from the United States, the activity increased by 159 percent from 2005 to 2017. This transition, fueled by both technological advancements and more egalitarian attitudes toward efficiency, is perhaps one of the most significant changes in global organizational culture in the last century.
And that was before the COVID pandemic, which changed the way businesses operate today. According to a 2020 poll, 70% of full-time staff in the United States worked from home during COVID-19, and 80% continue to work from home at least three times per week after the pandemic.
We consider remote work to be essential not only to our business model, but also to our way of life. We wanted to take a moment to explain how we do it and, most importantly, why it works so well for our team and clients.
How we go about doing it
Although many people may equate remote working with nomadic freelancers who Instagram their MacBooks in exotic locations, this was only the case for a small percentage of the population. In the United States today, the bulk of staff, or 70% of full-time employees, work from home.
Working remotely can be done in a variety of ways. It may refer to everything from a single employee being able to operate from home on occasion to internationally dispersed teams collaborating across timezones in the absence of a physical central office.
Our model at codecrusher.co is somewhere in the middle. Our studio and headquarters are located in Krk, Croatia, where our two founders and four other full-time team members work. Designers, strategists, product designers, UX analysts, animators, illustrators, developers, and project managers are among our extended network of partners who work remotely from all over the world. We have team members in France, the Philippines, Brazil, Lithuania, the United Kingdom, Russia, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic, to name a few. This works for us because we take the time to cultivate long-term relationships and only work with people we are confident in. Many of our remote employees are on retainers, while others work on a project-by-project basis — but they are all as important to our team as those who work at our Krk headquarters.
Project management is handled by Asana, messaging is handled by Slack, live communication is handled by Dropbox Paper, time tracking is handled by Hubstaff, and meetings are handled by Zoom. We’re constantly reviewing our structures and processes, searching for opportunities to learn and develop, because communication is essential to running an effective remote creative team.
Maintaining company culture is difficult, and it could be more difficult now than ever. Transparency, clear goals, and continuous contact have proven to be the foundations of good teamwork. The HQ team in Croatia now has regular stand-ups, while the remote team began with weekly one-on-ones. We want to broaden our community by holding weekly company-wide meetings where we can talk about our daily lives, weekend plans, tasks, and ways to strengthen our work processes.
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Our reasons
We’ve been embracing remote working since the studio’s inception in 2012, and it’s something we’ve done out of necessity. Our hometown has a population of just 7,000 people. It should come as no surprise that the beautiful island of Krk in Croatia isn’t exactly a hotbed for internationally renowned designers and developers (or for brands who needed our services, for that matter). But, rather than packing our belongings and moving abroad, leaving our friends and home behind, we found that living in the internet age meant we didn’t have to. By establishing a remote practise, we will be able to work with clients on a global scale while providing them with the best team for the job, regardless of geography.
Something that began as a real restriction on our company has now become an opportunity — one that we believe distinguishes us from other agencies on the global stage.
If I’m looking for a tennis racquet online, I’ll need a lot more information to figure out if it’s the right match.
The near future
We at codecrusher.co consider ourselves to be remote-natives. It’s the only way we’ve ever worked — it’s not a trend we’ve jumped on or something we’ve tried to incorporate into our narrative. But we’re still working on getting better at it. We know we need to find ways to preserve our community across our physical distances as we grow our team. Given how well our model allows for it, we’d like to encourage even more diversity in our team.
AI advancements are pushing society to rethink how we value jobs and productivity. It is critical to prepare for the future workforce, which will be aging, decentralized, and multi-hyphenate. One way we’re seeing this manifest more clearly than ever is the global growth of remote working, and we wholeheartedly encourage others to follow this future-fit model that has proven so fruitful for us.
When people are staring at their tablets, they can’t get a physical sense of your goods.
