How we create an effective remote-first environment at Cric

Whenever I mention remote-first environment to other start-up founders, I often get the same list of questions fired back at me:

• How do you build a strong company culture that way?
• Don’t you face disengagement from employees?
• How will you scale up from here?
• How do you keep your employees accountable?
• Don’t you think human-interaction is necessary for teamwork and creativity?

Let’s get one thing straight, remote work isn’t for everyone. It doesn’t work for every company and shouldn’t be implemented across the board.

But in the past year, we’ve built a remote-first environment that keeps our employees happy, engaged and productive, while scaling up from 5 to 19 team members at the same time.

Here’s the ‘Why?’, ‘How?’ and ‘So What?’ behind our remote-first culture.

The ‘why’ behind Cric’s remote-first environment

All our co-founders at Cric have worked in agencies in that were scaling up in the past, and we wanted to address a core problem that many of our past experiences left hanging:

How do we scale up without burning out our superstars?

We believe the key is in creating a work environment that values freedom and ownership, while also offering a sense of deep belonging to our team members.

That’s why we believe remote work, when done right, can provide all these things.

When done incorrectly through, it breeds disengagement, low productivity, and can even accelerate burnout.

So here’s our blue print to creating a remote-first environment that allows our talent to do their best work.

Step 1: Post-pandemic hiring

Hiring is by far the most important factor in building an effective remote-first culture.

At Cric, we are targeting a specific archetype of star-performers who feel disenfranchised in the post-pandemic work environment.

I call this archetype the Plutos.

They carry the usual traits of star performers. They’re ultra-productive, reliant, and resilient. They drive growth for companies and often become part of the core team in start-up environments.

However, unlike regular star-performers, these individuals have worked through the pandemic and have realized one thing. Traditional work paradigms don’t only disenfranchise them, it demotivates them, handicapping them from doing their best work.

Plutos are star-performers who reject traditional work-life policies like compulsory office attendances, micromanagement, over tracking, and the like.

Their performance in short:

Put Plutos in a traditional corporate environment and they’re often sidelined by management as regular team members. Stick them in a hybrid-work environment and you start to see their potential. Place them in a remote-first environment and they truly shine as star-performers.

Plutos are an untapped talent pool of star-performers that are overlooked by more traditional companies.

And that’s exactly why we’re targeting them.

Like I mentioned, remote work isn’t for everyone, and it sure isn’t the right solution for every business. So as a remote-first company, it’s paramount that we scout, vet and win over Plutos to our company as we continue to grow.

Hiring for Plutos

We’ve developed a specific process that helps us vet for Plutos that will thrive in Cric’s remote-first environment.

This involves four rounds assessment, including:

1. First interview round: Aim at accessing cultural fit, past experience and career ambitions.
2. Technical test: Aimed at accessing operational know-how.
3. Documentation test: Designed to test how candidates handle online documentation, an essential skill for a remote-first environment
4. Presentation test: To test how candidates can effectively interact and communicate with different stakeholders online

Throughout these three rounds of interview, we vet candidates by gradually filling out our score card to find the right fit. Here’s one of the earlier versions we used our hiring process back in 2022.

Step 2: Making our in-office sessions ‘worth it’

We hold optional in-office sessions every Friday afternoon. Our goal here is to make that one afternoon so great that it achieves three things:

1. It excite team members to come-in once a week to join our ceremonies in person.
2. That excitement heightens team work and fosters group creativity beyond everyday in-office work environments.
3. This human connection then strengthens bonds and creates a sense of belonging to fall members.

These three goals are precisely what in-office work environments were supposed to achieve.

They’re the reasons executives use to justify compulsory office attendances in the post-pandemic world.

But in-office environments often fall short in achieving these goals because many employees don’t want to be in office to begin with.

How we achieve over 90% weekly attendances despite making in-office sessions optional

We hold three main ceremonies during our Friday afternoon in-office sessions to boost team engagement, facilitate teamwork, and most importantly, get everyone excited about coming in.

These are:

1. Team breakouts
2. Team dinners & quarterly outings
3. 1:1 sessions (more on this in the next section)

Team Breakouts

Traditionally, team updates involve each employee taking turns to list out what they’ve been working on throughout the week.

But we’ve found that this format breeds disengagement. A big red flag for any team ceremony.

So at Cric we’ve developed our own format that involves the following steps:

1. Everyone gathers and managers shares company-wide announcements/updates
2. Each team breaks out and does their status updates in groups of 5 or less
3. Teams regroup, nominating one person each week to update the rest of the company on key achievements / cross-team collaboration opportunities discussed

We’ve found this helps keep engagement levels high, as the breakout and regroup sessions keep people on their feet, breakout updates are only heard by relevant members, and there’s a sense of representation during each team’s recap.

Team dinners and quarterly outings

We treat our team to dinners every week. It’s simply a great session to wind-down, bond, and celebrate the week’s hard work. Being situated in the foodie hotspot of Bantadthong street, our team dinners have become something most of us look forward to during the week.

Outings are also held every quarter, aimed at team-building while also have a bit of fun at the same time.

In short, whatever we save in not renting out a permanent office, we reinvest in creating systems and perks to keep our teams happy, motivated, and hungry.

Step 3: Getting at the heart of 1:1s

I’ve been lucky enough to have met mentors who ran amazing 1:1s throughout my career.

The one goal we always strive towards for these sessions is to go beyond task updates.

That’s when 1:1 sessions become the most valuable, as topics such as career advice, tips on dealing with clients, mental challenges and creative problem-solving are discussed.

For instance I’ve gotten one of the most valuable work-life advice from my previous manager thanks to our 1:1 sessions:

“Remember Toon, this isn’t real life. If things go wrong here, the world isn’t going to fall apart. Your real life is at home with your family and loved ones.”

Thank you Katya, this was pivotal to me developing a healthy relationship with work, and I couldn’t thank you enough for it.

That’s why we run 1:1 sessions right after our weekly syncs. So that everyone has a chance to speak to their manager about something else after giving task updates during the sync session.

Here’s our 1:1 protocol given to all team members during and after their onboarding process:

Step 4: Dedicated coaching sessions

We reinvest the commute time we save each week in coaching sessions for all team members to facilitate personal growth and career development.

These sessions are co-designed and created between a direct report and their supervisor.

Each person will have a coaching roadmap catered towards them, focusing on skills that they need to master in order to progress in their careers.

Here’s an example of what one may look like:

These sessions often involve role-playing, presenting individuals with challenging situations that can occur at work.

With each session, we aim for two outcomes:

1. Developing a written bespoke framework of how individuals can handle challenging situations when they arise
2. Giving individuals the opportunity to think on their feet and solve problems on the go

Step 5: Embodying our core values

There are three core values that we promote at Cric. We call this the OWL:

1. Ownership
2. Willingness
3. Lifetime learning

But core values are nothing if they’re just being preached alone. That’s why we’ve worked hard to materialize these core values in our ceremonies, systems and perks. Here are some examples:

Ownership

This means taking ownership of one’s tasks and responsibilities, taking the initiative to find creative solutions for each problem that arises. In other words, we trust in our team’s autonomy to get things done.

Core value materialization

1. Automated daily stand-ups: We’ve replaced the conventional daily stand-up meetings with automated stand-up reports that are done individually at asynchronous times.

2. Trust over tracking: We don’t track time, leaves or active hours.

Willingness

We celebrate each member’s willingness to work closely with clients as partners, tackling their business problems head-on to make a meaningful difference in this world.

Core value materialization

1. No to account managers: We get rid of the middle-person, having our experts work directly with our clients as digital consultants.
2. Getting to know our clients at a personal level: We keep the same project owner on a single client in the long-run, getting to know them over the course of years (most clients stay with us for over 12 months)

Lifetime learning

Finally, we embrace lifetime learning as a motto, treating each challenge, roadblock and victory as learning experiences to share.

Core value materialization

1. An internal library of 80+ recordings (and growing) on task how-tos, crisis management, and guides.

2. Company Audible and Headway accounts open to all employees, mostly filled with self-improvement and productivity books
3. Budget for online course purchases throughout the year

It’s all about the journey

At Cric, we’re lucky enough to be at a stage where we can experiment with non-conventional processes and management styles.

So we’ve embraced a fail fast, learn faster mindset in building our team, and have learnt a great deal about how to make a remote-first environment work, as well as how it can go wrong.

As we continue to grow as a business, I’ll keep sharing our key learnings along the way. Hope you found this interesting!