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Personal Startups and Business

Starting a remote working journey

Today I head to Gran Canaria for a month. Not for holiday, but to work. I’ll be leaving my friends and work colleagues back in London, whilst trying to convince them that this isn’t all about sitting on a beach and surfing all day long.

I’ve always read with admiration and a fair dose of jealousy the stories from various digital nomads around the web. Free to go where they will, work as they please. And yet I’ve never felt able to take the plunge.

While I’m only dipping a toe in to start, this is as much a company challenge as a personal one. At FundApps, we’ve grown to a team of 8 so far, all based in London. We want to foster a great place to work, and realise creating a remote-working friendly environment is a big pull for many people (as it is for ourselves). We’re also planning to expand into the US, and so we know we’ll *have* to soon deal with the practicalities of asynchronous working with a remote team in a different timezone.

We’ve grown as a clustered, centralized unit based in London without having to address these kinds of questions up front — so we’re now having to retrofit a remote-friendly culture. Working from home a day or two a week is pretty easy, when there’s still enough in person interaction to cover up any cracks in your approach to remote working. But when you take away that regular in-person contact, all that effortless information you pick up in the office fades away.

How do you make sure everyone knows what’s going on? Feels included? Feels part of a coherent company culture? How do you keep learning and sharing knowledge? How do you hire and interview? On a personal level, how does the reality stack up? How do you replace the personal contact that you’d normally have in the office with colleagues?

I know to do this well will be hard, especially with the rest of the team still being a core coherent unit back in London. But I’m hoping this will be an opportunity to learn a lot — and share the experience, both from a personal standpoint, and as a startup founder.

Onwards! I have a flight to catch.

PS I would love to hear your own thoughts. Do you care about remote working? What have you tried? What’s worked or not? Or what’s putting you off, or holding you back from trying it — either personally or at your company?

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