Craig Felston, our Head of People, recently featured on the well known Talent & Growth podcast where as a panel they discussed Getting It Right With A Remote First Culture. Craig and the panel explored how each of their companies make remote cultures work and gave their industry expertise by sharing their experiences and insights on things like; creating effective communication strategies, fostering a sense of belonging and engagement and ensuring productivity whilst maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Alongside the episode which you can listen to on Spotify below, we caught up with Craig to hear more of his insights.

ID 🎙 Why don’t you set the scene for us Craig when it comes to remote working?

CF 🎙 Well before we discuss remote culture, I think it’s really important to highlight that traditional office based jobs create their culture almost by accident - even the companies that have the most brilliant well defined culture in place. In their setting, you have these groups of people who share not only that vision of culture but share a physical workspace too, so they end up learning more about each other out of simple convenience; they have the kitchen spaces, the walks at lunch, the coffee runs, desks next to each other and there will be lots that even live in the same area, therefore are even more in sync than they realise. Obviously that’s not the same for remote companies such as ours. At Ikigai our lives are happening in different time zones, within different cultures, so to be successful we must remind ourselves and really reinforce our reasoning around being remote, which in our case was a decision born from this desire to bring about all the joys that remote culture can give us and for us, that’s happiness, or even more accurately - Ikigai. So in short, you have to work so much harder at so many things if you are remote but in turn you’ll have so many more benefits..

ID 🎙 So what does working remotely at Ikigai gives us;

CF 🎙 An obvious one that is thrown around a lot when hearing companies discuss remote work, is a better work life balance and that is of course a giant part of it but within that I mean things you couldn’t do in an office setting during the day. For our Ikigai’ers that’s seeing your family more, especially during the school holidays where people’s children are running around and we have Ikigaiers that might take an hour out to eat lunch or dinner with their kids before resuming work once again. On the other hand, it simply might mean using your breaks to go for a run at whatever time suits your own schedule. We also have lots of people that move back and forth between countries - it’s all possible here. Charlton, one of our Architects, spends time between Hong Kong and New Zealand where both his children are at school - pretty cool hey! Our main aim is to provide a greater level of flexibility in everything we do and as a result, we’re hoping for a higher level of productivity (plus happiness too of course).

Now if I am to come at the concept from a People perspective, you’ll tend to get a reduced turnover in staff if everyone is achieving happiness more regularly, which again leads to greater productivity and less time spent on hiring and upskilling replacements. It’s also brilliant for both lower employee and employer overheads. Here in the UK the average yearly commute will cost you £5k and that’s not taking into account the time it takes to commute as well. The cost saved for us as a business means we can also create memorable life events like our yearly BeingIkigai trip, which in 2023 took us to the beaches of Thailand!

Then from a recruitment perspective, something that can be forgotten is the ability to scale and scale quickly if need be. As a consultancy, we might take on a new bank build and as a result of our remote nature, we can hire at scale and do it fast. As a result of our remote hiring, we can well and truly hire the best and most diverse people in the market, instead of focusing on single cities.

ID 🎙 How do you keep people engaged and also informed, especially with the different time zones?

CF 🎙 It can be tough, we’re not just a remote company, we’re a remote consultancy where people don’t always get to live and breathe our culture and are in fact living through their client, which might not have a culture as good as you would hope, so for me we need to look at a few things;

When it comes to information, transparency is key. Since BeingIkigai 23, we’ve tried to make nearly all our Slack channels public and encourage people to ask questions in the right (hopefully public) channel and then use threads to discuss further, so if others were thinking the same thing, they can now get the answers or know they weren’t the only ones. Information is easier to pass along if our company is small too. We can grow and scale sure - but we are not growing for the sake of it.

You mentioned time zones. We try to work asynchronously as possible. If we don’t need the team to be online at the same time then why make them. Of course asynchronous work relies on greater documentation and transparency but that is something we thrive on and excel in. We have to balance that occasionally and for instance, all our leadership meetings and company wide meetings take place in the morning UK time wise, so everyone can attend and it works well. These might be anywhere from 6am my time, to lunchtime. Getting up for a one off meaningful 6am meeting when you work remote, isn’t like being in an office for 6am. If we were to have that old school approach though that we needed to work together 100% of the time, then I might argue that work actually slows down as one is essentially placing this artificial barrier on productivity. What really helps here is our DevOps/Software Engineering background I’d say where a lot of the methodology is really similar.

You asked about engagement and that’s a hard one. We’re constantly trying to strike the balance between what’s forced fun and what’s naturally fun. Almost everything in a remote setting is forced, so it’s about trying to set things up and then allow them to happen what feels like organically down the line. I write a weekly update that I hope isn’t boring and we all try to engage in that and we also have the updates tool on Lattice set up and we try and make our updates public and they are pushed to an open slack channel for people to view and comment, so everyone can see what others have been doing. Here we talk about both work & private life as we honestly do care what you are doing away from work. In fact, we start with all the updates with what we’ve been doing in our personal lives.

Something that I think we’re doing differently to other remote companies is that we’re trying to break the mould between either being solely remote, office based, or hybrid and creating this fourth category where we’re fully remote but if people live near one of our hubs, then let’s get together and work and then do something fun after.

ID 🎙 What are some of the challenges we may have not discussed?

CF 🎙 Perhaps it’s linked back to our communication and how almost everything is done virtually. So people’s perceptions on how a message may come across can differ. As well as, of course, really making an effort in our own communication style, we need to give benefit of doubt and appreciate we may not know everything.

I would go back to engagement too. I do find it really hard to work out what is best for us as a company. All Ikigai’ers aren’t the same and they all want and need different levels of engagement. Some will need more of a push and how we do that but keep it fun and authentic is the hard part, so it’s simply trying to strike the balance for everyone but this is the one area I’m keen to try and work on and learn more from other remote companies out there.

In summary, we hope that Ikigai Digital’s remote first culture creates this unique and productive work environment where we embrace transparency and give our Ikigai’ers a flexible work setting which is tailored to their own needs, whilst being able to scale quickly and maintain a really diverse workforce.