WLP325 Who's Up for "Head of Remote"?
A special episode, as it was inspired by a message from one of her listeners, who wanted to find out about more about the role of Head of Remote. Pilar reached out to Tyler Sellhorn, a teacher-oriented technologist who maintains the website headofremote.xyz.
Tyler is a teaching oriented technologist and the host of the podcast The Remote Show. He describes himself an educator with a passion for leveraging technology to help other people become their best selves.
Today’s episode was prompted by a listener who wanted to know more about how to adopt the role of Head of Remote, whether this might be a career pathway for the future, and what to do to help the organisation you work in invest in setting up the practices that will make a growing remote company successful.
Tyler reckons that “Head of Remote” needs to be a part of everyone's job - it’s an intentional decision by the organisation to be a remote-first company (or any other way the company wants to describe themselves). It’s up to anyone to grab the role of people leader to start setting up the systems and processes that will help this kind of setup.
Eventually, the Head of Remote will probably be one part of the Operations Team. In fact, GitLab made that shift not too long ago, and that post doesn’t exist as such anymore.
Everyone’s job is going to have some part of knowledge management and document management as a part of their jobs, just because no one is going to work at the same time, in the same place very much. And so we have to respect that and start shifting our collaboration models towards a document-centred one instead of a meeting-centred one.”
Tyler Sellhorn
21.51mins
Whether we label ourselves as “remote” or not, asynchronous practices and document-centred ways of working are going to be popular amongst those who look for autonomy at work, and who want to operate independent of location (whether it’s because your job e.g. sales requires it, because you are freelance, or like to travel).
Having a “Head of Remote” will not be just about that post, but about the way an organisation wants to present themselves to the world. Most of the responsibilities of someone with that title are likely to be operational ones, like improving internal communication, or making sure everyone knows how to use a knowledge management system.
For Tyler, it’s important to met those he’s met online in person. it’s a different kind of experience. He recently enjoyed hugging those “2019 remotes” he’s met in person. However, we need to be mindful that:
“There is a spectrum of experience of being able to meet people in virtual and in person. It’s both, and it’s not either or. We need to get rid of these false dichotomies and really embrace the messy middle.”
In the same way, not all organisations that have a Head of Remote are going to operate and express themselves in the same way.
At the time of recording, Tyler was working with Polygon, a blockchain technology company. The trustless aspect of these interaction is something that can be transferred to the “remote team space”. If there was a way to build trust faster between people, it would be easier to build work relationships remotely, and build remote teams faster, without worrying about whether people have had time to build trust.
Going back to the topic of the episode (which has evolved into organisations needing a Head of Remote spirit more than the title of Head of Remote), the important thing is to connect the dots between what the role entails and the aims of the organisation. So if you want to build this role in your company, it’s important that you pitch it to senior leadership as something that will help achieve the company’s goals, and be clear about how this will happen.
And of course, if you want to check out other Head of Remote job descriptions and other information for inspiration, head over to https://headofremote.xyz
Don’t forget to listen to The Remote Show from WeWorkRemotely, hosted by Tyler, and sign up to find out when the Remote Show Live is broadcasting: https://theremoteshow.live/ .
Find out more about Tyler over at his personal website and follow this link for all the other links!
And don’t forget to check out his Head of Remote resources.
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