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Inside InterNations

Remote First

Is Strong Team Spirit Possible When You Work 100% Remotely?

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Our team members discuss team bonding when working from home.

Is strong team spirit possible when you work 100% remotely?

Three members of the InterNations team answer this question with a resounding “yes”. Miriam (Team Lead Community Engagement), Karsten (Team Lead Software Engineering), and Kiki (Feel Good Manager) believe that team bonding in a remote setting is different — but just as cool.

InterNations, the largest international community for people who live and work abroad, is a remote-first company. Even colleagues based near our Munich office mostly work from home. In part 2 of our series on remote work, three team members talk to our Team Lead Corporate Communications Jane about the benefits (and limits) of a company culture that’s created online.

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“You need to work harder to engage with remote employees.“

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InterNations, the largest international community for people who live and work abroad, is a remote-first company. Team members are free to work wherever they like — from home, the office, or a combination of both. In part 1 of our series on remote work, you’ll find out more about how InterNations approaches the challenges of this new work style.

Part I: Founder & Co-CEO Malte talks to our Corporate Communications Team Lead Jane about the changes that an online culture brings to a team.

1. Why did InterNations switch to a remote setting?

Even before the pandemic started, we had introduced a flexible work policy.

So, when COVID-19 regulations made working from home mandatory within a matter of days, our team members luckily already had the technical setup to work remotely. Productivity remained high during the pandemic, and the teams enjoyed the higher flexibility and didn’t want to return to the office full time.

That’s when we decided to turn change into opportunity by embracing a remote-first model.

The advantages are clear: Employees appreciate the increased flexibility. They can live and work wherever they like. Our team members in the Munich area can now choose to live in less expensive places further away from the city center, as they no longer have to commute. And as an employer, we can recruit people from a much wider area than just in and around Munich.

2. What did you learn about remote work in these first few years?

In the beginning, we assumed many people would want to return to the office after the pandemic. So, we envisioned needing a hybrid setup.

In such a setup, it was really important to us to avoid a so-called proximity bias. That’s when the people who primarily work from the office have an advantage over those working from home, research shows. It can happen that team members who are on site are more in the loop and get promoted faster — just because they’re physically present.

So, we spent a lot of time rewriting our collaboration rules and processes. Our new meeting guidelines, for example. No matter where someone is working from that day, each participant needs to join the meeting online. This avoids colleagues working from home feeling excluded when those in the office are laughing and joking together in the same room.

However, we soon realized that we would never again be in the situation where the majority of the team works together in the same office building. The share of team members outside a commuting distance grew. And even the employees still living in Munich no longer come in to the office every day.

While a proximity bias would never actually apply to our work situation, simply thinking about it was a good exercise. It helped us to become more disciplined about processes and structures in a digital work environment. And it made us explore different formats of team bonding and really think about breaking down barriers between people and teams.

In short, we learned that you just can’t re-create the “offline” world in an online setting — and that applies to both work processes and socializing. You need to adapt and find new solutions.

3. What’s changed in terms of work processes?

Nothing’s changed fundamentally, but it’s the little things that can make a big difference.

It’s now even more important to have the right tools for collaboration. Working together on shared documents, knowing all the possibilities that our online communication tools offer and how to use them effectively — all this has become the backbone of collaborating smoothly in a remote setting.

That’s why we started regular training sessions for all these tools and included how-to guides in our internal wiki. Documentation in general is very important to make sure there’s a good flow of information. We’ve gotten a lot better at that since going remote.

And communication: it’s basically impossible to overcommunicate in a remote setting. After all, it’s easy to feel disconnected and uninformed when you’re sitting alone at home. So, there’s a greater need for interaction and conversation, and every aspect of company life needs to be more inclusive.

And we’ve noticed a nice side effect: our meetings have become more efficient. Online, people are more inclined to stick to the agenda and get to the point.

4. Where do you see the biggest challenges of remote work?

The biggest challenge is to maintain and shape your corporate culture. Our culture and team spirit have always been one of our biggest assets as an employer. Having this big group of international, open, and incredibly team-oriented people in one place was unique and made working at InterNations a special experience.

Switching to remote-first was a big shift. Now it’s sometimes months before I get to meet a new colleague in person. There’s no opportunity for that occasional chat in the hallway. Our corporate culture, which we very much shaped by and experienced through our daily interactions with each other, all of a sudden became harder to grasp.

This also makes it much harder to “pass on” to newcomers. That’s why we did a big culture analysis last year to see if we’re still on the right track. It’ll also help us figure out how to preserve and shape our culture in a remote world.

Culture and team spirit are closely related. Working remotely, it’s harder to create personal connections, and team spirit suffers. This is something we acknowledge and try to counteract via a mix of online bonding and in-person events.

We meet up in person twice a year, either in Munich or in another location, and we notice that collaboration is easier afterwards. We also introduced online team events with games and quizzes and other online formats, like a virtual coffee with a colleague. In a remote-first company, you simply have to work harder to engage with your employees.

5. How about the negative impact that working purely remotely can have on physical and mental well-being?

Mental and physical health are bigger issues in a remote setting. Some people may get less physical activity without the daily commute. And it might sometimes be more difficult to switch off, so to speak, when your workplace is in your own home. Another issue is that some employees feel quite isolated and alone at home.

But we’ve found ways to work on these issues, for instance, by adapting employee benefits to the remote world. One example: Yoga classes that used to happen in the office now take place online. But we need to go much further. That’s why we’ll make this topic a priority this year.

6. Were you concerned about a loss of productivity in a remote setting?

Like most employers, we were skeptical at first. But our team did prove us wrong! Productivity remained very high, and people used the flexibility in a positive way.

Our teams are motivated through the company mission and driven to achieve the goals they have set for themselves. What’s helped in translating company goals into team targets are OKRs, a framework we use for defining objectives and key results for each team.

Maybe we’re just lucky. But when you think about it, it actually doesn’t make any sense that more flexibility would have a negative impact on people’s motivation and willingness to work.

If there is a negative impact, it’s usually due to other circumstances, such as the possible isolation that comes with working from home or the lack of an adequate workspace.

7. What is your vision of remote work in the future? Is there anything you would like to change?

We would like to make a digital nomad lifestyle possible for our team members, offering them even greater flexibility and mobility to work and travel as they please. Currently, our employees can opt to work permanently from another country, but they cannot work abroad temporarily because of social security issues.

This is a shame, as many of our employees would like to be able to travel and work for a week from Spain, for example. As many of our team members are expats, this would also make it easier for them to spend more time with their families.

And we in management would like to be able to offer this type of increased flexibility across borders. That would be a big game changer.

Mental Health and Remote Work: Yay or Nay?

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How does remote work affect our emotional well-being and mental health? You might get very different answers, depending on whom you ask. Working remotely does wonders for the mood of some employees. Others consider it one more stressor in their life.

To describe its potential impact on mental health, we’ve come up with two scenarios. The stories describe the same day in the life of two remote employees who work for the same company. The first is thriving, but her colleague experiences firsthand why remote work is bad for her mental health.

Happy smiles or grin and bear it? How does working from home impact our mood?
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Why Everyone Benefits from Our Remote Leadership Guide

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To address the challenges of InterNations becoming a remote-first company, our Human Resources Team recently published a Remote Leadership Guide. Even if we’re not team leads or heads of departments ourselves, their insights can help us improve our self-management skills and our general team spirit.

HR Team Lead Christa shares why her team has created the Remote Leadership Guide.
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Remote First: The First 495 Days of Working Remotely for the InterNations Team

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In mid-March 2020, the InterNations Team started working from home as a response to the spread of COVID-19. And this temporary change has become a permanent one — going to the office each day will stay a thing of the past for us. This retrospective discusses the reasons behind this fundamental decision and its wide-reaching implications, both the benefits and the challenges. Let’s make remote work work!

Most of our team members have been working from home for most of the past 16 months.

For the past 16 months, our more than 100 team members have been working mostly from home. What started as a temporary health and safety measure during the first wave of COVID-19 has led to us rethinking first the way we define workplace and then our entire company culture.

“Of course, we also had official remote-work guidelines before COVID-19. However, our so-called ReFlex Policy mainly applied to employees working from home for a few days per month,” InterNations Founder & Co-CEO Malte explains. “Switching to working remotely every day was a major change for all of us. But we were pleasantly surprised by how quickly and how smoothly our team has adapted to this situation. Since the new way of working has a lot of benefits, we have decided not to return to the status quo once the pandemic is over.”

In this regard, InterNations is part of a larger trend that cuts across companies and organizations, especially in knowledge-intensive white-collar industries: In the latest edition of our annual expat survey, the Expat Insider 2021, nearly half the working respondents (48%) report that their employer has permanently changed their remote-work policy due to COVID-19. And a Deutsche Bank research paper from January 2021 puts it even more simply — its title is “Work from home has come to stay”.

Thanks to our new work environment, many of us have acquired new four-legged colleagues.

Going Remote First: Our New Working Arrangements

At InterNations, this management decision was also prompted by the results of our annual employee satisfaction survey, the InterNations Barometer. Last year’s data was collected in July and August 2020 when our team had been working remotely for at least four months: 65% of respondents state that they’d like to keep the opportunity to work from home. However, most team members don’t want to do entirely without office life as we know it. The majority of survey participants (77%) would also like to come in two or three times per week in a post-pandemic future.

InterNations acted accordingly, opting for a remote-first model. The new regulations allow more or less all employees of our expat community InterNations (based in Munich) and our relocation service provider InterNations Go! (based in Porto) to work from anywhere in Germany or Portugal, respectively. We can pick and choose if we would like to go back to the office — once the local COVID-19 regulations permit it — if we’d rather prefer working from home for a couple of days per week, or if we want to go fully remote after all. 

Does this mean that we’ll all become “digital nomads” and ship the next code update or publish the next blog post from a hammock on the beach? Sadly, the answer is no. This lifestyle, which has become increasingly popular among freelancers, will not be an option for our team members.

“We would have loved to give the InterNations Team this kind of freedom,” Malte says. “But due to the legal situation and the social security system differing from destination to destination, it is simply not possible for our team members to work in a country where they aren’t legally employed.” But anyone who wants to move abroad on a permanent basis is now free to do so — so, a new office near the beach is not entirely out of the question after all. “In this case, we’ll have an Employer of Record draft a new contract for them. This also applies to new international hires who can’t or would prefer not to relocate to Germany or Portugal,” he adds. 

Our HR Team has already developed remote-first strategies for recruiting and onboarding.

Larger Talent Pool, Lower Office Rents: The Benefits for InterNations as a Company

Speaking of international hires: Switching to a remote-first model offers our Human Resources Team far more potential recruiting opportunities. “We don’t want to make any trade-offs when trying to find just the right person for the job. But it’s not always easy to find the perfect candidate who either lives in the Munich area or who’s willing to move here. With our new working arrangements, we have access to a much larger talent pool,” says Christa, the Team Lead Human Resources for our Munich office.

Since both InterNations and InterNations Go! have an international customer base, our corporate language has always been English. New employees don’t have to worry about language barriers in a team that includes around 40 different nationalities from all across the globe. However, international recruiting for a remote-first company poses its own challenges for our HR Team.

“We’ve already updated the profile of our ideal candidate. They need to be both well suited to working outside a traditional office environment and highly motivated to do so. We would like to make sure that our future team members will thrive in a remote-first setting. They should still deliver a strong performance and communicate effectively with their co-workers,“ Christa explains.

On the one hand, an asynchronous work schedule should be possible for those working from outside of Germany or Portugal; on the other hand, team members in selected other time zones still need to be available during core working hours.

“Last but not least, we don’t want to lose all opportunities for personal networking and socializing. As soon as the pandemic is completely under control, we want the entire team to gather once or twice a year, for example, at in-house conferences or team-building events. So, our ideal candidates need a bit of flexibility and the willingness to travel occasionally,” Christa says.

The remote-first policy also means that all team members will no longer be present in the same office building at the same time. InterNations will therefore be introducing a hot-desking system. Team members won’t have their own personal desk anymore, but they will rather get desk space as needed.

“We hope that this prevents the kind of ‘silo syndrome’ where teams don’t share enough information. With a hot-desking policy, employees from different teams can also create a new shared workspace while collaborating on a joint project,” Malte says. “And from a business perspective, hot-desking obviously helps reduce a significant cost factor. We have already been able to save on office space — and thus on rental costs in central Munich.”

And InterNations is far from the only organization to recognize those benefits. In fact, a recent analysis by management consulting firm McKinsey & Company predicts that the rise of hybrid remote work may have important implications for urban economies in general, starting with lower demand for office real estate.

Fortunately, the hassle of our daily commute is now a thing of the past.

More Flexibility, Less Commuter Stress: The Benefits for the InterNations Team

Even if a perfectly cost-efficient and well-thought-out management decision has been taken, it won’t work in the long run, if it doesn’t meet with the team’s approval. So, what about InterNations becoming a remote-first company? It does seem to be a win-win situation for everyone involved. In last year’s InterNations Barometer, the team members themselves had good things to say about the increased flexibility, the improved work-life balance — especially for employees with family commitments — and the reduction in stress without the daily commute. Four in five respondents (80%) say they prefer working from home to working at the office — more than one in three (35%) even very much so.

“I really like no longer having to spend half an hour on the train before and after work each day,” a survey participant comments. Others also report being able to focus better on their tasks. “Without the many distractions and interruptions at the office, I have actually become more productive,” another team member adds. And yet another respondent highlights that “it’s a lot quieter at home than in the busy city center.” In fact, 93% say that they find working from home at least as efficient as working at the office.

Going remote first means making sure that all team members are able to participate equally.

Not Just a Hybrid-Remote Compromise: Remote First as a Level Playing Field

Despite new freedoms and various benefits, building a remote-first company is not all smooth sailing. A hybrid model that makes it possible to choose between working in an office environment and working from home leads to a number of organizational challenges too. The aim should always be to avoid any undue (dis-)advantages arising from a team member’s personal choice. This includes access to information and technical equipment, career development and personal growth, socializing opportunities, and even everyday topics, such as meetings.

Meetings are actually an obvious example. If the majority of our team is sitting in the same conference room, while just a few participants join via videocall from home, the discussion can quickly become unbalanced: the team members at the office will probably dominate the agenda, whereas the remote co-workers may have difficulties contributing. In a remote-first work environment, meetings actually need to be all-remote. Every attendee joins from their own laptop, no matter where they are. That way, all participants are on an equal footing. As this overview of the various stages of remote work puts it: a remote-first company is more than a hybrid-remote compromise. In such an organization, “offices are simply venues to work (remotely) from, instead of being the epicenter of power or culture.“

Good teamwork depends on a strong team spirit.

Smells like Team Spirit: The Challenge of Creating a Remote-First Company Culture

There are other downsides to not being in the same room as our fellow team members. Over the years, respondents in our employee satisfaction survey have described our team and our company culture in very positive terms. The friendly and welcoming office atmosphere has always made teamwork easier and helped our most recent hires to settle in more quickly. Now we have to do without the weekly team breakfasts, the spontaneous lunch dates, or the casual chats in the office kitchen. While the vast majority of participants in the 2020 InterNations Barometer say that the practical aspects of teamwork have not been affected by going remote, it remains to be seen how our team spirit can survive and thrive in a remote-first setting. Especially since the team keeps growing and we keep hiring new members that have never been a part of the “old” InterNations.  

“In the short term, we’ve been focusing on providing enough socializing opportunities for our team. So far, we’ve organized several virtual team events — from a Zoom magician to an on-brand version of the popular social deduction game Werewolf — and they’ve generally received positive feedback,” says Head of Content & Communications Kathrin. “But our long-term challenge will be identifying the ‘DNA’ of our company culture and figuring out how exactly to transfer it into a remote-first setting.”

One thing is for sure: We’ll be closely keeping track of what it takes for remote-first work to work.