The Three Pillars of Remote Site Success
Gaurang Khetan, India Site Lead, Director of Engineering
The Launch of Ethos India
We are proud to announce that we have opened up a new Ethos center of excellence office in Bengaluru, India in the last couple months.
At Ethos, we are always looking ahead — planning for our next stage of growth. As we continue to accelerate building our next generation of products, and continue to execute our mission to protect millions of families, we want to tap into talent pools across the world. This allows us to scale faster, benefit from skill sets available in different geographies, as well as increase the diversity of Ethosaurs. As part of our expansion outside of the US, Ethos has had an office in Singapore for more than two years now. And now we have kicked off our next brand new office in Bengaluru, India!
This will be an important site for Ethos strategically — we plan to grow rapidly, and hire different functions — ranging from engineering, product managers to data scientists/analysts, revenue teams, marketing, and more. This will serve as a center of excellence to catapult us into our next phase of evolution, and contribute to executing critical projects and functions.
We already have hired more than a dozen Ethosaurs at this site over the last two months, and plan to hire several dozen more in the coming few months. It is an exciting time at Ethos Bengaluru — building teams from scratch, like a startup starting up!
Remote sites can be challenging, especially with large differences in time zones. So, how will we ensure this venture is highly successful? We will tap into our experience with the Singapore office, as well as leverage our experience of starting remote sites before Ethos at various other multinational companies. We will use time tested principles to avoid common pitfalls and ensure success of the site from the get go!
Pillars of remote site success
We believe the success of a new remote site relies on handling the 3 Pillars of Remote Sites — the 3 Cs — very well.
Charter
The new site must have a significant charter for it to be successful.
Helps Hiring & Retention
Having a significant charter helps with hiring, as it addresses a commonly seen fear in the mind of potential bright candidates for a remote site that they may not get to work on the important parts of the product, but only asked to do secondary, unimportant work.
Secondly, having the ownership of broad areas requires the employees to not only deliver on well-defined features and projects, but empowers them to define the vision and roadmap of the areas owned, thus creating avenues for growth into senior and impactful roles. This improves employee satisfaction and retention at the remote site. This also makes the team more vested in company success, as they feel they have a greater ability to make an impact.
The bootstrap problem: Building a significant charter for the new site is difficult in the beginning for these reasons:
- Need to gain trust of leadership: The leadership typically at the beginning is unsure whether the new site will be able to deliver quality products and features in a timely manner.
A good way to solve this is by seeding the new site with proven, seasoned leaders and strong contributors — even better if they are personally known to the leadership.
And then to deliver on committed features and projects early and often to build trust in the newly hired team.
2. Carving out a charter: More often than not, there are no clear, broad areas available to assign to the new site initially. So typically, smaller areas are assigned to the new teams in the new site. After the new teams show promise and gain trust, there’s often friction in transferring a fuller, broader charter from already existing teams in the headquarters to the new site — potentially making the existing teams feel uncomfortable and insecure.
A good way to address this is by building a culture of always thinking company-first. What’s best for the company is, finally, the best for all teams.
Secondly, it’s important to assure all the teams of their criticality to the company, and ensure significant charters remain allocated to all teams in all sites, even after any needed restructuring.
Thirdly, popularizing a clear strategic vision around charter allocation across sites would help get a buy-in from all teams from all sites. More below.
Have a strategic view on charter allocation
The best way to do this is to take a holistic 10,000-foot view of the structure of the company, and then using first principles thinking, divide the organization into clear, independent areas of ownership, each area having well defined mission and goals. Then strategically allocate these areas (charters) to sites to optimize for organizational efficiency, taking into account skill-sets available at different sites, site growth plans, etc and while minimizing effort needed to transition to that structure. Some aspects to consider in doing this:
- Independence of the areas: Charters should be independent and require minimal overhead of collaboration with other sites in executing their goals.
- Co-location of related teams/functions: Teams that work together a lot are better located in the same site. Even functions that support those teams should be co-located — for example, product and design teams supporting the engineering teams. This reduces the collaboration overhead, and improves feature velocity.
- Proximity to customers or dependencies: Teams that need to interact with customers or vendors are better located in the same time zone as them.
- Global Support model: Sometimes, support-related functions may be ideally located in all sites for local support, or for follow-the-sun model for production support.
Having an easy to understand vision and strategy regarding charter allocation would help employees at all sites appreciate the organizational choices, thus ensuring a feeling of security and enabling stronger empathic relationships between the sites.
Site Champions
It may be useful to assign a few leaders in HQ to be “champions” of the remote site. They would be responsible for:
- Ensuring the overall success of the remote site
- Meet the remote site leadership periodically to understand challenges being faced, and then get them addressed by the company leadership
- Make sure the remote site health is considered in key decisions at the leadership level.
- To look for opportunities for the remote site to contribute when new projects are created, in alignment with the charter allocation strategy.
Culture
Culture is something which arises organically as the company grows from a handful people to a substantially sized company. Culture is not just the way the team tends to behave, but includes the values and principles the team develops over time that play a crucial role in the success of the company.
Hence it’s important for the remote site to adhere to the global culture of the company. This not only helps teams collaborate better across sites — but more importantly, enables leadership to have more confidence in the success and the ongoing health of the remote site, to believe the remote site will be able to execute on company goals just as headquarters does.
Spreading and establishing cultural values is a well understood process across the industry. It helps to define the values in a succinct way with plenty of examples, publicizing them across the company, rewarding great examples of following cultural values on an ongoing basis in team gatherings, aligning team performance and promotion processes to the cultural values, etc. For remote sites it also helps to have seasoned employees travel there and share success stories of following the company values.
Local, unique flavors: It’s helpful, even desirable, to allow local, unique flavors of the company culture to develop — on top of the global company values. This empowers the site to have the freedom to experiment with exploring new cultural values that could even improve on the company success formula or improve employee satisfaction — these values, if successful, can even later be incorporated in the global company value rubric, thus transforming the company to a truly global company!
Collaboration
Collaboration is often the hardest problem to solve for a remote site, but one of the most important.
There are many aspects that need addressing for healthy collaboration with the new site.
Culture of inclusion and empathy
Healthy collaboration with a remote site in a distant time zone cannot be achieved without a deliberate push from the top leadership to establish a company-wide culture of inclusion and empathy.
Being inclusive would mean employees make a fair attempt to ensure that their colleagues in a remote site are not “left out” (of any important event, discussion, decision, sharing of information, etc).
Empathy will help employees be cognizant of the fact that their remote colleagues may be attending many meetings in odd hours — and to seek out more sustainable processes that discomfort employees in all sites equally, with a company-first mindset.
If meetings in late evening or early morning are required, it often helps to designate certain days of the week on which these meetings should be scheduled, and be flexible in allowing employees to take personal time during normal business hours to avoid burnout due to long working hours. Another strategy that helps with this problem is to ensure cross-site meetings are efficient, with clear agenda sent beforehand, and when possible, instead of meetings, asynchronous channels be used like sharing meeting notes or recordings from a local site meeting.
Information free flow
Top-down:
All information flowing down from the leadership (business situation, leadership priorities, product roadmaps, financial matters, organizational changes, etc) to the teams should be necessarily shared with remote sites — via broad email announcements, screenings or dedicated sessions for remote sites of important all-hands events, etc.
This makes remote site employees feel more connected with the company, the company mission, and keeps them more engaged and motivated. Not doing this may eventually lead to increased attrition over time.
Bottoms-up:
It is equally important that teams in HQ do not feel that remote teams are disconnected, and that information from them is not available when they require it.
To address this, all bottoms-up information from the site like project status should be frequently shared via newsletters etc and be made available on tap via status web-pages, etc. Product launches or milestone announcements should also be broadly shared via email or presented in relevant forums.
Its also important to create and share good documents of work being done at remote sites — including engineering design, product specs etc. This helps with transparency and visibility, as well as builds trust that processes are being followed correctly.
Knowledge sharing
Bootstrapping knowledge in the new remote teams can be pretty challenging. Initially this is hard work — requiring multiple cross-time-zone meetings for knowledge transfers. One strategy is to have teams across sites work together on a project temporarily — this has a big collaboration overhead but enables rapid sharing of institutional and tribal knowledge.
Instituting a company-wide culture of better documentation, available recordings of tutorial sessions, and creating live/online training modules can help with scaled knowledge learning across the organization.
Care must also be taken to ensure continuing knowledge sharing across sites — this can be done by ensuring live or offline global participation in important meetings and discussions like tech talks, best practices sessions, outage reviews, business challenges/strategy sessions, etc.
For the next step in evolution of the remote site in the knowledge ladder, their senior employees should strive to work with senior employees at headquarters on broad company-wide initiatives — like defining best practices for the entire company, defining next generation technical architecture, taking part in global eng excellence activities, solving critical company-wide problems, etc. This will help break knowledge and influence barriers across sites, and help further dissipate knowledge to junior employees at all sites.
Engagement and Human connection
It is important to keep employees in remote sites engaged in company activities and events. This increases global collaboration, feeling of camaraderie, connection with the company, etc.
To facilitate this, company events and activities should be designed to ensure participation across sites. And participation should not just be passive, but all sites must be encouraged to participate actively by being presenters, facilitators, volunteers, etc. Some company events and activities should be hosted from remote sites, if possible.
It’s important that employees develop a human connection as well with their fellow colleagues in other sites. Informal virtual gatherings, cross-site team building activities and site visits can help.
Last, but not the least, recognition and appreciation of work done in remote sites in global forums can be crucial in making remote site employees feel valued — this can greatly increase employee satisfaction and the feeling of kinship among all employees globally.
Join us as we apply these principles to our new site
We know that applying these principles in practice will be harder than just knowing them! However, we are motivated to make the site succeed, and we have proven that we can do this with our Singapore site.
Ethos’s Singapore site has been a great success in all key dimensions — people: we have been able to hire talented team members who are motivated, effective, and connected — and impact: the site has already developed, among other things, our industry-leading, real-time underwriting engine and configurable question engine from scratch — the two technologies that are among the most critical parts of our product and underpin the disruption Ethos has brought to the insurance industry.
We look forward to doing a rinse and repeat at the Bengaluru site!
We have already laid the foundations by hiring a great founding team for the site and laying the seed for multiple teams ranging from engineering to product to program management that will work together. We have identified significant and critical areas that the new site would build — from our core policy administration engine to critical platform components like payments, fraud, identity, data engineering, data science/ML, product analytics, security and more!
Join us as we apply these principles and learnings to building a new successful site! You will get to work with other talented, driven individuals, learning and growing at a great pace — all while disrupting a huge industry!
Check out our Careers page and contact us at APAC-Recruiting@getethos.com
Gaurang Khetan joined Ethos in Jan 2022 as an Engineering Director, India Site Lead. When Gaurang isn’t driving teams to deliver promised features at a fast pace with high quality, he enjoys spending time with family, traveling, netflix-and-chilling, and playing badminton and chess. Interested in joining the India team? Learn more about our career opportunities here.
