RemoteRated Essential Advice: Darren Buckner Cofounder & CEO of Workfrom

Each week at RemoteRated.com, we speak with leading remote CEOs to share practical insights on running and growing remote teams and companies. This week, we speak with Darren Buckner, co-founder & CEO of Workfrom, building powerful tools and workspaces to make remote work feel more connected and collaborative.

Darren is no stranger to remote, having worked as a remote software engineer in the past, and in that experience discovered his love of remote work. We speak about the importance of trust, flow-states, and developing authentic personal connection as a remote team.

The full video of the interview is below, we’ve condensed the conversation to make the takeaways easy and practical!

Darren’s Essential Remote Advice:

• As a CEO you have to be a good example on all levels, not just on standards and culture, but on work style and boundaries. It’s critical to demonstrate to the team that your best work doesn’t have to happen in the confines of a 9-to-5, and that in some cases, your best work may happen at ‘atypical’ times. Show. Don’t tell.
• “Win the Morning”: I really loved this one personally. Darren makes a point to build routines for success, good breakfast, good workout, things to start the day on a high note to build momentum.
• Foster a culture of trust. All the benefits and performance advantages of remote teamwork can become quickly eroded with excessive supervising and micro-management.
• Recognize that trust comes from understanding, so build structure into the business to catalyze personal connections between teammates, have conversations that go beyond the work, and beyond the company.
• Personalization goes a long way! Don’t get lazy with things that scale easily but neglect to keep things real, authentic, and personalized — if a team event or get together has elements that specifically engage the interests and passions of your team, the results will pay dividends!
• As a leader, make sure your team are learning how to maximize the benefits of remote work, happy teammates make for effective teammates, so proactively encourage midday breaks, workouts, etc.
• Develop routines for yourself as an individual, and also for the company as a whole. Shared rituals and elements of structure allow for asynchronous and distributed teams to thrive.

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