Scaling a tech company with remote workers: benefits and tips

We started Lodgify, a leading software provider for vacation rental hosts and property managers, back in 2013 as a team of four. Initially, the team balanced separate full-time jobs during the day and worked on Lodgify in the evenings, both remotely and from coworking spaces, transforming their passion project into the company it is today.

Fast-forward 11 years, and we’re now a team of over 340 employees from over 60 countries, with an office in Barcelona and teams all over the world, including the US, South America and Asia.

Allowing remote work has been a major catalyst for our growth, but we haven’t always been a remote team. After launching Lodgify, we were a fully in-person company. It took the Covid-19 pandemic to show us that working remotely wouldn’t negatively affect productivity or engagement. Quite the opposite: it brought benefits that have since made us stronger than ever.

Why we haven’t looked back since going remote

Happier employees are more productive.

When companies started returning to in-person work after Covid, we were excited to offer our employees the option to work from home a certain number of days per month, which they’d have to request ahead of time through our HR platform.

Unfortunately, people didn’t take to our plan as we expected. Instead, they wanted full flexibility, with the ability to work in person or remotely with no restrictions.

It’s critical to take your employees’ preferences seriously. An Oxford University study has shown that workers are 13 per cent more productive when happy, which comes as no surprise when you think about it. This is also a matter of trust. While many companies worry about remote employees being productive with less oversight, research actually shows that employees in high-trust companies report 50 per cent higher productivity. So, when we eventually sent out a survey to get our employees’ opinions, our next step was clear: we needed to let employees choose where to work.

Hiring the right people, regardless of location

Allowing remote work has had benefits beyond that of a happy and productive staff, the biggest being the ability to widen our pool of candidates.

Having our main offices in Barcelona has meant that we’ve always had access to a large and talented pool of candidates, but adding remote candidates to the mix naturally expands your talent base. Allowing remote work also makes a big difference when it comes to retaining talent, as 40 per cent of employees report that flexibility is a top factor keeping them at their jobs.

With customers all over the world, we take great care to ensure we provide excellent service, with team members available in all our customers’ time zones. It’s also crucial that we have product, sales and customer success team members who can speak our customers’ languages.

Similarly, our marketing team has to be representative of our customer base in order to create effective campaigns – not only to be able to speak our customers’ languages, but also to speak to their pain points. This global presence allows us to understand our customers better and be responsive to their needs, no matter where they are.

Being able to hire outside of Barcelona has made it much easier to find candidates that meet these requirements, and just about any tech company would see similar benefits.

Diverse perspectives

Having access to a wider candidate pool also makes it easier to hire diverse candidates, which is important for any business, but especially so for those with a global customer base and an industry such as ours. With customers all over the world, who in turn have guests from all over the world, it’s crucial that we have a team that reflects their diverse perspectives and cultures.

Our marketing team exemplifies this diversity: 22 people across 15 nationalities, creating campaigns in seven languages. I have no doubt that this multicultural environment contributes to the team’s creativity and effectiveness.

After all, a large part of the travel industry is about interacting with and learning from new cultures, and the more we can embody that as a company, the more successful we will be.

How to do it right

Invest in the right tools

Granted, going remote isn’t as easy as updating your policy. You need to have the right tools in place to enable and sustain remote work, so thinking carefully about your tech stack is key.

Which solutions you choose depends on your industry and the size of your company, and tools will likely vary by department as well. However, at a company level, we’ve had a lot of success with Notion for project management, Slack for communication, Personio for HR and Google Workspace solutions for storage, content creation, meetings and more.

Having these solutions in place has been key in moving our efforts online.

Document everything

Once you have the right tools to work remotely, documentation is necessary to make sure everyone is on the same page. We have teams that work in different time zones, and many of our departments have flexible working hours, so documentation is essential to make sure everyone has the visibility they need and can get their questions answered at any hour of the day.

The productivity software Notion has been crucial for this, allowing us to create, assign and track tasks, take and organise meeting notes, and document processes. Creating a habit of documentation across teams – in which we assume that, regardless of the project or process, someone will probably need these details at some point – means the information you need is always readily available.

This is beneficial even for teams that do work synchronously, because rather than stopping your work to get someone up to speed, they can simply review what’s on Notion.

Embrace a positive team culture, remotely

Nevertheless, tools and documentation alone aren’t enough to ensure success as a hybrid or remote company. Many organisations make the mistake of assuming culture only matters for in-person environments, but embracing a positive team culture is actually a differentiator of the most successful remote companies.

Remember, the flipside of widening your candidate pool to remote workers is that they have way more job options as well. Creating an environment that’s attractive to candidates is one of the best ways to attract top talent.

At Lodgify, we’ve put a lot of effort into our team culture since allowing fully remote work, a challenge that’s double-sided since we also have employees in the office.

One of the efforts that’s worked the most is what we call “The Crew”, a group made up of employees who volunteer to plan all types of team-building activities to boost team spirit. While some of these events are in-person for our Barcelona-based employees, such as hikes and sports tournaments, they also prioritise remote activities that everyone can join.

We also use tools to our advantage here. For example, creating Slack channels for everyone to share nonwork-related messages helps us increase engagement, and using tools such as 15Five to integrate praises directly into Slack encourages a culture of recognition. Essentially, we want to mimic the kinds of watercooler activities people miss out on when they’re not at the office, because we know that they’re essential in helping people feel connected to one another.

Recognise when it pays off to come together

Finally, we’ve found that one of the best ways to successfully go remote is to… not always be remote.

Let me explain.

Twice a year, we fly the entire team into Barcelona for what we call “company week”, in which we have workshops, team-building activities and a party at the end of the week to celebrate. We also have an annual event in Buenos Aires for our team in LATAM.

Our most recent company week was at the beginning of June, and it was yet another reminder of how important this time is for us. The office comes alive as everyone gets to see each other again, meet in person for the first time and interact with people they don’t usually work with. Even if work is back to normal the week after, remote employees return home with a renewed sense of being on – and part of – a team.

This makes the investment in this kind of event more than worth it, because it allows us to have the best of both worlds: flexibility and trust that promote employee happiness and productivity, as well as engagement and a sense of shared purpose. It’s the kind of win-win that many people don’t think is possible with remote work, but absolutely is – if you approach it right.

For more information about Lodgify, visit www.lodgify.com.

About Lodgify

Lodgify is the all-in-one vacation rental platform that empowers independent hosts and property managers with tools to start and grow their businesses. The platform enables hosts, regardless of their level of technical knowledge or experience, to easily create their own website, accept direct bookings and payments and synchronise all their property data, reservations and guest communications across major OTA channels such as Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, Expedia and more. It centralises all property management tasks so hosts can prioritise increasing occupancy and visibility and providing excellent service to their guests.

About the author

Lorna Rivers is Head of HR at Lodgify, where she has played a key role in scaling the company’s in-person and remote teams. Prior to becoming Head of HR, Lorna served as a Talent Acquisition & HR Generalist and later Human Resources Manager for Lodgify. Her educational background is in psychology and business, with a focus on human resources management and services.