Move to the Edge, Declare it Center

Chapter 6PUTTING PRACTICES INTO ACTION: SUSTAINING A REMOTE‐FIRST COMPANY

Remote? Distributed? Hybrid? In‐office? These questions are no longer theoretical, because since 2020 every company has needed to navigate this decision. This is a “live” complex problem that has affected everyone, and for those of you who are making difficult decisions about your companies, colleagues, and employees, I'm with you in experiencing many “I don't know” moments in the past two years.

There is no universal right answer, but I believe remote‐first is the best answer for Truss, in part because we've put this hypothesis to the test for a decade. What's more important is that we used the Exterior and Interior practices in Move to the Edge, Declare It Center to come to this conclusion, and we remain open to continuing to improve and refine these practices so our employees and clients can thrive in this new normal of work.

This chapter concludes the book with the pragmatic nuts‐and‐bolts of how we build and sustain a distributed, remote‐first company. The purpose of this section is to share the details of how we implement these practices at Truss so you can adapt them to your organization. In addition, there are some Interior practice exercises you can try on your own. Over the last decade, we've collected these practices into the Truss Distributed Playbook, so this is the result of many iterations, ...