Half the CTOs I know are scrambling right now. Offices closed Friday, everyone’s home Monday, and nobody has a plan. I’ve been fielding calls all weekend.
Here’s the thing – at Decloud , we’ve been fully remote since day one. Not as a pandemic response. By design. So I’m not theorizing here. This is what actually works.
You don’t need a 40-page remote work policy. You need to unblock your team this week and set three or four norms that prevent chaos. That’s it.
Week one: just unblock people
Nothing else matters if your engineers can’t access the systems they need from home. This is your only priority for the first few days.
- VPN or zero-trust access – test it. Half your team has never used it outside the office.
- MFA on everything critical. If you haven’t done this yet, now’s the time. Security doesn’t get a pass because things are hectic.
- Make sure people have decent hardware. Laptop, headset, stable internet. Ship monitors to anyone who needs one. Don’t be cheap about this – a $300 monitor pays for itself in a week of productivity.
- Set up a single support channel for “I can’t access X” problems. Staff it. The first week will be a flood of small blockers. Clear them fast.
Set three norms and actually enforce them
You don’t need a communication manifesto. You need these three things:
1. Async by default. Write your updates so someone in a different timezone (or just eating lunch) can read them and act without scheduling a call. A daily standup message in Slack is worth more than a 30-minute video call where half the team zones out.
2. Meetings need agendas. No agenda, no meeting. This was good practice before. Now it’s survival. I’ve watched teams fill every hour with Zoom calls within three days of going remote. The result is zero deep work and everyone’s exhausted by Wednesday.
3. It’s okay to not respond instantly. This is the one most managers get wrong. They see someone’s Slack dot go grey and panic. Stop. Measure output, not presence. If your engineers are shipping, leave them alone.
The stuff people forget
PRs become your main communication channel. Treat them that way. Good descriptions, clear context on why something changed, how to test it. Hallway conversations don’t exist anymore – the PR is where knowledge transfer happens now.
People will burn out faster than you expect. Working from home isn’t a vacation. The boundary between work and life evaporates. I’ve seen it. Encourage your team to set hard stop times. Lead by example – don’t send messages at midnight and expect nobody to notice.
New hires are the most vulnerable. They can’t lean over and ask someone a question. Assign them a buddy. Give them a small, well-scoped first task. Check in daily for the first two weeks. This is where remote-first companies either win or lose.
One more thing
Stop trying to recreate the office over Zoom. You’re not going to replicate the whiteboard or the water cooler. That’s fine. Remote work is a different mode, not a worse one.
The teams that accept this and build new habits around async communication, written decisions, and trust-based management will come out of this stronger. The teams that spend all day on video calls trying to simulate an open floor plan will burn out in a month.
I’ve been doing this for years. It works. But only if you commit to it instead of treating it as a temporary inconvenience.
Got questions? Reach out. Happy to help.