Why Qontrol chose remote working

At Qontrol, the team works entirely remotely. Not even in a hybrid model with some presence in the office each week: we do not have an office, the team is spread across all regions of France, and the corporate headquarters is a mailbox that forwards us our (almost nonexistent) paper mail.

Since the startup's creation, this has been a subject of curiosity and questioning for many people we talk to. It seems quite rare to have chosen 100% remote work and not a mixed approach.

How can this work? Isn't human contact an essential ingredient for progress? Don't we turn into lonely, desocialized robots?

These are legitimate questions, especially in this post-COVID period where the "Return To the Office" (RTO) is instituted by tech giants (but not all), advocated by iconic figures like Elon Musk, or presented as more efficient by recent studies.

Several tech startups have adopted this way of working and share their remote culture and tools to facilitate asynchronous work, an indispensable ingredient for full remote. We contribute to this discussion with a series of blog posts on these topics.

Our experience is that with a well-organized and thoughtful setup, remote work is both effective and enjoyable for a tech startup like us. I don't think it's the only way to succeed, but it's the one that best suits us, with its advantages and disadvantages.

It's important to emphasize that efficiency and comfort do not come for free when implementing full remote work: it requires building different work methods from physical collaboration in an office, suitable tools, and coherent investments.

I want to share our experience on these topics to inspire curious teams who may be considering a similar organization, and to initiate a dialogue where everyone can share their best practices.

What do we mean by remote work? It's working from a distance, from wherever is most comfortable, collaborating thanks to a (good) internet connection. It's important to note that remote work doesn't necessarily imply working alone at home; it can also mean working from a shared space.

The immediate first consequence is immense autonomy for everyone. Not being in the same room, within sight or conversation reach, everyone essentially does exactly what they want with their day.

This is often the first feedback I hear, me being the CEO and thus leading the team: "aren't you afraid that nobody will do anything?"

A natural reaction, indeed, but in my opinion, it misses the essence of a functioning team. A successful startup isn't because the team was forced to work every open minute of the day. It's because a passionate team thinks and produces together a new solution to a problem.

If constraint or surveillance are part of the necessary cocktail for production, I think there's a problem with motivation or recruitment that will manifest in multiple ways to make the company fail. Being in the same offices can sometimes compensate for these underlying problems, but I believe it's a deception and remote work has the good idea of not providing a means to hide such misalignment -- for the better.

Of course, we don't live in an idyllic world where every day is a blessing. In remote work or not, success is sweat, toil, discipline; talent and the associated myth of succeeding with laziness, it doesn't exist, no more in French Tech than anywhere else.

And it's organized. Motivation and perseverance, they don't grow on trees, even binary ones. It's the consequence of a solid organization, thoughtfully managed with demanding discipline towards result-oriented goals rather than means-oriented goals.

Remote work wonderfully makes it impossible to manage by means. We manage by results, and the benefits are significant: everyone is motivated by their goals, team support is oriented towards collective results, the freedom of organization fosters constant creativity. The motivation isn't to appear at work, but to provide or exceed the results we seek to achieve.

So the first observation I can share after three years of remote work and two fundraising rounds is that remote work is perfectly devoid of the notion of relaxation often attributed to it! At least in our situation of a fast-growing startup with aggressive short-term objectives.

There would be many topics to cover to go beyond this initial presentation and answer the questions often asked of me: how to create a cohesive team remotely (hint: regular in-person offsites), how to create a pleasant daily routine (hint: well-chosen tools and processes), how to organize information flow (hint: culture of writing), ... We will return to share our findings and more or less successful experiments in a series of articles on this blog!

We will be delighted to collect your questions, doubts, and experiences to address them in future articles or simply to discuss them.

To not miss anything and join the conversation, follow Qontrol on LinkedIn.

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