Business Tip Image by Pete Linforth from PixabayThis is the 30th in a series of business tips from industry leaders that Enterprise Times has interviewed.

Enterprise Times recently interviewed Martin Buhr, founder and CEO of Tyk. Tyk offers a modern API Management platform, and Buhr shared his thought about the future of integration and API Management. He is also a CEO that works thousands of miles from his head office. The company was worked remotely almost from day one.

Working remotely

Martin Buhr, Founder and CEO of Tyk.io
Martin Buhr, Founder and CEO of Tyk.io

Enterprise Times asked Buhr to give a tip for a founder starting up their company that wants to consider that remote working culture similar to the one he founded?

“Learn to let go. That’ll be the headline. Essentially, the biggest problem with working remotely, especially when you have a large timezone distance as I do, and quite a few of our staff do.

“The one thing that you need to remove from your mindset of working is you have to trust the people you’re dependent on to do their jobs. And they have to be able to trust you. You have to let go of the stuff you can’t control. In an office, you can walk up to somebody and put pressure on them, or you can get an immediate update, or you can immediately, at least, try and get something done. You can pretend to be active.

“When you’re working remote, that’s far less possible because you don’t know if people are lying. You don’t necessarily have too much face to face contact. So a lot is done on trust, which means a lot has to depend on good communications.

“It all comes down to sort of how well you communicate without clogging up everybody’s diaries. It’s a subtle art. It’s a psychological piece. We have to get used to saying, I trust you, do this task, and they will do it. Have a good way of interacting; that’s critical, right from the start.”

Learning from the development team

“Developers have got it down because we’ve got GitHub, and we built these remote work systems to help them isolate. I think it might just be within the nature of developers wanting more headspace.

“If you want to take that model and apply it to a marketing team, a sales team, or an ops team, it’s more traditional to go into a meeting room to solve problems. Moving that to document-based, Slack based mechanisms can lead to a whole bunch of trouble. You start writing ethics guides.

“Remember the flame war of the 90s, when that was a thing. It’s still a thing. It is just happening in Slack. So it’s very much about learning good internet etiquette and communication skills.”

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