Christophe has been building Slite fully remotely since 2016 and constantly writes about the next frontiers of work on his blog.
With a team of 40 remote workers in 12 countries, Slite attended YC in 2018, raised more than 15M$ with incredible investors such as Spark Capital and Index ventures, and is serving tens of thousands of teams every month.
At the 2023 Running Remote Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, Christophe will be speaking about the future of work and addressing the five dysfunctions of remote work. You can expect him to discuss topics such as dedicated tools for decision-making, how to address information overload, and fostering innovation in remote teams.
We had the chance to ask Christophe four important questions about remote work, and his insights are a must-read for any remote leader, founder, or manager. He talks about the importance of building a super well-aligned distributed team, the emergence of tools dedicated to location-independent work, the best way to work with a balance of synchronous and asynchronous communication, and how AI is transforming the future of work by making knowledge more accessible.
Christophe reveals Slite’s AI-powered tool, Ask, which allows teams to ask natural language questions and receive answers quickly, making information more accessible for remote teams.
Don’t miss out on learning from Chris’s many years of experience and expertise as the CEO of a successful remote company.
Q1: What is the question you get asked the most about remote work?
Chris: Probably a variation of “You don’t really have the same connection as the one in the office, do you?” which I interpret as “How can you build a super well-aligned team in remote (both strategic alignment and personal bonding)?”
Q2: What trend in remote management are you most optimistic about? Where do you see remote work in 3 years?
Chris: I’m quite excited about the emergence of tools dedicated to remote work. I believe we hacked together tools to make it work in the past, and we’re finally starting to work with tools built for us.
When it comes to remote management, I believe it gives us tools to encourage a few key practices. The first example that comes to mind would be more deliberate decision-making.
Having clear systems lets you assign roles with simple RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed), having elaborate arguments, logging decisions, and sharing them with your team transparently feel absolutely essential to remote teams.
Q3: What’s the best way to work? Async or sync? Fully remote or hybrid?
Chris: At this point, I’m almost opposed to the word async, as it continuously is interpreted in an extreme manner.
I believe we all need a balance: all mediums (chat, documents, long-from discussions, video calls, etc) are available, have low constraints, and employees pick their tools and rhythm to suit their schedule. But also, very limited number of meetings with more than 3 people.
Regarding full remote vs hybrid – I’m curious.
It seems that hybrid will be the norm for the next few years, but I’m curious about how well it will work. My fear would be to see an inadequate office culture in teams where half of the people are not in the building, this would lead to a lot of unhappy people and poor business results.
Q4: Where do you see AI coming into play with remote work over the next year?
Chris: We are building a work tool with other remote teams in mind at all times. Our goal is to make all their knowledge accessible to each other and make it universal.
So we’ve had to think about AI, a lot.
For us, one of the biggest challenges of remote work is access to information. When you wake up a few hours before your teammate, you can easily lose these hours without the right information.
To solve this we built Ask, a GPT-based experience to ask, in natural language, anything to your workspace, and I believe it will be massive for teams that can’t rely on physical interaction.
