Work Your Way With Olu Adedeji, Founder At StayHired

Laura Beales 2 minute read

Work Your Way is our new blog series in which individuals give their honest answers about how they like to work when working remotely. From how to create and maintain a work culture when working remotely, to how they best like to work remotely, they share their insights and top tips.

Olu Adedeji, Founder at StayHired shares with us his thoughts on how to maintain their company culture whilst working remotely and the importance of leadership. StayHired is a conversational hiring platform for Startups, providing a radically different hiring experience for Startups and Jobseekers.

What is the biggest advantage to the company of working remotely?

Flexibility, allowing people to potentially work on their side projects without feeling chained to a desk. Side projects range from charity work to "side hustles".

Remote-Friendly or Remote-First?

Remote-First right now, I am looking for self starters, people who can manage their time without supervision. People I can trust who want to run a department, lead a large team or a company one day.

How do you keep remote work visible?

We're results/output driven.

Communicating the challenge; collaborating with the team to estimate the timelines and managing delivery risk with milestones and scheduled check-ins is really helpful.

Providing visibility; well we do this using a number of tools, Trello and Slack being a couple. The key is to have a communications strategy. So, weekly video meetings where members of the team come together to share achievements.(not issues)

Daily "blocker meetings"; where team members get to raise the key issues preventing them from showcasing their achievements on the weekly video meetings.

Of course there is the regular chatter on slack to resolve transient issues together, and a Kanban board like Trello to track weekly progress and report milestones.

Keeping the above as your MO and communication approach ensures that everyone is aligned on the goal and specifically the outputs at every stage

How do you maintain and create a company culture when working remotely?

How you lead sets an example for your employees. If you lead with integrity, you are open you admit when you are wrong and you are empathetic and compassionate, as a leader your employees can see this. They see it in your body language on the video calls, they hear it in your voice, they see it when you write and how you praise them for the work that they do. Company culture comes largely from the leadership style of the founder.

For example if you are bad at estimation and take on work your team will struggle to deliver, then you as the founder will radiate stress and in turn create a stressful working environment. This creates opportunities for less politeness, short tempers and a blame culture. I should know I worked in investment banking for 2 decades.

Where is your favourite place to work from when working remotely?

I like coffee shops if I have no meetings planned. It's great to see and speak to other people outside of family and work colleagues. I thoroughly enjoyed working for 2 weeks out in Malaga and then in Malta, before the pandemic.

A good hack for finding people in your industry if you work remotely, is to attend seminars and social evening events in your industry once a month

A big thank you to Olu for his honest answers and insights into Stay Hired. Make sure you check out StayHired.

With Tally Workspace, we can find your team a private office to call home or you can instantly book meeting rooms and desks.