This Remote CEO Explains Why CEOs Should Never Lead Company Social Activities

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Sharon Koifman has been running businesses remotely for 18 years, and now he helps companies around the globe hire full-time remote workers with his agency DistantJob. He’s also publishing a book, Surviving Remote Work, all about how to become the best possible remote employee (or manager). In our interview, Sharon shared a couple lessons he learned the hard way - namely, why CEOs should never try to be their company’s social centre. 

The perils of CEO-driven company socializing

→ When Sharon first started DistantJob, he went remote as a matter of cost: no office expenses and geographic arbitrage on salaries. This was also the value he thought he was offering to clients - a cheap talent solution. 

→ He soon realized the paradox that if you see humans as simply outsourced cheap labor, they won’t perform as well for you. He switched his mentality - and DistantJob’s work - to focus on placing full-time remote employees. 

→ As a result, he immediately tried to become what he called the “social centre” of the company. He’d bring everyone together for Zoom happy hours and crack jokes. The feedback was dismal: no one was having fun. 

Remaking socializing for remote work

→ After collecting feedback from employees, two themes emerged: they didn’t like that Sharon was driving all the company social activities and they didn’t like being forced into big digital groups. Both resulted in feelings of disengagement. 

→ As a result, the company revamped how it socialized: 

* The company uses Donut, a Slack app to match people for 1-1 coffee chats. 

* Further leveraging Slack, there are different channels for different kinds of socializing and fun, so people can pop into the “rooms” they are interested in - food, board games, etc. 

* The company is “99.999%” remote, but will occasionally get together around conferences (back when that was possible) - this allowed the team to socialize at night but also learn and connect with the latest industry trends during the day. 

The final word

“When you have too many people in a physical or zoom meeting, the majority of people don’t get invested in that meeting. But when you have one, two, or three individuals … you can really get to know them.”

Image courtesy DistantJob

Remotely Inclined Chats with Sharon Koifman

Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.

Stefan: Welcome, Sharon! Can you share how you got into remote work and what your company DistantJob is all about?

Sharon: I’ve been running businesses from my computer for about 18 years. I started off running a web hosting company - and I’d even started a company before that where I was trying to create one of the first music distribution sites, though unlike Napster it would all be legal. 

I didn’t really have money. So when I decided to find myself, I was sharing my hosting account with a few colleagues of mine and charging them. Next thing you know, we had about 3,000 clients and that music site never came to be. 

So hosting became my first company. We had offices in India. Had our servers originally in Texas then moved to New Jersey. I was sitting by myself running this entire operation. I realized my