This article is part of our Building in Public series where our Remote Operations team shares our experiences as we build and manage a distributed workforce at Oyster. Our hope is that by sharing our tips, strategies, and lessons we've learned along the way we can inspire other teams to adopt a new, distributed way of working.
One of the most important changes to the way we work that's happened in the past decade is an openness to remote work, which evolved from just 6.5% of private sector workers at home in 2019 into a massive experiment in full-time remote work during the pandemic.
While many companies spent most of the pandemic making do with their employees working from home, a surprising number have adopted a remote or hybrid model more permanently; in the first quarter of 2024, 35.5 million people teleworked, accounting for 22.9% of the workforce.
As such, they're giving deeper thought to how they run their distributed teams to ensure they're both happy and productive. And that typically means hiring a remote operations role or at the very least a consultant, to bring their expertise to managing remote or distributed teams.
As Oyster's Head of Remote, I know a thing or two about the unique challenges of running a company when you have employees in different time zones. After a career in Product Management, I started my first company with employees located across Europe and Latin America and quickly discovered that distributed workforces require a different style of leadership and operations.
That inspired me to start my own consulting firm Delocate, which helped companies operate better as distributed teams. Oyster was an early client and soon enough my team and I were brought in-house via an acquisition and I became Oyster's Head of Remote.
Defining the role: What is a Head of Remote?
A Head of Remote is the leader responsible for making distributed teams productive and connected. They strategize, design, and communicate processes that help remote employees thrive—essentially turning any company into the best distributed organization it can be.
Typically this role focuses on both Operations and People operations, or in other words developing standards and best practices for how we work, and ensuring our employee experience is a good one, and people feel supported in a distributed setup.
On the Operations front, a Head of Remote builds autonomy for employees and ensures that individuals and teams can operate in a way that minimizes the effect of time zones, mainly by ensuring people aren't too dependent on others to get their job done.
Here's why this matters: imagine an employee gets blocked on a project because they need information from a colleague. In a traditional office, they walk over and get their answer. But what happens when that colleague is 10 time zones away?
- The problem: Remote employees can't wait half a day for answers—productivity grinds to a halt. This is a critical problem to solve, as overall productivity growth has been positively associated with the rise of remote work.
- The solution: Self-service documentation and knowledge management systems
- The culture shift: Everyone becomes responsible for documenting their knowledge, not just hoarding it
On the People side of things, a Head of Remote will look to optimize employee experience to ensure their team can benefit from the positive elements of distributed work, such as fewer distractions, more inclusivity, more focus and flexibility, while also mitigating or minimizing the challenges of distributed work. They'll work to prevent things like overwork leading to potential burnout or isolation—a key concern, as fully remote employees are more likely to experience loneliness (27%) than hybrid or on-site workers—and create opportunities for social connection.
What Does a Head of Remote Do? Core Responsibilities
Beyond the high-level strategy, what does a Head of Remote focus on day-to-day? The role is deeply cross-functional, touching every part of the distributed employee lifecycle. While responsibilities vary, they typically fall into four key pillars:
- Strategy and Documentation: They design and champion the company's remote work philosophy. This includes creating the remote employee handbook, establishing documentation standards, and ensuring knowledge is accessible to everyone, regardless of their time zone.
- Operations and Process: They build the operational rails for the company to run on. This means optimizing asynchronous workflows, selecting and integrating collaboration tools, and designing communication protocols so that information flows effectively without constant meetings.
- Culture and Experience: They are the stewards of remote culture. This involves creating intentional opportunities for connection, designing remote-first onboarding and offboarding experiences, and developing programs to combat burnout and promote well-being.
- Enablement and Leadership: They act as a coach for the entire organization. They train managers to lead distributed teams effectively and help all team members develop the skills—like written communication and self-management—needed to thrive in a remote setting.
Skills and Qualifications Required for a Head of Remote
A great Head of Remote is part strategist, part operator, and part culture champion. They don't just understand remote work in theory; they've lived the challenges and know how to solve them. You're not just looking for a project manager or an HR generalist. You need someone with a unique blend of skills.
Look for candidates with:
- Cross-functional leadership experience: They must be able to influence and align stakeholders from People, IT, Finance, and Legal without direct authority.
- Deep operational expertise: Experience in building systems, managing complex projects, and driving process improvement is non-negotiable. Many successful Heads of Remote come from backgrounds in Product or Operations.
- Exceptional communication skills: They must be masters of written, asynchronous communication and be able to articulate a clear vision for remote work to the entire company.
- High emotional intelligence: They need to be empathetic listeners who can understand the nuanced challenges of distributed team members and build a culture of trust and psychological safety.
Head of Remote Salary and Career Path
Since the Head of Remote role is relatively new, compensation varies widely but typically aligns with senior leadership positions.
- Salary benchmark: Director or VP-level in People Operations or Business Operations
- Factors affecting pay: Company size, industry, and growth stage
Career paths are still evolving, but here's what we're seeing:
- Destination role: Combines passion for remote work with operational expertise
- Stepping stone: Can lead to COO, Chief of Staff, or Chief People Officer roles
- Key advantage: Deep understanding of how the entire business operates
Does my company need a Head of Remote?
Whether your company needs a Head of Remote is dependent on how many of the staff work remotely. In a hybrid or distributed model, I would say, yes absolutely.
A hybrid team needs to think of itself as remote first, just like a fully distributed team would because working remotely is somewhat of a constraining factor. So naturally, you design for the constraining factor.
Think of it like mobile-first web design—when smartphones arrived, developers had to design for the most constrained environment first. Same principle applies here: hybrid teams should design for remote work because it's the constraining factor.
When it comes to the size of the company, I think most can get away with not having this role until they hit about 50 people. At that size your organization likely has a healthy customer base, good product-market fit, investors, and your organization is becoming more complex as you're trying to scale while maintaining the culture that has formed. If there's not someone thinking about remote operations seriously, the cracks will start to show.
Industry may play a role here as well. Technology, legal, and consulting companies are often early adopters, which aligns with data showing that industries like professional, scientific, and technical services saw over 39 percent of their workforce go remote by 2021. In fact, they may have someone covering these responsibilities, they just don't have the title yet. And if they do have the title, say at a healthcare organization, the roles may be worlds apart.
Building a Remote Operations team
While I've seen other companies hire a single individual like a Remote Work HR Specialist or a Head of Remote Learning to handle a piece of the remote operations pie, I think the benefit of having a Head of Remote stems from having a dedicated and holistic approach to remote operations. This person can be a conduit between departments and pool together the areas where there's disparate impact of remote work on the business and address it through the help of their team.
In a fully distributed company like Oyster, we've invested heavily in ensuring our employees are both productive and happy. And as such, we have a six-person remote operations team. Here are a few of the roles we have or will have in the future:
Remote Operations Manager: Focuses on the operational backbone that makes distributed work scalable.
- Owns knowledge management and documentation strategy
- Creates remote-first standard operating procedures
- Develops project management capabilities for transparency
- Builds frameworks for asynchronous collaboration across time zones
Remote Experience Manager: Focuses on how distributed work makes employees feel and ensuring they thrive.
- Partners closely with Remote Operations Manager to optimize workflows
- Facilitates team bonding and cross-team connections
- Promotes employee wellbeing and work-life balance
- Ensures remote workers have proper home office setups
Education Program Manager/Remote Learning Manager: This role's main focus is to facilitate a remote learning curriculum, build educational partnerships with other companies, and be a learning and development resource internally. At Oyster, this person's role has focused mainly on creating Oyster Academy, which is a program we use both internally and externally to train people on best practices of remote work.
The future of remote operations leaders
While the role is still very new, there is a community of 50-100 of us (reach out to me if you want to connect with other folks in the role). I think if companies are truly committed to being distributed teams, if they want to be able to access global talent, or if they simply want to give existing team members the flexibility, trust, and autonomy to work wherever they want in the world, then this role will quickly become a necessity.
With startups, you tend to grow organically, doing what needs to be done. But if we want our distributed teams to work and operate at their best, we need to be more intentional about it.
Here's where most companies get it wrong: they think tools solve everything. They'll set up Zoom and Slack, maybe add a Donut app for virtual coffee chats, and call it a day.
But tools are just the foundation. The real magic happens when you design the processes around how those tools get used.
How do we use these tools? Is there a better way? How do these tools connect to each other? How should they? And how do we change people's habits and ways of working to ensure people adhere to these processes and use the tools in the best way possible?
That's why we find having a Head of Remote—someone with a high level of influence, that can spend all day figuring out the answers to these questions—is essential.
And I say high level of influence because in order to really change habits and behaviors, systems, and processes, you need the leadership team on board. At Oyster, I work really closely with our Chief of Staff because part of his role is to optimize the leadership team, and it's not enough to be a good leader at a distributed company—you need to be a good remote leader. So by working with the executive team, we're getting buy-in from the top.
But it's not just the leadership you need to persuade. A Head of Remote will also need to influence different departments in order to build internal champions so there's good top down and bottom up adoption.
Whether every remote company will have a Head of Remote position on staff in the future, or if teams split the responsibilities remains to be seen. But one thing's for certain, someone needs to be thinking about this in order to get the best out of your distributed workforce.
What else is to come in the world of remote work? Download our latest report to learn more about what you can expect this year and beyond.
About Oyster
Oyster is a global employment platform designed to enable visionary HR leaders to find, hire, pay, manage, develop, and take care of a thriving distributed workforce. Oyster lets growing companies give valued international team members the experience they deserve, without the usual headaches and expense.
Oyster enables hiring anywhere in the world—with reliable, compliant payroll, and great local benefits and perks.
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