Building World’s First No-Employee Remote Company

Our learnings from crafting an almost perfect work experience.

Hearing your boss complain that you are 10 minutes late when you traveled an hour to reach office…

Looking out of the window and craving for a trip or a vacation all the time. Or staying away from your family because of the ‘job’…

Not getting the growth you expect and working with people you don’t admire or look up to…

It sure as hell feels bad!

For a majority of people, work sucks. They are not happy with the work that they do.

And when the work doesn’t give you fulfilment your entire life starts to look terrible! Period.

Considering this, I’m really surprised to see that 90% of the companies don’t work on giving a great work experience to their employees.

I’ve only one thing to say to them — “Your company will die.”

The culture and values of your company will define the experience of your employees. If the employees are happy there’s a high probability that the company will do good and will even go beyond the call of duty to do something extraordinary.

For us, humans, the culture and values are becoming more and more important.

The sense of freedom and fulfilment holds the highest value of importance for today’s workers.

Credits : contactpoint.ca

We started Indiez with one mission- “Freedom and Fulfillment for all”.

When Abhishek, a senior member of Indiez, quit his job to pursue his dream to teach underprivileged kids how to code through his NGO Navgurukul, it made us believe that our mission is important for this world.

An ongoing session at Navgurukul

And, I can tell you 100s of stories like this!

We get 1000s of applications every month without a single dollar spent on marketing. This is only because we work day and night to give our members a phenomenal work experience.

We’re building a platform and none of these people are our employees. But still, we invest heavily in giving them a phenomenal experience.

Why?

Because freelancing is a bitch! It is difficult to start. You’ll miss those office communications. You’ll miss the sense of belonging. Surprisingly, none of the freelance platforms out there work on the ‘experience’. They are all about matching you with a gig.

Here are a few things we do at Indiez to make our members experience amazing —

1. Giving them freedom and autonomy

One thing that every self respecting and motivated person seeks is choice, autonomy and freedom!

At Indiez, all members are highly accountable for the work that they take up as it is the number one value we look for while hiring them.

There are four ways through which we give our community members the freedom they seek and deserve. We don’t control —

• When they work (TIME) — We have a Results-Only Work Environment where the are free to work whenever they want.
• How they work (TECHNIQUE) — Our members figure out for themselves how they are to complete required major tasks.
• With whom they work (TEAM) — We provide our members with a degree of choice regarding the other people with whom they work on various projects. They readily refer the best people from their network to Indiez.
• What they do (TASK) —Indiez members are not assigned any project by force. They themselves pick up the projects they wish to work upon and are truly interested in.

“Indiez brings together the best of two worlds for me. I get to work remotely at my schedule on projects of my choosing without the hassle of sales and marketing associated with traditional freelancing.” — Indiez Community Member

2. Making them work with the best

Our community comprises of top 0.1% global talent. We have set-up rigorous community recruiting processes that ensure that they end up working with only the best of the best talent.

Great people like to work with great people. When you keep the bar high, you automatically ensure that only the top professionals get in- which then creates a positive feedback loop hence ensuring that the community keeps getting better.

What community members find most exciting is the interactions that they have with worldwide members possessing varied experience and skill sets.

While they work on different projects, they are exposed to new people. This ensures that they don’t end up feeling stagnant.

“After working with similar kind of people for 10 years, I felt like I had hit a growth ceiling of sorts. After my first project with Indiez, I decided to quit my job to begin a new chapter of growth and freedom.”— Indiez Community Member_, Ex-500 Startups, Ex-Oyo, Ex-Tushk_

3. Making them feel proud of their lifestyle

Whether it is running an NGO by the side, devoting time to learning a completely new skill or travelling the world while they work, we ensure that Indiez community members are able to live the lives they dream of!

Taking the concept of working from anywhere even further, we introduced workations to bring new enthusiasm in our team. They travel to some of the best places while they work. How awesome is that?

Unlike other modes of freelancing, at Indiez, members are able to form meaningful connections with other fellow members that help them discuss and overcome challenges associated with freelancing.

Our community members tell us that they don’t feel that their work is a separate entity of their life associated with a state of anxiety. In fact, it is a part of them that they are happy to carry with them.

It’s a part of their identity and they take pride in it.

“I don’t think Kudle Beach has seen something like this ever before.😃” — Archit as he shares updates from Indiez’s recent workation in Gokarna.⠀

On our Slack channel, they happily post their workstation pictures from across the world. It’s the complete opposite to that feeling of being trapped in an office cubicle. This is what makes us truly happy!

“Thanks to Indiez, I can travel the world, while not missing out on growing my career. Already visited 40+ countries \m/” — Indiez Community Member , Ex-Software Engineer, Google

3. Giving them a phenomenal growth atmosphere

Growth is very important to everyone at Indiez. Keeping this in mind, we have curated a fast paced learning and growth environment. We have some of the most interesting community meetups, sessions at Indiez University and polls and discussions.

A discussion on tool purchase for API documentation

Indiez University is an initiative that enables members to share their expertise with others who want to learn from them. They host sessions to educate others on using JIRA, Confluence, Browserstack and other valuable skills.

This makes it so easy to learn from your peers and the best part is they are always available for you in case you need any further help or advice.

This ensures that members have an exposure to phenomenal growth experience!

4. Giving them a feeling of trust

Members in our community chalk their own timelines and commit to it. Every day, they are aware of the responsibilities they handle and that gives them an intrinsic feeling of motivation.

When something goes wrong, they don’t sit and wait for someone to craft the solution. Because committing to a task means they not only take care of any roadblocks/challenges that they encounter but also overcome them.

To them, it’s not just about making money. They truly love what they do!

From day one, we recruit people who bring that kind of energy into the community. And then, we put our complete trust on their abilities.

This is the reason we have been able to deliver projects with steep timelines without any time picking or time tracking.

For instance, our team prototyped a Natural Language powered BI tool for Aditya Birla Finance’s CXO in just one week. This would not have been possible if the 5 membered team comprising of a Product manager, UX designer, Visual designer, Data scientist and Full stack developer wasn’t highly motivated to make it a grand success!

5. Regular subtle checkins that are not a ‘pain’!

Despite the autonomy we assure our community members, we have a few regular mechanisms ensure that everything is aligned as per the expectations. We do this through —

1. Standups and impromptu check-ins to keep updated with what is going on with the team.
2. Regular feedback loops so that required corrections can be made early in the development process.
3. Retrospectives scheduled once in every two weeks to understand what could have been done better in the previous project.

On the same lines, we make sure that their valuable time is not spent in meetings that don’t create any value.

A study by collaboration software developer, Atlassian, suggests that tech employees spend on average over 30 hours per month sitting in meetings that prove to be unproductive more than 50% of the time. What a waste!

Our team values are built around valuing your team member’s time. A meeting should take place only when it’s absolutely needed. Sometimes, all you need is a daily SCRUM.

At Indiez, because we have a remote work setup, we truly value the synchronous time during meetings. We automate daily stand-ups through a scrum-bot Standuply that gathers all the updates from team members before the meeting asynchronously and publishes it to the team channel. Everyone reads this data before the meeting so the valuable time is not wasted in it.

6. Celebrating failures and successes likewise

A lot goes into ensuring a 100 percent success and guaranteed deliveries. There are times when things go wrong, when despite our best efforts we mess up!

But we have a very practical approach towards failure. We learn quickly and make sure we treat is a positive learning experience. Even our clients love that attitude.

We conduct retrospectives at the end of every project that help us summarise the wins and failures. We celebrate both of them alike, document our learnings and move on to cracking next project. 😃

We are confident that applying these simple strategies will help you create a fulfilling work experience for your team.

At Indiez, we are always on the lookout for super awesome talent.

Apply to Indiez to enter into a remote work culture where we guarantee you freedom and fulfilment and you help us deliver awesome results. Just go on and our fill our application form.

At Indiez we work hard to curate and manage top 1% tech-talent from companies like Google, Facebook, Uber, Spotify, Booking.com and the likes.

Join 100+ amazing founders who built successful products with Indiez.

Know more about us here — Indiez.io