Work wherever you want: Our method at Alan

At Alan, our organization is based on trust. This means that every Alaner is free to work flexibly, wherever he or she chooses. Here's how it works. 

At Alan, a fast-growing company means distributed responsibility, autonomy and freedom. We are all responsible and we trust each other: everyone is there to act in the best interests of the company.

And we're all different too. Some of us are night owls, while others have children and need to adapt their schedules. Respecting these differences has led us to establish a culture of writing and asynchronous working, so that everyone can organize their working time as they see fit. We explain how we make decisions without meetings in this article. 

Since flexible working hours and the obligation to come into the office are incompatible, telecommuting has always been a modality at Alan. As with many companies, the pandemic prompted us to question ourselves and presented an opportunity to affirm our choice to be a "work from wherever you want" company. 

In practical terms, each Alaner is free to live and work wherever he or she chooses, albeit within certain rules. We have offices or coworking spaces in different cities. So there are three options for everyone:

Naturally, the needs of our "100% remote" employees differ from those of those who work in the office. So, to ensure that collaboration runs smoothly, we have established a number of basic rules and principles in line with our philosophy: to guarantee every Alaner maximum flexibility in a secure environment.

Want to know how we do it? We'll tell you all about it.

Depending on your organization and the type of work required, you have several options for defining your remote working policy:

Most companies rent an office, hire employees to fill it and then move to a larger office as their business grows. At Alan, we've reversed the situation by focusing first on the needs of Alaners. Everyone is free to work and live where they want, because we assume that Alaners know each other and take into account what they need and what gives them energy. In return, we adapt to provide them with an appropriate workspace:

In 2020, we have decided to no longer limit the hiring of talent to the three countries in which we operate: France, Spain and Belgium.

This decision was accompanied by complex challenges across a wide range of regulatory bodies: immigration, payroll and administration, tax residency, social security law, labor law and so on. 

As a result, we have "tightened up" our policy to avoid having to deal with tedious international recruitment on a case-by-case basis.

Alaners can currently be recruited in 8 countries: 

That said, as a French-registered insurer, we have to apply the insurance regulations of the ACPR. As a result, some of our teams host functions and roles that cannot be operated from anywhere else. This applies in particular to sales, customer service and certain key corporate functions such as insurance management, for example.

 In short, employees can work from wherever they like within the country in which they have been recruited. For example, an Alaner hired in France can decide to work from Paris, Brest, Toulouse, Collonges-la-Rouge... In short, his only limit will be his creativity (and his appetite for the Limousin)!

However, there's nothing to prevent Alaners from working outside these countries from time to time, up to a limit of 30 to 90 days a year (depending on whether the country belongs to the Schengen area). But, while working asynchronously is a productivity booster, juggling major time differences can slow down collaboration and push the team to work at odd hours to ensure "synchronous" moments (1:1s, recruitment), which is not very healthy. That's why we restrict our "Work from Anywhere" (WFA ) policy to territories offering at least 6 hours' CET time difference between 9am and 6pm. 

Before starting the recruitment process or making a job offer, and after checking that your offer is competitive in the country in question, it is prudent to check how your status impacts each of these variables in the country in question:

☑️ Immigration obligations as an employer: 

☑️ Compliance with labor laws :  

☑️ Social security and health responsibilities: 

☑️ Income tax :  

☑️ Compliance and payroll administration: 

Very early on in Alan's history, we built a culture of writing, transparency, asynchrony and distributed responsibility to offer our teams great flexibility in organizing their time. As it turns out, it's this culture that has enabled us to generalize our "Work from Anywhere" policy from 2020.

The principle of transparency comes in many forms at Alan, such as written decision-making and meetings as a last resort, while the principle of distributed responsibility guides the way we make decisions every day. 

This mode of operation creates a flexible, high-performance and empowering environment. By making information public and accessible, we facilitate autonomous (good) decision-making. 

It also helps to put day-to-day actions and tasks back into a broader perspective, and thus restore meaning to work - which is particularly important in a hybrid or remote work environment.

Internally, we are accustomed to sharing our documents widely and systematically: 

Working remotely isn't always easy, especially for employees who are experimenting for the first time. At Alan, we're convinced that it's not just rituals that create bonds within a team, but above all that it's effective collaboration based on transparency, shared responsibility, clear definition of individual and collective objectives and trust, as discussed in the previous paragraph. However, it remains important to put in place times and initiatives that contribute to forging strong bonds between team members, so that everyone is in the best possible conditions to succeed.

If you'd like to go further on the subject, we recommend the podcast episode "Valuing proximity at work to avoid feelings of isolation", in which Lydia Martin, Alan's occupational psychologist, shares her advice to managers. You can find it here.

Here are some suggested rituals you can put in place to ensure strong social bonds, and how we put them in place at Alan :

Bringing the whole company together on a regular basis is an extremely powerful way of strengthening commitment and encouraging the development of inter-team relationships. At Alan, we organize Check-Ins twicea year where all the Alaners from our different countries get together. Here we hold a big presentation to share important updates, celebrate successes and ensure that the company's goals/mission are at the forefront of our minds. We then have breakout sessions or activities where we mix Alaners from different teams and countries. Of course, these events wouldn't be complete without a party where Alaners can make social connections and relax with their colleagues.

Regular contact points within teams are incredibly important when members are dispersed to ensure they are engaged and feel part of the team, company, etc. This can take the form of weekly Stand-ups where team members can share how they're feeling, discuss any topics they'd prefer to express verbally, and highlight any obstacles they'd like the team's opinion on.

Solving a company-wide problem and working with a group of people you don't normally interact with is very stimulating. Once a year, Alan organizes a hackathon on a specific theme. The aim is to identify new perspectives, to dare to propose ideas we wouldn't have thought of initially, around a 48-hour challenge. 

Twice a month, we organize an informal lunch at which an Alaner presents a topic of his or her choice - usually an area of expertise he or she is passionate about - to the entire workforce. The idea is to feed off the experience of our Alaners, outside their lives at Alan, and to enjoy an atypical moment of sharing where we discover common ground. 

Slack is our work tool, of course. But some areas are dedicated to bonding, a kind of digital coffee break. Aficionados of four-legged friends, fans of running or lovers of quotes shared out of context, will all find something to their liking among our many affinity channels.

Our off-boarding interviews enabled us to determine that telecommuting can be a reason for some Alaners to leave. The flexibility it offers is not without risk for their mental well-being: anxiety, hyper-connection, isolation. At Alan, we have adopted a culture of vigilance to monitor certain indicators despite the distance.

We invite every Alaner, and especially coaches, to pay attention to the following signals: 

If telecommuting is the cause of an Alaner's unhappiness, we recommend :

If the new recruit has shared his or her wish to opt for hybrid or 100% remote working, we recommend selecting a coach who will be in a similar configuration. As the saying goes: "He who knows the obstacles overturns them"; a coach who has encountered the particularities of telecommuting will be in a better position to advise his coachee effectively , to create connivance and immediate proximity - while limiting the risks of "mismatch" between two realities with distinct issues (face-to-face and remote).

We're aware that our Work from Anywhere policy isn't perfect, but we've designed it to be as fair as possible. It is based entirely on our culture of trust and asynchrony, of which transparency and distributed responsibility are the keystones. We are constantly updating it in line with these guiding principles: