What is a remote work policy?
A remote work policy is a workplace policy written for a fully distributed company, covering how the team stays coordinated across time zones, what equipment and security are required, and how performance is evaluated without a shared office.
When should your company use one?
A remote work policy is worth having as soon as a company hires its first fully remote employee with no expectation of office access, and becomes essential once the team spans multiple time zones. It's the right fit for a remote-first company; a company that mostly works from an office but allows occasional remote days should use a work from home policy instead.
Free remote work policy template
Use the template below as your starting point. It covers async communication norms, time zone overlap, and distributed security, and it's ready to copy into your employee handbook.
Purpose
[Company Name] operates as a distributed, remote-first company: there is no requirement to work from a central office, and employees are hired from wherever they can do their best work. This policy explains how the company stays coordinated and secure without a shared physical location, and what's expected of employees working this way.
Scope
This policy applies to all employees, since [Company Name] does not maintain a general-purpose office. It does not cover roles that require a fixed physical location by their nature, such as on-site field or installation work, which are governed by separate role-specific agreements.
Policy elements
Working well as a fully distributed company depends on writing things down, being deliberate about overlap time, and treating security as everyone's job rather than an office's job. The sections below set the baseline expectations for each of those.
Async-first communication norms
Because the team is spread across time zones, [Company Name] defaults to asynchronous communication:
- Decisions and updates that affect more than one person are written down in [the company wiki/shared docs], not only discussed live
- Meetings are reserved for discussions that genuinely benefit from real-time back-and-forth, and every meeting gets a written summary for anyone who couldn't attend
- Employees are not expected to answer messages outside their working hours, and a delayed response is not treated as unresponsiveness
- When a decision is time-sensitive, the message should say so explicitly and state the deadline
Time zone overlap expectations
Each team agrees on a block of at least [X] hours per day where members' working hours overlap, used for meetings and time-sensitive collaboration. Outside that window, employees set their own schedule around their region's normal working hours, as long as they're reachable within a reasonable window during their own workday.
Equipment and security for distributed teams
[Company Name] provides a laptop and any role-specific equipment needed to work remotely, and reimburses reasonable home office costs up to [$X] under the company's expense policy. Since there is no office network to fall back on, every employee is responsible for:
- Connecting company devices only to secured, password-protected networks
- Using the company's VPN and multi-factor authentication for any system that requires it
- Keeping devices updated and locked when unattended, wherever they're working from
- Reporting a lost or stolen device to IT immediately, regardless of time zone
Team connection and in-person gatherings
[Company Name] holds [X] in-person team gatherings per year and covers reasonable travel costs for employees to attend. Attendance is [expected/encouraged] since these gatherings are the primary way distributed teams build the relationships that async work depends on.
Performance and accountability
Without a shared office, [Company Name] evaluates employees on outcomes and communication, not on visible activity or hours logged. Missed deadlines, unclear status updates, or unavailability during agreed overlap hours are addressed the same way any other performance issue would be.
How to customize the template
Set the overlap-hours minimum, gathering cadence, and equipment budget to match your team's actual spread of time zones and travel budget. If your company also offers hybrid or office-based roles, keep this policy separate from your work from home policy so employees can tell which one applies to them.
Legal and practical considerations
If employees can work from any state or country, check whether that changes your company's tax, payroll, or labor law obligations, since remote work can create a legal presence in a new jurisdiction faster than companies expect. Data security requirements also apply wherever the work happens, so make sure device and network security rules are enforceable, not just aspirational.
Rollout checklist
Once the template is customized, a few practical steps make sure it holds up in practice:
- Set the overlap-hours minimum and in-person gathering cadence
- Confirm the tax and payroll implications of your employees' actual locations
- Add it to your employee handbook and internal policy library
- Communicate the async-first norms clearly so managers reinforce them
- Include it in new hire onboarding for remote roles
- Review it as the team's time zone spread or work locations change
