Managing Remotely

We are starting to implement this a little more as we grow. We have a lot of de-facto standards just from having done this for…

Communication in a virtual environment is absolutely key to building trust. And so for this reason we expect our team to respond to emails, and…

We have general guidelines for communication and signaling within our distributed team, but we anchor a lot of communication around daily and weekly synchronous rhythms,…

Yes – see my blog where I wrote the definitive guide to planning an offsite. 

Yes! We organize three all-company events per year. One focused on working together on specific company projects, one focused on training, and another focused on…

Once a year we converge on a tropical location for our annual company retreat. (You can find a recap of our 2016 team trip here.)…

Yes, absolutely.  Face to face communication is vital so we have teams break off and have quarterly offsites.  The Engineering team is going to Punta…

We meet at various times throughout the year at conferences and retreats. The schedule is constantly evolving based on team needs, but the one constant…

We do not routinely meet in person. Some of our management team has met a couple times and when I am traveling, I’ve made a…

Through project management and time tracking tools.

I am very fortunate to have an incredible team of consultants. They are self-starters who work until the job is done. This type of work…

1Password was founded by software developers, so we use a variety of tools to track objectives, milestones, and the resolution of technical issues. Our support…

Andrew Montalenti, Parse.ly co-founder and CTO, has said: “The biggest thing missing from fully distributed teams is true face-to-face communication. There are a lot of…

Rely on the technology available. From Google Apps to Cloud offerings, explore options that will suit your company best. Set regular meetings (as long as…

Communicate, communicate, communicate. And when you are done with that, follow up with good communication! You have to be able to express yourself well on…

Remembering to create and allow for opportunities to share and exchange information so everyone is kept in the loop, accountable, and takes pride and ownership…

Ensuring a consistent company culture and keeping everyone feeling connected.

Managing outgoing sales efforts.

We talk all the time. A short, daily all-hands meeting allows everyone to understand the what and the why. We make a point of being…

We have done three company retreats so far, and plan on doing at least two a year. Every time we do them, Nick, our CEO,…

We’ve evolved a lot on this one. It started as a quarterly Google Hangout where everyone got together to watch a presentation on progress made…

We offer employees a notable equipment stipend to be used for purchasing company assets when they start ($2,000 for technical production like designers and engineers,…

We let everyone choose their own devices, computers and operating systems, and reimburse a set amount for each employee every 3 years.  We do have…

Our employees get a laptop for administration work, as well as a display, keyboard, and mouse. The software developers and QA team may have different…

We have a minimum vacation policy at Buffer where we ask employees to take at least 15 days off every year, in addition to whichever…

Nothing atypical here. Typical holidays and vacation time and sick days.

We prefer to trust employees to do the right thing with time off and provide a discretionary time off policy. To stay in compliance with…

Not being able to meet some people in person means we have to rely more on references and our gut to gauge a potential hire.…

People being dishonest about the amount of time they are spending working on your project and doing things on the side. There are big brother…

We very naively started all being remote, so there were no fears. Here’s a challenge that surprised me: on the same day, I had a…