Working Remotely

Organically. Appen has been operating mixed remote and in-office teams for many years.

It was entirely organic. The biggest challenge as we’ve grown has been not letting the trappings of traditional office policies creep in. For instance, once…

The company was started as such.

Yes. While our employees work in different states and alone from home, no one feels like they are working alone because they see each other…

Absolutely, but it takes a little more work and doesn’t happen as organically as it would in an office. We have a #water-cooler channel in…

This is a common critique I’ve heard — that a remote company can’t possibly have the same deep level of culture that a physical company…

We train our new employees on our company culture, which is based on Accountability, Visibility and Respect. We have weekly onboarding meetings for all new…

Retreats are a huge thing. We have an annual all company retreat, but we also have more focused retreats pretty regularly for smaller teams within…

With great attention and intention! The little things really make a difference, such as acknowledging birthdays and work anniversaries on our company-wide Slack channels, or…

When introducing any change as significant as distributing operations, we recommend defining discrete steps and rolling out any change in iterative phases that adapt based…

Be sure you’re willing to put in the time and effort to hire people who are a fit for the remote culture. Are they independent,…

Believe that remote work can be more effective than in the office. On the other hand…sometimes people who start to work remotely expect to be…

Our company was built on its foundation as a remote organization since 2007, so it’s always been in our DNA to examine any challenges through…

Aha! is growing more rapidly than any other company that I have founded or worked for. Chris and I founded Aha! because we believed so…

We have a great culture and team and have been growing very fast in the past few years. The biggest challenge is ensuring we keep…

We utilize Zoom.us for weekly all hands, and individual teams hold their own weekly Zoom standups. Everything else is in Slack. We dislike phones and…

We have an online community for our teachers and rarely intervene.

We utilize conference calls for solving immediate issues as well as for operational meetings. We hold “Cockroach Meetings” if a problem requires immediate attention from…

Remote working had previously not been as widespread as it is becoming. New tools and ways of working has made it easier to accommodate home…

We are more organized now. You have to be extremely organized if you want to go remote because it’s easy to get lost in emails,…

We leverage video conferencing more and more to communicate and “see” one another. It has helped fill communication gaps by allowing us to read body…

Slack and JIRA—the platform we use to track development tasks—are asynchronous tools, allowing us to manage communication even with different time zones. Of course, sometimes…

We generally work on East Coast time (8am to 5pm) but have early birds on the East Coast and night owls on the West Coast,…

We have a 24/7 support team to handle communications around the clock. We also have specialized remote workers available to answer questions in the most…