Managing Remotely

We don’t place strict rules, but there’s a common understanding that everyone is usually on from the hours of 9 am to at least 6…

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,…

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…

Airbnb works great and really strengthens the team. Understand any dietary restrictions and assist in any way possible getting your team from their house to…

Yes, we do. This is critical for us. First of all, you need to have a clear agenda with what you want to achieve during the…

We don’t organise retreats, but we do have a ‘visit Melbourne’ subsidy where we reimburse remote workers $1,000 if they wish to visit Melbourne and…

Yes! Every fall, we gather for our annual “All Hands” meetup with our entire team. We started doing these meetups in 2013, and they have…

All of our events are optional, but yes we have a lot of in person events. We have a very active community that organizes events…

We fly our entire team out for a conference once each year. This is our opportunity to spend time together, get to know new team…

Depends on the roll, but in most cases it becomes very clear who is productive and who isn’t.  For engineers github is key.  

I don’t think this challenge is all that different for remote workers – someone can be onsite and unproductive just as easily as someone can…

As an organization, we hire really driven people, set clear and ambitious goals, and check in on them regularly throughout the year, both formally and…

Communication, communication, communication. Because we must forego some of the natural conversations and interactions that happen when a team is co-located, we emphasize clear and…

Clear requirements and expectations starting from the job description, the interview and the trial terms. A measurable process monitoring KPIs both on a technical level,…

Clear expectations are critical for remote workers. Training a remote worker is different than training an in-house worker; it is doubly important to be clear…

Making sure they are happy employees. You can’t see them and must rely on virtual communication, which doesn’t always reveal an unhappy employee.

One of the hard parts we’re working through now is adding layers of management we didn’t have before. We’ve grown a lot over the past…

Scheduling meetings can be tricky because we cover a lot of timezones and some people may choose to work very early or very late, depending…

We make our communication better by having daily calls and hangouts between team members. We get the entire team together at the GitLab summit once…

We make sure all of our employees understand our strategy and core beliefs, so we all know what we’re working to achieve. We also have…

We set OKRs for each team that are talked about in every all-hands meeting. We also have a #winning Slack channel where teams post a…

We don’t have a formal BYOD/A program like some companies do, however it’s important that people can do their jobs effectively, and that means supplying…

Everyone is free to get their devices from the company, but as far as I know everyone’s just using their own machine.

We do not provide any computers, cell phones, etc. since keeping inventory of items like that would be extremely expensive and difficult to retrieve at…

In short, “take some”. We used to not track days off, but it resulted in some people (mostly US employees) not taking enough time off.…

You can take off whatever days/weeks needed and as long as you have someone covering for your clients, we are fine.  

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…

We’ve always been worried that they wouldn’t commit to teaching online in the long run, because most of our teachers are busy with a full-time…

I would say more fear a lack of productivity, lack of communication or engagement, even how to manage potential issues like workers comp claims.  In…

I used to worry about things not getting done or people not feeling responsible. But so far, our people care and everything gets done.