Work from wherever, but work. That's our motto. Despite starting out as a hybrid company, since day 0 we've had the vision of being a globally descentralized workforce.
Starting in October 2022, we will become a fully remote, asynchronous company. To do so, we have this manifesto:
- We allow people to live and work from all over the globe, instead of a central location.
- We have flexible hours over fixed hours.
- We default to writing down knowledge, over defaulting to Slack and/or Zoom calls.
- We share information publicly (company-wide).
- We allow everyone to propose changes to docs (like this one), and encourage comments from all.
- We value asynchronous communication over synchronous communication.
The main benefit of being a 100% remote company is that we can hire the best person in the world for a given role. Lifestyle flexibility, saving real estate costs, and being a multi-cultural company are the icing on the cake.
However, this philosophy isn't perfect. It comes with caveats.
- Lack of information osmosis: It's the whole reason why we decided to start this company. We want to improve information osmosis for engineering teams. To help address the problem (both for engineering and non-engineering roles) we also have our manifesto of defaulting to writing down knowledge.
- Lack of team cohesion: Playing board games online is the best way we've found to address this point. Tools such as Donut can also help us as we get new team cohesion challenges as we scale. However, the best answer we have to this is getting together a few weeks per year. Read the Watermelon Onsite section below.
And some responsibilites:
- You are required to have a stable internet connection that allows your work to be comfortable. This means video-calls should work without issue, but if at a given moment they don't, you will be required to upgrade your internet connection, and if this is not possible, you are required to relocate at your own expense.
- You must make an effort to keep your work items protected. We will replace a stolen computer the first time this occurs, but not the second time and beyond. Please be extra careful if you are in a remote place, as replacing something as simple as a charger could be difficult.
To be a remote asynchronous company we need to minimize the number of meetings as much as we can. The only meetings we should have are our weekly planning sessions, calls with people outside our organization, and informal communication meetings (for example, a space to play an online board game).
We use #daily-standup to keep the whole team updated on tasks.
It's good that everyone reads all the changes that happened. Feel free to comment and ask about anything.
Weekly planning sessions are on our Google Calendars. The reason we have these weekly events is because it's what we've found out is the optimal point between achieving a level of information of information osmosis, without sacrificing our remote asynchronous nature. As months go on and as people change their timezone throughout their life, we will update the time of this event. When the company is on remote mode (we expect this to be 97% of the time), we expect everyone to be very structured with this. A tap on the shoulder isn't something easy to do when remote.
Every 2 weeks, on Thursdays, we have this session. This session allows us to fix errors for the next weekly planning, and to point them out in candid but respectful way.
Same as the other recurring meetings we have, the schedule can vary as we talk about it.
Sporadically through the year, we will bring the whole team together at some location in the world. Watermelon will provide flights, lodging and a food stipend. We do this mainly because it's the most effective way to increase our team cohesion.
When we're on onsite mode, we also get an information osmosis benefit. This means that some things can change respect to how we work remotely by default, because it's more natural to do so:
- Meetings don't have to be strictly scheduled. A tap on the shoulder is enough. We want everyone to feel the psychological safety of tapping anyone on the shoulder.
- Meetings shouldn't be virtual. We get more oxytocin transmitted when we have conversations in person. The exception is when we're together, but we're gonna talk to someone outside the organization who will be on Zoom.