How we work well together, from anywhere 🌍

We’re a globally distributed, fully remote team working across time zones, continents, and life situations. We don’t share an office, but we share a way of working that’s grounded in our values of Trust, Transparency, and Collaboration.

It’s also true that successful and sustainable remote working is not as simple as giving someone a laptop and saying “see you on Zoom”. Remote work simply is different, and if we are to reap the benefits of remote work whilst avoiding the pitfalls and traps, we require certain considerations, processes, and principles across the whole team.

Below you’ll find some of the ways our values are lived, and how we make remote work, work for all.

Async by default

Time zones are part of how we work. We acknowledge that from the start and work with our setup, not in spite of it. If we want to avoid people being switched on all the time and getting burnt out, or alternatively creating blockers and delays to projects, we have to work well asynchronously.

To us, this means:

• Having effective workflows, and setting up tasks in such a way that purposefully allow for people to not be present in the moment
• Being specific and committed to channels used for updates and tasks, so documents, decisions, and progress are trackable and accountable
• Providing full context to task or project updates. Taking that little longer to document full information can save much longer delays later on, and empowers our colleagues to continue great work whilst we sleep.
• Meetings are not completely avoided, but are used intentionally and with purpose, with clear agendas, preparation, and planned around preferred work hours where possible.

Trust

Trust is a prerequisite of working well together remotely on so many levels. We have to trust each other to independently manage work, hours, priorities, without the ability or wish to micromanage with a globally remote environment. We have no choice but to assume trust, and its essential to maintaining a high results, low oversight environment.

To us, this means:

• Empowering and expecting team members to make their own risk-appropriate decisions, and not micromanaging, instead focusing on results and outcomes
• Giving each other the freedom to manage time individually within role requirements