Finding Success with a Distributed Workforce: Distributed Teams, Systems & Culture
Originally published in Drupal Watchdog
In art, music and science, there is a commonly held belief that we become what we create. At Pantheon, we’ve set our sights on building the world’s best distributed website management platform — and so whether by coincidence or design, we’ve built an incredible distributed team. In many ways, the people and product are more similar than a cursory glance might suggest. For example, distributed systems are autonomous but collaborative, in that they coordinate their actions by passing messages.
Distributed teams are no different, in how they coordinate so that they can function independently in both space and time. Understanding these common underlying tenants lead us at Pantheon to forming a distributed culture — shaping how we define work, conduct meetings and even execute.
There are a number of reasons why we thought about distributing our workforce. Not only were there operational improvements, but there are also dramatic lifestyle wins for employees. Functionally, the company benefits since the available talent pool is no longer constrained by Chinatown, San Francisco — where the office is located. When there’s more talent available, there’s less competition to work with the best — and since part of the value of our product is high availability, we’ve found that a highly available team is more capable of delivering. For example, at Pantheon we have two PagerDuty shifts for infrastructure failures — so if there were to be an incident in the middle of the night on one shift it’s covered by the other. The same can be said about support — unsurprisingly, we’ve found that the more hours of the day we have covered, the faster our time-to- respond is, and the happier our customers are.
There are also wins for employees, aside from feeling like someone’s got our back, even if it’s in the middle of our night. By distributing our workforce we’ve opened the possibility for nomadic freedom — allowing colleagues to live where life takes them, as opposed to just where the company is located. Even if that means working from home more, or on a different schedule, there’s a significant amount of time that’s saved when commuting isn’t necessary — time that can be spent doing more of what we love. Happy employees are loyal employees.
A natural question would be when to commit to distributing a workforce. However, the beauty is that the scary, head first plunge isn’t necessary. In fact it’s the exact wrong way to start. As with any culture shift, it’s important to start small and adapt as necessary. At Pantheon we found that Work-From- Home Wednesday was a good way to try safely distributing our local team while also helping create empathy for our remote colleagues. Once the subtle differences between remote and local-life became readily apparent to everyone, great things happened. For example, shortly after we were all required to rely solely on our tools and persistent documentation to communicate, we quickly realized how much tribal knowledge there was in some parts of the development process. Rectifying that by documenting the right places not only had the effect of making everyone more efficient and autonomous, but it also had the side-effects of making onboarding new employees much easier, as well as codifying how something should work in the event there are changes that need to be made.
When it comes time to actually execute, we’ve seen that there tends to be two kinds of work, with optimal environments for each — work tends to be either iterative with a high frequency of changes that require a tight communication loop (such as feature development), or more monolithic, slower work that requires an interrupt-free environment (such as rearchitecting a testing framework). Tighter communication loops tend to favour local colleagues whereas remote colleagues tend to be slightly more difficult to interrupt, and so are better suited to work that is more stoic and consistent.
However, the secret to a healthy relationship in both work and love is having trust, empathy and good communication. Building empathy and trust doesn’t mean much if communication is poor.
To foster a healthy relationship with synchronous communication, we rely heavily on Slack. Not only do we have bots that add gifs to any conversation as well as a “watercooler” room for off-topic discussions, but we also have a Standup room that lets us measure each other’s pulse in a really lightweight way, as well as bots that can do infrastructure related tasks. Just by following a thread it’s possible to see how problems were diagnosed, and implicitly spread knowledge between peers.
We also make heavy use of Google Hangouts, with Chromeboxes in every room, which in recent months has had substantial performance improvements. For large, company-wide meetings, we’ve even set up speakers and a microphone so that remote colleagues have as much of a voice as local colleagues. Another good lightweight video-conferencing tool is Appear.in. Either way, it’s important to remember the timezone of everyone calling in — so if that means having an important meeting an hour earlier on the Best Coast™ to avoid a late night in South Africa, it’s well worth it.
Asynchronous communication is much easier to manage between local and remote colleagues. We currently use Jira for project management, StatusPage.io to communicate incidents, and as previously mentioned, PagerDuty for our oncall schedule.
Again, as with long distance relationships, text and video calls only go so far. Sometimes it’s necessary to meet in person. At Pantheon, we bring people onsite when they first start, to onboard them, as well as having gatherings a couple times a year, where we take the opportunity that facetime to provides to go through intensive planning sessions, architectural decision making, or important cross-team discussions. Perhaps the best reason to bring a colleague on site though, isn’t quantifiable. Spending quality time outside of work, bonding and building strong trust and empathy is incredibly important especially when most interaction happens digitally.
Distributing a workforce offers numerous wins for both employees and companies. Work becomes more blended into life, which can afford more freedom. It can be challenging, it can be risky and it can be difficult, but it can also be immensely rewarding.
For more detail, specifically on how to counter the difficulties and caveats of distributing a team, please view my longer discussion at