Starting a full-remote job as an Engineering Manager
Learning to step in as a manager in a remote-first environment
Whenever we recall a difficult situation in our lives, we often go back to the last discussion and the last emotion. I recently went through this after my grandfather passed away.
The last emotion was his last gift: a very nice bottle of Riesling from our native region. The last discussion was about my new job at BlaBlaCar. He was 91 years old and was not travelling that much. He was definitely not a potential user of the platform! But he understood what I was doing for the first time since I started working in tech 15 years ago. What a huge achievement!
What surprised him the most was my full remote situation. How is it possible to work alone at home in front of a computer? This was his last question and it never received a complete answer, but here is my best attempt.
As shared recently by our CEO Nico Brusson, BlaBlaCar is turning towards a flexible way of working.
People living near the office can come whichever day they prefer. Others living anywhere in the country of the office they are linked to, are granted a full remote status with a budget to come to the office once a month.
With the collective human objective to reduce the carbon footprint, saving daily commutes is a no-brainer, but this is not the only advantage of being remote. Let me dig deeper into BlaBlaCar’s core values:
- Fun and Serious.
- Be the member.
- Be lean. Go far.
- Share more. Learn more.
- Dream. Decide. Deliver.
- Fail. Learn. Succeed.
Fun and serious: Team days… A real shot of energy
BlaBlaCar’s People team regularly organizes company events and parties. They are great opportunities to meet colleagues in person. All remote workers are also granted a budget to set up their office, work from a coworking space, and travel to the office.
Each team in the company is granted a given budget for team buildings/events. This allows us to meet once a month in our awesome headquarters in Paris or anywhere else in France; in our local coworking spaces in Lyon or Nantes for example.
As a pretty busy father with 3 kids, I must admit that those team days out of the house force me to disconnect from the daily home life and the day to day routine. And they are quite intense! A usual agenda often revolves around:
- A team workshop around one common theme
- A team-building activity in the afternoon
- A nice party in the evening
- Some jogging in the morning for the motivated ones
- A few dedicated working sessions the following day.
Team days have one main objective from a management perspective: to build team spirit and create important bonds between us. And it works! At least according to our regular team retrospective meeting where we have the occasion to share feedback on those opportunities. And it confirms: The team days are real shots of energy.
Be the Member: the most fundamental one in a remote setup
“Be the member” can look many different ways: The first one at BlaBlaCar is the “Be the member day”. As a BlaBlaCar employee, we are granted a day to use the product, take a carpool, grab a bus or join another team to understand how our colleagues are working. This helps us to be even more efficient at work.
Another way is the “Be the remote member”, this is where I can have an impact as a remote manager. Feeling lonely is a real risk when you are a remote worker, and having a good work-life balance and a safe environment in which you can be listened to is a must-have. This is my first priority as a manager: I must take care of the people in the team, make sure they feel included in every discussion they should, and make sure they are feeling good at home and at work. The classic “How are you?” question is the most important one during my 1–1 meetings, and I don’t hesitate to spend the full meeting actively listening to my colleague. I want to identify all the signals in order to adapt my management to this given situation. “Be the (remote) member” is challenging, and we take great care in making everyone feel included.
Be lean. Go far: the obvious one
Spending 30 minutes per day finding the correct meeting room… Waiting for people to join the correct meeting room… Joining a meeting not prepared… Being included in alignment calls on non-urgent topics… This was the default in my previous work experiences and brought a lot of unpredictability during any given day.
This has drastically changed since I joined BlaBlaCar.
As I like being predictable in the team deliveries, I like being predictable in my organization, and the remote setup has made it reality: 95% of meetings are starting and ending on time, meeting room is not even a question, asynchronous update is the norm and does not prevent us from being efficient, team days are scheduled enough in advance to organize my family life without stress.
With such an organization, our quality of life increases. In my case, I take my children to school by bike every morning. I take the time to grab some vegetables and eggs in the garden to prepare a nice dinner. I can run or attend my yoga class nearby at noon. It definitely sounds like a perfect work-life balance.
In our department, we recently introduced trimestral objectives. Having this rhythm allows stepping back on a regular basis. It makes the key results visible to the team. It brings a sense of agility to ensure that actions are taken to avoid diverging from a given objective. It keeps the team focused, something that can be difficult in a remote organization.
Share more. Learn more: nice on paper but what about the reality?
The value “Share more. Learn More.” was the one I was the most skeptical about before joining BlaBlaCar, especially in a remote setup. Maybe because I was used to major big face-to-face events where we would only share major news. At BlaBlaCar, the organization is here to support it: weekly events to share significant news, information, product evolutions and zoom on some parts of the company are organized on a weekly basis. If you do not have time to attend all of them, no problem! They are all recorded to allow you to manage your time coherently.
During my first few months, this value became for me: “Listen more. Learn more.”
As a new manager arriving in a well-established organization, you need to adapt. Listening was key in team construction. Precious feedback was shared and I learned a lot. Having clear priorities, roles and responsibilities defined between the stakeholders and identifying the first follower for a given idea allowed me to create a first version of the team organization. The process is now well in place and it allows us to sustain the important amount of work inside the team and absorb a larger scope.
Dream. Decide. Deliver… and adapt
Like many of us, the first full remote experience was a forced one during the Covid pandemic. At that time I already knew all my teammates and it was not difficult to create a real continuity from the in-office routine.
That’s not the same as joining a company in a full remote setup as a new engineering manager. This is something I was both dreaming and worrying about. How will I be able to be well integrated? How will I be able to network in such an environment? How will I be able to bring my footprint in the company?
Despite all those questions I decided to join BlaBlaCar. The main reason was the mission: targeting zero empty seats in shared transport. This is indeed much more aligned with my personal convictions than previous job missions.
Once onboarded, I had to make some changes to my habits in order to be efficient and cope with the remote environment. Here are some of them.
The most difficult one was finding where and how to share information. What is the correct audience for the information I will share? What is the correct format? A private slack channel? A call? Should this information be shared publicly?
After a short adaptation period, the question I am asking now is “Why should this conversation be private?” I can only recommend having only public discussions for work-related topics as this sustains the transparency culture.
The most incredible one: is trust. I used to be a manager trusting people by default but with my last working experience this practice had turned very poorly, and I rapidly needed to stop trusting people blindly. I can now emphasize the importance of having values you can rely on. At BlaBlaCar, recruitment is strong enough to ensure candidates are matching the company values. Everyone is embodying them and that makes a real difference. That changes everything for me and the trust-by-default approach is definitively back! It’s even more powerful with people sharing the same personal values as you and if you are not able to trust others, an Engineering Manager role in a remote setup is clearly not for you.
The most surprising: be silent. The power of silence was always something highlighted in the different management training sessions I attended in my career, but it has never been easy to apply in an in-office setup. It turned out to be much easier to do in a remote setup. Just try it! What a nice surprise! Silence in 1:1 is powerful to force us to put words on a situation. It helps create trust in the relationship, and get rid of any doubt.
The most efficient: be curious and don’t be shy. At BlaBlaCar, very nice onboarding weeks are here to help you get contextual information, historical facts, and company stories. This helps integration a lot. As in any job the added curiosity you are able to bring will make you even more included and engaged.
Fail. Learn. Succeed.
Working in a company with over 750 people driven by a written and asynchronous culture creates new challenges on its own.
From time to time I find myself anxious about asking a question on a Slack channel with almost 300 colleagues. Can’t I find another way to find the information I’m looking for? I’m stressed about leaving a trace of that potentially dumb question somewhere or creating too much noise because of my question.
Am I already getting a bit old? Here is the mindset shift to operate. It’s not easy but you get used to it very fast: just avoid judging yourself, this is the key. Just write your question and hit “Send”. There is no stupid question in a hybrid, 750+ people company, really.
In a nutshell, joining a new company is always an intense period. After one year in the company, I went through some personal and collective changes to accomplish my integration.
On the personal side, I embraced the BlaBlaCar remote safe environment to nurture my curiosity, get rid of self-limiting barriers and set the people at the heart of my daily job by trusting and listening to them.
On the collective one, the team worked hard to create a team spirit by getting to know each other better. The team has been extremely motivated in defining a clear organization, and setting up the roles and responsibilities with key players. We are predictable enough to sustain and enhance our delivery rhythm.
I am now eager to keep participating in making BlaBlaCar a safe work environment and to keep demonstrating that as remote workers we are never alone in front of a computer
Special thanks to Guillaume Wuip for your review and for sharing your impressive blog poster tips. Thanks Ricardo Lage, Victor Mendez and Victor Rubin for the review!
