No office, No problem.
“I thought we would spend the next 10 years convincing the world how to do remote better,Instead, Covid did it within months.” Sid Sijbrandij CEO of GitLab
The actual pandemia forced us to rethink the way we work. Remote work seems to be the next big challenge for companies. Nevertheless, all of them are not yet prepared to do it properly.
Some love it, some hate it, some could take it or leave it. Remote work was thrust upon many of us without a choice this year. But half a year on, and many organizations won’t look back.
Key points
# 1 | Be clear
Clear, detailed goals that remove uncertainty are imperative for setting milestones that teams can progress towards together, and provide meaning to their daily workflow.
Clarity and detail is crucial where communication is limited to more structured meetings and catch-ups.
# 2 | Be regular
Meetings and calls are more valuable when people have time to prepare, and establishing routines has been proven to boost morale and productivity.
# 3 | Be there
While video conferencing isn’t always the most appropriate form of communication, when a Slack message or phone call will do, establishing a face to face connection reminds managers and their employees that each other are ‘real’, and creates better understanding through body language.
# 4 | Be visible
Team progress should be tracked in a way that’s easily visible to everybody, where everyone can feedback and comment.
The GitLab case study
The only time staffers meet in person is for the company’s annual all-hands gatherings, held (in pre-Covid times, anyway) in lively and relatively cheap locations like Greece. Another pillar of GitLab’s remote-work absolutism: radical transparency. It publishes a public online handbook detailing how it approaches pretty much any topic. You won’t find individual employees’ salaries, but you will find its executives’ strategic objectives for the current quarter and the exact formula for calculating wages in the 67 countries in which GitLab staff live, from Kenya to Morocco to Serbia. (There’s also a section on how and when to talk to Sijbrandij, and one on his cat.) Anything not in the handbook, which would run to 8,400 pages if printed, is likely in an internal Google Doc. Every meeting at GitLab has at least one companion online doc.
Sijbrandij also relies heavily on documentation to allow GitLab staffers to work seamlessly. Employees update docs and take notes, or share information asynchronously in Slack channels and video messages. Resolved decisions or plans get merged into the handbook, which tracks it all. “Every time you have to wait for permission or sign-off for someone else to do something, that’s a problem,” he says.
The trend of companies moving their operations online, especially since the start of the pandemic, has pushed even more development to the cloud, meaning business is booming. But customers are increasingly likely to call not for software support, but rather a crash course in how GitLab runs its business.
“Ten to 15% of our engagement with partners is helping them see how we do things,” says Michelle Woodward Hodges, GitLab’s vice president of channel partnerships.
Conclusion
Given the uncertainty and the likelihood that a distributed workforce will increasingly become the new reality of business, business leaders and managers must develop new ways to motivate and empower employees to stay productive and make an impact.
Managers will find their job as a leader becomes less about leading as an individual, but in building the environment of collaboration and ‘co-elevation’ of each other.
