Working Remotely at Hudl
In my 1.5 years at Hudl, I’ve been impressed with how much effort is put into making the remote experience as great as possible. Building the remote-first culture allows us to expand our talent pool into heavy population centers. We have remote workers in Nebraska, New York, Washington, Texas, California, Massachusetts, the UK, and Australia. Looking at just the US, these states enable us to recruit about a third of the US population.
Since joining Hudl, I’ve worked exclusively on remote heavy squads. No one on my current squad works in the same physical location as anyone else. I’ve gotten quite used to it and get weirded out by the rare 100% in-person meeting. As with all things in life, we do some parts well and struggle in other areas.
What do we do well?
Mindset — This is the most important thing to get right. Everyone at Hudl works regularly with remote employees; so people know how to deal with it. Our CTO, VP of Engineering, and VP of finance all work out of their homes in different states. Having these senior roles working remotely emphasizes how important it is to us.
Equipment — We invest in making the experience great for everyone; here is some of the key equipment we use:
Conference equipment
- Conference room cameras — Logitech PTZ Pro
- Computers attached to each TV — HP EliteDesk 800
- Conference “phones” — we don’t actually have phones because we have computers in every room. Phoenix Quatro 3
Personal equipment
- Standup desks — we provide the same standup desks we have in the office to remote Hudlies.
- Headset — each person can expense up to $75 for a headset. We recommend the Logitech G430.
- Webcams — most people in the office have an additional webcam provided by Hudl. We use the Logitech c910
Collaboration — Tools like appear.in, GoToMeeting, and Google Hangouts make having face-to-face conversations simple. These all integrate seamlessly in Slack with a simple “/appear” command.
Scheduled visits — Everyone comes to the HQ for their first 2 weeks at Hudl. After that, we have quarterly retreats which we encourage everyone to attend. These are good rallying points for getting everyone physically co-located throughout the year.
Where do we struggle?
Whiteboard sessions — I have yet to find a good digital alternative to whiteboards. Surprisingly, Google Docs is probably the closest thing we use for collaboration.
Time zones — With offices from London to Australia, some people get left out. We’ve also had some struggles with “working hours”. We don’t have prescribed hours, but when there are squads with people in London and on the West Coast, there are only 1–2 hours every day where their office hours overlap.
Squad bonding — Setting aside the time to get to know each other is hard remotely. One experiment I tried was getting coffee gift cards for everyone and then playing a board game online with a video chat open. This worked fine, not great though.
Overheard conversations — There’s benefit to eavesdropping. In the Omaha office, I sit amongst the sales team. I’m able to hear some of the pain points our users have just by listening to their conversations.
What have you done at your company to build the remote first mentality? Have you been able to overcome the whiteboard challenge? Hit me up, I’d love to hear more.
If this all sounds like something you want to be a part of, well you are in luck because Hudl is hiring!
