How Our Remote-First Setup Forced Us To Focus On Collaboration
LaterPay started as a remote team pretty much from day one. The challenges that came with a remote-first setup forced us to focus on collaboration, whereas in more traditional setups such important topics are much easier ignored or neglected. I hope that reading about the challenges we faced — and how we handled them — will prove both interesting and helpful to you, whether you come from a remote company or not.
One of the most-liked perks of working at LaterPay is the flexibility we offer. As long as you have a decent internet connection, we don’t care where you work from. We try to be as asynchronous as possible, but we do still find that we need some synchronicity to work well together, which is why we require a couple hours overlap in the EU afternoon / US morning from everyone. Other than that, we care more about what you do and your results than about whether you’re sitting at a desk at 9am every day. It’s not a problem if you need to go pick up your kid from school, take your car to be repaired etc., as long as your calendar is up to date and you’re not missing any meetings that you’re supposed to attend.
We’ve found we can only make that flexibility work well if we stick to a few best practices:
1) Communication as a Service
Because we mostly communicate asynchronously, we have to make sure we really think about the information we’re providing to each other. Who needs what information so that they can provide me with what I need from them? We want to push that information to the other person instead of making them pull it from us.
We view our communication as a service to one another and keep the following things in mind:
- Give the other person context on the urgency of your request. When do you need a reply by?
- Be clear about whether you’re looking for approval, feedback, a decision.
- Consider how much context the other person already has and what information they may require to be able to answer you. Can you provide them with a link to documentation, a ticket, screenshots? What follow-up questions can you expect them to ask and can you already answer those in your first message?
- If you pull someone into a conversation, provide a summary of the conversation for them and be clear about what you need from them. Don’t force them to read through the whole conversation and to find out why you pulled them into the conversation exactly.
- Be aware of language and cultural differences and avoid role-specific jargon and country- or culture-specific language.
We have learned that it’s better to over-communicate in order to keep people informed and aligned, no matter if we are communicating asynchronously or synchronously. We also try to expect the best intent from each other. Written messages from someone with a different cultural background can easily seem rude, but they probably weren’t intended that way.
2) Transparency
Transparency is vital for our team - not only to avoid miscommunications, but also to inspire and motivate. We try to be as transparent as possible about our goals, our strategy, our values, our decision-making etc. You can hire the perfect person for the job, but if you don’t include them in what’s going on, it won’t matter. If you want your team members to care, you need to give them something to care about. Be clear, open and empathetic about what’s going on in the company.
We make sure we share our company goals, and how we got to those goals, with the entire team every quarter. People share decisions and the context behind those decisions. And on a lower level, we aim to be “public by default”. This means that if we have something to share or a question to ask, we want our default to be to share or ask somewhere that’s public to the team. In our case this often is a public channel in Slack.
3) Documentation
What helps further transparency at LaterPay is documentation. We document pretty much everything: decisions and their context, project plans, how-tos, status updates, FAQs etc.
This builds scalable knowledge, prevents knowledge silos and prevents us from having to answer the same questions multiple times. We can link to documentation, others can search for it and find it themselves, and when people leave the company, they don’t leave with all the context.
We realise, of course, that it’s easier to document something than to actually keep the documentation up to date. That’s why we encourage people, especially new hires, to constantly help update documentation when they see that it’s no longer accurate.
I cannot count the amount of times that someone has asked a question I knew was discussed and answered before and I then managed to find and share the answer with a quick Slack or internal wiki search.
4) Ownership
Being able to take ownership makes a huge difference for us. Admittedly, we still have situations where ownership isn’t clear and mistakes are made because we didn’t define a decision-maker, but we try to give our team members as much ownership as possible. What does this mean for us?
- We own our work and take full responsibility for it.
- We encourage people to make decisions to the best of their abilities.
- We ask for help when needed. If something does not seem to be going right, everyone has the responsibility to address it.
In our experience, intent-based leadership helps team members to take ownership of their work and decisions. The concept of intent-based leadership comes from the book “Turn The Ship Around” by David Marquet. You can find a video explaining the concept here. In short: Instead of asking “What should I do?” or “Would you do A or B?”, share your intent: “I intend to do ABC. If you need more context, you can find that [here].” If there are no concerns, you’ll be told to go ahead with it. If there are concerns, they can be addressed and you can either give more context or adapt your plan according to the feedback.
5) Sync time
We try to collaborate as asynchronous as possible using Slack, good documentation, transparency and pushing information instead of pulling information. This allows us to collaborate quite well across locations, time zones and even across teams.
However, we also had to learn that not everything can be done asynchronously. We try to do what we can, and we then try to find the right time for sync time. This can be for creative brainstorming, collaborating on a project, building human connection or when there’s a conflict or misunderstanding.
We work synchronously by using video meetings or voice calls. For some projects where we feel we would really benefit from being together physically, we will bring a team together in one physical location for a few days. The whole team also meets up for 5 days twice a year for team building, updates, workshops and close collaboration.
Working asynchronously as much as we can, helps us appreciate our sync time and make the best use of it. I am 200% sure that we still have sync meetings that we could also do asynchronously, but these are constantly being questioned. It’s hard to hit it right, but it helps to constantly be aware of it.
Summary
- Consider your communication as a service to one another and aim to push information instead of making others pull for information.
- Transparency is vital for collaboration as well as motivation. Aim to be public by default.
- Documentation builds scalable knowledge, prevents knowledge silos and prevents us from having the same conversations over and over again.
- Ownership and a clear decision maker furthers smooth and efficient collaboration. Help your team take ownership using intent-based leadership.
- We try to be as asynchronously as possible, but find we still need some synchronicity to work well together. Find the right time for sync time.
