Born remote

Published in

LeadWise

5 min readNov 22, 2016

Hi! I’m Mariana, and I’m one of the team members at Semco Digital.

If you’re interested in organizational design, you will recognize the name Semco. Semco is a trailblazing company from Brazil that has pioneered many employee-friendly practices since the 1980s, achieving astounding growth (40% a year) while maintaining high employee engagement and low turnover (2% per year).

Ricardo Semler, CEO of Semco for over 20 years, was the mastermind behind these changes. His experiences have been chronicled in the international best sellers Maverick and 7 Day Weekend, as well as his popular TED talk.

Semco Digital was born in May 2016 with a desire to bring these 30+ years of experimentation and knowledge from Semco and other companies to the world.

Why now?

Because now is the time to share these ideas and tools. With the spread of the internet and the ability of people to work remotely, many of the practices that Semco tested and championed are able to be adopted by other companies.

Not only that, but we’re actually now living in a time of crisis. The employer-employee relationship is broken and based on distrust. Employee engagement is ridiculously low, and productivity suffers. If companies are to survive, they’re wise to think of ways to improve this bleak situation.

We’re here to help leaders prepare themselves to lead from a place of trust, to get out of the way of their team members, to tear down rules and power structures that hamper creativity and innovation, and to show them the tools that they can use to do this.

What do you actually do?

We do our work online, and it centers on education. So far, we’ve hosted webinars and launched a couple courses through our LeadWise brand.

How do you actually work?

We always try to practice what we preach in the way we work, so we’re a flat organization based on trust and transparency.

One interesting aspect that I wanted to discuss in this post is that we were born remote, and at no point in time have all of our team members been at the same physical place.

Where we’re located

Our team is distributed all over the world. As of this writing, our 8 team members can be found in a couple cities in Brazil, in the US, Portugal, and New Zealand; however, some of our team members are nomadic and change their location every couple of months.

Half of our team members are fully dedicated to Semco Digital, while others split their time with other projects.

Our team

When putting together the team, no thought was given to where the person was located — instead, their interest in improving the way work works and the skills they brought to the table were the main considerations.

No one signed a contract — instead, we each came up with handshake compensation agreements, first proposed by the candidate, which were recorded on our staff cards on Trello, viewable to all other team members. So far, we’ve had a couple team members leave because of other projects and family issues.

Now that we have been working together for several months, we invite people that we feel fit into our ethos to come work with us on either a project basis or something more informal, and when mutually agreeable, we agree to move into a more full-time arrangement.

There are no job descriptions. While everyone has specific skills they bring to the table, it is much more important to us that they fit in with our values and ethos, and we find this out by working informally with them first and then moving into more time-consuming arrangements.

Meetings

We don’t have many formal meetings, but we do have a weekly team meeting, which lasts two hours and usually takes place on Tuesday or Wednesday. The time of this team meeting can change to accommodate where our team members are located.

Collaboration tools

As with many startups and tech companies these days, we use many collaboration tools:

Our office is Slack, and we’re on it pretty much all day.
We write documents on Google Docs. Our spreadsheets are Google Sheets and AirTable.
Zoom is our team room, and relevant meetings are recorded and posted on Wistia for all in the team to see.

Transparency

As I mentioned, we have open salaries, which means that everyone in the team knows how much everyone makes. Everyone on the team has access to all our finances and is able to weigh in on strategic decisions.

When people work

Everyone is free to decide when they work.

Take me, for example. I live in Miami, FL, and I teach a design thinking class at a local college at night twice a week. I usually wake up, meditate, journal, go to the gym, shower, eat breakfast, drive to my coworking space and log in at around 10–10:30AM. While I do sneak in some peeks on Slack and email at the gym, I don’t sit down to start working until several hours after I wake up. On days when I teach, I log off a bit early, and on others, I stay on a bit later.

No one is tracking how much time I actually work — the proof is in the pudding — am I delivering? That’s what really matters. The same goes for my colleagues.

Evaluation

We’re a very small team and have not implemented a formal evaluation process yet. We give each other feedback informally at this point, and it has worked so far. We haven’t come across any big issues. If you have any suggestions here, let us know below!

Celebrating successes

This is really important! We try to have beers over Zoom to celebrate when we ship, though I must admit we need to have to be better about this and do it more often!

So this is just a bit of insight into how we work at Semco Digital. Look for more from us on organizational design, the future of work and more insights into how we work soon!

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LeadWise believes that we need to change how work works. We create online learning solutions to help individuals and organizations to transform their hierarchical command-and-control management styles to more horizontal and collaborative approaches in order to improve work satisfaction and produce better results. Join the movement at www.leadwise.co.