One Year at Home: Keeping Community At the Core of Our Work

From Natalie Angelillo, OfferUp’s Vice President of Community and Communication:

Before the pandemic, OfferUp had a strong work-from-office culture. We had a couple of hundred employees who came to work in person every day at our Bellevue HQ and another 40ish who worked together in our Miami office. In reaction to the rapidly escalating health concerns across the nation, and to keep our employees safe, we decided to close our physical offices and convert to an indefinite period of working from home.

Our office culture at the time and our interpersonal values reflected the ethos of our product and our core values — all of which are centered on the concept of community. Diving deeper, one of our core values is being “neighborly.” We are building the largest mobile marketplace for local buyers and sellers, which in most cases means meeting up in person. We live and breathe our product, so spreading neighborly energy to our colleagues is part of our special sauce. Being a fast-moving startup means that being able to meet with one another and solve problems quickly is critical to our success.

While the past year was by no means easy, we found at OfferUp that by using collaboration tools and prioritizing human connection that we could not only salvage our best practices but could innovate on them and evolve into a much stronger company.

We did a few important things:

1. We already had a collaboration hub (Slack) and had socialized using it well before the pandemic.
2. We quickly connected new “spokes” to our hub like video conferencing with Zoom and meeting scheduler Donut to make it easier to foster collaboration outside of core teams.
3. We tripled down on the essential part of digital collaboration — the people part.

While this first anniversary of working from home is an important reflection point, we are by no means at the “end” of something. If anything, we are only at the beginning of an entirely new era of work. As we look to the future and what that means for the community and culture of OfferUp, we only know two things for sure:

1. We will continue to lean on our company values to guide our decision-making, and center on being Driven, Neighborly, and Adaptable (our “DNA”).
2. We will focus even more on using technology to build bonds of human connection, regardless of where we work or if we’ve met in person.

We’ve learned some important lessons this past year and are putting these learnings into practice moving forward. Stay tuned as we chronicle our efforts on collaboration and community at OfferUp on this blog.

For those interested in further exploring collaboration best practices by OfferUp and other leading companies, check out Reimagining Collaboration: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and the Post-COVID World of Work, by Phil Simon. You can also listen to our recent conversation on the topic by listening to Phil’s Podcast — Conversations About Collaboration (our episode will be available on March 23rd, but many great conversations are already live now.)