On Monday, we led a core conversation at South by Southwest Interactive called “How to Create Awesome Culture in Remote Teams.” It went well — we filled the room! — so if you were there, thanks for coming! If you missed it, here’s an overview of what Matt and James talked about.
Due to technical difficulties, our footage from the talk isn’t available. So Matt and James took some time to film the talk by themselves:
(Oh, we’ve posted our slides, and collected some of the #teamremote tweets so you can get an idea of the conversations we had during and after the session.)
What we talked about
Culture can’t be created but it can definitely be influenced. We’ve found that a positive and open culture can be encouraged through the following 5 Pillars of Awesome: Hiring, communication, transparency, tools and of course, fun.
1. Hiring
Every person who joins a team affects its culture simply by being who they are. But how we hire is just as important as who, and it sets the foundation for the kind of culture we want. When we hire, we:
- Interview in pairs, so there’s back and forth conversation and a second take on the candidate’s suitability.
- Focus more on communication skills and personality than CVs or resumes. (In fact, we don’t even really look at those.)
- Ask humourous questions to learn more about them. For example: What kind of movie do you have to watch if it’s on? We don’t judge anyone who says Showgirls (okay, maybe a little) — the aim of the question is to allow candidates to describe why they love something outside of work. And there’s almost always a good story.
Once the interview is over, we put the candidate on a test project (usually taking about one hour) to see how they work. If that all shakes out, they start working with a mentor and are given access to our Google Sites Phuser handbook. We’ve found that this process immerses the candidate in our work right away, and gives everyone a good idea about how they’ll fit in.
A note on perks: We talk about these as soon as we can because they say a lot about the kind of company we are. For example, we offer 25–30 hour weeks, open vacation days, flexible scheduling and a plethora of other benefits, such as home office and education stipends. Our collection of perks say that we value work/life balance as well as quality of work, and we want our teammates to do the same.
2. Communication
Without frequent and proper communication, working remotely can quickly fall apart. Our policy is: communicate everything as often as possible — or, overcommunicate. This means we’re always logged into HipChat, running timers on Harvest, making sure our tasks and goals are up to date in Basecamp, giving regular status updates to clients, sending quick responsive emails, and more. It means being open and clear with everyone and touching base for the sake of touching base. When we don’t have lots of facetime with each other, it’s really important to know where we’re all at. We think overcommunicating:
- Encourages people to come out of their shells. A lot of people who work as designers and developers are introverts, and the more we communicate the better.
- Promotes bonding. The more we talk while we work, the more we get to know each other. (Bonus: This helps fend off the loneliness that can come from being at home with a computer.)
- Solves problems before they’re problems. (Sometimes.) Talking about things early and honestly amongst our team and with our client helps ensure we all have a smoother time working together.
3. Transparency
There are no secrets at The Phuse and we like it that way. The company cash flow, hours worked (through Harvest and our team activity monitor, P.A.M), goals and roadmaps are available and communicated to everyone on the team. We have weekly meetings during which we discuss what we’ve accomplished, are currently working on, and are blocked by.
Externally, we strive to make time for experience-sharing conversations with our peers — and even our competitors. When it comes to potential clients, we give them our Client Guide so they can learn about our process before even starting to work with us.
We believe that being transparent:
- Helps our employees feel more connected to and invested in the company.
- Shows our clients that we care about relationships and good work.
(Some of this is covered in a recent post by James on the value of transparency in a relationship-based company like ours.)
4. Tools
Without these, remote work — and our culture — simply couldn’t exist. Using the right tools for the right jobs makes a huge difference. A different piece of software can change the whole mindset for something and make a process seamless, like what happened when we starting using Base as our core CRM. Prior to using Base, tracking leads and deals felt cumbersome, but now that we use, it’s something the whole operations team has integrated into their daily work. (Its tagline should be: Making you not despise sales.)
We’re always looking for newer tools, but these are our current favourites:
- Basecamp — the center of all the work we do
- Dropbox
- Harvest
- ResourceGuru
- Invision
- Base
- HipChat
- Skype
- Hangouts
- GitHub
Using these frequently and effectively (with lots of gifs) makes our culture — and team — possible.
5. Fun
This is the kind of stuff most companies talk about when they mean culture: big open-bar parties, ping pong tables, beer fridges and the like. We agree that it’s important to play as hard as we work, and are experimenting with a few ways to have fun, even though we’re time zones apart.
Video games: We’ve started playing Team Fortress 2, and plan to set up our own Minecraft server. (Shopify has a really cool one.)
Movie nights: Every month we sync up and watch a movie at the same time. In the past we’ve watched Die Hard and Spaceballs while making jokes in HipChat.
Project Minga: In June, we’ll all be coming together for the first time in the Mayan Riviera to work, play and blow off some steam.
Secret Satan: During October, we sent each other candy instead of gifts.
Phusebot: Is our handy, humourous Hubot. It animates gifs for us, fetches images and draws cards for Cards Against Humanity. We’ve also made Phusebot useful — it generates Google Hangouts, for example — but it’s mostly for entertainment.
And that’s it!
Thanks again for all who came out. We’re really happy with how everything turned out, and would love to hear your thoughts on building culture in remote teams!
