Jobbatical — thinking beyond borders.
We had a conversation with Lauren Proctor, Head of Marketing at Jobbatical.
Jobbatical connects top tech and business talent with companies in every corner of the globe for “jobbaticals”. These are one-year career adventures that give skilled professionals the chance to experience a new city while putting their talents to work for a local team. They’re growing fast with over 50,000 professionals in over 100 countries and show no signs of slowing down!
What is the most important team value you have?
We really do all enjoy thinking beyond borders. It doesn’t just refer to literal borders that keep the world from working together. It means breaking down borders within ourselves; the stuff that keeps us from venturing outside our comfort zones.
How many people work remotely in your company and how often?
At the moment there are three team members who are almost exclusively remote. It varies a lot for the rest of us who are mostly based in Tallinn, Estonia. There’s almost always someone in the office and almost always someone that’s remote. It’s always hilarious when a team member currently located in the tropics asks the Tallinn team to “cheer up” when it’s freezing outside AND in the office. Every few months we try to get the whole gang in the same place at the same time. It’s important to make sure everyone on the team is a real person.
What is the biggest challenge you have faced as remote team?
This September, our team was more widely distributed than usual for the whole month. That meant wrangling a lot of time zones (from San Francisco to Sydney and plenty in between). The main challenge is, of course, communication. You often have to wait for someone to wake up while replying to people who have previously been waiting for you to wake up! On the whole, we’ve found that when it comes to working remotely vs in the office, there’s a balance that you have to strike to do your best work as a team.
How do you communicate with your team?
Most of our communication happens on Slack. The trick is to stay flexible (within reason) and patient. Keep Slack channels as to-the-point as possible so nothing gets lost in time. Mute channels you don’t need, so the chatter doesn’t deafen you. Skype and Hangouts calls are inevitable when you’re remote, so try to make sure microphones and cameras are doing their jobs before you start. That way you don’t spend ten minutes on Hi-can-you-hear-mes. We also keep in sync with daily stands on Slack and for big, unmissable decisions, we still turn to the ancient art of email.
Do you use visuals when collaborating with your remote team? How do you work with those?
We share our screens on video conferences and every now and again we find ourselves taking screenshots of sketches and that kind of thing.
What has been the best resource on remote working for your team, if you have used any?
For us, experience has been the best teacher by far.
Follow Jobbatical on Facebook or check out them out on Medium.
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Originally published at www.deekit.com/blog
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