Teleport — awesome, hard working and dedicated.
We had a conversation with Elen Veenpere, from Teleport.
Teleport helps you find and move to the best place to live and work. With just a few questions and answers, Teleport makes suggestions based on parameters you choose. Taking away the massive amounts of research and guesswork. Free people move and Teleport is there to help you. Teleport celebrated their second birthday and reaching 100K users when we had our interview and have come million miles since. Congrats! 🙌🎉
What is the most important team value you have?
I’d say it’s efficient and clear communication.
How many people work remotely in your company and how often?
There are twelve people on Teleport team right now. We’ve got ca 6 people in the Tallinn office and the rest work remotely from Tartu, Munich, San Francisco and Calgary. We also have a few nomadic members who don’t like staying still in one place. The amount of people at the office or working remotely depends on the day, really — nothing is set in stone.
Everything happens online for us — including our Watercooler chat on Fleep which is a sight to see 😊
We usually get together once every 3–4 months to meet, discuss, plan and obviously have tons of fun.
What is the biggest challenge you have faced as remote team?
Making sure our internal communication works seamlessly. We mostly use chat (Fleep) and video calls to ensure that everything that needs to be discussed, gets done. We also have weekly team meetings plus one on one calls to make sure we’re on the same page.
How do you communicate with your team?
As said, we communicate mostly through chat (again, we’re a big fan of Fleep) and Google Hangouts/Skype for team meetings as well as 1:1 or topical calls and conversations.
A good task management system is also crucial (we use Asana). All important outcomes and points of every discussion are written down in Google Docs — accessible and editable for all team members. It’s vital to keep all information available for everyone, get things out of your head and inbox!
For an overview of our team members’ locations and timezones we use one of our own babies — Teleport Sundial, which makes scheduling as easy as one plus one.
We have a weekly team meeting on Mondays, otherwise we discuss relevant topics with whoever is involved. We don’t do daily stand-ups.
Do you use visuals when collaborating with your remote team? How do you work with those?
For documenting larger discussions about important topics we use Google Slides. When we’re all in the same room together, whiteboards come in — we painted a bunch of our office walls with whiteboard paint so we don’t run out of room 😊
What has been the best resource on remote working for your team, if you have used any?
We rely mostly on our own experience, and any cool articles we find on the way.
Our own blog, Zapier’s Ultimate Guide to Remote Work and any other remote company’s experiences.
Follow Teleport on Twitter or Facebook.
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Originally published at www.deekit.com/blog
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