How we work as a distributed company
Task Analytics is a distributed company with 4 employees in Oslo, 1 in Bergen, 2 in Colombo, 1 in New York and 2 in Boston. I’m sure that in 6 months time we will have added more locations to that list. Some of us have never even met in person (yet). There are definitively challenges in building a distributed company, and there are some advantages as well. How do we make the wheels turn when many of us hardly ever meet?
(PS: We’re hiring: https://taskanalytics.com/careers/)
Maintaining a pulse
There are a lot of tools out there to help distributed teams keep in sync. The tools really doesn’t matter as much as being thoughtful about communication though. We spend time every week discussing how we can ensure information flow and keep everyone up to date. We deliberately keep regular video chats around recurring themes to make sure we have arenas for open discussion. This is under constant tweaking, but at the moment of this writing we run these regular sessions:
- A weekly 30 minutes Product sit-down where we discuss what we are building in the next week as well as what we built in the previous week. We always bring up the roadmap at this sit-down and maintain that our priorities are correct. While the meeting is open for everybody, its most typical for the product team + a few randoms listening in.
- The product team also runs a daily 15 minute video sit-down. This is like a daily standup. This meeting is some times attended by people outside the product team if they are involved in what’s currently being worked on. We normally use Slack video calls for this.
- A weekly 30 minute Marketing sit-down where we discuss our marketing activities and initiatives. This is also entirely open, and we typically run it on the back of the product sit-down so you can spend 1 full hour if you are involved in both. The sales team + CEO normally attend this meeting, and some times the product manager and CTO join in.
- A monthly 1 hour company wide sit-down. Everybody attends this meeting, and this is where we deliver strategic news, as well as an update on economic results. New team members also introduce themselves in this meeting so everybody gets to know them.
- A weekly 30 minutes leadership group sync. This is closed for the leadership group and is where administrative issues are discussed, as well as strategic decisions are reached.
Daily work cadence
We use Slack heavily for day-to-day communications. We try to avoid emails and we try to avoid too many one-on-one phone calls. The reason is to make sure knowledge is shared so we become more resilient in case someone gets ill or for when we can’t reach someone. In Slack we have a #watercooler channel for daily banter and then we have open channels for things like #development, #design, #marketing, #sales-win-learn, #webpage, #signal and #alerts.
Channels like #development are very busy with bots and integrations for deployments and git activity. In #design we discuss sketches and ideas we might work on, and in #sales-win-learn we deliver a report from each new customer, or every time someone stops using Task Analytics so that we can learn how to improve. We also get monitoring #alerts so we keep on top of what’s happening with the production environment for all our services, whereas #signal has custom integrations with daily system reports as well as support requests and in-app usage patterns.
Company retreats
We have annual company retreats where we’ll meet up somewhere in the world and spend a week together. This is a week with some work, but also a lot of fun. This is a great arena for playing with big ideas, but its more important to have a lot of fun and get to know each other better. In 2016, our first year of existence, we went to Sri Lanka and rented a big apartment together. For a good week we worked and had fun together in Colombo before wrapping it up on the beach, as you can see in the photo! Our 2017 retreat, scheduled for the fall, is not yet set in stone. Regardless of where we go, the most important thing is bringing everybody together and having a really good time.
Irregular summits
We also run some irregular summits where we gather parts of the team that are working on something special, in order to be in the same room for a couple of days, just banging at ideas. Recently we had an Oslo summit to welcome the newly joined USA part of our team. We rented a big apartment and spent a week working together on go-to-market strategies, polishing our value proposition and learning about the cultural differences we might have to overcome. We are considering similar interventions for new hires, new initiatives and whenever we see a need for this. The important part is to figure out when it makes sense to bring people together, and when it makes sense to just stick to the week-in-and-out slack and video chats.
Conferences
A final arena for some in-person time is when we meet up at a conference. We’ve not done this a lot yet, but having team members from different locations meet up at a conference they both want to attend is another way to bond better.
In day-to-day work, Task Analytics employees are expected to be responsive on Slack and handle their work duties. Apart from that, they are free to work however they see fit. Some of us like to work from a coffee shop, some of us keep to a home office. We have office space in Oslo and Bergen, and some of us use that part time. If an employee wants help to sort out a good working arrangement we will do our best to find a good solution.
Remote teams build strength and resilience out of sheer necessity. Information is harder to pass as you can’t just reach out to the next desk and ask a question. You have to do more work in the open, and you have to become better at describing problems and solutions. The other great part is that using chat a lot leaves a text trail. You can search back in time and find that discussion where you decided on something no one truly can remember.
The other awesome side to working remotely is the potential to save time on commute, and being able to work flexibly and break up the day as you see fit. Maybe the best thing for one team member is to work 6 hours within normal hours, and save the last 2 hours for when the kids are in bed. We really think that this work setup makes it easier to maintain a healthy work/life balance.
What is important to realise is that every part of how we cooperate is a work in progress. We iterate and reevaluate constantly, second-guessing if we really are on the right track with the right tools and processes. Overall, one and a half year in, we’re pretty satisfied with this setup!
We’re looking for a Software Engineer that would like to be a part of 👆🏼👇🏼
