Adapting Maslow’s Hierarchy for a Remote World
How one tech startup used psychology to design the work-from-home experiment
Square Root was ahead of the work-from-home curve since we already had flexible work scheduling before the pandemic reached us in Austin. For me, I’d committed one day per week to work outside the office. This usually looked like spending most of the day in a cozy corner at a local coffee shop. Laptop open. Headphones on. In the zone. As the Office Manager, my role usually consisted of moving around our campus quite a bit or having welcomed interruptions from our Radicals (the endearing term for our employees) interspersed throughout the workday. My day outside of the office was the ideal time for knocking out emails, approving expense reports, and reading through articles I’d saved up.
At the end of the week, we might have a themed happy hour to celebrate our week’s successes and have the social interaction that binds our team.
Between normal days in the office, scheduled days outside of the office, and our regular social events, we had a nice balance that seemed to work for everyone. Then, the pandemic pushed us to be fully remote.
Over two months into our unexpected work from home experiment, we decided it was high time to let our Radicals give us their feedback on what was going well and what wasn’t during remote life. We asked the obvious questions like, “What is going well remote?” and “What’s not going so well remote?”, but we also dug in deeper to understand how folks felt about potential long-term changes by asking “How would you rate your work from home productivity level?” and “How comfortable would you be if we were 100% remote forever?” These were purely hypothetical. The employee feedback only strengthened our feeling that in-person, in-office work is deeply Square Root. We love having moments of creativity and innovation that come from ad-hoc discussions and brainstorming. Even small moments of joy when we throw eco-friendly confetti during team announcements to celebrate…just about anything! We weren’t quite ready to let go of that experience even in the age of work from anywhere, anytime.
If we didn’t plan on changing our remote policy, then what? We wanted to take an already flexible policy and use this remote experiment to nurture the values we hold so dear, like elevating how we recognize family and parental obligations + mental and physical health needs.
We realized we needed to start at the basics. Inspired by a presentation given by our Founder and CEO, Chris Taylor, at our Q1 company meeting, we started to think in terms of a hierarchy of needs. In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (inspired by the Blackfoot Nation), the needs are categorized into sections: basic, psychological, and then self-fulfillment.
What lofty goals! How could Square Root attain our version of self-fulfillment, or as we defined it, our Nirvana of Remote Culture?
BUILDING THE FOUNDATION OF OUR HIERARCHY
To start, we quickly realized we can’t begin to build our hierarchy without a solid foundation — one of empathy, patience, and grace. These words keep coming up in our internal discussions because this was already built into Square Root culture. Now we’re just seeing it in a new context. Giving each other, and ourselves, room to navigate the complexities of our newfound work from home life is so key to our success and happiness as a team. Suddenly many of us were grappling with becoming homeschool teachers and entertaining our pets, all while we sat at our dining room tables (or beds!) trying to work our usual nine-to-five. Should I even mention the added stress and worry from a global pandemic?
Having the support of co-workers eases the burden as we all share similar adjustments, but it can still be hard to give ourselves the same pass that we may extend to our team members. On the flip side, when remote work overstayed its welcome, spilled over into May, and then into the dog days of summer, we found our patience being tested.
Level 1 — COMMUNICATION + CONNECTION
Keeping channels of communication open with one another is necessary to avoid the breakdown of our foundation. For us, informal communication between Radicals is essential. Like many tech startups, we use Slack for internal messaging and announcements. It’s easy to lack formal rules around Slack use when you can just as easily go down the hall or take a quick walk to another house on campus to chat with someone. When that option wasn’t available it became obvious we needed to make adjustments to our messaging habits.
During a weekly all-hands meeting in late March, we talked about our remote culture and the importance of oversharing. We agreed we wanted our Slack habits to be more inclusive, but what does this look like?
- Having conversations in public channels, so that entire teams can see the topics being discussed. This allows folks who may have nothing to contribute to the active conversation to still see the outcome. A decision is made and any Radical who reads the thread now has this information at their disposal. “Withholding info” is in our anti-bucket list; habitually making conversations public keeps it at bay over the long term!
- Encouraging individuals to share their schedules openly — schedules that may very well be messy and unpredictable at times — and also a little vulnerability can go a long way to keeping the foundation strong. The Culture + People team started sharing in a public-facing channel what our schedules would look like, when we needed a break for a snack or a walk, or even when a child really just needed a hug and some attention from Mom or Dad. This encourages others that it’s ok to express needs for breaks and that it’s normal to have interruptions.
Connection may be the hardest item in our hierarchy to achieve. We have 44 employees who have 44 individual needs. Finding ways to make everyone feel connected can be challenging, but we’ve hosted virtual happy hours, mid-day coffee chats, sent care packages, and posted questions of the day to encourage Radicals to share fun facts about themselves. One of our most successful experiments has been Radical Connections.
Kelsey, our HR + Recruiting Coordinator, created a dedicated Slack channel, #radicalconnections, for folks to be paired with another random Radical for a fun, get-to-know-you chat, no work talk necessary. Starting in August, the Culture + People team helped coordinate and schedule weekly group chats of 4–5 people as well as 1-on-1 chats for everyone at Square Root. This made it easy for the team to share moments of connection, joy, and whimsy — something most of us have been lacking for months. Not only that, but new and deep bonds were formed by folks who don’t often work together or connect. Next, we’ll follow-up by getting more Radical feedback on how the chats went so we can find ways to make this a better experience for all.
Level 2 — CLEAR PRIORITIES + EXPECTATIONS
We have always valued clear expectations and priorities, and have achieved these through a mix of all-hands and 1-on-1 meetings, but now we’ve added a 15-minute Monday kick-off. These kick-offs are concise and set clear expectations for each week so every Radical knows how to contribute to our company goals.
We also open all meetings with time devoted to sharing Happy News. From small stuff, like a hike over the weekend, to the big things, like adding a puppy to the family or an engagement, we make room for joy! We even end the meetings with a crowd favorite — jazz hands! Our Monday kick-off allows us to align and connect. Win-win.
Level 3 — COLLABORATION + DOCUMENTATION
Once priorities and expectations are set we need to have ways of working together to achieve our goals. We saw an obvious trend in our remote culture survey results — folks really seem to miss whiteboarding as a collaborative tool. We’ve used the Jamboard app, and we even bought a Kaptivo whiteboard camera for the conference room (still available for individual reservations if someone needs a Work from Work day.)
We’re still experimenting with virtual whiteboarding, but even without tools, collaboration can work well in a remote setting if we follow good documentation procedures. This brings us to our meeting philosophy: Meeting Magic! This was the result of a previous Hackathon project by a former member of the Culture + People team. Just before the pandemic started to become a serious threat in the U.S., Meeting Magic was going through an update to version 2.0. This was a timely revamp as many of the meeting culture values we held in office translated very well to remote culture. Since we already had a great meeting mindset, the main takeaway for us was to make sure we were being consistent, inclusive, and productive across all meetings, from Herd retrospectives to our weekly kick-off. To do that, we suggested new additions to Meeting Magic:
- Get in the habit of using shared docs for each standing meeting. There, ideas and actions are documented for anyone who missed the meeting, and there’s a record for anyone who needs to reference back, or a new Radical who joins the team and needs to catch up on tribal knowledge.
- Embrace notation rotation, the idea that regular attendees of standing meetings take turns being the note taker. This nurtures empathy and compassion. Each Radical knows what it’s like to take notes during a meeting, and note-takers get a break so they can focus on the discussion and not just note-taking.
Sharpening our documentation process in meetings is an easy, but high-impact adjustment with long-term benefits.
Level 4 — FLEXIBILITY + ASYNCHRONOUS WORK
This level of our hierarchy is still a work in progress, and we’re coming up with experiments to make asynchronous work a possibility for our team, in a way that works for everyone. Our hypothesis is that as we perfect the other levels of the hierarchy, this level will naturally become easier to make a reality.
The legwork of achieving asynchronicity will be each Radical having realistic expectations about what async-work looks like in practice, and having respect for one another. Some questions we need to sit with:
- What will happen if our teams are on varied schedules?
- How does your preferred schedule impact your team?
- How can more typical 9–5 hours (in our home base Central time zone) be accommodating to those outside of this schedule?
- Will all managers be ok with having their team on different schedules?
- Are you comfortable with and accepting of async communication?
We have a great deal to think about if this is a path we choose to take. Regardless of what our future remote culture looks like, the flexibility we’ve always had at Square Root will continue to exist. Our goal is to enhance this flexibility with tweaks and experiments now. We want to make sure our flexible policy is strengthened after work from home and continues to be supportive of family needs, health needs, and mental health needs.
Level 5 — ACCOMPLISHMENT + HIGH PRODUCTIVITY
This is where we’ll be when we reach our Nirvana of remote culture, and where we want to see some of the other hierarchy items level-up, like connectedness.
Having all or most of the team working at highly productive levels, feeling good about it, and having a sense of accomplishment is peak remote culture for Square Root.
One way we will start nurturing this idea now is to hold our bi-annual Hackathon virtually! What better way to get a sense of accomplishment and collaboration than to host our most innovative event of the year in a remote setting? Hackathons get our creative juices flowing and energizes us well into the holiday season, just in time to reflect on our year and start thinking about all of the possibilities that lie ahead in the new year. Even during this funereal year, we believe we can help our team feel productive and hopeful, one level at a time.
REACHING OUR NIRVANA OF REMOTE CULTURE
Following Maslow’s motivational theory, we’re creating a safe space for our team to fulfill their potential. Once we do all this, what does Nirvana of Remote Culture look like for Square Root?
We hope it means that Radicals are happy, engaged, productive, and included.
We hope Radicals feel connectedness, whimsy, a sense of accomplishment, and a sense of collective forward movement.
Ultimately, we want this hierarchy to encourage loads of empathy and lots of flexibility with respect reserved for everyone. For the many tech companies that are moving to a 100% remote workforce, we think this is a great guide for successful remote work. But we’re especially thrilled for the effect it will have on in-office culture when we’re ready to move back to in-office work…and we are so ready to see our Radicals in real life again.
Square Root is a diverse and innovative team in Austin, Texas building data-curation software for the automotive + retail field. Learn more about our platform + see how CoEFFICIENT can help make your field more.
