I’ve worked in distributed companies many times in my career. One of the first, was back at MySQL twenty years ago, when this was rather uncommon. When I joined the company they had around 30 employees scattered around the US and Europe and a tiny office in Uppsala, Sweden.
We had no US office at the time, but having received a series A investment from Benchmark Capital, CEO Marten Mickos and I installed ourselves in a conference room there and started hiring. Then we had two conference rooms, then a third and a fourth and at that point the Benchmark partners banished us to a remote building where their IT team toiled. This was a hint to pack our bags. We soon had our own office in Cupertino which was handy because I was getting tired of the commute to Sandhill Road.
Even though we now had an office with a few finance and marketing people, over 90% of employees were located elsewhere. As revenues more than doubled for several years, we continued hiring at a fast pace and soon had employees in 40 different countries and across three continents.
It was great to be able tap into a global market of open source developer talent, but being distributed made some things much harder. We learned through trial and error how to make a distributed organization work.
In recent years, more and more companies are starting out distributed. And even companies that didn’t set out to be distributed find themselves with a hybrid workforce, some in the office, some working from home, some in remote locations.
Working from home (or remotely) has the benefit of minimizing distraction, not to mention avoiding a daily commute, which generally leads to higher productivity. But if you’ve ever spent five hours of your day on Zoom calls, you know there’s a downside too. It can feel exhausting and impersonal.
With this in mind, here are some tips to help get the most out of a distributed team.
It’s The Work, Not The Location
As liberating as it can feel to work from home, sooner or later most people start to go a little stir crazy with the lack of in-person communication. Even the most introverted geeks benefit from occasionally working with others. And if not with other people, at least near them.
We found that most employees benefit from getting together face-to-face at least every six months. That could be one company-wide meeting and one smaller department or team meeting. For engineering it could be a product review session, a week of hashing out the roadmap, working on new features, prototyping and so on.
For Sales, why not have a week-long call blitz with everyone working from the same office and sharing best practices? Quarterly Business Review meeting are much better in person, rather than over Zoom. If you can pull together people from multiple regions or territories, so much the better as you’ll get more varied discussion and possibly more ideas.
If you’re running an offsite team meeting, I recommend inviting one or two people from adjacent organizations. That is, invite someone from Product and from Marketing to the Sales QBR. Invite a couple of Customer Success managers and SEs to Product and Engineering meetings. This cross-team collaboration can yield more creative ideas and better communication and execution than otherwise. Everyone should be an active participant in these meetings, not just spectators.
I have found when people get together for work, break bread, drink beer or play music together, they build bonds that go far beyond what is possible over remote communications. This is especially true if you visit people on their home turf, as opposed to requiring everyone to travel to HQ. Time together allows the development of trust which makes it easier to work on harder problems down the road. The relationships move from two dimensions to three (or maybe four!) making future work easier because you’ve taken the time to get to know people.
It can be expensive to get people together, but the productivity benefits last for months. The larger the in-person meetings you have, the more expensive it can get. And it’s easy to go over the top by hosting big meetings at a fancy resort with extravagant buffets, parties with too much alcohol, inviting spouses and partners and so on. But what really matters is getting people together where they can work side by side, not the bells and whistles.
So pick a budget, find a location that minimizes travel and focus on the work. Getting people together in person now and then not only strengthens the work relationships it makes the hard slogging time alone much easier.
I strongly recommend pulling the senior management team together quarterly. This makes it easier to work together in real time on setting and reviewing quarterly objectives, developing product strategy, planning product launches, annual budgets and so on. Collaboration at the executive level sets the tone for the entire company. Sometimes these can be scheduled around other events, conferences or meetings to reduce travel. It can also be helpful on occasion to invite up-and-coming managers or directors to participate in these management meetings. That provides more diverse opinions as well as opportunities for career development.
The On-Site Offsite
Even if you have just a small office, you can use it as a hub for bringing employees together. Gatsby was a fully distributed company from the start. But the founders were in Berkeley so they rented a small office near the BART train station. Over time, we ended up with a concentration of executives in the bay area.
Even though the office was closed during much of Covid, we used it as a hub for occasional on-site team meetings, quarterly business reviews, executive planning meetings and so on. By bringing people to the office, we had better cross-team collaboration and more executive participation.
Discord does something similar but on a larger scale. They have around 500 employees and operate in a hybrid model with most employees working from home. Since they have an office in San Francisco, all offsite meetings are held on site in San Francisco. Even local employees stay at hotels during these meetings so that everyone is available for meals together.
Teams = Time Zones
Time zones are the real killer in managing a distributed team. Most managers should have employees within 3 hours of their own time zone. Managing coast-to-coast is quite workable providing around 5 hours of overlapping time.
Once you add overseas locations, managing European employees from the US or vice verse, things start to get tricky. If you’re expanding internationally, someone’s going to be dealing with early morning or evening Zoom calls or Slack sessions on a regular basis.
Managing across two continents (North America, Europe) can be done as long as you have some flexibility. Once you add a third continent by hiring in India, Australia or Japan, life becomes much more difficult. You can never get everyone on a call without it being the middle of the night somewhere.
As you expand, keep in mind how many managers and employees are reporting across big stretches in time zones. As much as possible, try to organize teams around time zone clusters.
Working Asynchronously
One of the most important elements of working with a distributed team is to ensure that you can operate asynchronously. Not every decision, discussion or proposal requires a meeting in real time. Nor should you need to attend every meeting or follow every Slack thread to know what’s going on.
If Zoom has taken over the majority of people’s calendars or you have lots of attendees in meetings who are just watching and not participating, you may want to prune the meeting invite list and use more asynchronous documents to keep people up to date.
Start by making sure meetings have agenda documents that identify topics and owners in advance. You can then use the same document to record decisions. Rotate scribe duties so everyone gets good at it and no single person feels overburdened. People who can’t make the meeting because of their time zone or for other reasons, should be able to understand any important decisions that have been made.
From there, you can expand to using written documents to record processes, plans, proposal and decisions. Such documents can be anywhere from one to five pages, but generally shorter is better. At Gatsby, we routinely documented proposals for headcount or promotions, competitive intelligence, new feature proposals, launch plans, marketing campaigns, pricing adjustments, service delivery, quarterly board updates and so on.
Requiring written documents has a three-fold benefit: it helps people think through their proposal, it helps them develop good written communication skills, and it’s much easier for people to read and comment on documents on their own schedules.
Keep in mind, you need to develop the discipline and judgement to know how much to document and how much commentary to entertain. You’ve also got to consider how documents are named, tagged and stored as well as how to keep them up-to-date. If people don’t know about or can’t find the document they need or are working from an outdated version, that can be frustrating.
Not everything can be documented in text, so sometimes it’s helpful to have shared diagrams or video walk throughs. Tools like Canva, Figma, Loom and Miro make this easy.
At Gatsby, we often used recorded videos for engineers to walk through an architecture or demonstrate a prototype feature and its design. This enabled people to view it on their own schedule. It also made it much easier for people in far-flung time zones to have their work visible and understood.
More Trust, More Accountability
Mid-level managers operating in a distributed environment often have the toughest time dealing with time zones. Managers need to be both more trusting and also more rigorous when it comes to setting objectives. You have to trust employees will work well with less supervision and you’ve got to manage more closely to ensure that they don’t get stuck or sidetracked and can deliver good results.
Managers have to be better about communicating clear expectations, setting deadlines and also listening and probing for concerns. Managers in distributed organizations don’t get the benefit of informal hallway conversations. Communications software like Zoom and Slack don’t capture the nuance of body language. Managers and employees both need to take more care to probe for and raise concerns respectively.
Most senior employees appreciate having clear objectives and delivery dates. They also know when and how to get help when things don’t go as planned or they need advice.
However, I have found that a little tougher going for employees earlier in their careers. The risk of junior employees washing out in a distributed organization is higher. Particularly when coupled with a less experienced manager, inexperienced employees can easily go down the wrong path or get stuck in the weeds of a project for weeks without making progress. They often don’t know how or who to go to get help.
So if you hire entry level employees, make sure that you put in place more check-ins, more code-reviews or 1:1s to drill into projects. You may also want to consider an in-person boot-camp or similar training period to make sure new employees get introduced to more senior team members that they can go to for assistance.
Remember to Have Fun
Just because you’re remote, doesn’t meant you can’t have some socialization and fun in your work. Different companies have different rituals, but it’s important to find ways to have people socialize online. That can be with virtual “donut sessions” where you meet over Zoom and talk about things outside of work, an end-of-week online happy hour, or a fun segment during the all-hands meeting.
Maddie Wolf, VP of Operations at Gatsby, hosted the weekly all-hands meeting and did a terrific job created a balanced agenda of worthwhile topics and presenters. She gave everyone an opportunity to share their work, instead of focusing only on executive updates. She brought tremendous energy and enthusiasm to what could have become a routine meeting through creative use of memes, trivia, and occasionally ridiculous games. It made everyone’s week just a bit brighter.
We’re unlikely to go back to an “in-office all the time” approach to work in the tech industry. So we should all look for ways to improve, whether it’s a fully distributed environment or hybrid approach. What techniques have you seen work well? Share your ideas by posting a comment below.
The photo at the top was the Duo Security band “Louder than Necessary” at an all-hands meeting a few years back.
Fun to hear about Gatsby! I've worked with great managers who set clear objectives and expectations and revisit those expectations to help me with any blockers. In my experience, this has made the relationships trusting and productive, even in a distributed environment. I hope this post can help other managers on the learning curve of managing in this new hybrid/remote world
Thank you Zack! This is an incredible post on building a strong, distributed culture.
At Elastic, I was part of a powerful, distributed company and some additional comments to your post would be:
1) Allow local employees to go to a WeWork or small office if they want. Empower local teams!
2) In-person gatherings happen monthly for managers and quarterly for employees. The topics, locations, and attendees varied. In-person for the whole company happened annually until 2k+ employees and moved to every other year.
3) Asynchronous requires a commitment to transparency and building tools so anyone can find the information they need. Highly encouraging video meetings even with 1,000 employees and recording everything were a regular occurrence.