What do people tend to get wrong about remote work? And how can companies make it work better for them?
While just about every tech company on the planet has become remote over the last few weeks, GitLab has been at this a while — since pretty much day one of its existence back in 2014, in fact. Since then they’ve grown to more than 1,200 employees across 65 countries, with a staggering valuation of nearly $3 billion. They’ve figured out some stuff along the way, sharing it all in an ever-evolving handbook.
I recently hopped on a call with GitLab’s head of Remote, Darren Murph, to get some insight on how they make it all work. This is the second part of my interview with Murph; he and I chatted for quite a while, so I’ve split it into two parts for easier reading. You can find Part I here.
TechCrunch: There’s this ongoing conversation about how people are coming away from this remote experience. Are they walking away saying, “yeah, that was great, we can do this day-to-day, I wouldn’t have seen that before,” or is the fact that they’re being thrust into this, and on not the best terms, going to have a negative impact?
Do you think this [sudden shift] is going to have a positive impact on remote work?
Darren Murph: I do. I’m a long-term optimist on this.
There’s a Gartner survey that just came out. They surveyed over 300 CFOs globally; 74% of them said that they’re going to shift some of their workforce permanently remote after this… even though this is the worst possible way to be thrust into remote.
This is the worst of circumstances, and people are still like, “You know, I love not having to commute.” And businesses are like, “You know, I love saving $10,000 per desk by not having that real estate.”
If it’s working in the worst of times… six to 12 months from now, when the crisis is abated and people have had time to lay the remote structure, build their handbooks, get the right remote hygiene integrated into the DNA of their company… it’s going to be like, warp-speed accelerator.
If you can make it work now, you can make it work any time.
Exactly. […]
Companies who would’ve said they could never work remote… I met with a bank a couple of weeks ago. They’re so ironclad they wouldn’t even give VPN to anybody but executives. Then, literally overnight, they had to have 10,000 people working from home. Guess what? Everyone has a VPN now. And they’re working. I feel like… if it can work in the worst of time, we’ll figure it out.
What are your thoughts on work/life balance right now? It’s always kind of a weird, tough thing for remote workers. For the first five, six years of my time in a remote gig, it was impossible for me to turn off. Now we can’t leave the house! How do you deal with this? How can managers help people figure out how to turn off without messing with their workflow?
It’s an interesting challenge, and I think it’s a good problem to have.
I told someone the other day… they said, “I’m a [work-at-home] parent now… and I feel like I’m not getting any work done, so I work all day.”
I’m like, “Yeah, but you were commuting four hours a day. Things could go completely sideways for four hours a day, and you’re still breaking even from where you were in a co-located role.” And they were like, “OK, that makes me feel a little bit better.”
On the balance side, the way I think about it, for me personally… it’s less about work/life balance, more about work/life harmony.
This is what I mean by “harmony”: my peak productivity hours start later than most people, and they go later than most people, because I really value daylight. In the mornings, I want to be outside, doing something active, not on my laptop. I have no problem whatsoever working later into the evening, when there’s no light outside anyway. No problem. I can get into my zone, my son’s asleep, I’m jamming.
But I shifted. It’s not like I do both. I don’t work all the way through the morning and all the way through the night.
To your point about not micromanaging it… you do have to be careful about that!
I don’t want somebody to see me responding to an issue at 11:30 at night and think, like, “Why is Darren [working] at 11:30?!” It’s like… y’all, I’m on Aloha time. It’s only 5:30 in my brain.
I [also] think managers should ask their directs in every one-on-one: Do you feel oversubscribed to Zoom calls? Do you have Zoom exhaustion?
Another thing we do that I think any company can do: We have a cool tool in Slack called “PTO Ninja.” We developed this opt-in thing with them, where on the first working day of every month, it sends you a DM and it says, “Have you thought about what days you’re taking off work this month? If you do not feel like you can possibly take a day off this month, copy and paste this message into your next one-on-one and discuss it with your manager.”
So you have [explicit] company permission to be like, this is a problem, and I need to talk about it with somebody. We’re building a culture where we give people literal copy-and-paste permission to bring this up as something that’s important in a one-on-one. Any company can do that.
It’s going to be different for every person, and it’s even going to be different from week to week. I think about the last six weeks of my life, now that remote is like… everywhere. And it has not been normal. I’ve worked more than eight hours a day… but it’s a season. I’m willing to put in this work right now because I see the impact, but I’m already thinking about how amazing those two weeks in Kauai are going to be in October, and I’m toying with going somewhere in November, December. It’s about the harmony of it, less about the day-to-day balance.
I think with remote, your timescale gets much bigger. Is every day balanced? No. But is my month balanced? I can work toward that.
So it’s a matter of ensuring that people can be introspective about it.
Yes! You never know if someone is going too hard in a remote setting. How are you going to see that? You literally can’t see when someone leaves the office… but you also can’t see when they get there.
I come and go like eight times a day. I have weird days, you know? I was just completely out of pocket for two hours today — just pfft, out. Then literally right before this, we had a team-wide happy hour. And now [Editor’s note: nearly 7 pm, on his time] I’m doing an interview with you. So it’s just all over the map.
Another one of our sub-values is that we hire managers of one, which is just so important. Managing yourself also applies to your personal life. It’s not just about managing your tasks to make sure that your [boss] is happy with you on the results side; it’s also about managing your relationship with your family, and your community, and with sleep, and with fitness, and all of those other things. We want people to be able to manage those as well.
All of our calendars are public and transparent by default. We encourage people to put blocks in there — like, block out when you don’t want people to ask for meetings. I literally have a morning block every weekday morning that says, “focus and fitness time, please ask before booking.” So if anyone pulls up my calendar and they’re like, alright, 9:30 a.m. meeting with Darren? Nope. It’s gonna have to be a really important meeting, because… nope!
And I’ll see [others doing this] all the time. It’ll be like “kids’ band practice,” or “picking the kids up from school,” or “early date night with the wife, I’m out!” Or people even just put like, “blocked, personal,” when I’m not in a place where I can even admit what it is, I just need a minute.
You have to create a culture like that. If you make people scared to block their time out, it will just overrun them. I think, on the whole, GitLab does a really good job on that. And I like seeing what other people block out, because it inspires me to block things out. That was a long-winded answer, but it’s one of my favorite topics.
Is there anything that people tend to get wrong about remote work? Either new hires, or other orgs that you talk to.
Yes! The biggest thing that trips people up at GitLab is that people come in and don’t give themselves permission to drop organizational baggage and truly operate differently.
They go through six weeks of onboarding, they read all this stuff about all the things we do differently… but they spent 20 years in this other environment. So they just [snaps fingers] do things the way they always did it.
A new person will be in a Slack channel and is like, bam, wall of text, here’s this idea. And it’s like, “aghhhh, they ain’t starting it in an issue, they’re starting it in Slack!”
A cool thing about GitLab is that we even have sub-values to solve for that. There’s a sub-value called “Blameless Problem Solving.” It empowers everyone, so if you see that happening and you’re like, “Oh, I totally know what’s happening here… You don’t think it’s actually okay to start work over here, but we’re gonna remind you: it’s cool, it’s cool, it’s totally cool.”
I tried to bite off two really big projects when I got to GitLab. And Sid, our CEO, I had a call with him. I started running down [these projects] and he was like, “too big, way too big.”
I was mortified. I was like, “Oh my God, what do you mean by that?” and he was like, “Iteration, you’ve gotta practice iteration.” He pulled out this Google Doc and he wrote down 10 words — he was like, “Just do these 10, and you’ll be off to the races.”
I had been conditioned to only ship fully baked, perfectly polished products. Because that’s what you do [in other jobs]! You don’t want to show how the sausage is made, you don’t want to show people your work-in-progress. But at GitLab you do. It actually took Sid being like, “No, just do it like this. One at a time, it’s fine, one at a time…”
It took one or two of those for me to get it. Even me! I’m an expert remote worker… and it still took me one or two of those, “Hey, let us remind you with this link of how we do things differently.”
That’s the thing people get wrong the most. They try to do things some [the] old way. It’s frustrating to them because the rest of the team won’t let it happen; it’s frustrating to us we’re like, “We do things differently; please don’t try to make us become what we left. This is a different boat, rowing in a different direction.”
We have a couple of sub-values that come to mind that just help support this. One is: no ego. I love this sub-value. No one at GitLab exposes an ego, it’s expressly forbidden.
And there’s one that we have called “short toes…”
Short toes?
Short toes. I actually saw this today. Somebody came in, third day on the job. We were writing this abstract for Sid and for me. Our comms manager asked the new hire, “Hey, take a look at this. If you have any feedback, change it. Just go for it.”
She made some changes, and then she responded and said, “Hey, I made some changes, I hope this is okay. Let me know if I did anything wrong, I’m really new to this iteration thing.”
I was like … I love it! Because at least she recognizes, and calls out, that if feels awkward. Like, “I literally just changed your abstract. It has your name on it, and I just changed it! Let me know if I stepped on your toes!”
If I didn’t like it, I would just hit undo. So I pasted the link about short toes; at GitLab, no one has long toes — so it’s impossible to step on anyone’s toes. Everyone is free to contribute to anyone else’s domain, because we’re all trying to accomplish the same thing. If you don’t have an ego, and you have short toes, it’s a much more comfortable environment to just give and take feedback.
And no one is offended if you don’t want the feedback! Ultimately, if I’m the DRI on that abstract — the directly responsible individual — I have the ability to take it or leave it. That’s how it works.
That’s the thing people get wrong the most. They try to do office things in a virtual environment, instead of taking advantage of the virtual environment and all that it enables.
What are the gaps in remote work? Are there any tools that haven’t been built yet?
I think there’s an empathy gap.
I’m actually an advisor for a company called Sike Insights. They’re developing this Slack tool called Kona. It’s this amazing tool where anyone who joins a remote organization… you essentially go through this Q&A about: who are you?
It asks people certain things about themselves to essentially help them create their own README. A kind of LinkedIn-slash-personality profile for work. Because a big issue, in a remote team, is that it’s kind of hard to read people if you haven’t met them in person or worked with them for a long time. It’s like, boom! You’re on this new scrum team with people you’ve never met, let’s accomplish something by the end of the week!
This is proactively asking them questions so that someone can join a new team and immediately click a panel in their profile and be like, “OK, cool — this, this, this and this.”
It’s also a daily thing. Green, yellow, red — how is life right now? Are you “red?” We just need to know that, so we’ll be a bit more sensitive — we’re not going to come in hot, because we know you have other stuff going on in life.
The empathy gap is real, and I do think this Kona tool is in a place where it could help change that.
I’ve written my own GitLab README. Anyone in the company can go read that. It says things like, “How can you help me? How do I like to be communicated with? What matters to me in my personal life? What makes me grouchy?”
This is really useful intel for anyone who’s going to work with me for the first time. The shame of it is… almost no one else has this. In a remote team, that empathy gap is glaring for a lot of people.
So I think that’s the next big thing. It’s how we can make sure teams are more empathetic, more understanding of each other when they’re remote and, often times, shifting in and out of teams very rapidly. You get pulled into a meeting last-minute, it would be awesome to just be like, boom, boom, boom… red, red, yellow. Just something, some sort of context about a person.
Any final advice for teams being thrown into remote work right now?
Yes: Do not give yourself the burden of going from zero to mastery overnight.
I’ve seen way too many teams go from office to remote, they’ve got 10,000 people now working at 10,000 different desks… They expect the productivity to be the same, and they’re like, “hey! Let’s still hit those goals!”
It’s like… y’all! Everything just changed.
Don’t expect to become a master of remote overnight. I wrote this page [in our handbook] outlining the phases of remote adaptation.
Phase one is skeuomorphism, where you just kind of copy a meeting in the office and you have it virtually in Zoom. Nothing else changes. The time stays the same, the people stay the same. Work to graduate from that, instead of [trying to] become an expert in asynchronous work with all of your processes perfectly documented.
GitLab is good at this because we’ve had a nine-year head start, but we’re still getting better at it. Just today, there will be a thousand changes in the handbook. Just yesterday, we added new ways to do meetings better — literally yesterday.
Remote is a process. It’s a journey. It’s not a binary switch that you flip. Embrace the spirit of iteration, of getting better at remote. Listen to feedback, adjust to feedback.
We like to use the term “two-way door.” If you make a change, and it sucks… revert and try something else! It’s a two-way door. We try to do things that are two-way doors; before we press “Go,” do we have the ability to walk back through this thing if it sucks? Do that.
It doesn’t matter how many two-way doors you shut, because for every one you shut you’re getting closer to the actual solution. Embrace that spirit of iteration.
We’re in unprecedented times. You have flexibility and leeway to try some stuff. That’s my biggest advice.
And the final thing is: Never waste a crisis.
What does that mean?
We can’t wish this crisis away. It is upon us no matter what.
Therefore, the only thing we can do is choose how we react to it. Are we going to waste it? Or are we going to use this opportunity? We have thousands of people home right now. You couldn’t manufacture that. That’s a massive opportunity to implement tools, processes and communication workflows that you’ve been dreaming about for years. Do it right now! Don’t waste the crisis.
Build the remote infrastructure you’ve always known you needed to get to, to bring your company into the quote-unquote future, which is now present. Don’t waste it. You’re going to have to stabilize your company remotely anyway, you might as well stabilize it with intention, so that it lasts.
No one paves a road to drive on it for three weeks, or three months. You pave a road so that it lasts for 30 years. If you’re paving this remote road, so to speak, use the right materials, put a lot of intention. Make sure the lines aren’t painted all crooked — because this is your chance.
