Businesses of every shape and size are adopting more flexible work environments—from working from home policies to flex time to compressed work schedules. Millennials are all but demanding greater flexibility. 70% of employees say going into the office isn’t necessary. This strong preference has created a ripe breeding ground for distributed work. Employees aren’t just wanting to work more flexible hours or work from home. Entire companies have taken flexible work to the max and become fully distributed. 23% of remote workers now say their organization is fully distributed.
Mitchell Hashimoto, along with Armon Dadger, co-founded HashiCorp—which offers open-source tools that empower companies to successfully transition to the cloud—is well-attuned to distributed work. Since day one, HashiCorp has been fully distributed. It wasn’t a conscious decision. An open source software developer by training, Hashimoto had always worked remotely. When he started HashiCorp, he didn’t set out to make a statement or redefine the status quo and build a fully distributed team. It was simply what felt natural to him.
Today, by all accounts, the decision has paid enormous dividends. Now a 600-strong fully distributed team (with the notable exception of approximately 75 people who work out of a San Francisco-based office), HashiCorp has attained the elite “unicorn” status and is continuing to grow rapidly. It is one of the few companies of its size and scale (InVision being a notable other) that has successfully managed to thrive with a fully distributed team. I recently had an opportunity to sit down with Hashimoto and learn more about how HashiCorp has managed to successfully scale as a fully distributed team.
Treading the waters slowly
While HashiCorp’s decision to be fully distributed wasn’t initially a conscious one, it did become conscious after some time. The key inflection point occurred when HashiCorp was in the throes of hiring its first manager. At this critical juncture, Hashimoto needed to decide whether his company could continue to thrive with a fully distributed workforce. Management is challenging at the best of times. When team members are located in different settings, management becomes even more challenging.
Hashimoto ultimately decided to continue with a fully distributed model. However, he also decided to put several guardrails in place to ensure that the model wasn’t too overbearing and unmanageable. He, for example, originally decided to exclusively hire workers who were located within a three-hour timezone overlap of each other. This would ensure that the challenges of coordinating work across multiple timezones were minimized and, should the need for in-person collaboration emerge, it could be accomplished with a short drive.
Transitioning to a fully distributed workforce is a lofty endeavor. To minimize friction, Hashimoto recommends that companies start small. Companies, for example, can opt to test the fully distributed model with one specific team. Hashimoto recommends selecting a team other than engineering, as developers and programmers tend to be more accustomed to working remotely. Selecting your customer success or marketing team as a test case will likely make it easier to gauge whether a complete shift is feasible and likely to be effective.
Out of sight, but still in mind
To be sure, distributed work poses challenges. Not only is it more difficult to keep tabs on employees and ensure they are working, but it’s also more challenging to gain trust and shared understanding, two prerequisites for effective collaboration and teamwork. The absence of body language poses an especially great challenge. Albert Mehrabian's readily-cited 7% rule contends that spoken words account for only 7% of a person’s meaning, with body language and tone of voice accounting for 55% and 38%, respectively.
Hashimoto isn’t under the illusion that there is a substitute for in-person communication. In-person communication is critical. A face-to-face request, for example, has been shown to be 35 times more successful in terms of gaining acceptance, as compared to email. Moreover, remote meetings generate, on average, 10 ideas, as compared to in-person meetings, which generate an average of 13.
In order to ensure that workers foster strong bonds and communication, Hashimoto has embraced several strategies that allow for in-person communication. In virtual communications, the use of emojis are encouraged as a substitute for body language. HashiCorp hosts a company-wide meetup once a year. All employees are flown to one central location for three days of bonding. But unlike most company off-sites, the focus is not on company goals and objectives. Instead, these meet-ups emphasize the importance of developing trust and fostering strong bonds between and among employees. As a supplement to the annual meetups, each functional group (marketing, sales, engineering, and so on) hosts a more intimate meet-up once or twice a year. As well, each region is given a budget that allows workers to meet in-person for lunch once a month.
In addition to these in-person opportunities, HashiCorp has also adopted Donut. Donut randomly pairs different employees to have lunch or coffee using a roulette-type program. This helps to further build the cross-departmental bonds that are essential to effective collaboration.
Prioritizing transparency
One of the most pressing challenges associated with distributed work is ensuring transparency. It’s especially easy for transparency to break down when some workers are remote and other workers are co-distributed. Oftentimes, the “water cooler” and lunchtime conversations that are commonplace among co-distributed teams are work-related. Distributed employees are often left out of the loop and at a disadvantage.
In order to prevent transparency breakdowns, HashiCorp has implemented a mandate whereby no two team members can be co-located. This mandate has proven enormously effective as it ensures that communications are centralized (on Slack or in Google Groups, for example). This ensures that no employee is at a disadvantage.
In addition to transparency between workers, transparency between senior management and other workers is critical. Hashimoto and the rest of the senior management team prioritize transparency when at all possible. The company hosts its weekly all-hands meetings on Thursday mornings PST, a time that tends to accommodate a wide range of timezones—unlike the common practice of hosting all-hands on Friday afternoons PST, a time when several other timezones have started their weekend. Prior to the all-hands, employees are encouraged to submit questions. No question is off the table. All questions are answered, either during the all-hands or via a follow-up email. The all-hands is recorded and content is distributed widely to ensure that all employees are able to consume the information.
To further encourage transparency, the vast majority of Slack channels and Google Groups are public, a decision that helps ensure all employees can keep abreast of key changes, decisions, and revelations. Additionally, all managers are encouraged to have daily check-ins with their direct records. Importantly, the purpose of the check-in isn’t to ensure that employees are working. Rather, it’s a “how are you doing?” conversation aimed at ensuring employees aren’t blocked in their work and are engaged and motivated.
Strategically adopting workplace tools
Globally distributed teams rely heavily on workplace communication and collaboration tools—the likes of Slack, Trello, Google Groups, and Zoom. The choices can be overwhelming, regardless of how distributed your organization is. While workplace tools have immense potential value, they also have inherent limitations. Certain tools are much more conducive to real-time communication, whereas others are more conducive to ensuring work is effectively indexed and searchable.
To help employees zero in on which tools to use and when Hashimoto thinks it’s valuable to visualize a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid sit real-time communication technologies such as Slack. These tools are great for getting time-sensitive information and conversations. In the middle of the pyramid sit tools like email and Google Groups that are less effective at facilitating real-time conversations but have the notable advantage of preventing workers from becoming overwhelmed by endless Slack or similar notifications. Finally, at the bottom of the pyramid sit non-real-time tools such as Google Docs and Confluence. These tools are not conducive to real-time collaboration but provide a central source of truth where employees can find and search for critical information.
Hashimoto recommends that workflows start by being managed by tools situated at the top of the pyramid and gradually progress down the pyramid when work becomes more concrete and fully-baked.
Without a doubt, the future of work is distributed. More than three-quarters of employees feel that flexible working environments improve their productivity. What's more, 84% of people prefer remote meetings. Companies need to embrace the change and consider whether a fully distributed structure makes sense. The decision shouldn't be taken lightly. Follow the lead of HashiCorp and consciously consider which new strategies and practices, should be adopted to facilitate an effective shift.
