Guidelines for Time At Work

As an all-remote startup, we’re constantly improving our tooling and routines to keep us sane, connected and productive. The general intent of these tools is to allow everyone to collaborate regardless of where or when they happen to be working.

Our Routines

Routines are important for all remote teams and we try to find the right balance between too much and too little. In general, our practices encourage asynchronous communication as the default, as these align better with all-remote teams generally, and with growing teams in particular.

Slack and Daily Ping

Slack is our all-remote office.

When at work, Slack is open, with the status up to date.
At the start of the workday participate in the daily ping (aka “remote standup”). The standup bot will prompt you and your responses will be posted in #_daily-ping. Please ping at the start of YOUR workday in your timezone.
No internal emails: All internal messages are sent in Slack, not email.
We default to channels rather than DM for most conversations. Conversations that require privacy AND are ephemeral (i.e. not worth a private channel) should be by DM. In general, if there are multiple people who may need to know about something (now or later), it ought to happen in a channel.
Please be sure to use threaded discussions to keep discussions scanable.

It is a “space of flows,” both by the definition of Manuel Castells and in the silly sense that stuff just goes scrolling by and good luck to you if you need to find it again. We have some rules of thumb to try to combat the inherently ephemeral nature of Slack posts (title them, use threads), but in general, you should treat Slack as a hallway where interesting conversations are happening, but not as a repository where you go to find things. Information that needs to persist should live somewhere other than Slack.

Testing Tuesdays

Testing Tuesdays is in flux right now as we learn how to make the most of having a QA Engineer.

Everyone tests the application every Tuesday, regardless of whether there’s a release candidate being readied to be rolled out or not. We do this so that everyone in the company has a good sense of how the software is supposed to work, and even features that are not currently being worked on get a nice airing out for bugs regularly. See our acceptance testing manual for more information.

Focus time and no-meeting days

Please minimize meetings on Mondays and Fridays.
Avoid scheduling meetings on bank/government/school holidays.
Folks should plan focus time by blocking time on their calendars.
Please protect each other’s focus time - meaning respect focus time holds.

Managing Meetings

Moving away from a meeting-centric culture is one of the most difficult challenges of being all-remote across 17 timezones. Here are some things we’re trying. Please also refer to Community Norms and Meetings documents in Horizontal Practices.

Meetings are 30 min or 40-45 min by default. We don’t do 1-hour meetings because a series of 1-hour meetings stacking up means there’s no time to reflect or organize post-meeting notes right when it’s fresh in your mind.
In general, we’ll follow good meeting hygiene, which starts by asking “why must this meeting be a meeting?” Here are some useful ideas on running good meetings in HBR
Meetings are recorded and/or transcribed, if the content is complex enough that minutes won’t do it justice.
If you can’t make it to a meeting, no problem. Read the minutes/transcript and/or watch the video. Fight the FOMO!

The many benefits of moving away from “doing work” via meetings include:

Autonomy: We can say “you control your own time,” but if there are required (or FOMO-inducing) meetings all the time, then it won’t be true in reality.
Inclusion: Everyone gets access to the same information whenever they need it. You don’t have to put in “face time” for your work to be recognized and valued.
Focus: Less time being run ragged by meetings means more time to do solo work that requires uninterrupted chunks of attention, which used to require longer, post-meeting, work days.
Clarity: If you have to write everything down, you probably have to think it through more than you would if you were just saying it extemporaneously.

Tracking time

To ensure that the Company has accurate time records and that employees are paid for all hours worked in a timely manner, all nonexempt hourly employees are required to record all hours worked. Each workday please submit your timesheets in Justworks. If you miss reporting time worked, or if you believe any of your timesheets require correction, please notify Bomee and Erika via Slack.

Nonexempt hourly employees are not permitted to work overtime (more than forty (40) hours each work) without the prior authorization from the person who approves their timesheet and Erika.

Also, it’s a good idea to track hours worked even if you’re not required to, simply to keep track of how you’re prioritizing and exempt employees are encouraged to do so. Clockify and Timular are nice (e.g. Bomee has been doing some kind of time blocking for about 20 years).

Tools

We use tools to facilitate remote work. We provide access to Slack for everyone working with us, including consultants. Access to everything else is provided as needed. If you have questions or tips, use the #help-tools channel in Slack. The section below proposes a rough order in which to install them.

NB: keep an eye on your spam folder in Gmail. A lot of invites tend to lend there.

General Dos and Don’ts For Employees

DO use your Dashlane for both your work and your personal passwords. It would be absurd to have two of these services. There’s upside for you and no downside for the company.
DON’T use your work email to register for non-work subscriptions. Getting your personal and work email intermingled means, at best, that you’ll be switching modes, and probably also that you’ll have more spam in your work inbox.
DO use separate Chrome profiles for work and home accounts. This makes it easier to avoid intermingling work accounts with personal accounts.
DO keep your home and work calendars in synch with Reclaim.ai or similar.

Google Workspace

All employees and some consultants get access to our Workspace.
2-factor authentication is required - if you don’t set it up when you first get access, you’ll be locked out!
For the sake of security, save files on Google Drive, not your local machine.
While using Google Workspace makes file loss and various other hazards less likely, we’ll still need to follow security best practices, such as long (strong) passwords, downloading applications from official stores only, etc.

Laptop Security

Make sure your machine is set up with hard drive encryption on, in case it gets stolen.

Mac: Go to “System Preferences” → “Security and Privacy” → “FileVault” → make sure FileVault is turned on. If you need to turn it on, heads up that it can take a while (keep laptop charged, might want to let this happen over night).
Windows: Go to “Privacy & Security” → “Device encryption”, make sure “Device encryption” is turned on.

Password Security: Dashlane

Everyone should use 2FA and a password manager for long unique passwords for all work accounts.
Employees will receive Dashlane for password management
All work-related passwords should be auto-generated secure passwords via Dashlane. This includes your Google password.
You’re welcome (and encouraged) to use Dashlane for your personal passwords also!

Code and Tickets

GitHub for both persistent versioned documentation as well as code.
Zenhub for tickets.

Documentation Tools

Almanac: This is the more persistent home for documentation, and everyone who should be writing process documentation gets access. Regardless of whether the content originated in Github, Miro, Figma or wherever else, it should also show up in the process documentation in Almanac.
Miro: Flow charts, etc.
Figma: Designs.
Bluedot: Recording meetings

Scheduling: Hubspot and gCal

We use Hubspot to coordinate company communications with the outside world. If your role involves external communications, you will receive a Hubspot account as part of your onboarding.

External meetings - Individual Your Hubspot account allows you to set up a personal scheduling page so external folks to self-schedule meetings with you. Follow Hubspot’s instructions to set that up.
External meetings - Group Folks who have paid Sales Hub seats on Hubspot can use the collective (group) and round robin scheduling features. Please note that only other Sales Hub members can be included in collective scheduling.
Internal meetings can be scheduled as usual via the Google calendar, which will display availability for internal users.

Setting up Google Calendar

Make sure to subscribe to these shared calendars when setting up gCal:

_HR Calendar: to communicate away time, holidays, company-wide events or blocks (e.g. no meeting days)
_Production: Add new calendar by username using:
[email protected]

Also, see Calendars for more calendar management tips

Setting up Hubspot

The Hubspot Chrome extensionwill be automatically installed for you when you log in with your Google Workspace account. By default email will be logged but not tracked.
Connect your email inbox: In Hubspot sales > options

Bonus

These are things you may find helpful. We don’t have company subscriptions to these, but they have free versions for individuals.

Taco - see all your tasks (Github, Slack, Google, etc.) in one place
Otter.ai - Generate transcripts of meetings from uploaded files or from Zoom Pro or Dropbox
Reclaim.ai - Keep personal and work calendars synched up. Also does fun auto-scheduling tasks and meetings.