Articles and tips on the topic of working remotely are growing at a rapid rate, but there are few posts from companies like Splice Machine who moved to a 100% remote work environment before the pandemic. In this post, we share examples of some of Splice Machine’s communication outlets that work better than any water cooler can offer.
Lose the Water Cooler
Some people fear that when you lose the proverbial water cooler in a remote-workplace for conversations, communication and performance will suffer. Employees often depend on water cooler conversations to feel connected because other communication outlets are limited or don’t exist. Growing statistics gathered by companies like Remote.co indicate that communication, trust, engagement, and performance can actually improve in a distributed team environment because the teams use communication tools designed to memorialize discussions and are accessible to a broader group of people. FlexJobs’ annual survey found that 65% of respondents are more productive in their home office than working at an office space.
Communication Outlets
Splice Machine’s values influence almost every aspect of our company, so we turned to our values when building our remote-first strategy. As we wrote our strategic plan, we brainstormed on ideas to weave our values and existing culture into new remote-first operations. We looked for opportunities to extend trust, autonomy, and engagement throughout our organization by enabling new and updating existing communication outlets, especially those that directly influenced people; recruiting, onboarding, learning & development, total rewards discussions, and performance reviews. We have created layers of communication that vary in frequency, written versus oral, camera versus in-person that are all designed to help our team connect and share information.
Examples of Splice Machine’s communication outlets
“Fun” Slack channels used to share random thoughts, photos of pets, and play games like GameMonk.
“Company” Slack channel used to share important general information company-wide.
“PeopleOps Announcements” Slack channel used for announcements like Open Enrollment, performance reviews, and trainings.
Onboarding knowledge-share meetings for new hires, designed to train and build team rapport during their first few weeks.
Weekly team standups.
Weekly/ bi-monthly 1:1s.
Monthly Town Halls to discuss quarterly goals.
Annual in-person All Hands event.
Mid-year team retreats.
+2-1 notes from the CEO featuring company highlights.
Weekly fireside chats on Zoom led by the CEO.
Communicating Asynchronously
When working in an asynchronous environment, many conversations are written and posted on public channels. This may sound a little anti-social but it’s actually remarkably inclusive and useful for everyone, even for teammates working in the same time zone or in the same workspace. Conversations shared on a tool like Slack become memorialized and accessible to anyone, even years later. Not only is it helpful to refer to past discussions on Slack to solve new problems on a similar topic, Slack also serves as a great learning tool when onboarding new team members.
In-Person Gatherings are Vital
Few people on high performing teams will dispute the effectiveness of off-site team-building events and how they contribute to increasing a team’s overall performance. Trust and respect grow as you get to know the whole person. When Splice Machine decided to move to a distributed remote-work model, we set the expectation that in-person gatherings would be the rule versus the exception. We host an annual four day “All Hands” event at the beginning of the year for everyone world-wide to attend, and mid-year “Team Retreats” for small team breakouts.
Like many other distributed companies, we believe in-person events are important to build rapport with team members who might otherwise not meet or work with one another during the rest of the year. We know in-person get-togethers are a great way to inspire in-the-moment group conversations to innovate and to problem solve.
Annual All Hands
During our 2019 and 2020 Annual All Hands, the company reviewed and discussed what we learned from the prior year’s OKR achievements. We rolled out new company and team goals, had department discussion breakout sessions, team brainstorm sessions, hosted hackathons, and offered several “off-the-clock” team-building events. At the end of each All Hands, People Ops surveys the team looking for suggestions to add or improve upon for next year’s event. Brainstorm break-out sessions always rank high as a favorite activity.
People Ops, Communication Connector
In addition to our communication outlets, the People Ops team makes a point to connect with the team monthly to ask how each person is doing. The People Ops team focuses on enabling and facilitating conversations. We serve as a second set of eyes and ears to bridge communication gaps, helping managers and their teams work together better. To date, this extra initiative is demonstrating meaningful value.
Watch for our next post which will describe how we build trust and loyalty through effective goal setting. You may also view all of our posts on Splice Machine’s career page or download the Splice Machine Journey From Office to 100% Remote ebook that our posts are based on.