 Good morning and welcome to the GetLab Open House. My name is Beverly Rufner, and I am going to be hosting the session on Implementing and Reinforcing All Remote Practices. I'm excited to be presenting this topic. I'm someone who's moved very recently into the all remote space, having joined GetLab only seven months ago. For onboarding, I relish any opportunity to share the knowledge and insights compiled in our remote playbook, which senses on setting teams up for success in a completely remote environment. The evolution of remote work has been somewhat fast tracked over the last six months as a result of the global pandemic. This has paved the way for many companies to explore the concept, and in many instances with inadequate time to prepare or set thoughtful mechanisms in place to ease the transition. Which is why GetLab openly shares its recipe for ensuring our some 1,300 team members are able to contribute, connect, and feel a sense of belonging from over 65 countries around the globe. Today we'll be working through some content in the GetLab Remote Playbook, along with taking time to answer questions from the audience toward the end of the session. I hope you come away feeling inspired and empowered to rethink your world of work. Please be sure to share your general location and whether you're in a remote environment or not in the comments section. We've created a Google Doc for questions, and as always, everyone can contribute, so I encourage you to document your thoughts as they pop up. This incredible e-book, the Remote Playbook, which is available via all remote.info, came together earlier this year when COVID-19 hit. It is comprised of learning materials, content, and insights from within GetLab, which were all pulled together by Darren Murph, our head of remote and his team, to create some easy to read reference guide for those transitioning to a remote work environment, with many companies using it as a point of departure when creating their blueprints for the transition. If you're in the midst of transitioning, please be sure to comment with your biggest obstacle in how you're working to overcome it in the chat section. This quote, which forms part of our What It's Like to Work Here section in the handbook, holds a huge amount of insights into the unique workspace GetLab provides for its team members and the value-driven foundation on which it rests. It reads, those who thrive at GetLab take the opportunity to drop prior workplace baggage at the door, embracing a liberating and empowering set of values and give themselves permission to truly operate differently. There is as much to unlearn as there is to learn. When I first joined GetLab, I had done an enormous amount of research and groundwork to ease the transition for myself. And while that definitely did serve me, I found myself in an adjustment period as I got to grips with working in an environment, which encourages the assumption of positive intent is ever-evolving through continuous iteration and improvements, and is underpinned by a set of core values, which Sid touched on earlier, that is so consistently applied in every sphere, from documentation to direct interactions to decision-making and even compensation. It was a lot to take in at the time. And sometimes I felt it was quite overwhelming, but in hindsight, it all came together organically to liberate me from the baggage of my previous workplace experiences. There just wasn't room for them anymore and they weren't relevant or relatable. What this did for me in terms of my role was help to identify ways in which we could better leverage onboarding to ensure new team members are able to immerse themselves and feel a sense of belonging from day one. From the minute they click through to their unique onboarding issue, they will be experiencing GitLab through a lens of self-directed learning, working with the tool itself, something that we internally call dog-fooding and learning our guiding principles or sub-values of being handbooked first, having a single source of truth and making small but impactful iterations and becoming self-enabled, which will ultimately set them up for success in a remote environment. This quote provides certain sentiments that should guide your next steps in the mood to becoming in all remotes. Your team members should know that things will feel different because they are different and existing markers of productivity and success will be reformed as the new environments and methodologies come into play. The key to all of this is consistent communication of the remote mission, organically establishing trust within teams and ensuring leadership is on board and reinforcing the objective, not just verbally, but through their behaviors, living the values. Before we touch on the three main pillars of success in any remote environment, let's explore a couple of difficulties by just realities that come to the fore. Being mindful of these can make the journey that much easier and prepare managers to actively coach transitioning team members in the most impactful way possible. Working remotely can sometimes feel completely counterintuitive. Working asynchronously, along with making the smallest viable change and documenting as opposed to verbalizing are just a few of the ways we at GitLab have made the all-remotes environment work. If it feels wrong, you're probably doing it right, and the best way to get there is through self-service and self-directed learning. We encourage all team members to ask questions with a lower level of shame and then pay their learnings forward. It's not a trap. We definitely do things differently at GitLab and our approach to efficiency will look and feel different to what it would in a more traditional environment. We're a handbook-first organization and that means it's okay to enable team members by sharing a link, which in other settings may come across as a little cold, if not borderline rude. Rewiring is definitely going to take a little time and that goes hand-in-hand with having a spirit of learning as the remote space is ever evolving. We support this by having resources in place such as the remote channel and the GitLab Unfolded YouTube channel, both of which can answer a myriad of questions around the product and our culture. Iteration-driven efficiency means we're always improving our methodologies and tools. This having been said, what brings them all together is establishing a solid foundation of trust and transparency within your team. And that brings with it a level of vulnerability. GitLab has a ton of resources in place to support this transition. And we have great sources of information and insights or forums for feedback. Helping with another succeed and always assuming positive intent are really important in getting remote life rights. Reinforcement is okay and services a great step check in terms of value alignments and upholding the GitLab ways of working and communicating. Finding your way in an all-remotes environment is, as mentioned, a continuous journey of learning and iteration. This having been said, there are three elements that can really ease the transition and ensure you're adequately supported and set up for success. Namely, your workspace, your approach to communication and your mindset. GitLab encourages team members to set up a workspace that is ergonomic and aligned to their individual needs. These items can all be expensed and the handbook offers great suggestions in terms of products that best support remote life. As with everything at GitLab, this is a journey of iteration and it may take some time to figure out what will work best for you. Along with this, if a team member would like to find a shared or co-located workspace, GitLab is fully supportive of this and willing to carry the cost involved. A really important facet of having a dispersed team is communication. GitLab has multiple channels for communication and has carefully laid guidelines around the best platform to use in different instances. An example of this, excuse me, would be the Slack mechanism, which is primarily used for informal communication with messages expiring after 90 days. Slack provides an invaluable tool and that various channels create spaces for team members to interact based on their unique interests or needs at any given time. With topical channels that touch on a bunch of different things like mindfulness, parenting, cooking, fitness, gaming, cats, travel and mental health awareness. Along with this, team members are able to join a location channel which allows for them to engage with others in the same region, which from time to time prompts meetups for a co-working day or a casual date together. Working remotely is as much about having the correct system or tool set up in place as it is about mindset. Managers and leaders should pay an important role in encouraging and reinforcing that mindset. Working in parallel with learning and development to ensure that remote first contents is inclusive and speaks to team members from all backgrounds, locations and walks of life. There are five things that are really important to remember when working in a remote first environment. The first is reducing reliance on Slack and synchronicity, then not defaulting to a meeting. And if you're having a meeting doing it well, answering with a link which I touched on earlier and reading and living the GetLab sub-values, I'm gonna go through these individually now. Working asynchronously should promote greater efficiency and enable team members to use synchronicity in a more mindful and strategic way. Finding ways to effectively weave the two of these together will go a long way in delivering results without coming away feeling overwhelmed or fatigued. We have a guide to working asynchronously in place, which our head of remote, Darren Murph, is working to update to version 3.0 with insights from teams across the company on ways of working that they have found to be most useful in our unique environments. The update will be placing a sharp focus on defining based practices and intentional operations, leaning into GetLab, maintaining leadership in the sphere of remote work, reducing ambiguity and communication modes while reinforcing the handbook first approach, allowing for added flexibility in the lives of team members and supporting our long-term vision for global remote work. It probably comes as no surprise that we've compiled a guide for using Slack. If you're a time individual, time urgent individual like I am, adapting to using Slack in an asynchronous environment may take getting used to. These six rules make that transition a little easier, though you may still feel blocked from time to time. The way around that is being clear in your communication in terms of your urgency, whilst like acknowledging and being respectful of the working hours and priorities of others. Expecting delays comes with the territory, though I have found most team members are incredibly helpful and supportive when time sensitivities come into play. Next, we avoid yelling, unless you're making an important announcement or there is an emergency situation, using Atya or Atchannel in Slack is discouraged as it can raise an alarm. Transparency is one of our values and one of our key areas of focus at the moment is to reduce the number of direct messages within Slack. We as a team have made an effort to establish open channels along with closed ones which are used purely to communicate sensitive data from time to time. Using Slack bots can support keeping your values and your overarching culture in check. GitLab uses this functionality to ensure that language used within Slack remains inclusive, giving alternate options for words such as guys, encouraging the use of hello team or hey y'all instead. This is something I'm guilty of from time to time. The people experienced team uses Slack bots to keep team members informed. And a great example of this would be our automated response to anniversary gift inquiries at the moment. If you're using a Slack bot or something similar, please let us know in the comment section. We always welcome fresh ideas. Not defaulting to a meeting on my part initially felt like a leap while transitioning to an all remote environments. Using merge requests and issues within GitLab as a tool has fostered a more decisive and efficient way of working within me and allowed for consensus gathering to happen simultaneous to solution finding and iteration. I have come away feeling so empowered and inspired having eliminated the massive pressure of finding or presenting a full solution or applying a big bang approach but rather starting with and documenting a thought and collaborating from me. This having been said, there is still a place for meetings however it is important to ensure that they are organized having an agenda in place along with a team member nominated to document the key takeaways and action items to be carried out. Answering with a link is encouraged at GitLab. Not only does it aid the question, answering and solution finding process but it enables team members to turn to our single source of truth, the handbook. Leading them to a self-enabled way of working and a self-directed approach to learning. We have guidelines in place to ensure new team members are brought up to speed from the get go and how to search the handbook for answers using a link reinforces this. If the link is not available and the content has not been documented but should be in the handbook, the sentiments of paying and forward is applied and that team members can go ahead and create a merge request and add this information to the handbook. GitLab has six core values, the credit values which were touched on in the welcome session hosted by Sid and Carol. These are substantiated by subvalues. The subvalues have been collaboratively expanded on over the years and contain a wealth of knowledge inspired by real lived experiences of our team members showcasing not only what it means to work at GitLab but what our values mean to us and how consistently present they are in everything we do. Examples of these would be having a blameless problem-solving mentality, short toes and being respectful of one another's time. GitLab has a couple of tricks that it uses to ensure connection. Working remotely can have moments of learningness, something that has increased in the wake of recent global events. We have found incredibly creative ways to offset this, an example being our virtual hometown and country visits which can be a great way to establish connection and get insights into other cultures and walks of life. A few weeks ago, my colleague Nitin hosted us in India. That's a photograph from the session in the slide. Taking our team on a complete journey which included an airport pickup and views from our train journey to his hometown along with giving us insights into his life. He shared some of his history and the pride he has for his culture and heritage. This call had such a huge impact on our team and reminded us all how fortunate we are to work with team members from around 67 different countries. Another highlight for me was the recent Take Your Child to Work events hosted by our CMO Todd Barr. They did an incredible to nerdy themed storytelling and drawing session. I personally don't have children but I still felt a sense of belonging and inclusion in the call. And for me, that means we're definitely doing something right. Not having a water cooler and a co-located environment does not make it impossible to establish meaningful connections. What ways are you thinking of using to encourage connection in your remote work environments? Let us know in the chats. The last thing I'd like to touch on are the resources we make publicly available to support the transition to remote environments. Along with our handbook, which I will touch on in the next slide, the GetLab Remote Work Reports is great starting block if you're looking for data to support the decision-making process around or transition to a remote work environments and can be used alongside the Remote Playbook. The Remote Work Reports are 3,000 people from around the world being surveyed on why they love remote work. This all happened pre-COVID which means that the data wasn't shaped in any way by the pandemic. At GetLab, absolutely everyone can contribute. The handbook and methodologies used by GetLab are a compilation of thousands of major crisis issues and iterations, all of which have come together to help us make remote work work. When we say everyone can contribute, we truly mean it and the beauty of what's being created is that it is completely accessible to all, allowing companies considering or making the transition to learn from pioneers in the space. We recently launched our remote work certification which is comprised of 10 modules and serves as a great mechanism to use alongside the handbook, report and playbook. In July, GetLab embarked on a joint initiative with trusted interns right here in South Africa which saw around 650 South African youth completing the certification. I have included some feedback in the slide from one of the attendees and it is just such a topic that is close to my heart knowing that South African youth are facing struggles in terms of unemployment at the moment and it has been a passion point of mine to ensure that they become set up for success in terms of their career journey. Please be sure to join the all remote conversation on Twitter. Details for our head of remote are on the slide. We will be making these slides available and the links are included to all the pages mentioned after the session. Let's head on over to the questions now which Megan will be calling out. Thank you, Beverly. There are a few questions in the Q&A doc. Just a reminder, if you have any questions for Beverly, feel free to add them in the Q&A doc. If you want to utilize them now, she can answer them both. Thanks. So the first question is from Anita Blair. How do you expect to be managed in terms of engagement in the remote setting and how do your remote first practice with help? Thank you so much for the question. I think engagement in a remote setting has some similarities to engagement in a traditional setting. We do carry out an engagement survey but our communication practices and the transparency with which GitLab approaches things makes it easy to maintain that engagement. Megan, if you want to verbalize the next question. The next question is from Ruth. What would you recommend for a company focused on sustaining hybrid culture? This is after COVID-19. And would you also need to focus heavily on documenting everything? I think it's safe to say that documenting things is going to be a given, whether you're working in a hybrid environment or in all remotes. It is a way that everyone can remain connected and it serves as an opportunity for there to be a single source of truth which I think is so key to getting this right. What I would recommend for a company, GitLab doesn't have a hybrid model in place. What we do have is a complete or remote. As a hybrid does sort of pave the way for team members to feel a certain level of disconnect or exclusion. So that documentation is going to make it that much easier to maintain that connection and ensure that everybody feels a part of everything that happens within the company. I hope that answered your question correctly.