 Hey all, this is Darren. I'm the head of remote here at GitLab Thank you very much for joining today. The presentation. We're gonna be going over is a fun one for me It's something I've lived for many many years, and I love evangelizing and sharing more about it And that is implementing and reinforcing remote first practices So we're gonna try to reserve some time at the end for questions in the Google Doc I see some have already been prepared. I love Q&A. That's my favorite thing. So I'll try to get to those So with that, let's dive in. So I'm Darren I've worked across the spectrum of remote for my entire career So over 15 years now when I started working remotely 3g was not yet invented and my laptop battery lasted about 17 or 18 minutes So the world has changed quite a bit over time and it's been amazing to watch the evolution of remote and particularly Over the past six months. I think we've been catapulted ahead maybe 10 or 15 years Thanks to COVID-19 and a lot of the world is now coming to grips with what a lot of us at GitLab have already been doing for a long time For those that have not seen it The remote playbook was developed earlier this year when COVID-19 hit We wrapped all of our best learnings and educational material that I had written over the past year Into a handy dandy e-book called the remote playbook There's a credits page at the back of that I would encourage you to look at that a lot of people at GitLab contributed to that And it's an easy guide to send people who are struggling right now in the remote transition It gives them a single source to go to to start digging in and of course then the rabbit hole is very deep But it has has been awesome for a lot of companies. They have used it as a blueprint to start map position So I wanted to start this with a quote that we serve up during onboarding Which is those who thrive at GitLab take the opportunity to drop prior workplace baggage at the door Embrace 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 And I remember when I got to GitLab I thought I had this remote thing figured out and iteration still Had my number it took me quite a bit of time to figure iteration out to truly operate with a low level of Shame work with no ego put things out there and draft and it turns out all of those things are really core to working Well remotely they may not seem directly related to the workplace and infrastructure of remote But it turns out they actually are and improves discipline it improves improves transparency and it improves cohesion So I want to touch on a first first on a few remote Realities remote can feel counterintuitive. It just feels way different than your last job We like to write things down instead of verbalizing. We prefer async over a synchronous meeting There are a lot of things that go into this and so what I try to tell people is if it feels a bit awkward You're probably doing it right Similar with iteration if you put something forward and you're a little bit ashamed of how basic it is You're probably doing it right you're putting it out there early So you can get feedback on it and it can become even better The second thing is it's not a trap a lot of things that we do a get lab would get you in a lot of trouble in other organizations Answering someone with a link for example may seem very cold at another organization But here it's just a model of efficiency and it's being respectful of other other people's time And it's reinforcing that we do truly try to work Handbook first to take all of our time zones into account and operate as the most inclusive team that we possibly can The third is that rewiring takes time as I mentioned earlier It took me a few months to really dial into what iteration is and I'm actually still learning I think we all are and working remote first It really does require trust in your team a level of vulnerability that you may not be familiar with or comfortable with Initially give yourself some time. Talk it out. There's a remote channel that we have here in slack We have a lot of awesome remote veterans in there that are more than happy to Answer questions and help if you're struggling with some of these remote first workflows and lastly reinforcement is okay Sometimes you'll see someone at here or at channel and without a doubt within 60 seconds Someone will kindly respond to that with a link to our communications handbook that says and we don't do that unless it is Absolutely urgent and here's how we actually communicate with each other. It's okay to do that It's course correcting reinforcement is okay If you look into our sub values Don't let each other fail and help each other succeed or both in there and we take those seriously in a remote world Three foundational elements so for context here when I'm giving presentations to other Organizations outside of get lab I always use this slide to try to ground them on what the three focal areas are because the truth is Remote work as a whole is buried daunting to try to wrap your head around the entirety of Remote work and for companies making a suddenly remote transition a lot of them are trying to bite the entire thing off at once And that's not recommended So I give them the advice that even the transition to remote is a journey of iteration And so if you've recently joined get lab and you yourself are making a transition into an all remote space if you've spent a Lot of time in a co-located or a hybrid space That is also a journey of iteration and it is okay to remember that you don't have to have everything perfect from day one there is a lot to learn and Some of it just comes with time You need to be here long enough to see different things to hear different things to have different opportunities to work on different Projects and get into different workflows I like the the term reverse engineering I was not a user of get lab before I joined and what I really loved is digging into the MR Buddy's channel and just watching merge requests be solved and I would look at the diffs And I would look at what the expert would do to change it And then I would try to reverse engineer that to build my own knowledge of how to actually be better at using get lab So the three foundational elements that you have to get right workspace get lab is awesome And that we allow you to expense what you need to build the workspace that works for you to build a healthy and ergonomic workspace That is amazing a lot of companies that were office first that have transitioned to remote now They are struggling to figure out. Do we do a stipend? What do we do? Do we just wait for people to get back to the office? So take advantage of that and even the workspace is a journey of iteration My workspace did not look like this a few months ago. I was at a different room in my home We have a toddler. He was growing up He figured out that I was always in there and he would get really upset that he couldn't come in 24-7 so we actually moved it I did some iteration on the workspace and now it's a much more Same place for me. It's a mental health boost and it keeps him in his happy spot He can be downstairs live his best life and I can be up here working The second is communications communications is different in a in an all remote environment We use text very heavily I love that we're leaning into audio first platforms like yak and video first platforms like loom Feel free to try those out and pilot those Experiment with those. We're always looking to iterate and get better But it's really important that we have guidelines on where work communication happens and where informal communication happens We are blessed that we have get lab at the heart of all that we do so we can funnel all of our work into get lab But I also love that we expire our slack messages after 90 days so that we use it primarily for informal communication If you want to see how this really works in practice check out the in the parent hood slack channel That is an amazing place where parents all over the world who are doubling as teachers aides right now are Commiserating with each other laughing with each other crying with each other and helping each other out as we all sort of go through This uncharted territory together now in a common Workspace you may not use slack that way You may feel a bit uncomfortable just connecting as humans in a in an environment like slack But because we deliberately expire our slack messages after 90 days, it's really not great for work So it's mostly only useful for informal communication. So I would encourage you to dive into slack We have tons of different topical channels mental health aware is a great one daily gratitude is a great one We have fitness cooking video games dogs cats cute photos. You name it dig in there Surely you'll find something you like and also we have a lot of location channels So if you're in the Pacific Northwest or Southern California other areas around the world check that out You'll probably find a pocket of people nearby and once travel restrictions are lifted It's really awesome to get together every now and again hang out co-work together that sort of thing The last is mindset I often tell people that remote work is half tooling and half culture and mindset We are really blessed at get lab that our executive team has the mindset of Driving remote first practices. It truly does have to be modeled at the top Thankfully our executives do that But if you're a manager and you're a leader somewhere in the organization Remember that the culture and the mindset around remote first practices starts with you And if you want to dig into the handbook to learn more about what that takes I would say check out our leadership pages are awesome learning a development team They're building new stuff all of the time Really really awesome stuff on managerial training and how to truly have the mindset of remote first and to always think about Other people to be inclusive. Are there is there anyone I'm not considering in a different time zone? So on and so forth that gets seen and reinforced and then live down throughout the organization All right, five things to remember when working remote first I'm going to speed up here so we can save some time for questions We want to reduce reliance on slack and synchronicity Strategically the bottom line here is the synchronous time is really precious. It's really great for coffee chats But we want to make sure we you have enough mental energy to actually engage in those So we try to think about Synchronicity in terms of if I'm gonna have a synchronous meeting will it catalyze a lot of asynchronous work after so be Strategic about weaving a sink and sink together. It's not a sink versus a sink It's strat is strategically using them both and if you check out our asynchronous guide I'm actually in the middle of an async 3.0 initiative where we are codifying how different teams around the organization Strategically use a sink to gain more efficiency Try not to default to a meeting if you immediately think hey, let's have a meeting first I would say write down what you wanted to meet about and then see if it's possible to get the answer or come To the outcome Using written form the benefit here is you save yourself double work If you have a meeting about something and an outcome is achieved Someone has to write that down so that it goes into the right place in the handbook So if possible start the work where it needs to end up get lab issues or merge request write it down first Remember we try to separate consensus gathering from decision-making and consensus gathering can be done Asynchronously most of the time you can write down what you're thinking about Send it out to the most amount of people and allow a time boxed amount of feedback And then maybe have one synchronous meeting at the end actually decide on all of the feedback that was gained If you have a meeting do it well Make sure that you document it make sure that there is someone in there Responsible for codifying the takeaways and putting them in the relevant places in the handbook immediately Knowledge tends to have a quick decay. And so we try to get that in as soon as possible Try to always answer with a link I love doing these sessions and getting questions from people and immediately thinking I know that there's a link for that if you're struggling on Using the handbook and answering with a link. We actually have a handbook page on how to search and use the handbook It's like handbook inception. So find that dig into that you can become a handbook pro and no time And last but certainly not least read and live the get lab sub values I say this often but our six core values are probably words that you've heard before Collaboration iteration results, but they can mean different things to different people where it's really dialed in is in the sub values Which we think of as substantiators to each of our values. These are Incredible almost no other organization in the world has detailed their values in a way that get lab does and we allow them to evolve You can contribute a new way to substantiate any other value in there and even in my time here I have contributed some and I've seen some amazing ones come in from others Really take time to read that it is amazing How many conflicts and how many issues can be resolved if you just look at the sub values and take the advice there It's been built up over years and years is an amazing wealth of knowledge So I dug in a little bit on slack and synchronicity. I'm gonna Pass through these slides a little bit. I want to make sure we have time for questions We can send this deck out Afterwards and you can digest it and true asynchronous fashion so we touched on do not defaulting to a meeting So we'll send these slides around that way you can dig in a little bit more. Hey, check this out aloha day I'm actually wearing an aloha shirt today. We need to get another aloha day on the books Answering with a link another one of my favorites just a quick point here that answering with a leak is not rude It's actually very efficient and very respectful of other people's time And I also like to think about this is if you get a question that truly isn't in the handbook It's an awesome opportunity to answer the person and then immediately document it so that if anyone has this question henceforth They simply can find it in the handbook at scale and extrapolate it over time. This is amazingly efficient and We talked a bit about the good lab sub values. Thank you all very much for contributing to those. I love our sub values Just a few things here on informal communication if you're struggling with Isolation or loneliness we are always adding to our informal communication guide We recently added the DJ zoom room zoom added this cool feature where you can kind of DJ within a setting So everyone can just kind of be working heads down and kind of pass the baton on who's playing music in the room If you've ever been in an office where it's like 90s Fridays or something like that kind of a similar vibe But check that page out if you have any other things to add create a merge request and assign it to me One other piece of work that we did Late last year into early this year that I wanted to highlight here is the get lab remote work report so we surveyed 3,000 people across the world on why they love remote work and This was before COVID-19 So what I love about this data is it is not colored by the current pandemic and it is very useful to a lot of people now because it gives Insights into the minds of people who are working remotely before all of this happened So if you have peers or other leaders in your space that are curious about data shaping remote work Tell them to check out the get lab remote work report all of the surveys were taken pre covid and so the data is very pure and Last but not least everyone can contribute all remote info is the shortcut URL into the all remote section of the get lab handbook We are growing that every day super proud of it super happy to see how many contributions have happened And I can't tell you how many dozens if the hundreds of companies around the world are literally using this every day To shape their remote transitions. It's a big deal We are a beacon and a pioneer in the space and as tens of millions of people go remote What we write and what we share and how we live is going to impact how other companies are shaped and how they live It's a big deal to some degree. We are the Avengers We're saving the world from imminent demise by showing them how to work remotely So I would encourage you to continue living those values dig into the guide Let me know if you have any questions and certainly make merge request if you have them and with that I'm gonna slide over to Questions Emily, do you mind verbalizing some of these or calling some folks out? It would be my pleasure Darren and thanks during some of these great insights and learnings So we have a couple of questions. The first is from Phoebe Burks Darren, can you please talk about how get labs value of transparency is important for all remote work? Yeah, so amazing question. It is a non-negotiable thing in remote work Transparency is key to people feeling like they belong It is key for feeling like they are connected to the work and the people and the projects that are happening And the truth is this has always been the case even in co-located spaces the more transparency the more people feel like they belong The more purpose that they have in their work. It's not rocket science But in remote it is non-negotiable in a co-located space You can not do this but then you can bandaid the problem and kind of create this ad hoc solution By having a lot of meetings and continually looping yourself into various conversations that are going on So that way you feel like you're in the know and you feel like you're included But the systemic issue is it should have been public by default It should have been more transparent from the get-go and in a remote setting we have to do that So I love the notion of transparency that took some getting used to as well working out in the open But now we have a metric on messages that we want shared in a public channel or either a group setting As opposed to a direct message we actually track those metrics and we're trying to get better at that And I love that I actually see that as a game as a challenge I try to operate and work in public channels as often as I possibly can because you'll see that people Even outside of your workspace could see your work and then they'll think oh, I have an idea I can contribute to that and it is really amazing the magic that comes with that The first time you see someone who you've never worked with before See the work that you're working on and contribute to it and make it better You're an immediate immediate believer So I would say if you're struggling with that Have some faith take a chance have some vulnerability make your work public and watch the magic that happens Together I love it. Make it magic together hashtag teamwork hashtag dream work Our next question is from Rebecca. Who's not in the session, but we're going to share the stock asynchronously after Damon, why did git lab choose remote first so long ago relatively speaking and what prepared the leadership team to be pioneers in remote first So probably wouldn't surprise you that I can answer this with a link if you go to the git lab history page There's an entire section there where I mostly transcribed an interview from sid who answered this exact question so Out of sid's mouth this answer came and I tried to transcribe it So I would encourage you to go there check that out, but the longest sort of it is it wasn't intentional It just sort of happened Git lab started with people in various countries sid thought maybe they would just come to his house in the netherlands But then there was a long commute and it just stopped happening When y combinator happened and a small group of people came out of that in california They were given an office, but it didn't take long for people to stop showing up and the work still got done So it just sort of happened and then sid was visionary enough to start writing things down and documenting things early And it is amazing now to look at our seven thousand plus page handbook and think how Much more efficient and informed our lives are now for things that were written down years and years and years ago So documentation may feel less efficient in the moment But if you change your time scale from this very moment to the length of the company It becomes more efficient and the extrapolated compounding effect of that is really really powerful Over time a lot of companies that i'm consulting with say i don't have time for documentation Or this actually makes it less efficient if i have to pause and write things down But that's because their time scale is the current 30 minutes or the current hour They're not thinking about tomorrow or the next week or the week after last week I was on pto and all of the things i have written down Enabled my team and surrounding teams to move various projects forward because it was already written down That is the power of documentation. So i digressed a little bit there, but hopefully that was useful context great question I think documentation is super important and that's why we have these notes docs to document everything um, our next question is from tony Uh, what have been the biggest hurdles for being not only all remote but using a zero trust model for systems access I've only worked for companies that while partially in the cloud leverage vpns Or a network perimeter really heavily Yeah, to be honest, this would be a better question for our business operations team I have consulted and synced up with them On on some occasions, but I will say this Kitlab benefits from being all remote from the start. So we're not converting anything It was always set up to work this way So we had to make our systems and security and two factor It had to work with no one in an office because we didn't have Anyone in an office, but I would say dig into the business operations handbook page and the security pages They really do an amazing job of detailing What they do and check out a group conversation and or an AMA with them, but that's a great question Step we have max with remote work most of uh with With remote work most of the nonverbal communication is lost I don't see the faces of my colleagues throughout the whole working day I don't see subtle gestures and facial expressions during meetings How do you compensate for this information loss? How do you teach newcomers to cope with remote only communications? I would say this is why we try to encourage video Video goes a long way to conveying verbal cues. I mean you can see I talk with my hands a lot McBride does this we laugh at each other when we're in these sessions. It's just like two people throwing their hands around all the time So you do get some of that through video. Sometimes we hit zoom burnout and you just need to dial into a call and that's okay I will say this in person matters a lot and get lab is very intentional about integrating in person engagement That we have those we build a lot of rapport We build relationships and then that carries us until the time we meet again Now during covid this has wrecked everything. We couldn't have an in person contribute this year So that's why we're already trying to forecast when will our next ones be we want to make sure that when we onboard new people We give them an iou of you will see someone in person again This has been an amazing epiphany for a lot of companies that i'm working with that are transitioning They're essentially trying to figure out how do we build culture and how do we regain this awesomeness of FaceTime without ever seeing anyone in person again I would say that's not the approach in person matters a lot people love getting together I loved being able to go to an in person get lab commit various people saw each other at meetups and reinvents Right now. That's a little difficult, but I would say forecasting to a time when travel restrictions are lifted Leverage in person try to have an off-site try to get to an in person event In person matters a lot, and I'm excited for the next contribute It's amazing how much you can do virtually if you start with in person And so like everyone else we're desperate to get some of those moments back on the calendar How much darren I know we're at time But I wanted to give a huge thank you and invite all of our attendees to keep adding questions to the dock The team darren will all keep looking and uh and share those responses. Thanks darren Absolutely. Thanks for joining all find me in the remote channel or pretty much anywhere on slack. I appreciate your time