As a remote-first company, we have designed and established a couple of principles that should help guide you on how to act on a day-to-day basis. The principles reflects our teams daily operations, values and overall company culture. Let these principles constitute a fundament for how you act and how you interact with others. We are building this together, so feel free to suggest things to change or add ✨
We treat each other with respect and we expect you to foster a respectful and collaborative environment at work. We encourage constructive feedback, but in a way that is not offending to others. We will not tolerate anyone intimidating, pestering, humiliating, victimizing or sabotaging others in this company. We also prohibit willful discrimination based on age, sexual orientation, gender, ethnicity, race, religion or disability. This is by no means an exhaustive list but it gives an indication, use your common sense. This goes for teammates but also all of the people, users or clients that you interact with through this company.
You are a face of this company every day - remember that 💁🏻
Most of our employees work remotely. Some prefer to work from a dedicated room at home while others move around and bring their laptop with them. The important thing is that you find the right workplace for you, but keep in mind that there should be a quiet and focus-enabling environment around you. As a code of conduct, we appreciate all video calls being done from a quiet room where you are not interrupted. We also ask everyone to buy a good set of headphones (or get one sponsored from us) so that the listeners on the other side of the video call can have a pleasant experience too. This is especially important when you are in a client-facing role. We all know how incredibly annoying it is to be in a video call when the sound is not ideal. A good set of headphones will also help you to keep focus on work and exclude all of the possible interruptions that can come up throughout the day.
Working from a coffee shop ☕or a beach 🏖️somewhere is of course allowed in periods and now and then, but we recommend everyone to establish a more comfortable, stabile and work-friendly environment around them. Remember that everyone working remotely in our team could get a sponsorship to rent a desk at a co-working space of your choice.
We strive to give every employee the freedom to manage their own working hours. We don't clock hours or ask you to report daily on input. We measure output, and you are the boss of your own agenda. You are in charge of what to do and when to do it - as long as you deliver on goals and tasks that are agreed upon in a team level. Although we have a flexible working policy, we try to overlap at least a couple of hours with the team every day. Most of us are online between 11 am and 3 pm (GMT).
The only thing we ask from you is to let us know on Slack if you need to run an errand or will be unavailable for a period of time (a couple of hours). If you are planning some time off or need to block out time to focus on a specific set of tasks, it would be great if you can add it to your calendar so that your teammates can easily have a look there to understand if you are online or not. This way, we don't have to bother you unnecessarily and make sure that we plan stuff where we are dependent upon your presence around your schedule.
A small tip from the rest of the team that has been working remotely for some time already: Routines and schedule-structure helps. Block time in your calendar weekly to make sure that you have time to cope with everything on your list. Pay respect to your own and others "focus hours". Turn off notifications on slack and email, put on some music that gets you in the zone, and stay there until the calendar tells you that it is time for something else.
We use these a LOT. As we only get a chance to work face-to-face a couple of times per year, most of your verbal interaction with the team are going to be through video calls. We prefer to use Whereby, but sometimes we use Google Hangout or Zoom. When joining a video call with your team, make sure to have a quiet environment around you and put on headphones. If it is an all-hands meeting with more than 10 participants, make sure to mute your microphone before entering the call. Use the function to "raise hand" if you'd like to share something and wait until the meeting hosts gives you permission to speak. If you are in a team meeting with less participants, there is no need to mute yourself from the start. Just remember that the mute if there are background noise coming from you, others might get a bit annoyed.
Slack is our way of written communication and our go-to-place for the "water cooler conversations" that would normally take place in a more in-office environment. To make sure that Slack remains a productive (and not disturbing) tool for all of us, we have generated different #channels and have a more specific "code of conduct".