Workplace of the future - Page 12
When Buffer first moved to a self-management model, we moved to a completely flat structure. We just let loose and the message was “everyone go figure out what you want to do and work on, without too much guidance or leadership.” We talked about some of those challenges recently here. In short, to describe what “flattening” an organization means exactly, here is what we did: * Removed all managers that would help decide what someone would work on * Stopped all 1:1’s and mentorship sessions
We’re a fully remote team at Buffer, so we’re used to connecting with one another via video, chat, and other collaborative, remote work tools. Working this way is a lot of fun—and it means the times we get to spend together, all in the same place, are extra special. Not only do team retreats give us a full week to work (and play) together as a team, they also give us some time all together to reflect on the future of retreats as we continue to grow. (Our open roles are listed here.) So far, t
In 2014, I became a full time remote worker. This year, I’ve been lucky to work and travel in Paris, Malaga, Copenhagen, Casablanca, London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Barcelona… There’s one question that’s always in the back on my mind: How can I be as productive as possible remotely? I’ve tried many different experiments to do more in less time this year, and I thought I would share 5 tricks (and their accompanying tools) that have become part of my routine. 5 Methods for More Productive R
Recently Joel and I were talking about the new Jawbone UP3. I had just gotten one for free as part of Buffer’s perks program, and I complained that I found the closing buckle a bit fiddly and let off some steam about how I struggled to charge it. At the end I remember saying something like “Oh, but it’s cool that I know my resting heart rate now, though.” It’s kind of ironic how much I focused on the small challenges and gave the fact that I could now track my health much more intelligently on
“What gets measured, gets managed.” This well-known quote is often applied to business situations like marketing or product creation. But the basic truth is applicable to almost any situation: When we really want to focus on something, we pay close attention. We want details that can help us make good decisions. And at Buffer, we want the details that can help us grow as an inclusive and diverse team. We want to be conscious of how we grow: With a focus on the values that guide us, and with a
In December, my friend and co-worker Brian casually mentioned to me that he would love to explore Asia. I love Asia. I lived in Japan as a kid for 3.5 years, and I lived in Hong Kong for 6 months in 2012. It was a no-brainer for me to jump on the opportunity and travel around Asia with Brian. I had been in San Francisco about a year and was craving exploring again, having done a lot of travel in the 4.5 years since starting Buffer (which even contributed to us becoming a distributed team). I
At the start of 2014, I decided I need to make some changes in my life. I was working in an office in one of the coolest startups in Cape Town. I had worked in an office pretty much all of my career. I was also commuting to work and back, taking about an hour and a half of my day. Commuting has always been part of work for me too. I have a beautiful family; my wife who works from home and away on weekends shooting as a wedding photographer, my four-year-old son and my baby daughter, who had ju
What does it mean to bring your whole self to work? As part of Buffer’s evolution into self-management, we’ve been exploring this question a lot. We’ve long considered the Buffer team a family all its own. Because we’re a small, distributed team, we form a close bond through shared experiences and values, digital tools and our regular company retreats. But the entirety of the Buffer family goes beyond the team members we see on Sqwiggle every day—it also includes spouses, partners, parents, c
Having the ability to work from anywhere in the world has led to lots of travel adventures for members of the Buffer team. Niel toured Asia while working remotely. Rodolphe sailed across the Atlantic. Joel recently toured 11 cities in 3 months, and Octa is on a month-long cruise (with wifi!) as I write this. And the beauty of a remote team spread around the world where you make your own schedule is that you don’t even have to travel the world to reap the benefits. Remote work can mean spendin
When we wrote previously about how we hire at Buffer , one key component was that everyone we hire have usage of and experience with the Buffer product. That’s still the case today. In the past we have asked folks to use the product for at least 2-3 months consistently before we would consider them for a role. This feels a bit limiting, and discounts the fresh perspective a newcomer to a product can bring. Today we are a bit more flexible with this r
Our customers are the true heart of all we do here at Buffer — and we want to make sure the community knows it. We work on this in lots of ways—from striving for excellent customer support to hosting meetups to sending hand-written notes, swag and special gifts. From the very beginnings of Buffer, our founder and co-founder, Joel and Leo, sent hand-written thank-you cards and stickers to customers. They recognized the value of one-on-one relationships and how going an extra step can help show h
For most business owners, the thought of telling the world all of your financials is intensely frightening. The prospect of the whole world seeing and analyzing your every business move is enough to put even the most seasoned entrepreneurs in the corner crying. But as we’ve seen with companies like Buffer, that sort of transparency and openness is becoming less and less of an outlier. For many, it’s actually part of the very foundation of their existence! More and more startups are finding be
Optimizing one’s day for maximum productivity—and creativity!—is one of our favorite topics to research and think over. We’ve written on the blog before about morning routines, creativity routines, the routines of successful entrepreneurs and even ways to maximize your lunch break. But we haven’t managed to share any of our own daily routines, until now. Recently we were honored to be asked by the team at inbound.org to do an “Ask Me Anything” session, answering questions from their smart com
Can you explain what your company stands for in just a few words? Can you quickly sum up how you and your teammates work together, and what it’s like to get things done at your organization? If you can’t, you’re not alone. Creating a deliberate company culture is an exciting (and oftentimes ongoing) challenge, and it begins with your company values. In the UserTesting marketing department, we knew we were going to grow, and we hoped to set a great example for our new team members and maintain
I believe in the power of women to build inspiring careers in all types of fields. At least, that’s what I thought I believed. It’s what my conscious mind thinks, at least. My unconscious mind, however, favors traditional Western gender roles: men focusing on careers while women focus on family. I learned about this dichotomy from taking an implicit association test, a social psychology test designed to measure a person’s unconscious or automatic associations between types of people and s
Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate. I discovered bitcoin in early 2011. At first it was something that felt like play money and almost surreal. I didn’t fully understand all the details back then, but a decentralized, peer-to-peer digital currency was just too crazy and I became intrigued. Over the years I started diving deeper and deeper into bitcoin. Along the way, the true power of it re
***Quick update: We’re building a more inclusive Buffer! We’d love your feedback on our new Diversity Dashboard.*** Not too very long ago, developers at Buffer were called “hackers.” We had front-end hackers, back-end hackers, Android hackers, iOS hackers, traction hackers. We started using the word “hacker”in Buffer’s early days because—at the time—it felt like the most inclusive way to describe the work developers were doing. I asked our CTO Sunil to describe what the word meant to him: “I
Disclaimer: It is only through the kind collaboration with the previous owner of buffer.com that we were able to now be the new owners, and a key interest for them was to stay anonymous and not to draw any attention to them in this announcement, which we are very keen to honor. So we have redacted all names and replaced them with “Bob” for the individual and “Company corp.” for the company name. In similar interest to protect their privacy, the previous owner also wasn’t comfortable in sharing
Travel is embedded pretty deeply into Buffer’s values—so much so that our entire remote team meets up every 5 months at various spots around the world. Our Buffer retreats are special times for our remote, distributed team to connect in person with one another, with our Buffer audience and with the community of our host city. Traveling to different locations each time also gives us a great new perspective on gratitude and the extreme privilege we have to be able to work and live the way we do.
Just minutes ago, I went ahead and published a new version of Buffer’s culture-deck on Slideshare. It contains a tiny change that I and many on the Buffer team deemed a very important one. Here is the slide that changed before: and after: The essential change, as you can see, is the removal of the word “always,” which many of us felt made things slightly dogmatic and too one-sided. We’ve also changed the words “never” to something less one-sided, to be a better reflection of how we work as h
Note: We’re lucky to have the chance to experiment quite often with the way we work. Because of this, some experiments come and go. The post you’re about to read is one of these experiments; we learned a ton and are now exploring new approaches! I remember the first time I heard about companies operating with no managers. During a conversation about it with Joel, we were both absolutely baffled. There was no way, we thought, that Buffer could ever work in that way. How can any work get done wi
There are many features of the world that I simply cannot wrap my head around, and one of these has always been time zones. Teammates I work with every day who live in Singapore and Australia are a whole day ahead of me in the USA. Wild! In addition to confounding my brain, time zones also provide some fun and interesting challenges when it comes to how we all work together at Buffer as a fully remote, distributed team. For instance, here’s a glimpse at what our team looked like a while back,
Towards the end of 2014, Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich came back to his family home in Austria for a visit and was able to join the coworking community space sektor5 for a fireside chat about Buffer’s culture, values, transparency and lots more. The audience at this event asked tons of smart questions, so we thought it would be fun to share the answers with you here. What’s Buffer? Where are you right now? Leo: We are a social media management tool. We help people to publish, schedule and an
Hey there! Since this post was published, we’ve updated the Buffer values. See the updated values here. There are a few things I can count on when I tell someone about what it’s like to work at Buffer. If I stick to talking about what our social media scheduling tools do, I know I’ll probably have a fun conversation about the triumphs and challenges of social media. If I talk about Buffer’s culture and values a bit, a whole different conversation emerges. I’ve gotten a wide variety of reactio