Workplace of the future - Page 2
Here's exactly what three hiring managers at Buffer shared about onboarding folks together or separately, along with some of the advice, conversations, and best practices we hold onto for onboarding in a remote and fully distributed team.
We tried including every member of our Advocacy team in onboarding for new Advocates. Not only did this new approach facilitate the new team member’s integration into our close-knit team, but it brought some surprise benefits, as well.
In 2022, we’re diving back into more intentional team-building both asynchronously, synchronously, plus we’re planning the occasional in-person meetup where available. Here’s how we’re approaching all of these events and all of our current initiatives.
Over the last year, I’ve done at least 400 values screening calls and I always turn the call over to the applicants to ask whatever questions they have for me. Here are the top ten questions I get asked and my responses.
We eliminated two of our lower cost-of-living bands in our salary formula at Buffer. Here's my thinking behind this change and our approach to pay overall.
The first interview candidates go through at Buffer is a values interview. Here's what it looks like and why we start with values.
When we experimented with a four-day workweek it was initially for one month. As our CEO, Joel Gascoigne , wrote about in May 2020 when we first started the experiment, “This 4-day workweek period is about well-being, mental health, and placing us as humans and our families first.” Joel’s announcement about the four-day workweek in April, 2020. At the end of May, while we were collecting the data on how the experimen
In the spring of 2021, we put out an engagement survey to our engineering team to understand their experience at Buffer. In this post, we share the very honest and eye-opening survey results, and the action steps we plan to take from our learnings.
In this post, we share how our Customer Advocacy team has adjusted their schedules, goals, and mindset to acclimate to and thrive in a 4-day work week, all while supporting thousands of customers.
Since we first kicked off a 4-day work week in May 2020, people have had a lot of questions about it. What day are we taking off? How long will we continue this practice? Is everyone really working four-days a week or are some people working more? Some of the answers to these questions have changed over the last few months, and I’m sure some will continue to change and evolve as we learn more about operating within a four-day work week. A little while ago, I decided to answer questions about o
Our Engineering team is the largest team at Buffer. It has a lot of moving pieces and is composed of several smaller teams. As with any large team, we’re keen to make sure no one individual lacks guidance or an opportunity to grow. In this post, I’ll share a little bit more about how we’ve done that through a new program at Buffer that we’ve already had a lot of success with, our Engineering Mentorship Program. Why a mentorship program? Over the years on our Engineering team, we’ve had great
In March and April of 2020, work and life as we knew it was changing. I surveyed our team members (all 84 of whom are spread out across the globe) to understand the best way to help them cope with so many things shifting at once. I especially wanted to hear from parents about what could help them as many schools were shutting down and partners or spouses were also required to work from home. The results? Most people wanted more time to get through the new challenges they faced. As a remote or
Today marks ten years since I launched the first version of Buffer. What started as a landing page to gauge interest, and then a very basic product that I worked on alone, has become so much more. Buffer is now a leading social media management platform and a team of nearly 90 people working remotely worldwide, with our own approach and culture. Reaching this milestone means a lot for me, and I thought it would be interesting to reflect on each year of the Buffer journey. As you’ll see, things
Making and communicating decisions across an organization can be a challenge anytime. Making decisions during a pandemic is a whole new level of challenge. When the impact of COVID-19 started to grow, we at Buffer, like many others, needed to move as quickly as possible, gather a lot of information, and make big decisions that would ultimately impact our team, our customers, and our business. This presented a unique challenge. A lot of the decisions spanned the entire company and needed to be
We used to have a system called "transparent email" for all internal communication at Buffer. That stopped working for us, here's what we do now.
We’ve decided to conduct a long-term pilot of the 4-day workweek. See our results so far and what we're adding next.
As April comes to a close, and we look ahead to another month where our global team is living in various forms of lockdown and isolation, I decided that for the month of May, Buffer will operate under a 4-day workweek (at full pay) across the whole 89-person team. We’re in a period of time where there’s a layer of added anxiety and stress in all of our lives. At Buffer, we’ve been encouraging taking time off, and relaxing productivity expectations, in addition to shifting internal deadlines, bu
Many companies have a regular All Hands meeting. Generally, this is a company-wide gathering for all employees (‘all hands on deck’) to hear from the organization’s leaders and discuss the state of the company. At Buffer, the All Hands meeting is a key element of our communication and culture. As we grow, there’s an increased need to hear regularly from our CEO and leadership team and get on the same page about strategy and direction. Every month we alternate between a presentation-based All H
I have always assumed that a remote company must have a lower carbon footprint, but is that true?
No one knows how to work during a pandemic, and we’re all grappling through it together. So in the spirit of sharing, here are all of the internal messages we’ve shared with our team and shareholders during this time.
Here’s a look at how we’ve evolved the process of onboarding teammates at Buffer -- what we've stopped, started, and are doing next.
For the past few years, we’ve been on a journey to make sure our Buffer swag – the branded merchandise that goes out to teammates, customers and the world – reflects our Buffer values . Branded merchandise has a vast footprint on the environment — in terms of production, shipping, employment practices, and distribution — so we treat these decisions with care, always remembe
One of the most conversation-provoking perks we’ve ever launched at Buffer is our Dependents Grant. This benefit provides a $3,000 USD stipend to teammates for each person who depends on their salary (including spouses, partners, children, grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc.). When it first launched in 2016, the grant was designed to show support for Buffer teammates as they navigated various life situations. “We we want to help our teammates feel taken car
This team communication regarding COVID-19 is part of our COVID-19 Response Series. You can see all the messages in the series here . * Shared: March 4, 2020 * Posted by: Courtney Seiter, Director of People * Title: We are postponing our planned June retreat in Athens We are postponing our planned June retreat in Athens Hi team; I have some tough news to share: In light of the COVID-19 situation developing across the world and out of an abundance of cautio