Workplace of the future - Page 3
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: April 3, 2020 * Posted by: Joel Gascoigne, Buffer Founder and CEO * Title: Launching the COVID-19 Customer Assistance Program Launching the COVID-19 Customer Assistance Program Hey team, I’m glad to be sharing an update with you on how we’re planning to continue and expand the ways we’re helping customers get throu
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 26, 2020 * Posted by: Joel Gascoigne, Founder and CEO * Title: An assortment of thoughts on our approach during COVID-19 An assortment of thoughts on our approach during COVID-19 Hi team, As we come towards the end of another week in this pandemic, and many more places implement stay at home orders, I want t
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 18, 2020 * Posted by: Caryn Hubbard, Director of Finance * Title: How we’re positioned to handle this new economic climate How we’re positioned to handle this new economic climate Hi team, The last couple of weeks have been atypical and unprecedented, unfolding in ways none of us could have imagined. Public
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 30, 2020 * Posted by: Courtney Seiter, Director of People * Title: A note on COVID-19 sick time and time off A note on COVID-19 sick time and time off Hi team; the People and Finance teams wanted to share a special note with you about time off during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, Buffer’s Flexible Time Off P
Ever since the world got turned upside down by COVID-19, it’s been “business as unusual” for everyone – Buffer included. I sent this update out to Buffer’s investors one week ago. I hesitated on whether to share it more widely, as I know a lot of companies have been impacted more severely in these times. That said, I believe it makes sense to lean into our company value of transparency, since there may be some companies this could help, and it shows Buffer customers that we will be around beyon
One remote work best practice that we live by at Buffer is asynchronous communication. This concept simply means that work doesn’t happen at the same time for everyone. Communication and collaboration are complex issues, especially for remote workers – in our last three years of State of Remote Work reports they have been in the top three struggles for remote workers. Ensuring good asynchronous communication practices is one of the ways that we address this struggle at Buffer. Asynchronous com
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 12, 2020 * Posted by: Courtney Seiter, Director of People * Title: Buffer Guidelines for 2019 Coronavirus (COVID-19) * Note: We’re grateful to Human Made for sharing their guidelines openly via their handbook ! Some of this language was borrowed from their
We just released our annual State of Remote Work report, and one of the most consistent responses is that when we ask remote workers if they’d like to work remotely (at least some of the time) for the rest of their careers, 98 percent of them said yes. A further 97 percent of people said they would also recommend remote work to others. So what is it about remote work that makes people want to do it for the rest of their careers and recommend it so stron
We think a lot about work culture at Buffer. So at the end of the year, it’s always an interesting exercise to think on how the work world has evolved and the work culture trends we see on the horizon. Here are five of our predictions for 2020. They’re unscientific and pretty biased by our point of view, but that’s part of the fun! 1. The growth of ‘conscious companies’ Is the purpose of a business simply to make money? Up until recently, that question could be answered pretty simply: Yup! Bu
With more and more people working remotely at least some of the time, more employees are experiencing that things change when there’s no office. Dynamics, habits and workflows change in a remote organization. Some changes are obvious, but others are subtle. As an employee in a fully remote company for the last few years, I’ve learned a few things that have helped me make the most of remote work. Here are some of the my biggest lessons. 1. Over-communicate by default How do you know if your
Back in 2016, we shared the tech, bags and products that our team found essential for remote work. This year, it’s time for an update and many new additions to our original list. Here are lots more gadgets, gear and other essentials our all-remote team can’t live without, including: * Daily backpacks * Travel bags * Monitors, trackpads and computer accessories * Headphones * Cell phones and cases * Laptops * Journals and pens * Home speakers * Gaming systems * Other work/life essenti
A mystery So, it all started on September 1st, right after our cluster upgrade from 1.11 to 1.12. Almost on the next day, we began to see alerts on kubelet reported by Datadog. On some days we would get a few (3 – 5) of them, other days we would get more than 10 in a single day. The alert monitor is based on a Datadog check – kubernetes.kubelet.check, and it’s triggered whenever the kubelet process is down in a node. We know kubelet [https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/components/#kube
Friday has become somewhat of an “experiment day” at Buffer. Different areas of Buffer have tried Fridays with no Slack , have reserved Friday afternoons for personal development , and have even taken Friday afternoons off . Using Fridays to try new ways of work has become such a part of our culture that we recently tried our first full-te
“Hackathons” are pretty common at tech companies. During these events, engineers and others collaborate on a project with a goal is to have a usable piece of software to demo after the event – and eventually ship to customers. It’s a fun challenge to do a hackathon when you’re a remote team , which is why we’re especially proud after having recently hosted our third. Through every iteration, we’ve tried to improve. And after this third edition, it feels like
Today we’re happy to announce our new engineering podcast, The Buffer Overflow Podcast. And, our first episode is now available for streaming! How to Listen The Buffer Overflow Podcast is now available on all major platforms today, so if you open your podcast player of choice and search for us, we should be there! Here are some direct links: * Google Podcasts * Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/sho
Growing a team is an exciting prospect. More people means more capacity, more skills and more progress, right? But scaling a team often comes with its own special challenges and pitfalls. It’s been said that every time a company triples in size, everything breaks . We’re now a team of 90 at Buffer and have learned quite a [https://medium.com/slite/how-slite-buffer-and-doist-manage-remote-first-teams-2b9
Buffer’s People Team spends a lot of time thinking about perks. One of our biggest and most important perks is maybe the toughest to quantify: The freedom to work whenever, wherever, and however we like. Being a diverse, distributed team impacts our perks philosophy deeply. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach; we all work differently and are motivat
The biggest difference between remote work and co-located offices is where work happens. According to our State of Remote Work survey for 2019, 84% of remote workers work from their home. That means that most of us work and live in the same place. This results in the biggest struggle remote workers have: Unplugging after work. In this post I’ll share the four biggest lessons I’ve learned on how to create rem
One of our values at Buffer is to improve consistently, so we focus a lot on learning. Up until recently, a Buffer perk we were pretty proud of was our learning and development stipend . This fund gave each teammate $20 per month, or $240 a year, to invest in learning from mediums like tutorials, online classes, or real-life courses. Budget-wise, this worked out to about $20,000 for the year (assuming everyone uses th
We held our 10th company retreat this past April and it was a big one! 83 teammates flew or drove to sunny San Diego for a week of work with plenty of team bonding and activities thrown in. We treat everything like an experiment at Buffer, so each team retreat is an opportunity for us to reflect and decide what to keep, what to discard, what to introduce, and what to iterate on. Here are some highlights
Isolation can be a persistent challenge for distributed teams. In our most recent State of Remote Work report , we found that loneliness was the second most common problem remote workers share. At Buffer, we’ve tried to counter this challenge in many different ways , like rotating weekly chats, online team events, and encouraging local meetups. Some initiatives have made a dent, but as we’ve grown the
When we first started out building Buffer, time off seemed pretty simple. We offered unlimited vacation time to use as teammates saw fit. And since we were distributed across the world, teammates could simply decide which holidays they cared about and take them off. Easy, right? Turns out humans are a bit more complex than that. Over time, we learned that unlimited vacation policies statistically see employees take less [http://nymag.
With any team, there’s usually the need to sync up. This usually takes the form of a meeting – or a video call, for those of us on remote team. On the mobile team at Buffer, this is what it looked like for us for a long time. We had a video meeting of about 45 minutes every week where we got face-time as a team, got on the same page about work, talked though blockers and challenges, made decisions, and updated one another. While the format of the meetings changed and adapted over time, we
Our annual in-person working retreats are a highlight of the year for many on our team. It’s the one time of year our fully remote team gets to be all together in one spot. Well, most of us. We usually have anywhere from 3-6 teammates who can’t make it to retreat due to pre-existing plans, family obligations, health issues, or other reasons. For those folks, the retreat can be a disheartening time full of FOMO (fear of missing out). Personally, I missed one of our largest team retreats — a