Workplace of the future - Page 5
When we give remote work advice , we tend to give it from our own perspective, which is that of a fully, 100-percent remote team. However, this way of working isn’t the norm — or even the standard. In our inaugural State of Remote Work study, we learned that most of the companies who support remote work are not fully remote; 65 percent of them have a combination of office-based employees and remote employees
Sometimes things don’t go according to plan. Tools break, wires get crossed, the best-laid plans fall apart. And on those occasions, it helps to know exactly what happened—so it doesn’t happen again. Moments like these are when we at Buffer turn to a simple but remarkably effective process: The 5 Whys. It’s just as it sounds: A discussion of the unexpected event or challenge that follows one train of thought to its logical conclusion by asking “Why?” five times to get to the root of what
Remote work has been the norm at Buffer for many years now; we ditched our office in 2015 and have been hiring remote teammates since 2011. We now have over 85 teammates spread across 10 different time zones. Over the years, our team has experimented and learned tons about productivity, tools, collaborating, communicating, and disconnecting as they each relate to remote work. Here’s a full list of all of our resources on remote work. Comment below if you have a question and we haven’t written
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. Head to our homepage to view our most recent posts. We love conferences, and who doesn’t? They’re a great place to connect with like-minded individuals. Over the years as the Buffer team has grown, we’ve not only been attending more conferences, but we’ve started seeing more and more Buffer speakers as well. Speaking has so many benefits for the Buffer t
Got a few minutes? Get ready to get more done. Researchers have discovered some quick ways to get you more focused and motivated at what you do so that you can work smarter, not harder. Some of these motivation tips take only seconds to do. Others require that you get out of your chair for a few minutes. All of them are derived from the results of recent scientific studies. For some simple tips and exercises to increase your motivation, we’ll start right now. 1. Strike a high-power pose for
There’s a really great saying about how we need to experience some bad times in life to give meaning to the good times. I like Dolly Parton’s take best: “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.” I’m living a life packed with rainbows these days. My husband and I have just celebrated the biggest and most successful Pride in London festival, where I celebrated my community and my identity along with dozens of friends and thousands of allies. I work with a suppo
Prefer to listen? Here’s an audio version of this post. I still remember the setting: it was a little coffee shop in sunny Scottsdale, Arizona. We were three and a half months into planning the company retreat and a few days into the scouting trip. Nicole and I were knee deep in our notes from a morning meeting with a potential vendor and ideas for the retreat were flying. By that time, we’d narrowed down our initial list of 18 potential retreat cities across the world to just three: Scottsdal
Prefer to listen? Here’s the audio version of this post: Being a remote team and international company comes with a lot of things that are non-traditional, things like getting 80 people on remote all-hands meeting. We’ve talked about several aspects that are quite unique to the business side of an international company, too, like paying employees and when to give people holidays. In this post, we’re going to dive into another big part of working at and running Buffer, which is employee benefits
“We believe that it’s really important to come up with core values that you can commit to. And by commit, we mean that you’re willing to hire and fire based on them. If you’re willing to do that, then you’re well on your way to building a company culture that is in line with the brand you want to build.”– Tony Hsieh, November 15, 2010, The Huffington Post Buffer’s founder, Joel , set about identifying his values and the values of the 10 other employees in 201
I was once asked, “How often do you talk about your company values at Buffer?” I think the person I was speaking with was pretty surprised when I responded: “At least once a day!” At Buffer, our values are a blueprint for everything we do. We use them in hiring , in product decision making, in marketing, in overcoming company challenges and in many other situations. We work hard to make sure that our values aren’t just a plaque on the wall –for one, we
“I just sit in my office and read all day.” This is how Warren Buffett, one of the most successful people in the business world, describes his day. Sitting. Reading. He advises everyone to read more, and that’s certainly a goal we can all get behind. Our personal improvements at Buffer regularly come back to the books we read—how we aim to read more and make reading a habit. I imagine you’re in the same boat as well. Reading more is one of our most common ambitions. So how do we do it? An
Prefer to listen? Here’s the audio version of this post: One of the biggest questions that comes up when exploring how to work as a remote team is a question of operations: How do all those people, in all those places, stay organized and productive? Since Buffer is one of those fully remote teams, we get the chance to try out many different strategies and tools [https://buffer.com/resources/remote-wor
Remote work is an amazing way of life for so many people and companies around the world, but it also comes with its fair share of challenges. Even with the wonderful perks — the flexibility, getting to work where you’re the happiest, focused work time, potentially traveling around the world, and more — it’s hard to avoid moments of loneliness with this work and lifestyle. As this is something many of us on the Buffer team experience from time to time, we wanted to collect as much advice as we
Language is one of the most powerful tools we have as humans. It binds us. Instructs us. When used well, it creates a common understanding. And it’s essential for creating an environment where everyone feels welcome and included. Historically, language has left many out. Individuals and groups have been marginalized and discriminated against because of their culture, race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, socioeconomic status, appearance and more. We can do better. I
Prefer to listen? Here’s the audio version of this post! Disconnecting from devices is a challenge for most people. A study of Americans found they check their phones on average 80 times a day! For remote workers, it’s especially difficult if there’s no separation between work and home and your devices become your office. In fact, this is so much of a challenge that there is a law in France [https://www.npr.org
At Buffer we love working as a distributed team , but we also cherish the times we get to meet up in person . Since the early days at Buffer, retreats have been a core part of our culture and a part of why we’re able to keep working remotely as a company. In their current state, retreats at Buffer happen once a year. We set aside a budget [https://buffer.gho
At Buffer we regularly hold what we call ‘Snackchats’. These are short & informal presentations of something that we want to share with our team which help to build on our engineering culture and help each other to grow as engineers. Anyone on the team has the opportunity to give these talks ? Once a discussion has been proposed, a day/time can be picked ready for people to grab a drink (and snack!) to take some time out of their day to learn something new. These have been happening at Buffer
Prefer to listen? Here’s the audio version of this post! Working remotely and having the opportunity to work from home, coffee shops, coworking spaces, or wherever else I might feel the most productive, means that I can design my own mornings because they don’t necessarily need to be spent commuting. I’ve gone through many different morning routines over the years, and I don’t believe there is one perfect routine for everyone or even just for me. My morning routine is constantly changing and e
Last week we were lucky enough to be able to attend Google I/O in Mountain View, California. Between the two of us we managed to see a good handful of sessions – so we thought we’d both put together this short post about some of the things we discovered and where you can learn more about them. Android App Bundles App bundles are a new type of upload format for your applications that allows you to deliver a more optimized build to your users. Rather than uploading a generated APK to the Google P
At Buffer we invest heavily on Kubernetes. Since we use AWS as our cloud provider, getting services the right permission usually means having AWS keys/secrets in Kubernetes manifest files. In this SnackChat Steven walks through the steps of using kube2iam to eliminate the exposure of AWS keys/secrets. kube2iam: https://github.com/jtblin/kube2iam
Prefer to listen? Here’s the audio version of this post! All Hands, town hall, tea time — there are many names for the meeting where everyone comes together for company updates and announcements. For us, All Hands is not only an exciting time to see everyone’s smiling faces at once but also a big part of our value to default to transparency . Buffer’s All Hands meetings are a great place to openly communicate with the whole company at once. As a fully-remote c
Being a fully remote team means that we rely heavily on the tools that can help us connect and communicate with each other from anywhere in the world. One of the main tools our team uses for communication is Slack, a tool that allows us to send quick chat messages with each other either in public or private channels or direct messages. While we love and use Slack constantly, we also set firm bou
At Buffer, we value diversity and inclusion. We’ve made efforts to use diversity as a lens for refining our hiring process , writing a new code of conduct , and several other spots even going so far as to make diversity everyone’s job . Conferences, and especially tech conferences, are an area where there is often still a noticeable lack of diversit
We’re a fully remote team and have been since our start. We’ve also known the importance of meeting in person since the team started growing. For that reason, we never go too long without finding a way to get Buffer teammates together. There’s just something about meeting in person that you can’t replace with video chats. (Maybe with VR one day!) To make meeting in person possible, we set aside a budget every year to send the whole Buffer te