Managing Remote Teams

One of the biggest debates in tech these days surrounds the efficacy of remote work, especially with startup culture. I graduated college at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and started working full time in a completely remote setting for my first job where I stayed for a year-and-a-half before feeling the effects of burnout. My friends had similar experiences. At the time I was pretty much convinced that remote work simply wasn’t viable. 

So when I found Census it was a point of emphasis for me to tease out just why working remote for them would be different. To be clear, Census has an HQ in San Francisco and has, since joining, opened offices in Denver and New York. While we have these offices, employees are not required to come in and about half the company is remote including myself when I first joined. Now, eight months in, I can confidently say my experience working here has been a complete 180° from my previous role and I thought I’d write down some of the big reasons why I believe that is the case.

Making It Personal

It’s very difficult for any work culture to be effective if there are no personal connections between colleagues and that’s no different for a remote company. At my previous job it was rare for webcams to be on during video calls which reflects the experience of others I know at big tech companies. My entire connection with my coworkers consisted of a profile picture, their voice, and the text of their messages. 

Meanwhile at Census, everyone turns their camera on for meetings and huddles. There is no explicit rule that cameras must be on, but this is the cultural norm and the default state that any new hire will notice right away. I certainly understand why some individuals wouldn’t want to turn their cameras on and I found my first couple days to be difficult: the pressure of communicating succinctly and intelligently all while consciously having a camera on me was an unfamiliar burden, but now it’s hard for me to imagine an effective remote culture where this isn’t the norm. Seeing facial expressions and body language is non-negotiable for competent synchronous communication and goes a long way towards combating social isolation.

Seeing your coworkers is important but so is dedicating time to know them beyond work because you don’t have the normal casual conversations that happen during a day in the office. At Census, daily standups start with a Question of the Day which runs the gamut from “What fashion trend do you wish would come back?” to “The best advice you’ve ever received?” It’s difficult to pinpoint just why these little moments work so well at Census when I’ve been part of many “team bonding” exercises at other companies that felt forced and corporate. Maybe it’s the fact that everyone buys-in enthusiastically, or that many happen without a formal policy. It works remarkably well for us. The end result is a culture where you genuinely get to know the people you work with, even if most of your time is not spent in the same room together.

Reducing Transactionality

The biggest effect of creating those interpersonal bonds is reducing the transactional nature of communication in a remote setting. Something that stood out to me the first two weeks after joining Census was just how available and engaged everyone was. Slack channels are alive with people asking and answering questions and dropping snippets of interest, FYIs, and TILs of the codebase. Colleagues are happy to jump on a call to help debug issues and employees all along the chain of seniority participate in this process. At my previous job, it was common for multiple days to pass with only one or two messages in the team channels and even entire days without a message. Questions would go unanswered and there were times where getting blocked meant waiting 24 hours until the next day’s standup. This is the natural consequence of most collaboration happening in private channels and meetings where the transactional nature of communication feels high. It took me about two weeks at Census to realize if I’m stuck or have a question, I can just throw it out to the team and that was both the optimal and preferred method of knowledge transfer. Combine that with Slack’s incredible search features means that knowledge spreads far more rapidly and widely than it otherwise would.

Reducing transactionality is critical for an effective remote culture because it sits upstream of faster and broader knowledge transfer, higher developer velocity, and less energy drain. Sitting on video calls in a transactional environment all day is tiring! Reducing that friction and social pressure helps prevent burnout in a remote setting, something all too common these days in our industry. More recently we’ve had a lot of success experimenting with Slack’s huddle feature for impromptu calls to help debug or just hang out casually while working.

There is a tradeoff to building this dynamic in a remote engineering team and it comes down to emphasizing synchronous work. The more spread out an engineering team is across time zones, the more asynchronous communication is required, and the higher the latency in casual communication becomes. As a result, small blocking issues become large blocking issues by default, and the cost of any message becomes higher, leading to more transactionality. In general, we discourage working too far out of the American time zones for that reason.

Remote, but not Always

Lastly, one of the best parts about being remote at Census is all the times we aren’t remote! New hires are encouraged to spend a few days in SF while onboarding and we regularly hold team-specific and company-wide offsites at different locations. It can’t be overstated how much even a few days of in-person interaction and bonding can change the dynamics of a team that is otherwise remote. When you’re in-person you become familiar with all the attributes of a coworker that don’t get expressed over video calls— habits, mannerisms, fashion, etc— that would all collapse down to a 2D video with audio under normal conditions. Work is simply more enjoyable when you actually know the people you’re working with beyond the pixels and the occasional offsite goes a long way to allowing that in a remote setting.

Census also goes out of its way to have satellite offices and pay for coworking spaces where the employees are. Beyond SF we now have offices in Denver and New York which provide hubs for employees in various locations to come work out of and meet each other. This style of hybrid model achieves the best of both worlds and lets someone like me living in New York work together with colleagues in person while staying flexible. I’d even go as far as to say having these small satellite offices in various locations is a strictly better model than one big HQ or no offices at all!

Eight months in and I’m constantly amazed at how different the culture is here at Census compared to other places my friends and I have worked at. I was growing skeptical of remote work as a viable strategy for companies— especially startups— altogether but Census has proven to me that you can build the dynamic and engaged culture I was looking for while still offering the flexibility many people have come to expect. The incredible part of all of this is, apart from offsites and offices, most of these cultural norms don’t have to come from the top. It cannot come from just one new hire but it’s up to the collective to turn their cameras on, to answer (and ask!) questions publicly, and create the overall cultural norms required for a vital remote environment. I believe we’ve done a good job of that so far at Census!

P.S. Want to see what I mean? Come work with me!