When Dmitriy Zaporozhets and I decided, in 2013, to launch an enterprise business around GitLab—the open-source collaborative software-development application that he’d designed and I’d been working on—it wasn’t with the intention of turning it into one of the world’s largest all-remote organizations. It was just that we lived 2,000 kilometers apart—he in Ukraine and I in the Netherlands—and our first hire was in Serbia.
Today our more than 2,000 team members are spread across some 60 countries and regions around the world. We neither own nor rent any corporate office space, and we believe that our early adoption of an all-remote approach has made us a better, more scalable company. I’ll admit that I was a little worried when those first few Dutch team members stopped coming into the home office I’d fashioned for us. Were the chairs not comfortable enough? The snacks not tasty? Had I forgotten to shower? My colleagues assured me that it was them, not me: They were simply more productive on their own time, in their own spaces, without commutes.
Every corporate culture rests on norms and values. Norms are the policies and practices that guide how work gets done, how colleagues communicate, and so on. Values are what the organization cares about. At GitLab the top two values are results and iteration. If what they need to know isn’t there, the next step is to work with colleagues via Slack or Zoom to understand or decide on the right information or course of action and then add those insights to the handbook. It takes a bit of time and energy in the short term but creates great long-term benefits.