Hi @ChrisJankulovski Chris, to add to Magnusโs points above, and beyond the administration struggles of a distributed team, a healthy company culture is a vital ingredient to a successful remote team. And with a distributed, multi-cultural team you have the huge benefit of baking all those personalities into one rich, colorful, unique brand.
Itโs important, not only for internal use, but for your customers to tell the unique stories of all your team members. It helps them build confidence in the business and ensures a personal connection with the brand.
Getting to know your colleagues online can be challenging, when you are often in different time zones and far removed in your work responsibilities. We use knowyourcompany.com, originally a product of Jason Fried and 37Signals, to stay up to date on all our various work activities, as well as getting to know each other more personally - with fun questions asked weekly.
We also try meetup in the physical sense as regularly as possible. Challenging when youโre a team of nearly 50 across 16 countries - and costly. We ensure one annual team meetup somewhere different. Weโve visited Austria, UK, Netherlands, Cape Town and San Francisco. This time together is hugely valuable, yet difficult to tangibly measure. Our time together is largely spent sightseeing, socialising over meals and doing team building exercises. We also house workshops and more lately hackathons.
We also have smaller meetups, e.g. the European team, the WooCommerce team, the US support team. I think itโs safe to say everyone feels quite energised and more unified after such trips.
Iโd strongly recommend the Buffer blog for great posts on distributed teams, open salaries, transparency, and the importance of autonomy in the workplace.
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At least for Woo, and hopefully more companies. Once we can past the few barriers to true nomadism, like phones, banking, insurance, etc. - there will definitely be a huge transition.
