UPDATED 11:03 EDT / MAY 01 2020

NEWS

All-remote GitLab offers advice and resources for life away from offices

Almost overnight, the world has gone from office first to remote first. Will it go back?

If predictions by some people are right, one of the outcomes from the global pandemic will be that companies currently structured around owning and maintaining an office infrastructure are going to be taking a hard look at whether that makes sense in the future.

“Remote first is going to be the default going forward,” said Darren Murph (pictured), head of remote at GitLab Inc. “We’re just one or two quarters away from major CEOs sitting in the hot seat on CNBC when it’s their turn for quarterly earnings, and they’re going to have to justify why they are spending what they spend on real estate. Why are you tying so much of your business results to geography?”

Murph spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the importance of communication in remote work arrangements, how GitLab relies on documentation to drive the company and positive outcomes as the lines between work and home disappear.

Pressure on communications

While the hot seat may get hotter for top executives with extensive corporate real estate investment, nearly every company will also be forced to examine cultural changes where a majority of employees no longer commute to work every day. One company that doesn’t have to worry about that is GitLab. That’s because the nine-year-old DevOps platform bills itself as the world’s largest all-remote company, with over 1,200 team members located in more than 65 countries.

The firm’s all-remote orientation means that the normal process where people are spontaneously thrown together to cultivate business relationships no longer applies. This puts more pressure on communications and a well-documented process that all must follow.

“You put them in the same building and people just kind of figure it out,” Murph said. “In a remote setting, that’s unwise. You’re going to get a lot of chaos and dysfunction when people don’t know how to communicate and on what channel. At GitLab, we’re very proscriptive that work communication happens in a GitLab issue or merge request and then informal communication happens through Zoom calls or Slack.”

Working ‘handbook-first’

This process is carefully documented in a handbook that serves as the singular resource for all things GitLab. New hires are onboarded using 200 check boxes of items to read and knowledge assessments to take. And, true to the open-source ethos, GitLab spells out its remote work process in a playbook that is fully available for download.

“We try to work ‘handbook-first,’” Murph explained. “Instead of having to ask someone on our team, we go ask the handbook. That allows our humans to do truly creative things, not just answering a question for the thousandth time.”

While company workflows and processes are carefully documented at GitLab, that doesn’t take away every manager’s responsibility for communication. In fact, managing remote teams demands less of a top-down approach and instead it focuses on opening new ways for getting valuable feedback, according to Murph.

“It may feel a little counterintuitive, but the farther a team is from you, the more distributed they are, the more you really need to let go and allow them to have a mechanism for feeding back to you,” Murph said. “A manager’s job in a remote setting switches from being a pure director to being an ‘unblocker’ and a really active listener.”

The global spread of coronavirus has created a crisis-induced work-from-home situation where employees now communicate from bedrooms or living rooms while managing pets or children or both. The lines between office and home are now blurred, a development that Murph believes may yield positive benefits going forward.

“We have technology at our fingertips; we can be humans with each other,” Murph said. “That’s going to encourage more empathy, and, as we’ve seen at GitLab, more empathy leads to better business results.”

Here’s the complete video interview, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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