Iterable has three offices in the US, but our people can be found all over the country. Many of our teams are distributed (whether people work from home or in different offices), and we make extra sure that remote teammates feel just as included as those who work from offices. This is all about how and when we communicate!
The most important of our engineering core values is one of the pillars for success of distributed teams. We discourage private Slack channels and direct message discussions of topics that may be interesting to other people. Anyone can join any team's channel and behold or take part in discussions that happen there. No one should be shy of posting a question to a channel with 50 people. Our remote employees are well known for being active in Slack, in PR reviews and in guilds.
A lot of discussions, even if they originate verbally in the office, are intentionally moved to Slack.
Our most successful distributed teams have at least a 5-minute video stand up every day, calling in right from their workplaces. There's no need to schedule a 1:1 call to discuss something quickly right now - just jump on a call!
Adding to the above, we love to pair program, pair investigate an issue or even pair PR reviews, and try to do that as frequently as possible and feasible.
We have all proper integrations in place to start a meeting with as little friction as possible! Every scheduled meeting gets a Zoom automatically, and pop-up video calls can be done by typing /zoom in Slack or just using Slack calls.
We want to make sure that our people know each other not only by their Slack username, so we every remote employee tries to visit the office for a week every few months and spend time with coworkers inside and outside their team.
With people all over the country, there inevitably are time zone differences. We put a lot of effort to accomodate everyone's schedule - between San Francisco and New York, for example, it means that we never schedule regular meetings outside of both timezones' working hours.
Not feeling like commuting today? Anyone who usually works in the office can work from home from time to time. In fact, we encourage everyone to work at home at least one day a week to remind them what it's like to work remote and reinforce good remote friendly practices.
Quite a few of out employees moved out of offices' locations to become remote, with great success. We understand that remote work is not for everyone - some people just strive much more when they have people around them - but our liberal work from home policy really helps try that out and understand whether that is an option.
Sometimes we hire for remote positions right away. In order for this to work, the candidate should have a track record of successful independent work in the past, and ideally they should be familiar with the majority of our stack.
Your teammates cannot see you in the office and don't even know if you are at work or not. You don't want them to forget about you - so be active! Engage in discussions, initiate new ones, help out others, hop on calls with people. Also, turning on your camera in Zoom meetings helps make sure people know how you look like.
With most of the communications chat-based, we can't read body language, and it means some comments may inevitably be perceived in the wrong light. Be positive and constructive in chats and don't get intimidated by critical feedback. And of course, try to get to know the people you chat with whenever you get out to the office.