BY
JULIA HERBST
Before pandemic lockdowns hit the U.S., in March, just 2% of the country's wage and salaried employees worked from home full time. By May, more than two-thirds of white-collar workers in America were logging on from their residences. It's been an unexpected success for many. In a July study by Lenovo, nearly two-thirds of the more than 20,000 global respondents said they got more done working from home—despite COVID-19 distractions. Mindful of the ongoing pandemic (and the potential to save money on office space and salaries), some companies—Facebook, Twitter, and Square among them—are now offering employees the option of working from home permanently.
But while most organizations have backed into this setup, GitLab's all-remote, asynchronous work style is a highly intentional undertaking that Sid Sijbrandij, the company's San Francisco-based cofounder and CEO, is promoting well beyond its virtual halls. The pandemic ushered in "the first wave" of remote work, he says, "where people just take their existing processes and transplant them online." But he's focused on the beast-mode model, where you're not just moving processes that worked in a traditional office to a digital framework; you're rethinking the framework entirely. "The next wave," he says, "will be taking advantage of what remote can offer."
Not only has GitLab created a vibrant culture of watercooler Zoom meetings over the past decade; it has also developed a way to introduce new hires who have never met their coworkers in person. It has set down rules for email and Slack to ensure that far-flung employees, working on different schedules around the globe, are looped in to essential messages.
To make this possible, the company has designed a workplace that makes other companies' approach to transparency look positively opaque. At GitLab, meetings, memos, notes, and more are available to everyone within the company—and, for the most part, to everyone outside of it, too. Part of this embrace of transparency comes from the open-source ethos upon which GitLab was founded. (GitLab offers a free "community" version of its product, as well as a proprietary enterprise one.) But it's also crucial to keeping employees in lockstep, in terms of product development and corporate culture.
GitLab raised $268 million last September at a $2.75 billion valuation and is rumored to be preparing for a direct public offering. (Its biggest competitor is GitHub, which Microsoft acquired for $7.5 billion in 2018.) As the company's profile rises, its idiosyncratic workplace culture is gaining attention.
Since March, GitLab has been advising the likes of Twitter, T-Mobile, and Sanofi, according to Darren Murph, the company's head of remote, who helps manage GitLab's officeless setup while spreading the gospel of remote work externally. At the start of the crisis, Murph and others released a 38-page e-book geared toward leaders at companies struggling to oversee far-flung teams. It's been downloaded more than 30,000 times.
Financial services company DTCC is one of the businesses that has been informally discussing remote work and the future of its operations with Murph. "What was most interesting to us was how public they were about their culture," says Robert Palatnick, who is a managing director and global head of technology research and innovation at DTCC. "Once you start reading about their culture and their values, and most particularly around their focus on collaboration, you see how they made it work."
Murph embraces the opportunity to discuss how remote work might fit with different business models and industries. "COVID has accelerated the embrace and understanding of remote by at least 10 years," he says. "We've catapulted beyond the discussion of 'Is remote work good or bad or feasible?' The question now is, 'Is your company going to embrace it, or are you just going to ignore it?' "
A BRIEF HISTORY OF REMOTE WORK
IBM begins installing “remote terminals” in employees’ homes to test the feasibility of remote work. By 2009, 40% of IBM’s 386,000 global employees are telecommuters.
A USC research team conducts a cost-benefit analysis of commuting at a time of rising oil prices, coins the term "telecommuting," and predicts that this kind of work will gain acceptance with new technology.
With the growth of the fax machine, personal computer, and modem, management guru Peter Drucker declares that in the future, “office work, rather than office workers, will do the traveling.”
A new Department of Transportation Appropriations bill includes a mandate directing executive agencies to establish policies around telecommuting for eligible employees.
According to a survey of North American business executives, 42% of companies have some sort of telecommuting accommodation for employees—up from 33% the year prior.
Electronics retailer Best Buy introduces a flexible work program that allows corporate employees to work from wherever, whenever they like.
Slack emerges as Silicon Valley’s office-messaging platform of choice, and a generation of all-remote tech companies takes root: DuckDuckGo, Toptal, and GitLab among them.
Best Buy kills its flexible work program, as does Yahoo. “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” says Yahoo’s HR director.
With revenue slumping, IBM gives employees 30 days to either set up shop at a company office space or find a new job.
With white-collar workers stuck at home amid the COVID-19 crisis, GitLab publishes a management guide to remote work. It’s downloaded more than 30,000 times.
new Mac computer at the desk of her Maryland home office and clicked on a link that brought her to her first GitLab "issue."
In GitLab-speak, "issues" are the fundamental building blocks for how work gets done, both using GitLab (the product) and at GitLab (the company), which relies on its development platform. Reeder's first issue was a more-than-100-step-long to-do list of onboarding tasks, covering everything from the logistical (setting up two-factor authentication) to the social (reaching out to a random coworker and scheduling a "coffee chat").
Employees are expected to spend their first two weeks checking off each item on this list before beginning their actual work. This rite of passage is the company's way of acclimating new hires to both the company's way of working and its actual product.
Though Reeder has worked from home for most of the past 15 years—and is now part of Murph's team of remote-work evangelists—she says GitLab's onboarding process, which emphasizes written communication, is very different from what she's experienced at other companies. "There's a lot of work being done to form a strong culture," she says. "Learning to fit into that, at first it's kind of intimidating."
Few companies have embraced asynchronous work to the extent that GitLab has. For good reason: Working across multiple time zones and employee schedules presents a logistical nightmare. But Sijbrandij is focused on the benefits. "You don't constantly have to be interrupted, because you can time-shift and do work when you want," he says. The key, though, is that "instead of keeping everything in your head, you write it down."
That's where GitLab's extreme transparency comes in. For one thing, employees are encouraged to document virtually everything. Because of GitLab's asynchronous work style, meetings are optional. They are also recorded and often live-streamed publicly on the GitLab Unfiltered YouTube channel. Attendees take notes in a standardized format, and those who miss meetings are encouraged to read through them and add appropriate context later.
Notes and memos for all but the most closely guarded product-development plans are posted online for employees—and others—to view. Much of the activity employees are doing in GitLab's platform is visible to the public, allowing anyone to explore what the company is working on, from human resources initiatives to new product features. You can also search by individual employee to see how people are spending their days, right down to the comments and queries they leave for colleagues.
On Jessica Reeder’s first day at GitLab,
WE CALL OUR OWN BABY UGLY,” SAYS SIJBRANDIJ, ABOUT GITLAB’S PUBLIC CRITIQUE OF ITS FEATURES.
GITLAB’S GUIDE TO USING SLACK IN AN ALL-REMOTE OFFICE
Slack is asynchronous, so don’t expect an immediate response, and don’t feel obliged to respond to messages when you’re not working.
Never @here or @channel in a group channel—or @ a person in a public channel—unless the message requires immediate attention.
Avoid direct messages, which silo communications
and discourage collaboration.
DMs should be less than 50% of total messages.
Direct messaging a group of colleagues is also a no-no: These kinds of group DMs are hard to maintain and limit transparency, because others can’t be added to the chat. Create a channel instead.
If you’re having a hard time keeping up with Slack messages when you’re not at your desk, set your preferences to receive email notifications.
Use Slackbots to maintain company values. GitLab has one, for example, to remind workers to replace the greeting “hey guys” with a more inclusive “team” or “y’all.”
When Corrina Stasik worked at GitLab as a senior product manager, from May to September 2019, she was one of the few women on the product team. It wasn't the first time she'd been the lone woman in her 17 years in tech. "The politics of the way that relationships work, the way that teams work, the way that decisions are made, has been a tough navigation," she says. But being on a remote team with a high-growth startup mentality exacerbated the tendency for white men to be considered for positions by default: "As more senior leaders came in, they wanted to hire the people that they've worked with before and that were successful. It was a safety net for them, that they could anticipate what [that person] was thinking or feeling in a remote situation."
To build a truly inclusive workplace, Evelyn Carter, director of training and people development at the diversity and inclusion consulting group Paradigm, says that it's important for remote companies to ensure that managers trust all members of their team—not just those who they deem a "culture fit." Stasik says that new employees also need to feel empowered to share their perspectives. "There was a shift happening as I was leaving where, as [GitLab was] growing rapidly . . . we didn't have a lot of people used to working remote," she says. "The confidence, the skill set to navigate it, has to be taught."
The question of how to scale culture remotely is something that experts such as HBS's Choudhury are considering too, especially for large companies that have invested heavily in campus-based cultures. "You've built all these fancy, beautiful [campuses] like [Facebook's in] Menlo Park," says Choudhury, who is consulting with India's IT service firm TCS, which plans to take 75% of its more than 450,000 workers remote by 2025. "What does it mean for people not to come to a campus every day? How do you change the culture of communication? How do you create this shared code at the top?"
Although he's enthusiastic about companies adopting a structure similar to GitLab's, he says it only works if the CEO and top leadership are deeply devoted to transparency. Take, for example, that 7,100-page handbook—the touchstone for GitLab's culture. "Sid doesn't only say it, Sid actually goes and [writes] handbook entries," he says. "That is the difference."
Even then, "it's intimidating to read a handbook that large," Choudhury says. "[GitLab employs] 1,300 people, but when you've got 50,000 people, how large does the handbook become?"
For the past decade, GitLab has provided a model for small to midsize companies that want to go remote. As GitLab prepares to go public, Sijbrandij wants to continue to find ways to share information publicly without running afoul of the SEC. "A lot of companies remove a ton of information in the process of going public, and we'll also have to remove some," he says. But he knows that there will be so much he'll still want to share. Whatever that ends up being, you can be damn sure that the conversations will be public—and likely live-streamed.
Dave Munichiello, a general partner
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new Mac computer at the desk of her Maryland home office and clicked on a link that brought her to her first GitLab "issue."
In GitLab-speak, "issues" are the fundamental building blocks for how work gets done, both using GitLab (the product) and at GitLab (the company), which relies on its development platform. Reeder's first issue was a more-than-100-step-long to-do list of onboarding tasks, covering everything from the logistical (setting up two-factor authentication) to the social (reaching out to a random coworker and scheduling a "coffee chat").
Employees are expected to spend their first two weeks checking off each item on this list before beginning their actual work. This rite of passage is the company's way of acclimating new hires to both the company's way of working and its actual product.
Though Reeder has worked from home for most of the past 15 years—and is now part of Murph's team of remote-work evangelists—she says GitLab's onboarding process, which emphasizes written communication, is very different from what she's experienced at other companies. "There's a lot of work being done to form a strong culture," she says. "Learning to fit into that, at first it's kind of intimidating."
Few companies have embraced asynchronous work to the extent that GitLab has. For good reason: Working across multiple time zones and employee schedules presents a logistical nightmare. But Sijbrandij is focused on the benefits. "You don't constantly have to be interrupted, because you can time-shift and do work when you want," he says. The key, though, is that "instead of keeping everything in your head, you write it down."
That's where GitLab's extreme transparency comes in. For one thing, employees are encouraged to document virtually everything. Because of GitLab's asynchronous work style, meetings are optional. They are also recorded and often live-streamed publicly on the GitLab Unfiltered YouTube channel. Attendees take notes in a standardized format, and those who miss meetings are encouraged to read through them and add appropriate context later.
Notes and memos for all but the most closely guarded product-development plans are posted online for employees—and others—to view. Much of the activity employees are doing in GitLab's platform is visible to the public, allowing anyone to explore what the company is working on, from human resources initiatives to new product features. You can also search by individual employee to see how people are spending their days, right down to the comments and queries they leave for colleagues.
On Jessica Reeder’s first day at GitLab, in March, she unboxed her
These norms and procedures are recorded in the company's handbook, which covers nearly every facet of the company's business model and philosophy. Its section on communication includes 38 categories detailing best practices for using Google Docs, Zoom, Slack, and certain emojis, as well as instructions for the maximum number of times you should go back and forth via chat or email before scheduling a call. (Spoiler alert: It's three.) Compared to most company handbooks, which are relegated to dusty filing cabinets, GitLab's is regularly expanded upon, often multiple times a day. Not only is it updated frequently, but edits are publicly visible.
GitLab's founders didn't initially intend to build an all-remote company. In 2011, cofounder Dmitriy Zaporozhets was based in Ukraine, Sijbrandij was in the Netherlands, and Marin Jankovski, GitLab's first engineering hire, was in Serbia. The plan was to have at least some of GitLab's employees work out of Sijbrandij's house as the company grew. But though their early hires showed up for orientation, they quickly dispersed to work from more convenient locations. And that was that. "They never asked; we never talked about it," says Sijbrandij. "But one day, they just weren't there."
After GitLab participated in the incubator Y Combinator, in Mountain View, California, in winter 2015 and received $1.5 million in seed funding, Sijbrandij signed a two-year lease on a loft in San Francisco. But employees stopped showing up there, too. "All their colleagues, all their information, it was all on Zoom and on Slack, and so it just wasn't necessary. They weren't getting extra information or career opportunities [from being in an office]," he says. He and his wife ended up living in the loft for the duration of the lease. "Now our corporate address is a mailbox at the UPS Store in San Francisco."
These days, Sijbrandij, who speaks English with a Dutch accent he's taking weekly lessons to eliminate, is such a believer in his company's transparent model that the employee handbook includes a nine-page section on him alone. Employees can get the rundown on his favorite restaurants, tips on how to communicate with him, and even Sijbrandij's list of his eight biggest flaws as a manager. ("I look serious all the time, it is OK to say 'maybe you can smile more.' ")
Remote work had been gaining mainstream attention for years before the pandemic, as startups competed for Bay Area talent. "They were having a hard time hiring and retaining people," Sijbrandij says, which led to highly competitive salaries. He contrasts that with GitLab's model, which pays salaries based on local rates, meaning that an engineer living in London makes more than a similarly experienced engineer working in, say, Omaha, Nebraska. (GitLab uses a publicly available compensation calculator to weigh factors including job title, region, and seniority.) "Not everyone needed a San Francisco salary," he says, "and nobody needed a San Francisco office."
Sijbrandij makes clear that an all-remote workplace doesn't work for every organization. Companies that produce a digital product, such as GitLab, are ideal candidates; manufacturing, where it makes sense to be close to a physical product, is likely not. "If you're in a highly creative environment, it's tougher," he admits. Even GitLab values in-person connections: It hosts an annual conference for employees to come together, and it subsidizes travel expenses for coworkers to visit each other and attend significant life events, such as weddings.
Prithwiraj Choudhury, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who plans to use GitLab as a case study next spring in his elective for second-year MBAs, is bullish about the secondary advantages an all-remote team can offer. "The CFO sees, 'We don't need this expensive real estate.' " Or the chief human resources officer says, "Now I can hire from places I could not hire from before," he says. "There are so many good things about this [remote work] phenomena in the second- [and] third-order effects: urban decongestion, the climate outcomes, talent moving back to middle America."
Sijbrandij's biggest concern is that companies will be hasty in returning to a central office, even partially. "The solution is not to open the office back up, because hybrid companies are very, very hard to run, and the remote people will feel left out," he says. "Productivity will drop, and they'll conclude, 'Oh, [we] have to be co-located again,' which is the wrong conclusion."
To him, it's all or nothing.
as Thursday afternoon sun streams through a window in her Ghent, Belgium, home.
From his home in Minnesota, Timm Ideker, a regional sales director, drops a link into the chat for a kayak that breaks into pieces for easy transportation. "I have some concerns that this just means it's going to leak in seven places," says Simon Mansfield, a member of GitLab's sales team, in Cardiff, Wales.
For most employees, this sort of conversation would be a brief sidebar from work, but discussing kayaks—and weekend plans and favorite board games—is the entire point of this call. Employees from any GitLab team (or time zone) log on to these recurring 30-minute Company Calls to replicate the casual conversations that happen naturally when coworkers share the same office.
The company, which makes an application that enables developers to collaborate while writing and launching software, has no physical headquarters. Instead, it consists of more than 1,300 employees spread across 67 countries and nearly every time zone, all of them working either from home or (in nonpandemic times) in coworking spaces. Research shows that talking about non-work-related things with colleagues facilitates trust, helps break down silos among departments, and makes employees more productive. At GitLab, all of this needs to happen remotely.
The company takes these relaxed interactions so seriously that it has a specified protocol in its employee handbook, which is publicly available online in its entirety. If printed, it would span more than 7,100 pages.
The section on "Informal Communication in an All-Remote Environment" meticulously details more than three dozen ways coworkers can virtually connect beyond the basic Zoom call, from Donut Bot chats (where members of the #donut_be_strangers Slack channel are randomly paired) to Juice Box talks (for family members of employees to get to know one another). There are also international pizza parties, virtual scavenger hunts, and a shared "Team DJ Zoom Room."
was considering investing in GitLab back in January 2017, when a friend suddenly reached out to alert him that something odd was happening.
One of the company's products, GitLab.com, had gone down due to an employee error, forcing GitLab's team to scramble to restore a backup. Even worse—from the friend's perspective, at least—employees were troubleshooting the outage publicly in a Google document, tweeting frequent updates, and even live-streaming the recovery effort on YouTube. (The video became the second most popular broadcast on YouTube for a few hours, outranking a White House briefing that was happening at the same time.)
His friend was concerned about the risk posed by an employee drawing attention to the company's troubleshooting progress. Munichiello discussed it with his partners at GV, who were "a little skeptical," he recalls. But when he spoke to Sijbrandij, the CEO explained that this wasn't an example of an employee going rogue. "Sid's response was, 'Yeah, that's how we run the company. We are radically transparent,' " says Munichiello. Sharing information made the company stronger, in his eyes. Nine months later, GV led GitLab's $20 million Series C.
Munichiello says that GitLab's commitment to its workplace model makes the company stand out. "So many of GitLab's patterns don't match the typical venture capitalist pattern for what will be a large enterprise company," says Munichiello. "There's radical transparency. There's this remote-only component. It's just a very different approach."
This includes publicly posting a "maturity" page on GitLab's website, where the company details just how far along—or lacking—any new feature is. It's "where we call our own baby ugly," Sibrandij says. But he's not worried about competition. "You don't help your competitors that much by being clear about what you're doing. They're smart people—they'll figure it out," he says. Instead, his top priority is ensuring that everyone on his team is aligned about priorities.
The company's transparency also makes it easy to spot one of its biggest challenges. While GitLab emphasizes the importance of flexible remote work in building a diverse workforce, the company—like many other tech startups—has struggled to hire women and BIPOC, especially in leadership positions. According to numbers the company published at the end of June, women make up just over 30% of total employees and 26% of leadership. Out of the 740 U.S. team members, 2.8% identified as Black, 5.5% as Hispanic/Latino, and 3.9% as two or more races. Currently, there are zero Latinx or Black individuals in director-and-above leadership positions at GitLab. (In a blog post, Sijbrandij committed to "fixing this" by 2021, though—in a rare moment of opacity—he declined to provide specific goal metrics.)
GitLab is tweaking its hiring process with an eye to improving its diversity numbers. It's focusing on external, targeted recruiting rather than open job postings. The company also offers additional referral bonuses for underrepresented groups. But hiring is only part of the problem. It's also about making sure people feel welcome once they join.
Slack is asynchronous, so don’t expect an immediate response, and don’t feel obliged to respond to messages when you’re not working.
These norms and procedures are recorded in the company's handbook, which covers nearly every facet of the company's business model and philosophy. Its section on communication includes 38 categories detailing best practices for using Google Docs, Zoom, Slack, and certain emojis, as well as instructions for the maximum number of times you should go back and forth via chat or email before scheduling a call. (Spoiler alert: It's three.) Compared to most company handbooks, which are relegated to dusty filing cabinets, GitLab's is regularly expanded upon, often multiple times a day. Not only is it updated frequently, but edits are publicly visible.
GitLab's founders didn't initially intend to build an all-remote company. In 2011, cofounder Dmitriy Zaporozhets was based in Ukraine, Sijbrandij was in the Netherlands, and Marin Jankovski, GitLab's first engineering hire, was in Serbia. The plan was to have at least some of GitLab's employees work out of Sijbrandij's house as the company grew. But though their early hires showed up for orientation, they quickly dispersed to work from more convenient locations. And that was that. "They never asked; we never talked about it," says Sijbrandij. "But one day, they just weren't there."
After GitLab participated in the incubator Y Combinator, in Mountain View, California, in winter 2015 and received $1.5 million in seed funding, Sijbrandij signed a two-year lease on a loft in San Francisco. But employees stopped showing up there, too. "All their colleagues, all their information, it was all on Zoom and on Slack, and so it just wasn't necessary. They weren't getting extra information or career opportunities [from being in an office]," he says. He and his wife ended up living in the loft for the duration of the lease. "Now our corporate address is a mailbox at the UPS Store in San Francisco."
These days, Sijbrandij, who speaks English with a Dutch accent he's taking weekly lessons to eliminate, is such a believer in his company's transparent model that the employee handbook includes a nine-page section on him alone. Employees can get the rundown on his favorite restaurants, tips on how to communicate with him, and even Sijbrandij's list of his eight biggest flaws as a manager. ("I look serious all the time, it is OK to say 'maybe you can smile more.' ")
Remote work had been gaining mainstream attention for years before the pandemic, as startups competed for Bay Area talent. "They were having a hard time hiring and retaining people," Sijbrandij says, which led to highly competitive salaries. He contrasts that with GitLab's model, which pays salaries based on local rates, meaning that an engineer living in London makes more than a similarly experienced engineer working in, say, Omaha, Nebraska. (GitLab uses a publicly available compensation calculator to weigh factors including job title, region, and seniority.) "Not everyone needed a San Francisco salary," he says, "and nobody needed a San Francisco office."
Sijbrandij makes clear that an all-remote workplace doesn't work for every organization. Companies that produce a digital product, such as GitLab, are ideal candidates; manufacturing, where it makes sense to be close to a physical product, is likely not. "If you're in a highly creative environment, it's tougher," he admits. Even GitLab values in-person connections: It hosts an annual conference for employees to come together, and it subsidizes travel expenses for coworkers to visit each other and attend significant life events, such as weddings.
Prithwiraj Choudhury, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who plans to use GitLab as a case study next spring in his elective for second-year MBAs, is bullish about the secondary advantages an all-remote team can offer. "The CFO sees, 'We don't need this expensive real estate.' " Or the chief human resources officer says, "Now I can hire from places I could not hire from before," he says. "There are so many good things about this [remote work] phenomena in the second- [and] third-order effects: urban decongestion, the climate outcomes, talent moving back to middle America."
Sijbrandij's biggest concern is that companies will be hasty in returning to a central office, even partially. "The solution is not to open the office back up, because hybrid companies are very, very hard to run, and the remote people will feel left out," he says. "Productivity will drop, and they'll conclude, 'Oh, [we] have to be colocated again,' which is the wrong conclusion."
To him, it's all or nothing.
ILLUSTRATION BY LOUIS OTIS
A group of employees at the tech company GitLab is debating the merits of an inflatable kayak over Zoom.
"It's definitely [for] calm waters,"
"It's definitely [for] calm waters," says engineer Lien Van Den Steen,
BY JULIA HERBST
says engineer Lien Van Den Steen,
at the venture capital firm GV, was
says engineer Lien Van Den Steen,
at the venture capital firm GV,
Illustration
By
Louis
Otis