What Remote Working Means & The Tools We Use - Buffer's Founder Chat Friday

Key Takeaways

every one we thought it were interesting to talk a little bit about remote working how we do things a buffer maybe we can start off with how do we even come to the decision that we won't offer to be remote team that's a good one yeah so I think there was a time when so we're now twenty people those time when we were five or six people and we were all distributed but we had this opportunity where everyone wanted to be in San Francisco so he said you know when now we can choose do we want to be distributed and keep embracing that or do we want to take that opportunity to adjust things and have everyone in one place in San Francisco and and by one of the key things I did was I I got coffee with David cancel who's they he was the founder of performer ball which was acquired by hope spot and he's now the chief product officer Hopps but and asked his advice on this and he said he's had three successful companies in the past and he said to me he's tried both ways with his latest company had ever won in the office but he's done a remote before as well and the key thing he said to me was make sure you choose one of the two and don't try and do far away in the middle and don't try and have you know 70 80 85 percent of people in the office and then have like a couple of people dotted around remotely and I think the key reason for that is there's some great advice from Basecamp 37signals they said if you're gonna make remote working work then you need there to be no advantage to being in the office and no disadvantaged are not being in the office and I think that's the way we've always tried to approach it so don't want to create those second second-class citizens for people who are not in office it exactly nice perks ORS yeah I think the key thing is that the when you decide to be a distributed team and you work remotely you work in a very different way even if you have an office and you have a few people in there if you're embracing the distributed team like remote working idea and you work very differently so maybe you can share some of the tools we use for how we do that and how that's so different yeah definitely people ask us very often how does it even work and you know how can you mean and some of the key tools that have become really really important for us is think the first one that comes to mind is HipChat is kind of like everything runs on HipChat for us like we have lots of different rooms we have like the engineering room we have the content crafters rooming up the happiness room and so the whole team kind of like collaborates in there then obviously you know getting FaceTime or something close to facetiming is also super important we use a great tool called squiggle so squiggle lets you a little bit easier than the Google hangout or a Skype call you don't need to accept calls but everyone you can see everyone's face you see everyone like has like a screenshot and you just click on people and you're immediately in the call which it gives you this you know I can just tap you on the shoulder you're already talking right yeah so so squiggling HipChat really helped us on the communication side I think on the project management side be using Trello a lot yeah which is really powerful especially the notifications yeah Museum a lot email in a syllabic part especially with transparent email so we see we see see all this every time via email so everyone always knows what's going on what else do we use hackpad yeah that's a great great tool for collaborating like kind of like a little bit more lightweight than Google Docs but you can see who's who's writing where it's kind of like like a good iteration of Google Wave like if you know that that kind of real-time we can both be in the same time writing stuff it's very cool yeah so yeah I think those are some of the key key tools that we use and that's how approach to remote working yeah awesome love to hear everyone else's thoughts