GitLab executives provide advice for returning to offices
GitLab was remote before remote was cool.
The 10yearold maker of software development tools has never had a physical office, although it gets mail in San Francisco, its official headquarters, and will arrange coworking spaces for employees who want them. Its 1,200 employees are spread across more than 65 countries.
“Everyone always told us this was a really difficult model and it turns out it wasn’t; every company can do this,” said Sid Sijbrandij, GitLab CEO and cofounder.
When the rest of the world was thrust into remote work a year ago, lots of enterprises turned to GitLab for advice.
“People start frantically Googling for remote help, and inevitably, we show up, so they get to us,” said Darren Murph, who became GitLab’s head of remote in 2019, possibly the first person with that title, according to the company.
GitLab has written a massive open source document on how to juggle a farflung workforce, with tips on compensation (a GitLab worker in North Carolina makes about 75% of what the same job would pay in San Francisco, for instance), “radical transparency” (the document itself exemplifies that) and combating burnout.
“I’ve been so inundated with ‘what is head of remote?’ that I wrote a handbook page,” Murph said. “Every week I get outreach from medical centers, government institutions, places you’d think would be the last in the world to go for this.”
GitLab has evolved lots of techniques to keep its disparate workforce engaged with one another, such as creating alwayson videoconferencing rooms and setting up chat channels to discuss nonwork topics like sports and families.
It encourages connections among employees’ kids via Zoom, called Juice Box Chats, which might be unstructured or focused on topics like Lego, superheroes or camping. It’s the allremote version of “bring your kid to work” day.
During the pandemic it closed its virtual doors for one workday each month so staffers could take time off to recharge.
But GitLab has a warning for other companies.
“If you go partway back to the office and get hybrid structures, that will be hard,” Sijbrandij said. “Hybrid is the worst of both worlds. What you quickly get is an ‘A team’ at the office and a ‘B team’ for everyone else. (The remote workers) don’t hear everything, have a harder time interrupting in meetings.” Murph echoed that point. “The global conversation of returning to work is so fixated on physical space that it misses the point: Very little is about where you work, it’s all about how you work,” he said. “If people go back to offices and all workflows snap back to the way things were, it leaves those people who are not in the office in a bind. On days they don’t go to the office they will be like a fish out of water.”
In other words, GitLab is telling companies that they need to revamp their workflows and ensure that they are not officecentric.
Overall, though, the pioneers are impressed.
“It turns out everybody was ready” for remote work, Sijbrandij said. “It’s remarkable how well companies made that transition.”