Zapier
Wade Foster, Zapier CEO and cofounder
- Zapier, a fast-growing automation startup with some 300 employees, has been all-remote from the very beginning, with a workforce scattered all around the world.
- Business Insider spoke with Zapier CEO Wade Foster about how he manages the company, and how he stays productive and focused when working from home.
- The lessons come as companies in every industry send their employees to work from home to limit the spread of coronavirus, creating a culture shock for workers and managers alike.
- Foster says companies need 3 essential tools - chat, video, and shared documents - to get started. But learning how to stay productive and creating a company culture that can blossom remotely takes more time to develop.
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Fast-growing Silicon Valley startup Zapier is known for being a popular tool that connects applications together and letting users build automation.
But it is also notable for another reason - it's always been an all remote company, with no main office. Its 300 or so employees live all across the United States and often outside of it. The company's cofounders, including CEO Wade Foster, live in the San Francisco Bay Area, but most of their employees do not. A few years back, in fact, Zapier even offered a $10,000 bounty to any new hire who was willing to leave the San Francisco Bay Area.
That gives Foster, and Zapier, some experience in a problem now faced by all the companies that have opted to send employees to work from home to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus. For workers and managers alike, it can be a real culture shock to go from an office environment to a distributed workforce.
Foster tells Business Insider that the foundation of meeting this challenge comes down to three tools that every remote workforce needs: A chat tool, a videoconferencing app, and a collaborative document editor. Zapier itself uses Slack, Zoom, and a mix of Google Docs, Coda, Quip, and a home-built tool for those purposes, respectively.
That's the technical stuff you need just to get started, he says, but it's not all there is to thriving as a remote company.
"From there, a lot of it is how you approach the work from a cultural standpoint," Foster told Business Insider - which, for Zapier, meant hiring people who were motivated self-starters, ensuring that all communication in the company was transparent, and creating a culture of learning among its employees.
Keeping a structured work week
A major key to remote work is having a somewhat structured work week, Foster said. Many newcomers to working from home bemoan a loss of productivity and focus. Foster said some structure and a regular schedule helps with that, including taking time for breaks.
Foster tries to keep his own calendar fairly regimented: On Mondays, he schedules one-on-one meetings with employees to set priorities for the week. On Tuesdays, he meets with one department, like the sales or marketing teams. Wednesday to Friday he leaves open for whatever may come up: interviewing candidates, the weekly all-hands meetings on Thursday, and anything else.
Structure can also help when it comes to managing remote employees. While it can seem daunting to not know what employees are up to or how they're working, Foster said rather than micromanaging, Zapier just sets a clear structure for keeping everyone up to date on what you're working on.
"[It] just creates a bit of organizational awareness and team awareness around what's critical for individuals and it's a bit of a gut check on alignment to make sure we're all sort of working in orchestration with each other rather than against each other," Foster said.
Every Friday, employees check in with their teams on what their top priority was that week, how they tackled it, and what's top priority for next week. People also share fun anecdotes about their personal lives, their weekend plans, and et cetera.
Company culture when you're all-remote
That last bit is important for creating a company culture, which can be a bit tricky when all your employees don't interact face to face every day. Foster said for the new wave of companies that might be experiencing remote work for the first time, this will be the hardest thing to replicate in such a short time period.
"This is something that we had years to really get good at it," Foster said. There's a few things that make it possible, the first is making sure employees have a place to talk about non work topics, in the same way they might in an office setting. Zapier uses Slack channels assigned by topics like gardening or cooking.
Another thing Zapier does is pair up employees randomly to get to know each other. The matched-up employees then schedule a 30-minute chat to just catch up with each other. Foster said the purpose of it is not work related - oftentimes employees are just learning about what each other's roles are or what their hobbies are.
"These interactions are really important in a distributed company because one thing that you have to recognize is that you aren't around people all day, so it's easy for loneliness to set in. And so these are some things that we do to combat that," Foster said.
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