#23 Darren Murph - Unlocking the Super Powers of Remote, and its Positive Effects on Families

the number one superpower of a remote team is the ability to work well asynchronously so this is the concept of moving a project forward without needing two or more people online synchronously at the same time there's a lot that goes into this but if you are able to unlock async that's a great sign that you are en route to being a superpowered remote team. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Future of Work Project. My name is Derek Franco, and it is my great pleasure to welcome you to this program dedicated to bringing together smart and thoughtful leaders and innovators experimenting with new and unique ways of working.

From remote work and culture to research into the peak performance of human beings, We'll learn alongside these experts pushing the boundaries today. Today's guest is Darren Murph, the head of remote at GitLab. Now, Darren is a true pioneer in the world of remote work, helping shape remote teams across multiple organizations, and was actually named an Oracle of Remote by CNBC. Before this, Darren spent time in multiple editorial roles, and while serving as a senior editor at Engadget, was responsible for writing over 20,000 articles, earning himself a Guinness World Record as one of the most prolific professional bloggers.

When he shifted to working remote, he traveled to all 50 states and wrote his book, Living the Remote Dream, a guide to seeing the world, setting records, and advancing your career. In 2019, Darren and GitLab pioneered a monumental shift in remote work by creating the head of remote role at GitLab, where he is focused on helping define and improve remote cultures at GitLab and beyond. Darren is also responsible for creating GitLab's industry-leading guide to remote work. The GitLab Remote Playbook is a public library of implementable processes that are necessary for distributed teams to thrive.

During our discussion, Darren and I dive into his initial steps into remote work and how GitLab's handbook, which is publicly available, is built to help teams all over the world build incredible remote cultures. We also take a deeper look at the superpowers that Going Remote unlocks, the phases of remote adaptation, and some tips and guidelines for teams that want to implement a more hybrid model post-COVID. And finally, we dive in to why Darren loves remote work so much, including its positive effects on families and what he hopes it helps unlock in the future.

And with that said, it's my great pleasure to welcome Darren Murph. Well, Darren, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Derek.

Yeah, of course, of course. And, you know, before we really dive into the whole conversation, you know, I'd love to really go into a little bit more of your background and, you know, really learn more about some of the things that you've been doing recently. It's been a wild journey, one that I'm very grateful for. To my knowledge, I pioneered the head of remote role.

We are seeing that role pop up in more organizations as many of them look to be more intentional about their remote transformation. But a bit about my background, I fell in love with remote work when I figured out that I could travel and work at the same time. So I call it life's greatest cheat code. I was able to travel to all 50 states in the US and more than 50 countries in just under 10 years.

And I earned a Guinness World Record in publishing while doing all of that. And in large part, due to how much time I was able to save by not commuting for 10 years, I actually wrote a book in 2015 called Living the Remote Dream, speaking to that efficiency. I loved storytelling. I worked in supply chain for a while, but my true calling was in storytelling.

And while I spent eight years at Engadget, it's a consumer technology publication, I built one of the first company wikis, which if you look at the GitLab handbook now, you'll see that wikis have grown into something much larger, which is the GitLab handbook. And at the time, I did that for a very simple reason. It enabled me to scale myself. So whenever we had a new hire, a new editor come in, inevitably, they asked many of the same questions.

So I would document answers to those and then answer with a link. And when someone would ask a question that was not yet documented, instead of just answering them directly, I would answer it in the company wiki and thus we scaled knowledge and documentation. I didn't know what I was building at the time, but it turns out that was the early blueprint for company handbooks, which will be much more important as remote work grows coming out of COVID. No, for sure.

For sure. And, you know, I'd love if we could kind of dive a little bit more into the GitLab handbook, especially for those that aren't really familiar with it. And then, you know, really GitLab itself. You know, I know the company, especially in the tech world, it's just extremely famous for being one of the best run remote enterprises.

And, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, you guys actually have never actually had a company owned office, correct? Yeah, that's correct. So we have over 1,300 team members in more than 65 countries, and we have been office-less from the start. Now, there is a quick bit of trivia.

Coming out of Y Combinator in California, the team did get an office because it was essentially forced upon them. It lasted for about three days. People stopped showing up. Work continued to get done.

And it was just very obvious to that team that that money was better spent on talent and tools and hiring people all over the world But yes the GitLab handbook we at over 8 pages now and I do expect that to continue to grow Amazing Amazing And so correct me if I wrong you know the handbook really was kind of built up like you said as kind of a central repository to not only the information for the company but kind of how the company would run as well correct Yeah. So wrapping your head around the GitLab handbook can be very difficult if you've never seen anything like it.

all of our processes, our workflows, our strategy, our OKRs, our goals, policies, how we communicate both informally as well as formally within the work context, all of it is documented. And what's really special about the GitLab handbook is that it's publicly available on the web. So you don't have to ask a lot of questions. Much of it is documented.

And my hope, honestly, for this conversation is for every question I get, I can think, oh, there's a handbook page for that. And if you ask me a question that I can't answer with a handbook link, what I'm going to do after the fact is go and document it so that when people listen back to this, they will be able to find it in the GitLab handbook. But it's critical for a remote team. It's how we build transparency.

It's how we enable belonging. We give people maximum visibility to what everyone in the company is working in and at and on. And you'll find that in a remote team, you have to be very rigorous about documentation. We like to say that all remote forces us to do the things that every organization should be doing anyway, and rigorous documentation, starting with values, which defines our culture all the way through all of our workflows.

No, that makes perfect sense. That makes perfect sense. And so, you know, one of the things that I would really love to dive into is, you know, especially kind of what you mentioned before, this kind of superpower that it seems that remote teams are kind of able to unlock. Would you mind if we dive into a little bit more of those, especially since you've been working remote before, and like you said, you literally wrote a book on the subject.

Absolutely. Yeah. Let's talk remote superpowers. Perfect.

Perfect. And so, kind of a little background on my side. So, I had run a remote team before for about, I guess it's about a year and a half. Yeah, I guess about a year and a half, two years.

And that was kind of my first introduction to remote. And I think one of the things that I really realized very early with it was I could figure out when I was most productive. You know, it wasn't just a matter of, oh, you know, it's nine o'clock now I got to start working. And especially at the time, you know, I was I was pretty young at the time.

I was, you know, maybe 24, 25 when I had originally started working in a remote team. To me, I worked great at night. So the ability to kind of just have a couple of meetings in the morning, take it easy for the day. And then at, you know, one o'clock to, you know, 10 o'clock, just be able to dive in and code.

It was absolutely incredible. And I wonder, I guess, how do you lean into that real kind of superpower of allowing people to really work when they feel that they're most productive? Yeah. Love that context.

I resonate with that very much. So to back up a bit, I believe that there are phases of remote adaptation. And of course, there's a GitLab handbook guide on this. But skeuomorphism is phase one.

That is essentially copying the office environment and pasting it into a virtual environment while changing fundamentally nothing about how you do work. This is not leveraging virtual. This is forcing the co-located norms into a different environment that frankly it's not suited for. The number one superpower of a remote team is the ability to work well asynchronously.

So this is the concept of moving a project forward without needing two or more people online synchronously at the same time. There's a lot that goes into this, but if you are able to unlock async, that's a great sign that you are en route to being a superpowered remote team. The second part of it is enabling psychological safety so that people can live what you just described, and I coin nonlinear work days. This was a key chapter in the book that I wrote, and living the remote dream, enabling people to work when they are most productive.

There are a lot of prerequisites to make this happen. You have to have the right workflows in place, the right culture in place, and a psychological safety net that allows people to come and go from their work. And of course, this isn't amenable to every type of work, but for work that supports it and largely in the digital output field, it enables a level of flexibility that is very uncommon, very unique, and can create a high degree of loyalty and productivity and efficiency when you create the atmosphere for people to really embrace it.

And so I'm curious, what are, I guess, kind of the main pillars to help create that environment, especially when it comes around to a lot of teams right now where they were kind of forced into this remote environment because of COVID, what are things that people can do to really build, I guess, you know, office values that allow for this to really thrive? I would say, look at the GitLab values page as a starter guide. We have six core values, words you've heard before, collaboration, iteration, results, things like this.

But dive deeper in the GitLab values page and you'll find sub values that support and substantiate each one of those values. And they spell out what it means to embrace the values in your day-to-day work. Short toes is a great example for collaboration. We enable everyone at GitLab to contribute to anyone else's domain without fear of, quote unquote, stepping on someone's toes because we all have short toes.

This is a great example of showcasing what collaboration looks like specific to our organization. So step one, if you're a leader, is to write down things like that. Write down an exhaustive values page so that you don have to be online with someone synchronously to get a beat on how they working with other people You wanna shift that burden from people into documentation And the second piece here is to make sure that you have a centralized workplace for all of your work to funnel through.

At GitLab, we use GitLab, the product, for all of our collaboration, and it's a great tool for collaborating and gathering consensus asynchronously. Whatever that is for your organization, you have to have it. If you try to bunch together carrier pigeons and Zoom calls and emails and work well asynchronously, it's never going to work. You have to funnel work directly through a heartbeat, if you will, of the company.

And I'll caution you, many companies try to use Microsoft Teams or Slack as that repository. And GitLab uses common tools like Slack in uncommon ways. We expire our Slack messages after 90 days, for example, to force people to do work in GitLab instead of in Slack. If your work vanishes every 90 days, you're unlikely to continue working there.

So we call this a forcing function to get work where we want it. And it does another impact as well, which is it creates a very nice medium, a water cooler, if you will, for informal communication. We have public channels like hiking and parenting and fitness where people can just talk to each other like humans. And Slack is a very natural place for that to happen.

And it's more easily fostered when you're not also doing work around the proverbial water cooler. Correct. Correct. And just like you said, you have tools for the components that really need the work to be done.

And because they're all happening in that one location, it's not like if somebody misses a meeting, they don't know what's going on. The entire conversation flow is happening within that ticket or task. Absolutely. And you want to create a workflow where people don't, number one, they don't need meetings.

But number two, you don't really lose out on things if there is a meeting and you miss it. At GitLab, we attach Google Docs to every single meeting so that people can contribute questions and input asynchronously both ahead of the meeting, during the meeting, and after the meeting. And this is our default meeting hygiene that is very foreign to many other companies. But I bring that out because it's a boring solution.

We're not reinventing the wheel. We're using Google Docs in an uncommon way. We're very rigorous about attaching it to meetings and we put a high degree of friction in meetings so that people have less of them. I was asked early on in this pandemic by a chief people officer, how do I make my meetings better?

And I said, make them harder to have so that you have fewer of them. The goal here is not to have better meetings. It's to figure out better ways to work so that you require less of them. No, that makes perfect sense.

That makes perfect sense. And so, you know, actually a good segue from this, I think this idea of kind of a hybrid remote environment after the pandemic is over, when we go back to normal. A lot of companies have realized that their employees want remote, but for various reasons, they want to have some type of office environment. I guess, what are your thoughts on this idea?

If there is a hybrid style that people are going to, are there any real things that companies need to call out to make sure that they are able to not ruin the culture that they've built up remotely? This is such a fabulous example of humans being humans. So hybrid remote seems like the best of both worlds on paper, but if done without great intention, it truly is the worst of both worlds. And many organizations think that they want hybrid because they don't have any other baseline.

And there's a lot of other things coming into play, things like long-term leases on buildings, or assuming that culture will fall apart if people don't show up in a building because they've never put any intentional effort around culture. It's just something that has happened. A lot of this is happening in the background. And instead of just admitting it and evolving the company in a very drastic way, there's this notion of hanging on to the past, hanging on to legacy, so that it seems less risky.

But the warning here is it gives you a fallback. And one of the great tragedies coming out of COVID is if we as a society do not leap forward and relish the opportunity to truly evolve what work is and the relationship between work and life and the identity and the balance and the ratio of the interplay between them. This is a huge, huge opportunity to do it well. I understand why people think hybrid is a good idea if you don't have a great baseline of a really thriving all remote culture.

But now is the opportunity to really run headlong into what the future is. For companies that want to keep offices around, I don't have anything against real estate. It's really good to get together with people. People are relational, communal beings.

In-person is a huge part of the strategy. At GitLab, we put a lot of effort into getting people together in person very strategically. But the office can't be a place that changes how you work. It simply changes where you work.

And if you contort all of your workflows to fit remote first, it really won't matter if you go into the office. It won't change how you work, how you document, how you think about meeting hygiene. It just means that maybe you're ready to get out of the house and you prefer the coffee at the office. Yeah.

No, very well said. Very well said. And, you know, actually, I was actually listening to a talk you gave the other day with the Turing conference. And one of the things that you had mentioned when they brought up at Hybrid was, if you are doing this, you need to make sure that the leaders aren't the ones that are going back to the office first.

Yeah, absolutely. It's going to require absolute executive sponsorship to work well. If there's anyone in your executive team that's apathetic or waffling, you're setting yourself up for long-term failure. And if you do open an office back up don let your executives be the first ones back in In fact keep your executives out forever And here the reason Forcing functions and signals are really important If you open an office back up and you tell your company that you will allow remote, but they immediately see all of your executives flock back into the office, it sends a signal that although you're allowing remote, you aren't supporting remote.

And there is a huge difference between the two. And also, if the execs go back to the office, it's less likely that the remote fluency and the remote muscle you've built up during COVID will stick. It's more likely that you'll snap back to doing meetings and ad hoc documentation here and there without a lot of rigor. You'll snap back to your old ways.

Keeping the executives out of the offices forces you to completely rethink how you work. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And, you know, really, how do you guys view in-person time? You know, is this something where people are getting together to work or is there kind of a more of a deeper concept behind it?

Yeah. In-person time is a great point of leverage for rapport building and culture building. In-person time is precious. It's very expensive.

It commandeers people's schedules. Anytime you get people together in person, synchronously, there's a high cost associated with that. So we try to do as much work as possible asynchronously and really save that in-person time for culture building. We get the entire company together during non-COVID times once a year for a summit we call GetLab Contribute.

We call it an unconference. There's an opening keynote, a closing keynote, but everything in between is just folks hanging out with each other, choosing excursions to go on, getting to know each other. And we believe that those strategic in-person moments, they fill our social reservoirs and they buy us a lot of great just rapport building and catalyzes a lot of great work until we meet again. We also have user conferences and sales conferences around the world that we try to get as many people to as possible.

So if you're a transitioning org, make sure that you budget funds to support travel as a point of cultural leverage. It is very critical to get people together, but mostly just to hang out. Of course, throw some strategy in there if you will, but make sure you give people time to just be people. Very well said.

And yeah, I think that was one of the biggest things that we learned with really all of the remote organizations was you do get closer to your team than ever before, because you're right. The time you're spending together in person is really growing the team culture and getting everybody to know each other more and more. So yeah, I love the idea behind that. And I do want to take this opportunity to share why I love remote work so much.

I get this question. Why are you such an advocate and a champion for it? I kind of mentioned this early on. I fell in love with travel.

And of course that still is the case. I can't wait to resume flying more after COVID. But more personally, my wife and I adopted a newborn at birth just over two years ago. And it is an absolutely extraordinary way to grow your family.

It has made me an even bigger advocate for open adoption. And I'll be honest, the ability to grow my family in that way was largely enabled by the flexibility that remote work provides. And so when I think about tens of millions of people going remote across the world, what I see is this massive opportunity for society as a whole to repurpose the recaptured commute time into something that can move people forward. When I think about adoption and foster care, you have tens of millions of people that now have multiple hours back in their day.

And if even a small percentage of those people say, you know what, maybe I have time for this now. We solved the orphan crisis almost overnight. And I look at something like that and I think, what else could we do? This has massive, massive potential if we see past the middle that we're in right now to a brighter and different and more flexible future.

So that's really what drives me. And I see teams that are transitioning to remote and I see parents that are able to spend more time with their kids and family or just be there for neighbors or invest in their communities in a way that has been largely impossible when they're living their lives around the rigid confines of a commute. That's encouraging to me. So I'm long on remote.

I'm long on society. And if you're interested to engage more on that conversation, look me up on Twitter. I'd be happy to converse. No, I absolutely love that.

Well said, well said. I think that giving people that time back in their life, we're going to see some really amazing results come out of it. Well, Darren, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. If people wanted to learn more about GitLab yourself or even the GitLab handbook, I know that there's a lot of great information in there.

Where could they go? Yeah, you can start at allremote.info. That takes you straight into the all remote section of the GitLab handbook.

You'll find our recent out of the office report. you'll find our remote playbook and end-to-end guide on transitioning and thriving as a remote team and lots and lots and lots of documentation. So if anything has piqued your interest on this call, allremote.info will get you into that.

You can follow me on Twitter at Darren Murph. Thanks for the time, Derek. Thanks all for tuning in. Godspeed and be well.

Thanks everyone for listening to this episode of the Future of Work Project. Now, as with all of our work, this is part of our ongoing research on the future of work topic, and we'd love to get your thoughts on the discussion. To reach out, go to our website at fowproject.com or reach out on Instagram at thefowproject.

We'll be sure to share the feedback, and it could be featured on an upcoming episode. And with that said, thank you for listening. Thank you.