Stampede has been fully remote since day one, thanks to our early beginnings with clients primarily from Europe, United States and Australia. We take great care of our people and promote a healthy remote culture, enabling people to do great work together despite the distance.

Going against the grain

While working remotely is the norm in many jobs today, the same cannot be said when we began in 2006. Despite internet penetration already being high in most countries, the shift towards remote work was slow.

One of the more vocal proponents for remote work, Jason Fried of 37 Signals even argued that working from an office was counterproductive on his TED Talk: Why work doesn’t happen at work | Jason Fried

Iwan, a longtime member of the Stampede team since 2010, recently reminisced about the early days of remote work. Back then, programming was done without Git and calls and meetings were handled through Skype. An internet speed of 8Mbps was considered sufficient at the time as most work was done offline, with occasional online uploads and calls. According to Iwan, working from home did not feel deficient compared to working in the office, but it did require a higher level of self-discipline due to the absence of physical supervision.

As technology improved, new tools such as Git, Figma, and Slack emerged, which Stampede adopted after allowing them to mature first. Iwan also recalled that remote work was less common back then, and some people had a hard time grasping the concept of working from home. All that changed overnight though, as know it, with COVID-19.

Our remote culture

Being remote has allowed us to tap into the pool of talent and capabilities unlimited by location. It is astounding how many talents and wonderful people have joined our rank thanks to this conscious decision to treat location as a strategic tool (we still do plenty of on-site at client locations) but not a necessity.

But having a fully remote team is just the beginning. In the next edition, we will look into what makes Stampede’s remote culture, the true workhorse of our success.

The post Stampede Remote Work Origins appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

As in the words of Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos:

Our number one priority is company culture. Our whole belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff like delivering great customer service or building a long-term enduring brand will just happen naturally on its own.

With teams in a physical workplace, most companies tend to disregard the exercise of building culture with the assumption that it will naturally happen. That should not happen with remote teams, when everyone is distributed across places and timezones. It is hard to gauge everyone’s level of happiness and satisfactory when you could not see them face-to-face, therefore, setting things right as much as possible on the first try is crucial.

Here are six things we have learned on the journey of building the culture for a remote team.

• Hire the right people
• Use onboarding for new hire success, and quick assessment
• Invest in technology and tools for work and fun
• Organise in person meetups
• Provide perks & professional development
• Be transparent and cultivate trust

Hire the right people

A client once told us, that every one in our team has this Stampede DNA that makes us gel well together as colleagues and friends. What is this unspoken Stampede DNA that she speaks of? We ourselves don’t know, but upon years of hiring, we know what kind of people we do not want.

At Stampede, we hire based on this order: good attitude, willingness to learn & skills more than possessing the skills, followed by the rest. We understand that it’s tempting to bring on board someone with the technical skills to immediately get down to work. But any skill can be trained, but things like personality and temperament have a huge effect on how someone will meld into your team and perform for your clients.

Hiring for attitude ultimately opens up a wider pool of candidates. Also because the technical requirements for business are constantly evolving, you can’t anticipate the hard skills you will need several years out. Which is you should always be on the lookout for someone who is hungry to learn and know more when you are hiring.

Onboarding & assessments

We take great care when we are welcoming a new Stampede-ian onboard. We want to make sure that their first day leaves a good impression (and with better impression the next few days and weeks, because we are overachievers that way), that everything they need is ready and most importantly, they will not be bored or be left wondering what they should be doing on the first day.

In order to make this happen, we have checklists on what the new Stampede-ian should be provided, briefed and walked through on the first day.

On top of this, in order to ease them into our culture, they are also included in internal meetings and some client meetings for observations. This shall also help us to assess how well they get along with the team and clients, and how well they perform in social situations.

Another thing we learned is that to assess new hires as frequent as possible. Do not wait until the end of the probation to provide feedback. Keep a spreadsheet of weekly observation of how they perform, and discuss the progress every week on how they are doing and how we can help them to perform more should there be problems.

For the hires requiring technical skills (coding and programming), we assign weekly coding assignments on top of real projects and encourage them to ask for feedback as soon as they have problems. This way, we are able to see their initiative to problem-solving, and that it is okay for them to get help if they are stuck.

Tools for work & fun

A physical office develops its own personality through inside jokes, shared experiences and a collaborative environment where you can just walk to someone’s desk and do all of these. However, when it comes to a remote office, we do not have such luxury, so we shall make do with something similar.

We spoke in Part 1 of how much we use tools to automate our work as well as to motivate each other in a remote setting. When we speak to the team members who had worked in a physical office before, they admitted they get more things done than before and our inside jokes are pretty legendary too.

Here are some of the tools we have been using.

• Slack: Virtual office and gif ping-pong
• Basecamp: Project management and client communication
• ResourceGuru: Scheduling
• Bitbucket: Hosting version control repositories
• Google Apps: File sharing, to-dos and many more
• Dropbox: File sharing
• DoneDone: Issue tracking for maintenance projects
• LastPass: Password management
• Toggl: Time tracking and employee timesheet
• Bonus.ly: Peer-to-peer bonuses program

In person meetups

To be honest, we troll each other in Slack every single day it is almost we are in the same office together. So what happens when we gather everyone around for a couple of days at least once a year? Peak action potential happens 🙂

The in-person meetup includes loads and loads of food, jamming session, LAN party and also so much trolling and laughing like no other. Just an extension of our virtual office in Slack.

Perks & professional development

Earlier this year we have started to implement more and more perks to our full time Stampede-ians:

• Everyone in the team gets 3-month free membership of gyms of our choice.
• 2-week paid leave on top of the compulsory leave
• Every team member gets to propose any local or regional conferences they want to join, and most of the time, we let them go and pay for their expenses too!

We learned that by doing this, the team members return to work more motivated and always ever ready to share their experiences!

Another new thing we have done recently is subscribing to online learning programs. They are really convenient and everyone can learn at their own pace and time. Now every team member has a Lynda account of which they can use to delve more into their related skill sets, both technical and soft skills.

Transparency and trust

Since we are a distributed team, we learned to trust our colleagues in order to get the job done. But in order to do so, everyone is responsible to make sure they are worthy of trust. There is no one in the team to hover around each other to make sure everyone does the right things, so it starts with the first point – hire the right people.

What’s wonderful is when you learned to trust your team members, oftentimes they will amaze you. With the trust, they continue to feel empowered and do good things and beyond. Give your team members the benefit of the doubt and you will learn that most people just want to do amazing things as you do!

Conclusion

This is by no means a definitive list. As we grow as a remote team and as remote working gets even more popular, we shall learn more and more things on how to build culture around a remote working team. When we find out interesting things, we shall be sure to share with you.

To recap:

• Hire the right people
• Use onboarding for new hire success, and quick assessment
• Invest in technology and tools for work and fun
• Organise in person meetups
• Provide perks & professional development
• Be transparent and cultivate trust

If you are also part of the remote team, what are the things you have learned about building the culture for a distributed team?

While you are here, please also take a look at Part 1: Running a Remote Team.

The post Working Remotely Part 2: Building Culture in a Remote Team appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

How do you run your team remotely?

Over 10 years, we have employed a number of wonderful people across Malaysia and a couple of other countries. We do not have to worry about the availability of resources, as we employ good people internationally. On top of that, we allow our team members to travel while working (or working while traveling, whichever works best!) and it had been such an eye-opener experience every single time.

On the spirit of sharing, we’ve decided to start our own series of Working Remotely to answer some of questions on how we got it to work. Rather than setting this as guidelines on how to run your team remotely, we shall have this as a sharing session of things we have learned about remote working for the past ten years 🙂

How It Started

Stampede had its humble beginnings starting with just two individuals, Shaza and Dov. Over the course of time, we attracted clients from the Netherlands, USA, Australia, UK, Spain, Canada and Russia. Many of them are still with us to this day, marking 10-years of partnership with Stampede. Initially some of them required design only, but pretty soon everyone wanted to join in on the HTML/CSS bandwagon.

The decision to hire like-minded individuals came to mind when Dov and Shaza started to experience an increase in workload. While they had the option to say no to new requests, at the time, they were learning so much from the work. The business and the clients were all too exciting to miss out on. The partners loved their life in Langkawi but realised the chances of finding a web developer for Stampede was slim in the tropical island. As with today where the debates are still ongoing, many people were skeptical with remote jobs, thinking it was too good to be true.

The timing was right however, because in 2005-2006, web development was entering a transitional period in Malaysia. Many young people were enthusiastic about the Internet but they didn’t yet know where they would fit into the greater scheme of things. Some were already holding a dull job, others were at the last definitive phase of their studies. A few were brave enough to give the position a try.

The first job posting was quite a good hit. Several people tried out and we hired our first front-end developer, Renee Chung, because she was humble to admit her knowledge wasn’t perfect and was open to learning new things. Renee has done several freelancing gigs in the past so she wasn’t new to remote work and she was able to work under minimal supervision.

Since then we received applications from fresh graduates too, some of them not even aware that we’re a remote company. Shaiful for example, was intrigued enough to decline a job offer from Shell and has been with us now for 8 years.

Over the course of 10 years, we have hired and also, unfortunately, let go some of the great people who had been with us. We understand remote working is not for everyone. But the ones who had been with us had contributed immensely to our experiences of building and managing a remote team.

Recipe to Run a Successful Remote Working Setup

As with many recipes, the ingredients listed are the utmost important ones: ready for everyone to tweak and add on to suit their business and team needs. Over the years, we have learned that there are four basic ingredients in running a successful remote working setup: Technology, Team, Tools and Process.

1. Technology

Mobile technology enables remote workers to do anything/everything other co-located workers can, sans cubicles and distractions. Before we jump onto the other ingredients, technology is the most basic thing needed in order to do the job and keep the lines of communications open with the rest of the team. While this might seem obvious, we often stress this often to our new hires before they come onboard.

Internet

We all know that the Internet is certainly the driving force when it comes to mobile work. In fact, remote working’s rapid growth in the last decade, can be directly attributed to the growth in home broadband Internet availability and the maturity of online services and applications. The Web fuels all the technologies that make working away from the office possible and easy: email, instant messaging, video conferencing, file sharing etc.

As such, it is self-explanatory that the Internet needs to be fast and reliable to avoid any disruption when we work remotely.

A computer

Another very obvious necessity: a team member needs to have a computer that is as powerful as possible to suit their needs in the team. A designer especially, needs a powerful desktop computer with very good processor, SSDs, sufficient RAM and a good monitor to be able to support the amount of interface design work at a given time. The same applies to programmers and front end developers.

Though the majority of work will be done primarily on desktop or notebook computers, the team members should also be ready with other mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets for quick work on the go — as well as conducting internal reviews for responsive designs.

2. Team

A remote working setup will not work successfully without a wonderful team. As mentioned earlier, remote working is perhaps not for everyone. Therefore, it is important to build a team whose members are capable of functioning in a remote setup. Here’s what we have learned:

Hire people who are self-initiated and self-disciplined

In a physical team, a manager can always monitor the progress of every team member. Far away from the hovering eyes of a manager, a team member in a working remote setup knows what needs to be done, once they are given the proper training, clear instructions and guidance. There is no need to check in with them every hour of the day, they will make it happen on their own.

Hire people you can trust, and trust the people you hire

It is almost impossible to work with someone you do not trust, even in a physical setting, much more in a remote one. It might get tempting to worry about what the team members are spending their time on or if they are actually working — start the process right by hiring only the people you can trust, and show trust in the people you have hired.

Hire people who can write, or train the team members to write better

Understandably, in a physical office, a lot of communications can be done face-to-face. However, in a remote setting, a lot of communication will take place in writing – email, Slack, Skype etc. It is easy to get misunderstood when you cannot convey your information via writing properly. Which is why, the team members need to be able to write properly – and if they are lacking a bit in that department, you need to train them.

Keep track of the team temperature

Remote workplaces are less social than physical ones. It is easy to get lonely when you have no co-workers to have a ‘water cooler’ banter with. While it is crucial to hire people who are able to cope without a social workplace, cabin fever tends to set in as we work far away from our social setting. Watch how the team members are faring, and if needed, find a way to help them to overcome this problem.

3. Tools

In a physical office, you can always round up everyone for a quick meeting around a desk if the need arises. However, in a remote setting, we automate as many things as possible to project manage our team. Fortunately, these days there are tons of online tools available to help us do these.

Here are among the tools we have used on a daily basis to run our team.

Slack

Slack is our virtual office. This is where we announce when we sign in to and sign off from work. This is also where we discuss work, Diablo, communicate during internal reviews,  praise each other for good work, coordinate get-together plans and many more.

As we are so much into organisation, we decided to create multiple channels for both work and fun. For work sections, we have channels such as #design, #code, #content, #UX, #readinglist and according to projects we are working on. For fun, we have channels such as #diablo, #gym-buddies, #ideas and also #random, where sometimes we share cat jokes, new movies trailers, trivia of the day and some tech news, among others.

Basecamp

Basecamp is our main project management tool, which we have been using since day one – we decided to stick with Basecamp 2 and not upgrading to Basecamp 3 because we felt the second version fit our team and business needs better.

This is where we have the repository of all our projects – internal and external. As for external projects, the ones involving clients, we will loop in clients as well for communications. As Basecamp 2 comes with to-do lists (we love lists!), notes, messages, and the ability to categorise between team and client, they are very useful when it comes to communicating between teams in internal reviews. We have a feeling that no other platform could top Basecamp 2 for now for us.

ResourceGuru

After a few years working remotely, we felt like we needed to have a holistic view of everyone’s workload. While Basecamp has the calendar feature, there are no options to allocate everyone’s working hours and the amount of available hours every day for everyone. So we were on a hunt for a platform which could do this for us.

Enter ResourceGuru, which was recommended to me by Brett Harned after I did a little #lazyweb asking on Twitter. Internet is so wonderful.

Bitbucket

For the programmers, we signed them up to Bitbucket, a system for hosting version control repositories.

As we work with multiple clients and thousands of lines of codes for every project, Bitbucket helps code management as it changes over time. It allows past versions of the project to be saved in case new changes break things. It also has quite a few other features and is often quite complex but as a simplification you can think of it as a way to backup code and share it between different people the team.

Google Apps

We run Gmail as our email host, we are also on Google Apps. With the myriad of products, we found ourselves creating spreadsheets, write-ups and presentation slides and just sharing the files across the team by notifying them through the email. We can also share the links with anyone outside the team, with the option to either view, edit or both.

So instead of scouring through our folders looking for the documents, we can just enter the keywords inside Google Drive search and find our documents easily.

Other tools

• Dropbox: Centralised file repository. We do not know how to live without Dropbox now
• DoneDone: Issue tracking especially for maintenance projects
• LastPass Enterprise: Storing all our services and websites logins
• Toggl: Time tracking and employee timesheet
• Bonus.ly: Peer-to-peer bonus rewarding system

4. Process

More so than processes, we shall treat this as how we work and what have we learned from the years of running a remote team. Having a process in place is good to make sure that there are organisations in the team. They are bound to change so most of the time we tweak these proc — I mean, how we work — in order to suit our team.

Checklist checklist!

We have a list for everything – onboarding, internal review, client review (we even train clients to do this too so it will be easier for them to keep track), ideas and many more. Thanks to Basecamp 2, it makes it easy to list down and document as many ideas and processes as possible, so we will always have our thoughts written down.

Automation

Whenever possible, we automate a lot of things. On top of saving time, it can also save cost since we can keep our team small without having to hire someone to do multiple tasks. It also keeps our team members focused on their work since we do not have to go to meetings all the time or manually fix lines of codes which could be done globally.

A culture of accountability

Deciding on keeping the team small and focusing on more meaningful projects, we decide to assign team leads for projects. This way, the team lead will be responsible to foresee the success of the project from start till finish. Once the projects are signed off, the team leads and their team members are properly celebrated (usually involving food). This could also nurture the sense of leadership and time management in all our team members, whichever our role is.

Training and sharing sessions

In the spirit of encouraging everybody to their best potentials, we decided to get everyone a Lynda.com account and devise training goals and a training syllabus based on everyone’s needs and skills. The results shall be assessed in a series of questions, scenarios and presentations. While we do have training goals for each team member, these sessions are held light-heartedly and often end in a high note.

Culture

Culture is the highest priority for us when it comes to running the team. When hiring, we often make sure that the new guy/girl will have a good cultural fit with us. That being said, more so than expecting them to blend in, we also provide a fun and a safe environment for them to be successful, fail and be themselves.

• Happy Things: Weekly sharing session where we would all share what makes us happy and grateful for the previous week
• Constructs: Useful HTML, CSS and Javascript techniques microblog, ran by Jared.
• Curated: A microblog celebrating design, the processes and the people behind it, ran by Zana.
• Blog and social media: Everybody is required to write a blog post on a rotation on the topic they are good with. Some of the blog posts had been garnering over 11,000 views so far!

Perks

Just like other companies, we offer tempting perks to our team members. The list below is just a sliver of how we reward the team and let them know how wonderful they are.

• Gym membership: 3-month gym membership – Shaiful’s favourite!
• Conferences: Every team member are able to propose any conferences or workshops that they want to attend from the management – and we usually let them go and even pay for them!
• 2 weeks extra paid leave: Applicable for those who had been with Stampede for over a year.
• Yearly get-together: Includes loads and loads of food, jamming session, LAN party and also so much trolling and laughing like no other.
• Team vacation: Langkawi! Phuket! Kuala Lumpur!

Conclusion

To be honest, a lot of these were not decided on early — and over the years we are always looking for ways to improve how we run our team. Despite lacking of physical setting, our team members are extremely close knit and with the transparency we practice (this shall be in later blog posts), we often get encouraging feedback on how we should run our team and business remotely better.

So if you ever decide to have a remote working team, keep your mind open always for feedback and suggestions, learn from others and be open to experiments! Good luck!

On to Part 2: Building Culture In a Remote Team

The post Working Remotely Part 1: Running a Remote Team appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

What is teleworking?

Allow me to do a little enlightenment here. In practice, “telework” is a work arrangement that allows an employee to perform work, during any part of regular, paid hours, at an approved alternative worksite. With the advancement of technology which allows every aspect of our work to be accessed via cloud, more and more digital companies opt to allow their employees to telework. In my case – aside from Star Wars-loving and quirky (and sometimes irritating) team members, teleworking is one of the perks working for Stampede which I really value.

The first impression.

My first few months were pretty tough for me to cope with the work arrangements. There are many aspects that I had to familiarize with without having a one-on-one interaction with my team members, for example – file sharing, time tracking, communications and so on.

Since we work EST, I also used to have problems adapting to the hours and my personal time. To solve this, I spend my daytime hanging out with my friends and working during the night.

Although we had been communicating through Skype, Google+ and emails as much as we could, I sometimes have trouble adapting to these means of virtual interactions. But once the guys started ‘mooning’ each other through Skype, I know we are in for a good virtual office bashing…

The personal transition

The flexible work hours for teleworking would either drive you to contemplation, or discipline you. During the transition while working in Stampede, I decided to set up some rules for myself. One of this is moving to another place just to get a bigger working space and better working environment for me.

The new place is closer to where my friends live as well, so I don’t have to travel far to go see them every day. Surprisingly, the new space also helps me to perform better at work. Since then, I’ve noticed a lot of changes on my mood, I got motivated and my performance increasing a little from the last time.

Time management

Like I said, teleworking is a good practice especially if you are not used to have constraints on yourself. The flexible work hours would either drive you to contemplation, or discipline you. I am really glad I opt for the latter, incidentally or not.

To be honest, used to be very lousy with time management and I used to get tired while working after spending the day out with my friends, which soon will affect work performance.

To solve this, I would make it a practice to sleep a few hours before work, soon after I come home from hanging out with my friends.

Working hours

Most of us in Stampede work EST hours since most of our clients are in the States and it is easier for us to interact with them during their business hours. However, it is not mandatory. For example, Iwan the front-end developer work from 4 am – 12 pm EST (4 pm – 12 am MYT). Shaza, Shaiful and Zana mostly work a lot later. This practice also makes sure that all of us have overlapping hours so that we will be able to discuss about the projects we share.

For now, I am working closely with Shaza, my (awesome yet sometimes scary) creative lead so she could guide me on my journey of becoming a lead designer in Stampede. In this learning process, it is very important for me to be prepared before I can work on my own. There is a plan for me to be able to work during MYT hours in the future, but for now I will stick to the EST work hours during this training process.

A few months later…

Teleworking is a wonderful thing.

After a few months working, I have come to realize that I’m in full control of my working environment and the time flexibility helps me to adjust my working hours to my needs whenever I need to run some errands on the day.

In a small group of team (there are 7 of us), we tend to keep things very personal and get involved and help each other as much as we can about our team. Also, from my experience from the previous company I have worked with, politics occur when there’s a big amount of staffs included. In here, we have no problem about it at all. Na da.

Apart from a few adjustments which I had to make, I have to say, (tele)working at Stampede has been a great experience so far and I look forward for something new every day.

Have I mentioned teleworking is a wonderful thing?

The post In the Cloud appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Everything we do to manage a business consisting mainly of remote employees is something anyone else could do too. There’s so much untapped tech talent that does not live near your office, but would work for you if you allowed them to.

I wouldn’t say there are no disadvantages with assembling a remote team. It’s true that you have to be more careful with the hiring process. Employees need to feel comfortable enough to commit to an employer they probably have never even met, and employers need to invest some trust that the person hired can actually deliver work with minimal supervision.

The Challenges

Having been on both sides of the extremes, here’s the truth. It doesn’t work all the time. Or rather, it will only work with specific people with the right level of job ownership. A few remote employees we hired before keep having difficulty establishing priorities.

Working remotely requires a level of discipline that is easily lost – you can easily cheat because no one is looking. The truth is, the responsibility does not diminish whether you work in an office or at home. The workload and performance expectations are the same. Working remotely simply offers flexibility of managing your time, not cheating it.

The Fine-Tunings

As an employer, it is unfortunately easy to undervalue the human connection especially when you are missing the visual cues. I do believe body language is important and there is no real substitute to it. If you can afford it, organize a short weekend get-together every so often or assign a team leader to check the team temperature. Support and motivation is crucial to any employees, even more so with your remote team.

Having the right company culture definitely helps – spend a day with us and you will find that our team is a lot closer than the average work colleague sharing the same physical space.

Stampede is unique in the sense that the work we do requires minute level of orchestration. Our team is from all over Malaysia. We have clients from many parts of the world, across many different timezones. We run 15-20 concurrent projects at any given time. While EST work hours is not imposed, we tend to gravitate towards it because the lack of distraction allows us to focus and get real work done. We do big deal stuff but have precious little time to write about them.

We use Basecamp and recently, Asana, to manage our projects and communicate tasks. We do design and development concurrently as if we’re all in the same room. We have weekly meetings, team huddle and client conferences over Skype. We even have Sharing Saturdays for anyone who wants to learn something new from another team member. We handle discovery sessions and revision rounds through screensharing apps. We also have flexible working hours so we make sure daily status gets updated through G+ Messenger.

These tools allow us to connect with the really talented people in our team, but without being open to remote-hiring in the beginning, we would have never been able to assemble such great talents and wonderful people to work with.

Noah Stokes from Thirty-Five sums it well:

Hiring employee(s) is incredibly difficult. Oh, hi person whose entire livelihood is in my hands. Nice to meet you.

Reading List

Boom time for remote, online work in Asia by Jamie Yap
Working Remotely – Dale Harvey
The Challenges of Working Remotely – Sam Brown
Walking the Line When You Work From Home -Natalie Jost

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