When we give remote work advice , we tend to give it from our own perspective, which is that of a fully, 100-percent remote team. However, this way of working isn’t the norm — or even the standard. In our inaugural State of Remote Work study, we learned that most of the companies who support remote work are not fully remote; 65 percent of them have a combination of office-based employees and remote employees
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. —Joseph Addison We’re a remote team that loves reading (and self-improvement ). In fact, through the first nine months of 2018, we’ve read over 1,000 books! So when International Literacy Day popped up on the calendar, we wanted to get involved. International Literacy Day, celebrated annually on September 8 ,
Remote work has been the norm at Buffer for many years now; we ditched our office in 2015 and have been hiring remote teammates since 2011. We now have over 85 teammates spread across 10 different time zones. Over the years, our team has experimented and learned tons about productivity, tools, collaborating, communicating, and disconnecting as they each relate to remote work. Here’s a full list of all of our resources on remote work. Comment below if you have a question and we haven’t written
There’s a lot written about churn. A quick google search returns several blog posts with various definitions and types of churn. That said, not a lot of what’s written is in form of code. At least not open source code. Since the definition of churn depends on the domain and company, a few companies share how they predict churn. At Buffer , we decided to spend a few weeks trying to predict when our customers are going to stop paying for a specific subscription. We called that
Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate. Head to our homepage to view our most recent posts. We love conferences, and who doesn’t? They’re a great place to connect with like-minded individuals. Over the years as the Buffer team has grown, we’ve not only been attending more conferences, but we’ve started seeing more and more Buffer speakers as well. Speaking has so many benefits for the Buffer t
Prefer to listen? Here’s the audio version of this post: Being a remote team and international company comes with a lot of things that are non-traditional, things like getting 80 people on remote all-hands meeting. We’ve talked about several aspects that are quite unique to the business side of an international company, too, like paying employees and when to give people holidays. In this post, we’re going to dive into another big part of working at and running Buffer, which is employee benefits
Prefer to listen? Here’s the audio version of this post! Disconnecting from devices is a challenge for most people. A study of Americans found they check their phones on average 80 times a day! For remote workers, it’s especially difficult if there’s no separation between work and home and your devices become your office. In fact, this is so much of a challenge that there is a law in France [https://www.npr.org
At Buffer we love working as a distributed team , but we also cherish the times we get to meet up in person . Since the early days at Buffer, retreats have been a core part of our culture and a part of why we’re able to keep working remotely as a company. In their current state, retreats at Buffer happen once a year. We set aside a budget [https://buffer.gho
Prefer to listen? Here’s the audio version of this post! All Hands, town hall, tea time — there are many names for the meeting where everyone comes together for company updates and announcements. For us, All Hands is not only an exciting time to see everyone’s smiling faces at once but also a big part of our value to default to transparency . Buffer’s All Hands meetings are a great place to openly communicate with the whole company at once. As a fully-remote c
Being a fully remote team means that we rely heavily on the tools that can help us connect and communicate with each other from anywhere in the world. One of the main tools our team uses for communication is Slack, a tool that allows us to send quick chat messages with each other either in public or private channels or direct messages. While we love and use Slack constantly, we also set firm bou
At Buffer, we value diversity and inclusion. We’ve made efforts to use diversity as a lens for refining our hiring process , writing a new code of conduct , and several other spots even going so far as to make diversity everyone’s job . Conferences, and especially tech conferences, are an area where there is often still a noticeable lack of diversit
Editor’s Note: Thanks for checking out this post! We’ve released our updated 2021 pay analysis here. At Buffer, we’ve always marched to the beat of our own drum when it comes to how we pay our team. We make our salaries transparent to the whole world. We calculate all salaries with a fully transparent (and publicly available) formula. And we’ve been proud to be part of the Equal Pay Day conversation for the past two years, by sharing our full data in a transparent pay analysis. For Equal Pay D
We’re a fully remote team and have been since our start. We’ve also known the importance of meeting in person since the team started growing. For that reason, we never go too long without finding a way to get Buffer teammates together. There’s just something about meeting in person that you can’t replace with video chats. (Maybe with VR one day!) To make meeting in person possible, we set aside a budget every year to send the whole Buffer te
We aspire to live by our values at Buffer. This means turning our values into behaviors that positively impact how we treat each other, how we interact with others, and how we see the world. Even still, having values isn’t enough. Especially if we want to create the inclusive organization that we’re striving to become. So to complement our values, we’
The end of 2017 brought lots of joy at Buffer. It was the best financial position we’d seen ourselves in in a few years and the team was excited to celebrate. Our CEO, Joel Gascoigne , and Director of Finance, Caryn Hubbard added to the celebrations with the wonderful news that they had managed to set aside money for Buffer to donate to charity. The whole Buffer team [https://buffer.com/abo
Hi there! This is an out of date post that we’ve kept around for transparency purposes. Go here to view the latest version of this post. What comes to mind when you think of remote work? In our experience, it’s not only one image. Remote work comes in many different shapes and sizes. We are a fully distributed team at Buffer, meaning that we have no office and everyone chooses to work from where they’re happiest: both geographically (we have teammates across the world) and functionally (we hav
2017 was an exciting year for the Buffer team with some big changes, a few firsts, and some major progress forward. We set a new vision for the company and products , went on our 8th company retreat to Madrid , calculated equal pay at Buffer for the first time, and got to a very healthy place financially, among many other
The end of the year is a wonderful time to focus on reflection and self-care. These are things we’ve been very mindful of at Buffer in the past few years. Everything from encouraging more vacation time to having summer hours have been top of mind for us in creating a company focused on healthy and happy employees. Often times the year flies by so quickly that people don’t take enough vacat
There is a lot of imagery that comes to mind when someone says “working from home.” A quick Google Search yields results that are anything from someone working on the floor surrounded by pets, to people holding babies during calls, to someone working in pajamas. Source: Ray Wenderlich A lot of these things (the pajamas and family at least) are things you can’t always do at a regular office. Sometimes the pets
Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate. Head to our homepage to view our most recent posts. Imagine working at a company where on your first day the CEO says: “We are really excited to have you here. Now, how can I use my personal network to help you get your next job?” That’s exactly how Jon Bischke from Entelo kicks off the first day for his employees on day on
Have you ever been curious about other people’s processes? How they start their day, how they work remotely, or how they focus their energy levels? I definitely have, and I know so many people who feel the same way. After all, what better way to learn than by looking at what is working for others! We’re fortunate to have access to an incredible community at Buffer, and over the years we’ve collected actionable advice from this community during our weekly bufferchat on Twitter [https://buffer.c
Like many other tech companies, we used to have an unlimited vacation policy as a way to encourage employees to take vacation days when it felt best to them. When unlimited vacation didn’t seem to be working, because it’s hard to tell how much time unlimited really is, we switched to a minimum vacation policy this time last year. With our unlimited policy, the highest percentage of vacation days was in the range of 5 – 10 days per year, closely followed by the 10 – 15 days range. It wasn’t quit
There’s this powerful myth that exists in the working world: the more you work and less you rest, the more you will get done. It turns out that our bodies and our brains don’t quite work that way. What’s surprising is that the opposite is in fact true. If you rest more and work less, you’ll be more productive, healthy, and creative. Not to mention, one author believes more rest can positively impact climate change and gender equality — I’ll elaborate on all of that below. We gave this a try a
When we think of continued learning and self-improvement, reading naturally comes to mind. That’s why we’re so excited to be celebrating International Literacy Day, a global celebration planned by UNESCO. This celebration is a strong reminder of how digital technology and the internet enables each of us to do more reading, writing, and learning. Source: UNESCO We have more ways than ever to get access to books and reading materials. But how much reading are we doing? One survey reports that “[