Remote Working Guide at GitLab

The folks at GitLab have been working in a full-remote scenario not only since the current epidemic, but ever since they started. They gathered a lot of experience in remote working, and have created a quite voluminous Remote Playbook (which you can download there) as well as equally detailed guide to working all-remote.

They abstract their philosophy with a Remote Manifesto similar to the agile one:

  1. Hire people from everywhere
  2. Enable flexible working hours
  3. Prefer written documentation to oral
    • This is a little surprising to me. While I do know that documentation is important, obviously, I currently feel that verbal communication seems the more natural, and thus the easier way.
  4. Prefer written processes to guided training
    • Similar to above.
  5. Public sharing of information
  6. Let anyone edit any document
  7. Communicate async over synchronous channels
  8. Results over work time
  9. Prefer formal communication channels
    • Curious about this as well, especially how they define the difference between formal and informal channels. Does it suffice to have a company slack server?