by Janus Boye
Distributed teams have unique challenges, and unique rewards.
In a recent call with our product management community, Shaun McGough walked through how Elastic came to be a distributed company, what the culture is like, and how resilient the model has proven.
Distributed is not the same as remote
In one of his opening remarks, Shaun made the important point that it does matter what we call things. Remote working indicates that there’s a central HQ and can easily make employees working from home feel like they are missing out.
Calling it distributed working creates more of a balance between those in an office and those working from elsewhere.
What being distributed means at Elastic
The distributed advantage
In the call, Shaun made it clear that distributed means many different things. He highlighted several aspects that stood out to him as the big advantages of working distributed
In particular the ability to attract talent was high on his list. When you are not confined to a certain location and those with a willingness to commute to an office, you can attract a broader range of talent and have access to a substantially larger talent pool. He added that Elastic also does interviews remote and recently made a new limit of max 5 interviews per candidate
He also talked about how he got things done and how he was less distracted without the constant buzz and humming of a traditional office. He shared how his best days looked like when he could follow his energy and organise the day, so that he was both most productive and also with time to be a human with time for hobbies and other things than work.
Benefits also came up, also in terms of being able to decorate your own home office and being able to expense the costs.
DIstributed is a part of the DNA at Elastic
How to grow distributed?
According to Shaun, trust is a key element to make it work. He shared how it’s important to escape the 9 - 5 mindset, always assume no malice and to have as few top-down decisions as possible.
Communication is also an important aspect. In Elastic, Email and GitHub are books of record. Also, internal presentations are repeated multiple times to avoid trouble with the timezones.
In the call, we also had Elie Auvray from Jahia who made the interesting point that some venture capitalists have concerns with distributed teams. In his view, working distributed is a strength in the long run as it’s better for scaling.
Learn more about distributed working
Elastic is far from alone in not having the good old fashioned approach to working from a corporate office. At digital agency 10up, they’ve been doing it for a while and their CEO John Eckman shared his insights in July, 2019. The post is called How To Make Remote Working Successful, but they too are practicing distributed working so in hindsight would have been a more correct title.
You can also browse the slides from the session -
Finally, do consider becoming a member of our community. You can meet Shaun in person in our product management community. In Europe we also have a few peer groups on Future Workplace with more to come.