š“Ā Tremendous is fully remote
Fully remote, meaning that thereās no Tremendous office or headquarters. Most team members work from home; a few work out of co-working spaces.
Offices
We have no physical offices. We donāt plan on opening one. We believe a hybrid environment would create an imbalance for those not present in person.
In New York, we do have access to a shared office space where team members go in sporadically. Nick goes in occasionally, and Kapil goes in almost never.
Why remote?
Remote has its drawbacks. So whyād we choose it?
- Recruiting. Global talent pools are 1000x bigger, which makes it much easier to hire for skillset and fit. Also, the sort of high-performing, senior people we are trying to attract often prefer (or at least donāt mind) working remotely, and care less about the things that are lacking such as daily socializing with colleagues.
- Autonomy. Remote means that team members can be productive on their own schedules. They can take time, both planned and unplanned, to tend to their needs and those of their loved ones.
- Documentation. Remote work is successful at Tremendous because we are so biased toward documentation over meetings, but all this documentation serves many other benefits (onboarding, knowledge-sharing, clarity of thought, etc.). However, if we spent more time working in person, less would be documented. So remote work forces us to be disciplined about documenting, which leads us to be more productive and make smarter decisions.
šĀ Where we are
Hereās our team on a map:
š°ļøĀ Collaboration hours
12-3pm ET
We maintain baseline collaboration hours of 12-3pm EST. These are hours in which we try to make sure everyone is available for cross-team coordination. We also schedule team meetings (like all hands) during these hours.
Team members are expected to be generally available during these hours.
Itās worth noting a few things:
- Weāre a low-meeting culture, so for most of the team, these hours donāt end up being booked with meetings. Theyāre just specifically reserved availability if we need it.
- Team members are available throughout their local working hours. Itās common to book meetings outside of these hours.
- Some roles, like management, sales, or product support roles, will have higher availability expectations.
šļøĀ Offsites
Social connection is rarely a problem in in-office environments, where team members grab coffee or eat meals together on a regular basis. For remote environments, itās a challenge.
We solve this with team offsites. They condense the socialization and bonding that happens in an in-office environment into a short team trip.
Types of offsites
- All-company offsites are designed for team bonding and social interaction. They feel more like summer camp and include few working sessions.
- The last three were in Utah ā°ļø, Puerto Vallarta šļø, and Mexico City š®. See our Photobook
- We also do smaller team-level offsites. These are more about high-bandwidth collaboration, though we manage to have plenty of fun too.
- The last few team-level offsites were in Portland š¦« and Rio de Janeiro š.
Team member expectations
- Team members should expect to have to travel for Tremendous 3-4 times per year.
- Though we attempt to be inclusive in our choice of offsite locationsā¦ travel times can still be quite long. But the value of the face-to-face connection is worth it.
- While offsites are optional, we strongly encourage attendance. We record and stream any business-relevant sessions so that those who canāt attend still get the content.