Doist Remote Company Q&A
In 2014, our team at Doist tried Slack. We were looking for a virtual workspace where our remote team could collaborate more easily: Slack’s real-time chat seemed promising. Slite team at offsite 2. Cultivate a thoughtful writing culture. One of the most challenging aspects of managing a remote-first team is the fact that you can’t always be on the same time zone as.
Amir Salihefendic,Founder - Interview with Remote.co
What does your remote-friendly company do?
Doist’s mission is to inspire the workplace of the future by creating simple yet powerful productivity tools that promote a calmer, more balanced, more fulfilling way of working and living. Todoist– one of the world’s most popular productivity apps– is our flagship software with over 10 million users. Our newest software is Twist, a team communication app that fosters mindful communication and gives modern (and especially remote) teams a central place to grow their knowledge base and have organized, on-topic conversations that are accessible to everyone.
How important is remote work to your business model?
Doist is– and always has been– bootstrapped, independent and profitable. Our remote-first structure has truly allowed us to thrive as a business. Since we don’t run the exorbitant costs of renting an office in an expensive tech hub or hiring a team who lives exclusively in said tech hub, we have been able to grow completely organically without having to live and die on VC funding.
What were the main reasons to integrate remote work into your workforce?
- Access to the entire world’s pool of talent, rather than just limiting ourselves to professionals in one specific geographical location.
- Lower costs– there are less overhead costs and salaries on a global level are much more reasonable than those in tech hubs like Silicon Valley. This means we can invest more in providing amazing benefits to our team and giving back to the causes that we feel strongly about.
- Happier employees– our team members have the flexibility to work on the schedule that they choose, in the location they choose.
What traits do you look for in candidates for a remote job?
When we hire, we look specifically for people who share the same fundamental values as us. That’s not to say we look for people who are exactly the same – our diverse perspectives 100% lead to better decisions, a better product, and a better team culture – but everyone needs to be on the same page in terms of expectations regarding how we communicate and work.
Also, in a remote setting it’s vital to hire proactive, curious people who won’t wait to be told how to do things. That’s why one of the most important things we look for in interviews are “Jacks & Jills of all trades” – people who take ownership over learning new skills.
Do you use third party testing or evaluation services when hiring remote workers?
We do 100% of the testing and evaluation process of hiring in-house. That said, we do use Workable to manage our application processes from start to finish.
How do you measure the productivity of remote workers?
We’ve experimented with OKRs and Squads but they haven’t worked or us. Ultimately, we created our own hybrid of the two systems – goals and squads – in what we call the DO (Doist Objective) System. The system is output-focused rather than outcome-focused which means that our quarterly goals consist of things we have full control over shipping. We feel like the DO system is a better fit for how we work – light on process with a focus on shipping concrete things quickly – and addresses the big issues we are now facing in coordinating a larger team.
What is your BYOD policy for remote workers?
Team members can use any hardware that they please. After you’ve worked with Doist for six months, you are granted a generous hardware and software budget that renews every two years.
What is your time off policy for remote workers?
Work-life balance is something we take very seriously. We set the expectation from the get-go that no one should be working long hours or during the weekends. Eight hours of effective work five days a week is more than enough to get everything done (we are in the productivity business, after all). We enforce this rule strictly!
In addition to a balanced day-to-day schedule, full time employees have 25 days of mandatory vacation per year and of course all national holidays in their country of residence.
Full-time employees who have successfully passed their three-month trial period are eligible for Doist’s maternity and paternity leave which is 18 weeks of PTO for mothers and 5 weeks of PTO for fathers or adoptive parents.
How did you implement a remote work policy?
The idea of building a remote company wasn’t something we explicitly discussed at the start – it simply grew out of necessity. One of the challenges when you start out as a bootstrapped company with an unknown brand and little cash on hand is access to talent. Hiring a remote team was the best solution to this challenge and we’ve stuck with it since day one.
Can a remote-friendly company have a healthy culture?
This is our #1 priority. As a bootstrapped company we’ve always had a conservative approach to scaling the team– we don’t hire faster than the culture can absorb new team members. We work very hard to preserve our culture by being mindful of the way we work (asynchronously) and by investing heavily in the health and wellbeing of our team members.
Doist as a company has existed since 2001, but it wasn’t until the first company retreat in 2015 that the concept of “Doist” truly started to come to life. Many of the team members, having worked together for several years, met each other in-person for the very first time. There, the camaraderie and bonding solidified what it meant to be a Doister.
Retreats undoubtedly help bond the team together and reignite energy in what we’re working toward, but the fact is that it’s just one week a year. Everything else we do throughout the year to live up to our core company values is much more important.
What advice would you give to a team considering to go remote?
Being remote-first isn’t the same as remote friendly or ability to work from home. I don’t consider companies who have a handful of remote team members working remotely to be a “remote company.” If you are going to go remote, you either go you fully remote or you don’t. The grey area is highly problematic.
The most important advice I would give is to hire people based on your company’s values. Maintaining a culture in a remote setting is very difficult, and I would say it is nearly impossible if the whole team isn’t rowing in the same direction in terms of values, priorities and mission.
What challenges have you encountered building a remote team?
For Doist, it has been a very natural, organic process. We have always been remote-first, so it is integrated into our company’s DNA. Nevertheless, as we grow (we’re now approximately 50 people in 20 different countries), it has become more difficult to follow what is going on and who has ownership of what. We are hopeful that our DO system will help solve these challenges.
What are the most effective tools for remote team communication?
We’re proud “dog-fooders” of our own products– we use Twist exclusively for all team communication, and Todoist to turn our team communication into actionable items.
We do not use email (except for external communication) and we do not use group chat. We tried Slack but it had numerous negative side effects for our team: it’s highly distracting, bad for team members in outlying timezones, and exclusionary for people who prioritize doing deep work (which should be everyone!).
Finally, meetings are a rarity at Doist. We generally only schedule ad hoc meetings when we feel “face-to-face” communication is really needed to move a project forward.
How do you personally manage work-life balance?
It’s difficult since I am very passionate about the work we are doing and I could spend all my time on it. Nevertheless, as the CEO, it’s important that I don’t set an example of being a workaholic or connected all the time.
I try to work for about 8 to 10 hours per day and, in my free time, I enjoy reading, learning, surfing, watching movies, and playing soccer.
What is your favorite business book?
I would say it’s “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey A. Moore. It’s one of the first business books I read and it was very insightful. The book is about how to bring cutting-edge products to large markets.
While live chat applications can promote teamwork, their real-time nature often discourages deep, thoughtful conversations. Aiming to offer a more organized and meaningful way for teammates to collaborate, Doist, the company behind the popular ToDoist task manager, created Twist, a calmer, and more efficient communication tool.
Designed to compete with existing chat apps like Slack and Carrot.io, Twist creates a streamlined workflow that helps ToDoist users interact more efficiently and boost their productivity.
Many work teams use Slack as their go-to communication solution. Up until about four years ago, so did Doist.
The remote company relied on Slack because it facilitated collaboration by allowing for real-time group chats, direct messages, and file sharing in a central place. However, they also discovered a few shortcomings which ultimately impaired productivity. Being a company all about productivity, Doist created Twist to address Slack’s pain points while promoting a more balanced approach to work and life.
Image credit: Twist
Doist does it calmer
In Slack, conversations take place in long chat feeds in which users can create threads in response to individual comments. While Slack promo claims the app is a place, “where work happens,” searching through chat histories to find specific information eats up a lot of valuable time. Not only is it easy for communication to quickly become disorganized and chaotic, but with numerous exchanges between co-workers, the entire real-time communication technique can at times seem downright shallow.
Doist replaces the continuous stream of comments with interactions that take place in threads right from the start, allowing for asynchronous communication. Composing a new thread looks and feels like writing an email, except that other team members can initiate conversations in response to an original post. After naming their thread, users can write multiple paragraphs, attach files, and notify some or all members of their team.
The paragraph feature is important because it promotes more in-depth thought. A writing exercise that encourages prose over text-format communication. And since users cannot discuss outside of threads, everything is more organized.
Image credit: Doist Blog
Deep dive into calmer and more productive work
According to Cal Newport, author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, the deep work practice is defined by, “the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task...a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time.”
So how does the Doist team apply deep work to their communication platform? By significantly decreasing the risk of distraction.
With Twist, you can actually avoid reading posts about an unrelated event or subject. The concept, meant to encourage in-depth conversations, also offers a calmer user experience by avoiding the sense of urgency that typically comes with live discussions.
Traditional chat applications move quickly, and users run the risk of missing out on relevant conversations if they are offline. The real-time nature of these tools creates a habit of being consistently connected.
Getting pulled into conversation after conversation throughout the day can leave employees feeling overwhelmed and unproductive.
Twist allows team members to snooze notifications and finish what they are working on before responding to comments in a thread. Any work tool that promotes a snooze button has got to be a good one right?
And if you feel you’ve snoozed too much, don’t worry, you won't miss out. The application includes an Inbox that groups together threads a user is involved in to ensure he or she knows when other teammates make updates.
Another pain point for real-time, by the minute conversations, is time zone. Luckily, a topic familiar to Doist, a completely remote company. Twist’s asynchronous communication makes collaboration with team members from other countries much more manageable.
Twist still allows for real-time conversations, but users have to start them as direct messages in a different tab. While threads are employed to express more complete thoughts and have long-term discussions, team members mostly use private messages for quick check-ins or socializing. With two separate tabs for threads and messages, users can check one without getting distracted by the other.
Keeping messages in separate tabs gives the space to display a preview of a new message before a user opens it. Employees can determine the importance of a message at a glance and decide when to answer.
Less anxiety by design
With their constant stream of notifications, applications like Slack and Stride can be very distracting, borderline annoying, and anxiety-inducing.
With Twist, users can choose whom they want to notify when they start a thread or comment on existing posts. Co-workers can discuss specific issues without bothering the whole team.
Image credit: Doist Blog
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Not only does Twist offer the user more control, but it has also omitted the dreaded read receipts feature. So no more “read” or “seen”-induced anxiety attacks. The decision to 86 this feature is a conscious move on Twist’s part to apply a more human approach to team communication.
A “Time Off” mode can silence notifications for an extended period and let other users know that an employee is absent or on vacation. Team members can also specify their regular schedule to avoid late-night alerts.
The Doist team believes that online presence indicators included in most communication apps can quickly become “expectation tools.” When they see a teammate online, users tend to anticipate an immediate answer. Without a presence indicator, Twist lets conversations happen over a slower period, promoting deep work and giving team members time to reflect before answering.
Take a load off
Doist considers that teams deserve less pressure to always keep up with group conversations and more time to focus on important work. Twist represents the company’s bet against workplace cultures that require people to be continuously connected. With its distinctive features, the solution prioritizes meaningful productivity and lets employees sign out guilt-free at the end of the day.
Dost Time
According to Twist, nothing you see in the chat platform is an accident – everything is a conscious design choice. And with more mindful design comes a more balanced approach to communication, something every worker can agree is something to work towards.
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