What does “Remote-First” mean

Camunda is going to become a “remote-first” organization - not just during the COVID-19 pandemic, but for good. 

This will be reflected in the principles below:

1. Our people can work remotely as much as they like.
2. We do not hire for specific locations.
3. We manage, collaborate, and socialize remotely.
4. We optimize our offices for remote work.
5. We carefully invest in physical Interactions.
6. We do what it takes to win and serve our customers.

Those principles are aspirational, i.e. we will not be able to live up to all of them all the time, and certainly not right away. But they define our ambitions and the direction in which we are going.

In this document, we will explain the motivation for this transition and explain the principles in more detail. However, we will not answer all the operational questions that would result out of them - those are to be answered in dedicated documents. 

Our people can work remotely as much as they like.

Everybody at Camunda is entitled to work remotely, for example from home, as much as they like and whenever they like. This holds true regardless of the personal leadership style preferences of their manager.

The only exception would be roles that by definition require a physical presence in the office, e.g. at the reception desk. 

Being entitled to work remotely does not mean being entitled to work from everywhere though. These are the limitations that need to be observed: 

• People can only work permanently from a country where we can employ them.
• Working temporarily from other places can be possible, but only within bounds and with implications that need to be considered. 
• Relocating to other places in order to work permanently from there can be possible, but comes with implications that need to be considered.

We do not hire for specific locations.

When we advertise jobs or select candidates, we do not communicate or consider the candidates’ location as a selection criteria. This holds true regardless of the personal leadership style preferences of the hiring manager.

This principle is limited by: 

• People can only be hired in a country where we can employ them.
• For market facing roles that are focused on a certain region, e.g. a local account executive, a local developer advocate, a local demand gen campaign manager, hiring for specific locations makes obvious sense.
• Time zones - generally speaking, anything between ET and CET gives more room for synchronous interactions and can (not has to) be considered a preference.

We manage, collaborate, and socialize remotely.

Going remote-first is a profound transformation and it will only succeed if everyone is truly committed. 

Managing and collaborating remotely translates into specific measures we’re going to take, which will be defined in dedicated documents. 

Some key principles are: 

• A truly helpful Company Handbook as the single source of truth for “permanent content” which guides us on how we can / should / must go about things. 
• Embracing asynchronous communication as the primary way to clarify complex questions and to make decisions. 
• Treating synchronous communication (meetings) as a scarce resource that we apply in a mindful way to get the most out of it
• Developing our leadership and alignment practices further, in particular around OKR and the DRI principles. 

To socialize remotely will become one of two building blocks for a successful team building (the other is onsite socializing) which will both be further described in a dedicated document. 

We optimize our offices for remote work.

We will continue to provide office spaces to make sure that everyone who prefers to work from an office will have the ability to do so. 

The new primary mission for our existing offices is to provide distraction free, well-equipped, pleasant work environments for individuals. The primary mission is not to provide space for onsite collaboration.

In addition we will provide our people with the necessary tools to be productive while working from home by providing Remote Work Equipment to a reasonable extent. 

We carefully invest in onsite interactions.

Onsite interactions create a benefit we cannot achieve with remote interactions only:

The feeling of “truly meeting” someone builds trust and empathy. In a group, this leads to stronger identification, loyalty and engagement. 

We need to be aware that our options to bring people together, especially when they need to travel for that purpose, are severely restricted during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

We will set up a dedicated strategy for Onsite Team Building. 

We do what it takes to win and serve our customers.

Camunda is a remote-first company, but that doesn’t mean our customers are. 

If we feel that we should be onsite with a customer for sales, consulting, customer success, event marketing etc., we will go onsite.

Exceptions only apply because of acute circumstances (e.g., restricted travel due to pandemic)

Nevertheless, we do invest in our capabilities to win and serve our customers remotely, for example with 

• the ability to use the remote meeting tools the customers prefer 
• superior remote training experiences
• engaging online conferences. 

Why are we doing this

The World is changing

As an organization, we have managed the sudden shift to work from home very well. It was actually an opportunity to break with old habits that we as humans often consider necessary until we’re forced to develop new habits. 

And we’re not alone. All around us, companies are moving towards a remote model and allow people to work from home as long and as much as they like. This is true for tech companies in Silicon Valley just as for conservative companies like Allianz or Siemens. 

In some ways this is just necessary because nobody can say for sure for how long and to what extent our lives will be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

But actually, it is time to realize a few fundamental truths: 

• We are witnessing an inflection point in the evolution of our economies. Even when COVID-19 should be “over”, many companies will not move back to their previous co-located work culture. 
• That is because going remote has such tremendous business advantages
• Employee happiness due to more personal flexibility
• Employee productivity because they can pick the most productive environment and avoid daily commutes
• A much bigger talent pool to recruit employees
• At some point a business can move a lot faster and more efficiently - Example: You can meet 5 customers instead of 1 within one day. You can argue that those remote meetings are not as deep as face-to-face, but we must understand that the entire society is shifting, and everyone including our customers are getting more used to this kind of interaction. We should not underestimate the force of this change - This could be a societal change at the scale of change that came with telephones or cars. 
• Reduced costs for office space 
• It comes with challenges, for example when it comes to personal relationships - but figuring out how to overcome these challenges will become part of the competition, i.e. those market participants that figure this out before the others, will have a severe competitive edge in their markets. 
• This will unleash a market economy driven dynamic with incredible force and collective creative brain power which will lead to new tools and practices which will eventually help to overcome those challenges a lot faster than we can imagine today.

Prediction: Up to 10 years from now, for any “non-physical” company (e.g. not in manufacturing) remote work will be the default and not the exception. 

This is our Opportunity

During the first years of Camunda, we had a clear preference for co-located work. We did not allow for home office unless in exceptional circumstances, and we required anyone who signed up with us to move to Berlin if they did not live there already. 

When we decided to expand our business to other countries it became clear that we would have to employ people there, but we generally kept our preference for co-located work. This led to  difficulties for both efficiency and culture, because those people that did not live in Berlin did not have the same same access to information and could not as easily participate in discussions,  meetings or the famous water-cooler chats when they happened in Berlin and basically excluded everyone else.

That’s why in 2019 we decided that Camunda should more seriously turn into a “distributed organization”. There were some concrete implementations of this idea (e.g., moving the all-hands meetings online), but besides that it was more of an abstract idea and left room for individual interpretations. For example, many managers still prefered to set up co-located teams and hire only for that team’s location (e.g., Berlin) and would not allow their reports to work from home, or only to a limited extent. That was a problem because a lot of collaboration and socialization happens cross-functional, i.e. between teams and not just within them, and it reduced the talent pool those managers could recruit from.

We cannot know how long exactly COVID-19 is going to last, and even if it went away tomorrow,  there could be new pandemics. It would be stupid not to learn from this one (“fool me once,...”). One learning is that we need to be always ready to suddenly work from home in order to practice social distancing. This would also reduce our dependence on physical offices, which can be a liability for example when our Berlin landlord decides to conduct huge construction projects.

So in summary:

• COVID-19 forces us to be able to work remotely, probably for the better half of 2021. 
• The advantages and the feasibility of a remote work approach have become clear to so many companies, that we can expect a general shift in our economy.
• We should therefore embrace this change and double down on our transition into a remote-first organization.

Once we have achieved that, we will have a much stronger company with people that can enjoy their individual flexibility and empowerment thanks to a truly remote-first Camunda. 

How will we make it happen

In order to become “remote-first” we need to be aware of three big areas: 

• Administration - This includes necessary rules and procedures and is determined by both our own wishes and the laws and regulations that we have to comply with.
• Leadership & Collaboration - We will need to develop new habits and learn new practices in order to successfully come together and make great things happen. This is true for both colleagues collaborating as well as our approach to leadership and how to manage people.
• Team Building - It will be a particular challenge to build and develop a strong shared identity and see us as one team, no matter where we are based and without seeing each other in person on a regular basis. Last but not least this is also about the sheer pleasure, joy and fun that we always had at Camunda and want to keep having.

We will look at each of those areas in dedicated documents and roll them out in Q4 2020, then learn and incrementally improve on them over the course of 2021.