Remote Buddy

Another critical tool for remote success is using a 'culture buddy,' a peer who can help you learn more about the history of a company as well as ease the teammate into the company. Related article: for tips on tools to help you manage a remote team, check out our article Top 20 Tools to Empower Your Workforce. Select an onboarding buddy or mentor. Starting a new job, while exciting, can also be intimidating, particularly when onboarding and working with a remote team. Build a remote buddy system Onboarding is a time for asking as many questions as possible so new hires can get to know the company and codebase quickly. When co-located, you have the benefit of being surrounded by people available to answer questions, but when you’re remote, a lot of the social and environmental cues that help you decide who. If I could give this 10 stars I would. I lost my original remote somewhere in this house. Directv is ridiculously expensive to replace. I took a chance and ordered this remote but did not expect it to work. But whoooa Buddy to my surprise the thing darn near set it self up.

When I first joined a company as a developer, I felt like the biggest imposter in the world. I didn’t know what version control was, let alone what a server was or how to run code on one. I spent my nights furiously googling, terrified that I would disappoint everyone by not being a fully productive team member from day one. Since then, I’ve been on a mission to help create a positive and smooth onboarding process for as many people as I can—whether it’s their first day at a new company, or their first day as an engineer.

Fast-forward nearly a decade: Today, I’m an engineering manager at Fellow, where I designed the engineering organization’s onboarding process, and I’ve helped teams at other companies create their own, too. I’ve written before about the basics you need in onboarding (think: goals, 1:1s, and feedback loops, among other things), and I want to show you how you can build upon that foundation and make the experience great for remote engineers so they can have a strong start on their new team.

Remote Buddy App

Successful onboarding isn’t about learning the codebase at light speed or pushing out new features as quickly as possible; it’s about building a foundation of relationships and psychological safety that allows your team to feel comfortable asking questions and requesting feedback so they can grow. This isn’t easy! You need to take explicit steps to foster this culture, which is hard in person and can be especially challenging when teams are remote.

Keeping that in mind, I’ve put together some strategies based on what we do at Fellow to kick-start your onboarding and help create a solid foundation for your team.

Start with thoughtful basics

Logistically, seamless remote onboarding requires thorough prep work up front so new team members are ready to work remotely right away. Along with making sure any required hardware (preinstalled with necessary software) arrives before their first day, work with new hires in advance of their start date to create a first-day (or first-week) schedule. This step is key to preventing any surprises when your new hire gets access to their new corporate calendar, and allows them to make sure personal considerations (e.g., childcare) are accounted for as they plan their workday. Sending those first-week calendar invitations to both their corporate and personal emails—or, if sending to the latter creates logistic challenges, sending the schedule itself to their personal email—will allow them time to prepare.

Joining a new team brings on a whirlwind of emotions and an overwhelming amount of information—and, combined, that’s pretty stressful. To ease the anxiety and information overload, provide new hires with a templated document that outlines the “how-to” of the team (including elements such as links to documentation, code repositories, monitoring and logging tools, and the names of the members), and a company readme with references to company handbooks or official policy documents. You should also give them a personalized checklist of clear and actionable goals for the first one, seven, 30, 60, and 90 days, so your new hire can better understand what’s expected of them, how they’re progressing, and what their early-days work is building up to.

Whatever onboarding process you create, keep in mind that feedback is a gift. Asking for feedback at the end of your remote new hire’s first week to learn what went well, what could have gone better, and what information they felt was missing is a great way to make sure that the process is continuously improving, and that you can support your team member in getting what they need from the outset. Your processes might go through dozens of subtle or even substantial iterations: There’s always something good that could be great, a company might evolve between iterations, or someone’s learning style might lend itself to new ways to present information. When possible, you might even encourage new hires to update the process themselves as they go through it: You’ll demonstrate trust and a collaborative spirit, and they’ll have an opportunity to make a meaningful impact on the team experience from day one.

Create a content list

When you join a new in-office team you usually have the opportunity to meet people at lunch, over coffee, and through spontaneous hallway conversations. Remotely, those interactions have to be initiated deliberately. What’s more, it’s easier to set up virtual coffee chats or team lunch-and-learns than it is to move the conversation beyond awkward small talk. Instead of relying on icebreakers and dreaded silence, set the team up to have real conversations right away by establishing a baseline pool of topics that everyone can discuss. One format I particularly like is a multimedia content “playlist” that the team curates together—a compilation of anything safe for work which showcases the unique personalities and interests of team members. Perhaps folks will add favorite background music for focus time, links to podcast episodes, books, blog posts, pet pictures, descriptions of their remote work setups, and so on. Sharing this in advance helps to break the ice, providing new team members a window into what others on the team are interested in or care about.

Make it fun

Onboarding isn’t just a one-week thing—it’s a process for the long haul, and it can take months before someone develops a sense of belonging at their new company. When teams are co-located, connections are built by virtue of proximity and the ability to easily strike up or join conversations. Remotely, those same interactions can be challenging because of differences in communication: Writing often takes longer than talking, and starting a call with someone can feel like an intrusion into their work time. At Fellow, we replicate some of these nonwork conversations and continuously get to know each other by participating in a “Friday Funday” Slack thread. Every week we answer questions like, “What is the most unbelievable fact about you?” with pictures. It’s an inclusive way to continue to get to know each other, while getting familiar with little ways a company’s culture and values manifest. And because it’s asynchronous, it doesn’t rely on everyone being available at the same time.

Struggle together

Even if you’ve established a healthy culture of psychological safety, remote new hires may not implicitly feel it right away. They won’t be a witness to their infallible veteran colleagues frantically debugging issues and coming to the realization that the issue was something small and obvious. Those day-to-day difficulties need to be visible so that new team members build confidence that it’s safe to ask questions and make mistakes (even if they’ve spent an hour trying to figure out why nothing works after forgetting a semicolon).

To bridge this gap, I recommend pair programming’s frustrating (yet productive) counterpart: pair struggling, in which remote new hires shadow experienced teammates, watching them debug issues and navigate challenges. By seeing which tools, services, dashboards, and channels are monitored and searched, new hires can gain helpful insights into the things they’ll need to do their jobs successfully, even as they observe that developers who have been working on the company’s codebase for a long time still have trouble sometimes. This helps build trust that the team has an atmosphere where it’s okay to fail, to not have all the answers, and to ask questions that may appear too “basic.”

Establish trust from afar

Creating mutual trust between teammates early on is critical to maintaining a productive and healthy team. Without trust, team members are less likely to share feedback with each other, may speak up less often about issues or new ideas, and may avoid solving problems collaboratively. Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, has described how the company actively assesses the “trust battery” between team members, and how this container of trust only starts off half full. Instead of waiting for mission-critical projects to bring up the trust level when someone joins a team, I like to find other ways to build trust while showing new members the team is invested in their success.

For example, recently, a new remote engineer on my team was relocating from Brazil to Canada. He had a list of potential apartments to rent in Ottawa, but he didn’t know the city and wasn’t sure which spot would be the best fit. Instead of leaving his housing situation to chance, the Ottawa-based members of Fellow joined a #welcome-to-the-city Slack channel where our new teammate posted real estate listings and we shared our local knowledge to help him find a place he’d love. The sense of collective outreach gave everyone a stronger feeling of belonging. Establishing conventions that promote camaraderie and trust supports the workflow, too, by allowing team members to feel more comfortable with each other, and ultimately more comfortable asking questions and making mistakes.

Celebrate early accomplishments

Recognizing people for their work is always important, but at the start of a new job, it can give a sizable confidence boost that helps push past that first wave of imposter syndrome. When someone joins my team remotely and I see that the first ticket they’ve picked up is marked as “in progress,” I keep a close eye on recent pull requests to make sure that I notice theirs as soon as it’s created. When it pops up, I like to congratulate them in the team Slack channel with as many :tada:-style emojis as I can find. Creating a culture on the team where everyone celebrates each other’s wins, big and small, brings teammates closer together, and shows people that they are valued from day one.

Be mindful, though—as Lara Hogan points out in her article “Questions for Our First 1:1,” not everyone enjoys public praise. If you know this about your team member, sending a personal e-card is a fun but discreet substitute.

At Fellow, my team’s weekly meeting agenda includes a section dedicated to showing work in progress so that everyone is aware of what’s going on and to promote a culture of seeking feedback from peers early and often. After I’ve recognized a new hire’s work, I invite them to share it during this period, even if a change is minimal. For those comfortable with it, it’s a chance to showcase what they’ve done early on and reinforces that the team cares about their work and impact.

Build a remote buddy system

Onboarding is a time for asking as many questions as possible so new hires can get to know the company and codebase quickly. When co-located, you have the benefit of being surrounded by people available to answer questions, but when you’re remote, a lot of the social and environmental cues that help you decide who to go to with questions are gone. It can be intimidating to message someone (with whom you may never have interacted individually) out of the blue and await their answer, wondering whether they’re taking 10 minutes to respond because they’re out for a walk or because they’re annoyed and ignoring you.

Pairing new members with a buddy on the team (preferably one whose working hours line up with theirs) makes the process of figuring out who to go to with questions easier. While you might be tempted to assign the most senior developer on the team to be a buddy, assuming they’ll be more likely to have all the answers, I find that early-career and recently joined team members make particularly helpful buddies: They often have their own onboarding experience top of mind, which provides an important perspective when answering questions and filling in information gaps. Plus, helping others learn the ropes reinforces their own knowledge of the code and the team’s processes. Similar to getting recognition for that first pull request, spending time helping others grow in the early days of a new role reinforces the buddy’s notion of their impact on the team.

Outside of technical know-how, buddies play an essential role in helping new hires understand communication expectations, company social norms, and team dynamics. Ask them to help facilitate introductions to cross-functional teams, give the lowdown on Zoom etiquette, and invite their new-hire partner to social and community Slack channels that connect them to others with similar interests.

Be principled

As you build purposeful solutions to tackle the challenges of remote onboarding, remember that the core of high-performing teams is trust, psychological safety, and collaboration. Wherever your team is working from, you can make these principles part of your team’s experience from day one.

Last Updated: Nov 2nd, 2020

Remote Buddy Inc. (“Remote Buddy”) takes your privacy very seriously. We have created this Privacy Policy (“Privacy Policy”) to outline how we collect, use and disclose Personal Data from Users of our website and web-application (the “Platform”), located at https://remotebuddy.io (“Site”) and our User App (the “App”) and the related services described in our Terms of Use (collectively, the “Services”).

Please review the following text to understand our protocol with regards to Personal Data and how we treat it. By visiting https://remotebuddy.io or installing our App, you are providing your acceptance and consent to practices outlined here.

Background Information

When we refer to “Users”, we are referring to both individual users (“Individual Users”) and Organizational users that hold an Account on the Site or have installed the App. The Services allow Users the opportunity to participate in daily chats with our chatbot, watch and rate web content, and send feedback to the organization they work for. In some cases, the user can choose to take part in exercises or activities suggested or facilitated by the chatbot. In the event that an Organization purchases a subscription to the Services, they will have access to aggregate reporting relating to usage of the Services by Users and other related analytics associated with their Organization. By default, Organizations will not have access to the author information of Chatbot Responses orFeedback messages unless allowed by the author. If an Organization’s policies require access to this data, then Remote Buddy will comply. It is your responsibility to read and understand your Organization’s internal privacy policies.

Definitions

Terms utilized in this Privacy Policy have meanings as defined below:

“Author” refers to the individual user who has written and submitted content through the chatbot and/or feedback section of the App.
“Chatbot Responses” refers to any content written in relation to interactions that Users have with the Remote Buddy user app chatbot.
“Feedback Messages” include the related messages that are exchanged by Users in the process of requesting or giving feedback.
“Organization” refers to the entity that entered into a subscription agreement with Remote Buddy and that you provided to us when you created an Account with Remote Buddy (or that we otherwise retrieve during the signup process). The Organization will generally be your employer, or a subsection of your employer (i.e. department).
“Personal Data” means data about a living individual who can be identified from those data (or from those and other information either in our possession or likely to come into our possession), and any information about the individual associated with that information.
“Work Network” is the group of employees, contractors or other authorized Users at your Organization.

Contacting Remote Buddy

If you have questions or concerns about what is described here in our Privacy Policy or you have other communications including the reporting of violations that should be brought to our attention, you may contact us below:

Remote Buddy Inc.

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To: Privacy Department

120 Adelaide St W Suite 803, Toronto, ON M5H 1T1

Children under 13

Remote Buddy does not knowingly offer its Services to children who are under 13 years of age. If we become aware of usage of its services by individuals in this age group, we will attempt to delete all related information immediately. If you have any information related to such usage, please report it to us at privacy@remotebuddy.io

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance

For residents of the European Economic Area, Remote Buddy generally processes Personal Data in order to fulfill contracts we have with the Organizations that are our customers and Users, as well as to pursue our legitimate business interests as set out in this Privacy Policy. Otherwise, Remote Buddy will obtain consent from an Individual User in respect of processing of Personal Data.

When we process data on behalf of Organizations under an agreement with that Organization, Remote Buddy is acting as the “data processor” and the Organization is the “data controller”.

Residents of the European Economic Area (“EEA”) have certain data protection rights under applicable laws (including under the GDPR), including the right to request access to, obtain, correct, amend, delete, or limit the use of your personal data. Individual Users who wish to exercise these rights, should contact Remote Buddy using the contact information. In circumstances where Remote Buddy is a data processor and the Organization is the data controller, Individuals may be required to contact the Organization to avail themselves of such rights.

Information collected from Users will be processed by us and some of our affiliate services and service providers (“Sub-Processors”). A list of our current Sub-Processors is available here. We will take reasonably necessary steps, including contractual measures and other legal requirements, to ensure that your Personal Data is dealt with the same level of caution and care as described in this Privacy Policy.

Data transferred from the European Economic Area to Remote Buddy or a Sub-Processor shall be in accordance with approved international transfer mechanisms under applicable law.

Security

We take security seriously and have the necessary measures in place to protect and secure your data. No security system is perfect though and for this reason while we cannot guarantee the impenetrability of our systems, we do treat the protection of your data and security with the highest priority.

Types of Data We Collect

When using our Services, we collect information from you – some of which is considered “Personal Data” and can be used to identify you and some of which is “Anonymous Data” which is not linked in any identifiable individual. In the following sections, we will outline the details of what we collect and how:

Information You Provide

When you sign up or your Organization signs you up, we create an account for you on our servers (“Account”) to access our Services. We will store information such as your first name, last name, job title, department and email address.

Remote Buddy’s primary objective is to help you increase your well-being while at work through the logging of chatbot discussions, feedback, goals/priorities and more. Remote Buddy also offers smart suggestions on what actions you may want to take in order to optimize your well-being (for example, “you should consider going for a walk outdoors”). In order to provide such suggestions, we rely on insights provided by the author.

In order to offer these Services, we require access to the following information:

Chatbot Responses and Feedback provided by you, the author.
Calendar (applicable if you connect your calendar): We access data about the events that you participate in such as organizer, title, attendees and optional attendees (names and emails), date, time, duration, calendar resources (meeting rooms) and recurrence of events.

Once you sign up, we may ask you more information including your job title, department, who your manager is and whether you have a 1 on 1 with this manager and which calendar event this corresponds to. We also provide the opportunity for you to invite other individuals into the platform (in order to invite others, we may will ask you for some further information about those Users including their name, email address and organizational relationship with you).

The main interactions with Remote Buddy will be both through the App and on our Platform. Users on the system will be able to participate in daily chats with our chatbot, watch and rate web content, and send feedback to the organization they work for. In some cases, the user can choose to take part in exercises or activities suggested or facilitated by the chatbot. The content created by these Users will be stored and accessible through the Services. This information is by default only accessible to Users who were part of the interactions and is only accessible by managers of the company in an anonymized format on the Organization’s dashboard (unless those that were part of the feedback interactions explicitly share such feedback with others such as managers). Metadata about the interactions (such as stats on usage) will be available to managers. The only exception to this rule will be if the policies of the Organization require us to share this information upon request from the Organization.

Information Collected through Systems

Servers

Our servers (hosted by Microsoft Azure) collect information including the type of browser and O/S you use, your IP Address, domain name and the timing / duration of your visit to our Site. This information is collected to make our Services more useful to you.

Logs

We record some information from your interactions with our Services automatically in our logs. This data includes IP addresses, browser type, Internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, operating system, date/time stamp, and clickstream data. This information is used to analyze trends and usage patterns all in an effort to better tailor our Services to your needs.

Remote Buddy and its partners use cookies or similar technologies to analyze trends, administer the website, track Users’ movements around the website, and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole.

We use “cookies” to help you personalize your online experience. A cookie is a text file that is placed on your hard disk by a Web server. Cookies are not used to run programs or deliver viruses to your computer. Cookies are uniquely assigned to you, and can only be read by a Web server in the domain that issued the cookie to you. One of the primary purposes of cookies is to provide a convenience feature to save you time. The purpose of a cookie is to tell the Web server that you have returned to a specific page. For example, if you personalize pages on our Websites, or register for the Services, a cookie helps us to recall your specific information on subsequent visits. When you return to the same Website, the information you previously provided can be retrieved, so you can easily use the customized features.

You have the ability to accept or decline cookies. Most Web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser setting to decline cookies if you prefer. If you choose to decline cookies, you may not be able to fully experience the interactive features of the Remote Buddy Services when you visit. Remote Buddy keeps track of the pages you visit within Remote Buddy, in order to determine what portion of the Remote Buddy Services is the most popular or most used. This data is used to deliver customized content and promotions within the Remote Buddy Services to customers whose behaviour indicates that they are interested in a particular subject area.

Analytics Software

We use some analytics services from third party vendors such as Google Analytics in order to analyze usage of our Services. These services utilize information that they retrieve from cookies on our Web Application or other information that we send them directly to provide us with aggregated analytics that we can use to perform our analysis. These analytics services will have their own privacy policies and terms of use. By using our Services, you are agreeing to the processing of this data by such analytics services.

Information Collected from Others

By connecting to Calendar as mentioned earlier in this document, we will be able to determine things like who works with whom with your organization so as to offer you smart suggestions on how to improve your working relationships.

Information Collected from Your Organization

If your Organization becomes a customer of ours, we will create accounts for your usage of our Services. We may obtain from your Organization information about you such as your name, email address, title, department and reporting relationships.

Prospective Customers

We collect names, email addresses and other business contact information about individuals who represent our customers as well as individuals who we consider to be prospective customers and business partners (“Prospects”). We use the information to contact Prospects with information about Remote Buddy products and services.

Use of Your Personal Data

General Use

In general, we use the Personal Data we have about you to offer you a more tailored experience and to respond to any requests you send us in a more comprehensive fashion. We use this data in the following ways:

Allow for the creation of your account.
Identify you on our system and keep track of the Work Network you are involved in.
Improve the Services that we offer you and provide a more tailored experience.
Respond to the requests that you send us.
Send you messages (via the chatbot and Email and our Web Application) that relate to your usage of our system or security and administrative messages.
Send you smart suggestions and feedback received from others in your Work Network.
Send you communication request for the purpose of improving our Services (i.e. request for phone call, completion of a survey).
Send marketing related messages to our Services with your consent (from which you will be able to unsubscribe).
To Send you other notifications that relate to your usage of the system (for example, the fact that you have some pending feedback requests or if you have some unviewed feedback).

Anonymous Data

We use anonymized data retrieved from our database (i.e. where personally identifiable information has been obfuscated) in order to create analytics that will help us surmise how to improve our Service. Some of the reports created with this anonymized data may be share with your Organization so that they can understand the overall usage of our product by their employees/constituents.

Disclosure of Personal Information

Disclosures of your Personal Data are described as below:

Designated 3rd Parties

We will share your Personal Data with parties that you have already consented to share information with such as your Organization and those in your Work Network. For example, feedback that you exchange with other Users in your Work Network will be viewed by them.

Third Party Service Providers

We use a set of third parties as part of our system in order to offer you the Services that we do. Examples include analytics services (as described previously) and email service providers. Service Providers who process Personal Data on our behalf are considered Sub-Processors.

Disclosure to Organization

In the event that your Organization becomes a customer of our Services, we will share information about your account related to usage statistics (such as number of feedback exchanges and with whom these exchanges happened) but will not share the author of the content of the feedback exchanged unless the author has elected to do so through the use of the Anonymity On/Off toggle at the time of submission of feedback content. Your organization may have specific policies in place regarding how Personal Data is shared to which we will have to comply.

Business Transfers

If our business (or substantially all of our assets) are acquired by a third party, or if we go out of business, enter bankruptcy, or go through some other change of control, Personal Data may be made available or otherwise transferred to the new controlling entity, where permitted under applicable law.

Other

In certain situations, we may receive a demand to disclose Personal Data in response to lawful requests by public authorities, including to meet national security or law enforcement requirements. Remote Buddy may disclose your Personal Data (a) to any governmental authority as part of an investigation to determine our compliance with any applicable law, rule, or regulation (including privacy laws, rules, and regulations), (b) in response to a court order, subpoena, discovery request, or other lawful judicial or administrative proceeding, (c) as otherwise required under any applicable law, rule, or regulation, and (d) in good faith, to defend the rights or property of Remote Buddy and other Users and (e) if Remote Buddy is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of all or a portion of its assets, you will be notified via email and/or a prominent notice on our Web site of any change in ownership or uses of your Personal Data, as well as any choices you may have regarding your Personal Data.

Third Party Websites

Our Websites sometimes provide links to other websites. We do not control, and are not responsible for, the content or practices of these other websites. Our provision of such links does not constitute our endorsement of these other websites, their content, their owners, or their practices. This Privacy Policy does not apply to these other websites, which are subject to any privacy and other policies they may have.

Sensitive Personal Data

Remote Buddy 2

If you provide us with sensitive information in the course of interacting with the system, we will only use sensitive information for the purpose of storing and processing it as part of our Services. Sensitive information may include information about you such as racial or ethnic origin, religious beliefs, political affiliation, sexual preferences and criminal records, as well as health and genetic information about you. If you do not consent to the processing and storing of your sensitive information, it is therefore important that it not be submitted to us in the course of your usage.

Options Considering Personal Data

We describe some of the changes and options available to you on Personal Data below:

Email Communications

You may unsubscribe from our marketing communications by clicking on the “unsubscribe” link located on the bottom of our e-mails, or by sending us email us at privacy@remotebuddy.io. Customers cannot opt out of receiving transactional emails related to their account with us or the Services.

In order to unsubscribe from account related communications, you must contact the administrator of your Organization.

If you do not want to accept Cookies from our site, you may change your browser settings to not accept cookies. If you do not accept these cookies, you may not be able to use our Site and Services to the fullest extent.

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Access, Modification or Deletion of Your Data

You may contact us at privacy@remotebuddy.io in order to request a copy, change or delete any Personal Data that we have on file for your Account. Please note that feedback exchanged cannot be deleted as it involves more than one party. As an Organizational customer, you may request the deletion of your entire Account (and all individual Users within that account). We will delete this information within 15 days of your request. Your information may stay on our backup servers for up to an additional 30 days but will no longer be present thereafter.

Residents of the European Economic Area (“EEA”) have additional data protection rights under applicable laws (including under the General Data Protection Regulation), including the right to request access to, obtain, correct, amend, delete, or limit the use of your personal data. Individual Users who wish to exercise these rights, should contact Remote Buddy using the contact information. In circumstances where Remote Buddy is a data processor and the Organization is the data controller, Individuals may be required to contact the Organization to avail themselves of such rights.

Retention

We retain Personal Data that you provide us as long as we consider it necessary for the purpose it was collected, or as needed to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes and enforce our agreements, and then we securely delete the information. We will delete this information from the servers at an earlier date if you so request, as described above. If a customer terminates its use of the Services, we will, unless legally prohibited, delete all customer information, including your Personal Data, from the Services.

Periodic Updates to Privacy Policy

We periodically update this Privacy Policy. In the event of an update, we will post the new policy at https://remotebuddy.io/privacy and update the “Last Updated” date above. Please check this page regularly for updates.