In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and John (People Ops) discuss aynchronous working, no meeting days, and the role of face to face meetups.
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Beah: Hello, and welcome to DuckTales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. This is my dog, Friday. He’s appeared in other episodes. So in each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or our approach to AI.
John: Hello.
Beah: In this episode, you will be hearing about our approach to remote work. I’ll quickly introduce myself. I’m Beah. I am on the product team at DuckDuckGo. Then, John, I’ll let you introduce yourself.
John: Thanks, Beah. Yeah, my name’s John. I work on the People Ops team at DuckDuckGo. You can probably hear from my accent. I’m one of the couple of members of the team that’s based in the UK. So my job is predominantly around meetups and a little bit about culture, but predominantly about meetups and how we meet up in person and a little bit virtually as well. So yeah, that’s my role here.
Beah: Great. Yeah, so that is a good segue to jumping right into talking about how we work remotely and how we connect personally given the remote circumstance. So maybe just before we get too deep into the details and what we actually do, can you describe, John, just like what we even mean when we say that we’re a remote company?
John: Yeah. So in very simplistic terms, I would see being a remote company as us not all going to one central place to work. You know, we don’t have a big office building that we all come into either on a semi-regular or, you know, an everyday basis. So that is people probably predominantly working from home, but not necessarily. We have ways and means at DuckDuckGo for people to work, you know, in a co-working space with other people if they need that or if they have circumstances at home where they need to. Essentially, there’s a choice and a trust in where people work. We feel, you know, there’s pros and cons to that, but we feel there’s a, you know, overall a net positive, I think, to that way of working. So that’s the way I would think about it, that we work in that way. And then to facilitate that happening, you know, all companies will have tools to, you know, online digital tools to allow people to collaborate and move their work forward. But we maybe think a bit more or maybe have a few more tools that allow us to collaborate digitally and make sure that we do what we need to do online essentially and digitally.
Beah: Do you know, you might not, but do you know how many people do work from co-working spaces or somewhere social that is not their home?
John: Yeah, not too many in the company. So we offer a financial element for everybody if they want to work in a co-working space. I think we definitely have a handful of people, certainly in our organization, who pretty permanently work in co-working spaces. And that may range from family circumstances or living circumstances, whether it’s just difficult to work from home, through to people that just need that kind of social interaction each day. And that’s what makes them more productive. I think there’s a handful that work fairly permanently from coworking spaces. And then there’s definitely a good chunk of the organization that will treat themselves for a day in a coworking space, maybe once a month or meet up with somebody to work with. But yeah, I’d say that most of our team day to day will work from home, really, have a set up at home. Yeah.
Beah: Yeah. And I guess, I mean, we have, maybe I’m getting ahead of the conversation, but we also have plenty of locations where there’s like clusters of DuckDuckGo people, like a dozen people or five people or just three people, and they will sometimes get together, either like work together or just like grab dinner, grab lunch, right?
John: Yeah. And that’s happening more and more as we, you know, as we get bigger. You know, I had a quick look at our stats before we started this conversation, you know, 10 years ago, we were around 30 people. So, you know, meeting up was much harder. Now, you know, 10 times that amount. You know, for example, I know there’s a meetup happening in Spain. I can’t remember if it’s Barcelona or Madrid, but there’s a meetup happening soon just because we’ve had a lot of new starters start in that region. So somebody thought, well, that would be nice. We can get to our different types of meetups and how we arrange that. But that’s really cool. We’ve had a few people start in Spain and someone’s thought it’d be really nice to meet up in person. So yeah, whether that’s sometimes dinner or just a co-working day, we’re becoming more and more common.
Beah: Okay. I actually am in the midst of planning a family vacation to London and we have a ton of folks there and I am gonna try to plan a meal and see as many people as are willing to come meet me for a meal.
John: Yeah. You see, that’s nice. That says something that you don’t want to have for your holiday and completely not see anybody from work. That’s kind of nice. There will be some people who don’t want to do that. But yeah, that’s really cool. That’s really nice. Yeah, we’ve got a lot of folks in London.
Beah: Yeah. Yeah, I actually like that. It’ll be cool for my family members to meet folks too, because they, especially as we’ve gotten bigger, they know fewer and fewer of the people that I spend my day with, and so I’m excited.
John: Yeah, yeah that’s nice, that’s really cool.
Beah: Okay, all right, I kind of got us a little off track there, but I think that’s okay. So tell me a little bit about like, you know, given that we’re just everywhere in the world, how do we do meetings generally? What kinds of meetings? How do we talk live to each other?
John: Yep, no, don’t worry. Yeah, I mean, taking a step before how we do meetings, I would say we make an effort in some ways not to do meetings if we can, let that go. So another way of thinking of working remotely or as we, it’s a bit of a pretentious term, asynchronous working or async working. I know when I said that to my family, they were like, what? I was like, essentially we work online, but we write a lot of stuff down. That’s the way I would think of async working. We maybe write more stuff down than a lot of other companies would. So I would say we don’t try and avoid meetings for the sake of it. But I would say that if we can, we try to do things async if we can. And even if we do have meetings at DuckDuckGo, we try and do as much prep before that to save as much time in those meetings as well. And I know I found it slightly disconcerting, but also amazing when I joined DuckDuckGo that sometimes we had a meeting in the diary for half an hour and in previous organizations, half an hour wouldn’t have been enough to cover it. But not only that at DuckDuckGo, we finish the meeting sometimes in like nine minutes because there’s been a lot of chat before the meeting and you sometimes feel like, well, this feels a bit too easy, but it’s because that work has been done already and the meeting is just a really important thing for us to align and if there is anything else. You know, we, other people have maybe talked about this on this, we, Wednesdays and Thursdays are non-meeting days for us in terms of standing meetings. You know, we try and keep those, well, we do keep those for deep work. We don’t make exceptions to that rule. So we do use Zoom, you know, for, and we have, and I really like this, we have a number of processes, I guess, whether that’s kicking off a project or post, what we call post-morteming a project where we, I would go so far as to say we mandate, don’t we, getting together in person, we think getting together on Zoom is important to do those meetings. And we don’t make exceptions to that. And that’s what I mean by having sometimes a very quick meeting, we decide what processes require a meeting. So yeah, most of them done through Zoom. I think it’s very rare at DuckDuckGo to have really more than a half hour meeting, isn’t it? For most project kickoffs and post-mortems team meetings, maybe a little bit longer, but even then we pack quite a lot in. So yeah, most of our meetings are done online and we try and keep them as minimal as possible and as useful as possible. Yeah.
Beah: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the way I think about it is like, we, I feel like we try to, you know, reason from first principles about when a meeting is the right venue for something rather than defaulting to meeting. And so there are times when that is absolutely critical. Then there, and there’s times when it’s actually like not the best way to make a decision or come to some conclusion or a hybrid is the best model, like you said, of thinking it through, writing it down ahead of the meeting, meeting to pull out the nuances, do the things that happen really well live. And then also we try to like, you know, we kind of have a principle of like a decision isn’t really made in a meeting. Like a decision can kind of be discovered and cultivated and then we kind of like write it down because there are times when you’re like, you’re caught up in the moment of the meeting and maybe the social dynamics or I don’t know, you’re just, you’re thinking on the spot and then afterwards, you know, in a moment of reflection or writing like, you think, well, maybe that’s actually not the logical answer.
John: Absolutely, yeah. And I think another thing I found about meetings at DuckDuckGo, you know, I’ve been here about three years and this is no slight to any other organization I’ve been at, but it also feels slightly disconcerting not giving really any status updates at meetings. Like we tend to dive straight in because we assume that everyone attending that meeting is aware of the things we’re going to be discussing at that meeting and is relatively prepped for it. We know everybody’s busy, but relatively prepped for it. And as you say, it’s almost like converging on a decision and that can feel slightly strange compared to other organisations where you are sometimes in meetings spending your time getting people up to speed. I don’t think we do that a lot at DuckDuckGo. We tend to all enter a meeting pretty much knowing why we’re there, what our role is in that meeting, why we’re there to discuss what we’re discussing, you know. So that feels great as well. When we do have a meeting, it feels purposeful in that way. Yeah.
Beah: Yeah, I mean, okay, so maybe in contrast to the somewhat throwing shade on like spending too much time in a meeting, there is value in all being together, you know, via Zoom and in person. Let’s talk a little bit about the in person part or a little bit more because we kind of touched on it. But what do we do in terms of getting people together?
John: Yeah. So we, this again, when you are a company that is evolving and growing at the, you know, there’s companies that, you know, will grow people wise a lot quicker than us, I get that. But when you, when you do sort of grow tenfold, that can be, feel quite dynamic in terms of how we do it. So that is still constantly changing and we’re working out what works best for us. As a principle, everybody will meet up in person at DuckDuckGo generally twice a year as a minimum-ish. So our functional teams all have an opportunity to meet up once a year somewhere in the world and they will get together. And then we have an all company get together. Yeah, good point. So we work across objectives. So
Beah: What do you mean when you say functional teams?
John: I know other people have discussed this in this podcast series before, but we work across objectives rather than always in those functional teams, but we do have a home. So we have, for example, a design team, a certain engineering team. You’re in the product team, I’m in the people ops team. So we will have functional meetups once a year with those teams, me and my, there’s nine of us in the people ops team. So we will get together once a year. And then we have an all company meetup, which is again, once a year, we hold them at a cadence where they’re roughly six months apart. So everybody can sort of see somebody, see people in real life every six months at least. So they’re the two main ones that we do. We do co-working meetups as well, which is a lot of fun. So anybody can suggest a co-working meetup. We don’t cover absolutely everything for that, but we give people the opportunity to book office space and hotels, et cetera, to meet up as a co-working meetup.
Beah: Okay.
John: And then aside from that, and this is another thing I really like about DuckDuckGo, we have a high level of trust to then allow people to meet up really in any way they feel is beneficial. And we have checks and balances on that, but most of our objective work is done online and is done not in person, but every now and again, an objective will want to meet up. Somebody will feel it’s important for the, let’s be really honest, every company there will be certain objectives that feel straightforward and there are other objectives where actually getting together in person might iron out some problems or might feel the right thing culturally for that objective. So we do have some objectives that choose to meet in person as well, which is, you know, it’s a big ask of people to do that as well. You know, there’ll be two types of people and then everybody in between around whether flying halfway across the world for work seems really exciting and thrilling. And there will be people that always feel that and people that are absolutely like, oh no, whatever they need to, they’re a home bird or they’ve got family or whatever, or travel’s not their thing. So we want to make sure when we do bring people together, it’s really meaningful and it resonates with people.
Beah: Yeah. Yeah, that’s very much on my mind. In the past couple weeks, I’ve been working with the product team to pick a location for our upcoming meetup. And there’s definitely a lot of people who are torn between wanting to go somewhere exciting and new, but also do I actually want to arrive at this thing coming off a red eye with however many hours on a plane versus a more convenient location that’s maybe a little bit less exciting. So tell me a little bit about like how we generally outside of that anecdote pick locations and dates for these in-person events or meetups.
John: Yeah, the dates is relatively simple. We have a, as I say, a cadence of, we try, it’s pretty flexible, but we try and have a six month cadence between those functional meetups and the all company meetup, which just feels a nice balance. So our functional teams, we try and get them together sort of March, April, May time. And then we do our all company meetup roughly six months later. And we do that, you know, September, October, November kind of time, roughly. Sure.
Beah: Can I interject a detail about the timing of the meetups? So we used to just say, basically pick it. Well, several years ago, we were just like, it’s all on you, functional team. Just do what you want to do in terms of dates. Then we kind of said, try to do it in the spring, that sort of April-ish timeline. And then, and now, I think maybe this year or last year for the first time, we’re like, try to do it in one of these three weeks. And the idea there, I think we’re still, it’s like, you can tell me if I’m wrong, but still open to evolving that model. It’s a little bit tricky when you have two months where there’s always one or two teams missing at a time, so consolidating that. But we also don’t want to force teams to pick a single week that might not work for that team, and so trying to find the right balance there.
John: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. What you’ve just said there, I think could be applied to so much stuff at a company like ours that has gone from 30 people to close to 400 people, where you want to keep that magic. You don’t want to become a really processy policy based company. That’s not what we want, but you’re absolutely right. As teams get bigger, we just need a few more guardrails on it and a bit more guidance. That’s what we’ve tried to do over the last couple of years. So you’re absolutely right. With this year, is the first year we picked like three core weeks where we said to teams, if you can go away during those three weeks, brilliant. If you can’t, the main goal is to get people together. So there’s no point going away as a team of 15 people, if only three of you can make one of those weeks, you know, so we will. And that seems to have worked pretty well this year, sorry, there’s one week where we’ve got, you know, close to half of the organization out for a week, which sounds odd, but it means we can kind of shut down for a whole week. And everybody’s aware of that and then start fresh the week after.
Beah: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right, maybe not shut down if half the company’s available. I do, I do, yeah. Yeah, you rip the bandaid off basically. And I should clarify, at these functional team meetups, the agenda, it’s not work as usual. I think everybody’s using their best judgment and if there’s something that is time sensitive, sure, they might be progressing something or unblocking something, but like the majority of the agenda is about like taking advantage of being together in the room and working through things outside of the normal flow of work.
John: No, shut down, clearly. Yeah, but you know what I mean. You can put it into your project planning. Exactly. Yeah. Absolutely, yeah. So it’s not work in its traditional sense. Every team will do what’s right for them, but I think we all work in a similar way, this is how we guide teams to do it. So if I look at my own meetup with my team, we didn’t sit down and do core people-based work, but we did some sessions where we had some special guests and other teams kind of sign in on Zoom while we were all together in the room and we had little chats with other people at DuckDuckGo about AI, for example, and we had someone from the data science team talk to us about evaluation methods, because that’s something we do a lot of. So we will absolutely have some work based chats and we did some personality stuff, which was kind of fun. Yeah, the rest of the time is just hanging out and it’s pretty unstructured hanging out. We do give some guidance on what kind of works well for teams, especially bigger teams. It probably goes without saying with our company, but we’re not, you know, unless the team wants to, we’re not going to a riverbank and building a raft. It’s not, and doing trust falls. It’s not that kind of, that’s not what our meetups are about. We want people to just organically hang out. So, you know, we do do activities. Actually that does sound all right. That does. It’s yeah, but we definitely want the teams to have the choice of what they do essentially and what works well for them. So.
Beah: Going to a riverbank and building a raft sounds great. But okay, that’s just me. That’s just me. Yeah. Yeah.
John: So yeah, so that’s the content on them. And go back to your original question. Sorry, go on, go on.
Beah: And, and no, well, so in terms of like the whole company meetups, I think kind of the same principles apply, right? Like we are, it’s not like, it’s not trust falls unless you really want to do trust falls in which case you can do trust falls. You and I are definitely doing trust falls. I feel like this whole conversation is a trust fall. And it’s not, but it’s also not really like decision-making work, right? I mean, I’m thinking now about the whole company meetup. We’re not coming together in the annual, it’s not like an annual meeting of business where we’re trying to resolve things. I mean, you talked about just relationship building is a big part of it, getting to know each other. And then I think, but you tell me how you think of it. It’s like the other big component is kind of basically learning, like context building and learning from each other. No, you tell me the correct answer.
John: No. Exactly that. No, exactly that. There’s probably a main aim for it and then some sub aims that we have for it and objectives. The main aim is, our chief exec Gabriel will talk about this when he stands up at the start of the meeting, it’s to hang out. It’s to spend some time together. And if you look at it in business terms or psychology terms, that’s about trust building, that’s about collaboration. But essentially it’s hanging out. It’s getting to know people face to face. And we really evaluate our meetups, but there’s a certain amount of sort of unmeasurable magic that comes with that, that just feels nice about being at those meetups. So yeah, we do some work sessions in the morning. As you say, explore each other’s work that we’re doing. We do some pretty informal sessions, presentations, and a lot of the time when I say presentations, it may be just a couple of slides and then a chat about an objective and people can go and learn about what everybody else is working on.
Beah: Okay.
John: Even those can feel pretty chill. And I can tell we do them in a chill way when I go and speak to the venues. You know, we might book out seven rooms at a venue and we’ll have concurrent sessions going on. And the venues obviously work with companies where they’re very, how many chairs do you need in this room? And what do you want us to do with the empty chairs? And is everybody mic’d up? And do you want us to, and it’s like, it’s just cool. If the mic doesn’t work, we’ll all just have a chat. And if there’s not enough seats, I’ve seen people sitting on the floor and that’s not ideal, but it’s fine. We’ll be all right. We’ll be cool. So even that has a chilled feel. And then, yeah, we spend the rest of the time at our all company meetups doing fun stuff really. And go back to the point of, none of that is mandated. So if you’re somebody that finds it a lot and it is a lot coming away for a week and being with 300 colleagues suddenly, it’s a weird thing. It’s a lovely thing, but it’s a weird thing and it can be tiring. So we don’t mandate anybody doing anything really. We want everybody to come along to the work sessions because that’s a really nice opportunity to hear about what the organization is doing. So that’s as close as we get to mandating something. But in the afternoon, and this is what I love about DuckDuckGo, it’s a lot of self-run things that people at DuckDuckGo are passionate about. So we’ve got a lot of people that are passionate about board games. So I don’t arrange any of that. I literally find a space and someone at DuckDuckGo will set up a board game room. You know, we have a chess tournament, we have art classes, we’ve had writing classes in the past, we do a lot of sporty stuff. You know, people that are passionate about basketball or softball, actually people that aren’t passionate about those will go along and just hang out and have fun at those. So yeah, it’s a very chill environment, a very, and that seems to work. It seems really nice. Yeah.
Beah: Yeah, I love personally that I do all the sporting stuff even though I’m not a very skilled athlete. I would say I’m passionate but not skilled. Like the only time I play basketball, soccer slash football, softball is once a year at the company meetup. But I love it and it’s so cool because like I actually, I didn’t play, this was the first year that I played soccer slash football. And I’ve never in my life been a soccer player. And there’s people at DuckDuckGo who have played borderline professional football in Europe. Like, people who have actually played on teams where people are getting paid to play really well. And then there’s me who did not even play in a kids league in the US. And somehow it is just magical to like see how the teams come together and just the level of camaraderie and respect and everybody kind of meeting each other where they’re at. I was genuinely a little nervous that it was going to be like, that I was going to be, yeah, or that people would kind of feel like it would be annoying to have me on the team. Like, well, maybe it was, but nobody acted like it was. So I had a great time. I had a great time. Yeah.
John: Yeah, super competitive and... I didn’t hear anybody saying that. There wasn’t any, yeah, it’s cool. I think for people, you know, there might be a lot of people listening to this going, how cool does that sound like going away? And there is, I always think my job is one of the most fun jobs in the world. Like I’ve got such a cool job. I get to go out and sort all these fun events. You know, I’m not sorting an Uber like to the minute work event where I’m very stressed about this person coming on stage at the right time. So we’ve not got that, which is lovely for me. And then the stuff I do arrange is things like, yeah, I’ll book a softball field for people. And it’s such a lovely job to be able to do that. But I do always say to people, like, if I was doing that for entitled people, my job would pretty soon be terrible. Like if I had a bunch of entitled people turn up, because, you know, things go wrong at these things, or, you know, people are tired from travel and that’s for me, what is lovely about our meetups. It’s full of people doing lovely stuff for the other people at DuckDuckGo. Like if they’ve got a passion, as I say, like, you know, I’ll get a ping, hey John, I’m really passionate about this role playing game that we do. Could we do it in the meetup? Of course, yeah, that’d be great. So it’s self-organized and you just get happy people doing fun stuff and it’s lovely. Yeah, a bunch of unentitled people just enjoying themselves. It’s nice, yeah.
Beah: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I know now we’re just in the realm of like, we’re so great. Such a lovely group. Tell me like, before we wrap this up, I think this podcast has gone longer than most because I mean, really, what were they thinking when they put the two of us in a room? Were they thinking that it was going to be 12 minutes?
John: It’s so nice. Yeah, it’s so lovely. Yeah, sorry, that’s me. I know and it’s fun to talk about travel rather than, you know, email security or whatever, it’s a lot of fun of course but I’m just saying yeah sorry cool.
Beah: Yeah, it is fun. So tell me though, are there any like, is there like a magical meetup moment that we haven’t already mentioned that you want to cite?
John: I guess I’m so cliché, but I think most of the magical moments are kind of the smaller ones really. You know, from people doing events, like I, I’m normally running around doing stuff, but the year before last, I did get to play like soccer and stuff. So I agree with you. Like that sort of stuff is kind of feels fairly magical for me. It’s like the smaller stuff. So, you know, when I, to sound like a proud parent or something. When I wander through the hallway and you maybe see, I don’t know, our CTO who’s been here since almost day one sitting with a new starter who’s been here a month from marketing and then maybe an engineer in that team and you see them all just having a coffee together. That’s kind of a magical moment because that doesn’t, we do engineer that to happen a bit virtually but they still, I don’t care what anyone says, there’s still that slight cringey, slightly awkward thing about virtual socializing. There is, isn’t there? We remember it like during COVID. Like it was fun and we had to do it and we did Zoom calls with the family and stuff, but it never feels quite as organic as like real life. That for me always makes me smile at the meetups when you see a group of unexpected people together doing things. That feels like a sort of a magical moment. I guess for me as well, I would say like we’ve evolved it the last couple of years, but our welcome session always feels really magical. You know, this year was the first time we did that in the evening. And it was a bit of a celebratory thing. So I know you were on stage sort of talking about product stuff and we had a number of people that felt really cool in terms of a celebratory element of where we’d got to over the year and an update of where we were at. But still a good laugh, you know, and people really, you know, getting involved with it with the vibe of it and stuff. So, yeah, I would say those are the magical moments. I guess if people are like hearing that and going, he sounds a bit corporate saying that. I’ll be really honest, like, we’ve stayed in some like beautiful properties as well, like not necessarily like really posh, but like in beautiful places. So you do, I’m sure the vast majority of people who work here, sometimes when they’re getting a coach in the airport and it sort of takes that last turn and you’ve got like a mountain range, for example, and like this old hotel that you know is all of ours and there’s a lake and it’s like, wow. So that I think for a lot of team members that feels a bit of a pinch me kind of magical moment I think that always feels nice yeah.
Beah: Yeah. Awesome. All right. Well, I think we’ve officially deeply exceeded the time limit. So I think we should wrap John. Yeah. I think so. I think people, I think people would listen to that.
John: Yeah. Okay, let’s do that. We’ll do like a three hour, we can do a three hour version, the two of us. Yeah, like we can do a long form. For our subscribers, that’s what podcasts do, isn’t it? We have a short, okay, as long as we get him or her as an audience. Yeah, that’d be great. Yeah, no. Thanks, Beah. It’s been fun. Yeah, cool. Yeah, you too. Thank you. Cheers.
Beah: My dog would. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you so much. It was nice. Yeah, nice chatting. All right. Later.
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