We won’t hire you.

Culture

Mar 7

If you need an office. Our remote culture explained. Over the years, we have fine-tuned our own Panaxeo remote setup and feel like it works. So that everyone knows what they are getting into, we have sat down with our team leaders and wrote it all neatly down.

What comes to mind when you hear about a “hybrid-remote setup”? 3 workdays forced in an office and 2 gracious home-office days per week? We don’t want that.

Put simply, a Panaxean works remotely. If we want to come to an office, we can . Full-time, if we’d like to, twice a week, once a week, just enough time every day to fetch the kids from school, whatever.

The point is, it’s up to each of us individually. The offices are there to help, not to imprison.

There are drawbacks.

We believe that heathy relationships are key to forming efficient teams. Fully remote work, however, makes them quite difficult to grow and maintain. Purely because there is no space for a cup of coffee with your coding buddies.

Here are 5 ways we solve that issue:

01.
We are extremely open during hiring and onboarding.

Expectations should align. Every candidate knows that their work will be mostly done remotely –that there might not be as much personal contact. An office person, for example, would not be happy around here. We’ve got some offices, yes, but they are sometimes empty, since many of us are 100% remote. It’s good to keep that in mind.

On the other hand, we strive to be open about the company, the people they will come into contact with, their work, and much more. Nobody is left in the dark, all questions are valid.

02.
We consciously focus on building and fostering relationships.

This is something our team leaders take very seriously. They make conscious effort not just to get to know their team members during 1-on-1s, but also to find and leverage anything that would help engineers form bonds amongst each other.

“Since there’s often no way for this to happen organically in person, it’s important for me to be consciously open during any synchs and standups.” — Adam Horváth, Scrum Master

03.
Feedback is king.

We ask for it often and we give it back too. It’s the only way for us to know whether the environment we’re creating actually works. It also helps us grow and learn more about the impact our work is having.

“In a remote setting, it’s hard to use body language. A large communication tool is suddenly not at your disposal. Therefore, it’s important to ask a lot of questions and be conscious about it. You also need to make sure that everyone is kept in the loop and never feels isolated.” — Zuzka Opálková, Program Manager

04.
Make room for banter.

We are social creatures. 🙂 Sharing parts of our personal lives even in work-related meetings (standups, retrospectives, all hands, etc.) has become an important part of our culture.

We have created space to just chat, share fun stuff and memes (a Slack channel for bad puns and dad jokes?) or to indulge in mutual hobbies. (E.g. our Panaxeo clubs for books, travel, hiking, etc.)

05.
Sometimes, we meet in person

And make it epic. 😎 Nothing beats personal contact. Company retreats, team-wide or project-wide meet-ups have been a big success so far.

Even smaller, more regular events go a long way. Our monthly board game nights in Bratislava and office breakfasts in Banská Bystrica have become fan favourites!

It may not be perfect, or for everyone but it’s the remote setup we’ve found to work best for us.

Now, if you’ve read this far and think “this is something I’d fancy”, why not check out our open positions, or just shoot us a message? We’d love to meet you!