04. The Garage
Many companies are struggling with the question of Return-To-Office vs Hybrid vs Remote. When you don’t have an office anymore that choice is easy — but how you work remotely is still an ongoing experiment for us here at HBS – an experiment that we’re really enjoying!
For many years, we’ve used a variety of tools for asynchronous collaboration and coordination: Slack, Google Docs, Miro, Trello and Git (to name a few).
We still use all of those tools in our remote world, and they’re valuable and necessary in their own right – but what’s been truly a joy to experience is our use of standing video conference rooms for live collaboration.
Every morning at 10am, our small band gathers in THE GARAGE. It’s a GoogleMeet room that is always there, always open, and ready for jamming together. This is the start of our ‘formal’ work day (don’t judge) and also the central hangout space for the rest of the day. It’s worth noting that while almost everyone is in Seattle, we have one person in LA and another in Berlin – so we’re bridging a lot of time and distance here.
This meeting tends to start with random conversations as folks trickle in, which is a nice way to catch up with each other – ending with a “hard left turn” (™) to shift to project topics. After a brief update on what everyone is working on, maybe a little Q&A to align on open questions, there’s this amusingly awkward “go team” kind of break and we settle in to work, without having left the room at all.
Sometimes it’s super quiet as we’re all heads down on our tasks. And yeah it was a little bit weird at first, with only the sound of keys tapping to break up the silence. But then organic conversations just crop up when someone has a question, observation, or stray thought – could be a design question, could be a debate about coffee, could be pet related (okay, it’s often pet related). Over the course of the day, folks balance their use of cameras or mics as needed or simply step away for personal appointments, a lunch break, or family.
We also have two side rooms, HOPPER and WOODS (named after Grace Hopper and Granville Woods, long story). If a topic feels like it’s going to turn into a deep dive exploration, we’ll jump into one of these side rooms. Anyone can invite themselves along, even if only to listen in. Amusingly you might look around and see almost everyone in the side conversation and realize you could’ve just stayed in The Garage! In fact, sometimes it’s fastest just to do a quick screen share, get to the bottom of the question (with answers coming from anyone who can help) and then it’s back to quiet focus. We actually haven’t needed a scheduled, on-the-calendar meeting in weeks.
To be fair, there’s an intimate scale to this whole situation — there’s only so much distraction that can be created. Maybe when we hire a few more folks, we’ll find the limits of this approach and adjust how we do things.
But right now, this has been an amazing way to stay connected, stay in sync on the project, while also feeling engaged with each other’s homes and lives… and pets.
