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News


GITLAB'S HEAD OF REMOTE WORK TALKS SUCCESSES AND STRATEGY




GITLAB INC.'S WORKFORCE IS ENTIRELY REMOTE. IT'S DARREN MURPH'S JOB, AS THE
FIRM'S HEAD OF REMOTE, TO MAKE SURE THE FIRM AND EMPLOYEES SUCCEED UNDER ITS
REMOTE MODEL.

Share this item with your network:

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By
 * Patrick Thibodeau, News Writer

Published: 08 Nov 2021

As head of remote at GitLab Inc., Darren Murph manages the remote workforce at
the DevOps platform development firm.

GitLab's 1,350 employees are fully remote in over 65 countries. The firm has a
P.O. box in San Francisco. Murph works across the organization, including with
HR and operations. The firm has detailed guides for employers on how to succeed
as a remote worker. For example, GitLab Issue takes a page out of software
development and applies the tracker and collaboration concept to worker
productivity.



In this Q&A, Murph discusses his role in helping create an intentional,
remote-first culture, values that were a priority even before COVID-19. 

Why is your head of remote position needed? 

Darren Murph: When I joined the company [July 2019], it was around 700 people
and scaling. It was an opportunity to put documentation around what GitLab was
doing operationally. It enabled new hires [for instance] to know the guardrails
and thrive as remote employees. 

What are the guardrails? 

Murph: One is a documented if-then chart to decide if a meeting is necessary.
What is the outcome? Is it possible to achieve this by starting a GitLab Issue,
similar to an issue board used in software development, and tagging people you
would have invited to the meeting? You are documenting it instead of just hoping
that people will make the right decision. That intentionality is very indicative
of a great remote-first culture. You leave as little as possible to chance, and
you're very intentional about guiding people and ways of working.

Darren Murph

What else is documented?

Murph: We have three copy-and-pastable sentences on how to decline a meeting.
This sounds small, but if someone sends you a meeting request, you may think
that, 'I could probably answer this by writing it down in a more public place
like a GitLab Issue.' As a GitLab Issue, more people could contribute feedback
to it, it would be more transparent, it would further our goals as an
organization, but it may be a bit awkward if it's coming from someone more
senior than you. And so we document this. Here's something that you can copy and
paste back to the person who may not have seen this part of the handbook, or
they may have skipped over this during onboarding. We give people as many
reinforcement elements like that as we can.

What is another reinforcement element?

Murph: Another thing that we do is explicitly say that it's OK to look away in
meetings. Everyone is entitled to be the manager of their own time and
attention. So if you are in a 50-minute meeting and only 10% of it pertains to
you, it's OK to look away or work on something else. And then if somebody
verbally brings you back into the meeting, it's totally fine to say, 'Hey, I was
doing something else, could you repeat that?' At other organizations, this may
be taboo. So we specifically write these things down so that people know what
they're empowered to do. If you look at [the reinforcement elements]
individually, they may seem like a minor thing, but when they're stacked
together, what you find is that it builds culture.

Do you think you have figured out how to do remote work successfully? 

Murph: We are always learning; that's the beauty of GitLab. Our mission is
everyone can contribute. That applies to the GitLab product, where a lot of the
product features that we've shipped started as contributions from the wider
community. That also includes how we do work. The example I just gave you on
copy-and-paste bubble phrases to decline a meeting was developed by Dropbox.
They've attended a few of our events and spoken in our panels. And when they
developed their virtual-first toolkit, I read every word of it because it was
essentially their version of the GitLab playbook. And they had a section in
there on how to decline meetings with these copy-and-paste phrases. I thought
that was genius.

Do you ever miss being in the office? 

> If you want it done well, hire someone to focus on it. Darren MurphHead of
> remote, GitLab

Murph: There's a lot of value to in-person touchpoints. Great remote companies
are very intentional about their in-person strategy. Every year, we have this
summit called GitLab Contribute, where we try to get everyone in the company
together. We have other smaller events. It enables the time spent to be wholly
devoted to building rapport, to building culture, to breaking bread instead of
forcing people into a lifelong pursuit of commuting to the office on the off
chance that you'll bump into the right person in the right mood, in the right
space.

What's your argument for creating a specific head of remote position? 

Murph: If you want it done well, hire someone to focus on it. This has been the
case for everything in business. You want growth, hire a head of growth. If you
want diversity, inclusion and belonging to be more than just something you talk
about, you hire a chief diversity officer. What's happening is a wholesale,
fundamental rearchitecting of how people work. Companies will need to audit all
of their processes and workflows and culture and pressure test them with the
question: Will this work if no one's in the office? Are our values explicitly
documented? Is the culture transferable through geography and the written word?
For most companies, the answer is 'no.'

What characteristics and background make an ideal head of remote work? 

Murph: I think the two nonnegotiable things are somebody that's extremely
cross-functional and OK with operational ambiguity. That's No. 1. And two is
someone who is an emphatic and compassionate, empathetic storyteller.

What's your approach to remote work technology? 

Murph: GitLab is very intentional about outfitting your workspace in a way that
makes you set up for success. We have a saying: Spend company money like it's
your own. When I joined the company, I was able to buy this microphone [visible
during the interview], buy this camera that you see here, and a couple of
lights, a couple of monitors and a desk that goes up and down. Companies
historically haven't thought twice about investing tens of thousands of dollars
per person to outfit a cubicle in a high-rise. It pays dividends to make sure
that your remote workforce can have a healthy and productive workspace.

What about technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR)?
Do you see a role for this tech in remote work? 

Murph: I don't think you'll be using an AR or VR headset for all of your work.
But it's a tool in the toolbox. Another tool is language processing in a way
that hasn't been used in the past. For example, if you have a tool that listens
in on calls and is intelligent enough to discern my voice from your voice, it
could create the takeaways in a written document that could potentially plug
into a platform. And it would help a lot more people give visibility to what's
going on in the organization. 

What else do you expect from remote tech?

Murph: We're just in the earliest of innings in seeing what technology can do in
a remote-first workforce. Two years ago, if you wanted to create a tool to
empower remote-first teams, the total addressable market was minuscule. It was
very difficult to get funding and traction, and at best you would serve a niche
market. COVID-19 changed all of that essentially overnight. I'm hopeful that
we'll see a lot more startups creating technology that will empower
digital-first and remote-first teams. That's going to be a significant
change.               

Editor's note: This interview was edited for clarity and length. 

Patrick Thibodeau covers HCM and ERP technologies for TechTarget. He's worked
for more than two decades as an enterprise IT reporter.



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