#397 Remote Work: Timezones and PTO

This week, we made scheduling adjustments as team members kicked off the summer traveling season.

Parabol is a fully remote company that provides unlimited PTO for team members. We currently have 14 full-time employees working across 7 timezones, from the West Coast of the US to Vietnam (and soon to be New Zealand). This often presents challenges when it comes to scheduling sync meetings and communication in general. As an async-first culture, we strive to be as responsive as possible to emails and Slack messages while being mindful of each other’s differing work schedules. We usually have 2-3 sync meetings scheduled per week and frequently adjust meeting times an hour or so depending on time zones and daylight savings time. Those of us who work in time zones further East tend to schedule our working days so we have at least a couple of hours of overlap with those further West. The result is a collaborative environment that still allows us to work from anywhere in the world.

Unlimited PTO is another facet of our culture that we pride ourselves on. However, this, too, comes with scheduling conflicts and communication challenges. We’ve developed a set of best practices, so we’re aware of when our colleagues will be “out of the office.” First, we make sure to add our scheduled days off to our Gcal and invite a “Parabol PTO user.” This sends a notification in Slack every week in our #calendar channel informing everyone of upcoming PTO. We also make sure to change our display name in Slack to include the date when we’ll be back online. Finally, every week during our team check-in meetings, we have an agenda item where we share our upcoming plans.

Here are a few pictures from our recent travels around the world:

Our funnel traffic and active users were down again this week, while our weekly meetings rebounded from last week.

…Prepared for a slew of upcoming Enterprise renewals. May and June are particularly busy this year.

…Announced our Team plan price increase. This will be the first price increase for the Team plan in 7 years.

…Created 7 different AI models to test. Each of them generates positive/negative insights that we can provide to leadership based on their team’s retro data.

…Welcome the Product team back from their retreat in San Diego!