Sean: How do you suggest that we are able to teach or to share our culture with this new hire? How can this new hire be immersed with our team's culture? Are there steps, softwares, et cetera that we can use and utilize?

Brett: The first thing that has to happen is you have to define your culture because you can't teach it. If it's not defined. Osmosis isn't going to happen anymore. So without osmosis, we are lost. But if you define your culture, then you've got to document it.

And so one of the things that remote companies do very, very well, the successful ones is documentation. And it's documentation to a whole new level to what we used to and what we typically would expect, even in a co-located environment. Let's assume you documented your culture.

The best onboarding programs do not aim for productivity. Productivity is an outcome of aiming for removing anxiety, developing trust and building relationships with that new person. Relationships build trust, trust build success, trust builds the ability to work effectively. You need to help the new joiner understand the invisible currents.

The way we do things around here of the culture. And typically remote companies use a buddy system for that. You need to allow the new joiner to demonstrate their strengths quickly, not start work, demonstrate their strengths. So you need to understand what their strengths are so that they can demonstrate it to you and to them.

And then you need to create an environment of psychological safety, where the new joiner can be themselves and feel they can bring themselves to your work environment. Then you will get productivity. You have to remember that the onboarding experience serves as the first experience of your culture post interview.

The whole point around doing this and documenting this is to overcome the loss of osmosis. If a new joiner joins the sales team and the sales team has seven people. If you don't document this and you don't demonstrate it effectively during the onboarding, that new joiner now has to call each one of your sales team and say, "how do you work?"

As a new joiner, your colleagues will say to you, hi, if you want to know about how to work with engineering, look at this link. If you want to work on how to work with marketing, look at this link. If you want to understand our values, look at this link" and actually you will go and look at that page and then you will get drawn to other pages.

It's very beautiful, it's actually poetry in documentation structure. It's beautiful the way you can get lost in the document. And so there is, the problem with office environments is the human being was actually the bottleneck. The bottleneck was my ability to get time to learn from you.

Now at GitLab, there's no bottleneck. I can read and learn as much as I like. Obviously I'm not, you know, there are probably, I don't know, maybe four, 300 pages on the team, so you can go and learn. The whole team has documented it. So you can go and learn about who they are, where they work, what they like, where they live. You know, they, their jobs, what they do.

And you can see the links that are important to them. You can go and you can go and understand how the dev ops works. You can go and see how - you can learn everything about the company. It's an absolute, you know, it's a serious competitive advantage. It is there.

It's open. You can learn anything about that company? I do. I read it all the time. I just go and read the, get that manual for fun.

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