Introducing the Twist Remote Work Guides 🌏

When we started Doist as a remote company over twelve years ago, remote work was a novelty. We didn’t have guidelines on running a team spread across the globe. Instead, we felt our way in the dark, learning by doing.

Today, things look a lot different. New start-ups and established corporations alike are finding that remote work boosts employee engagement and productivity. At the same time, top performers are recognizing that location independence allows them to build meaningful careers outside of traditional urban hubs while maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

It’s clear that remote work is here to stay. So how can companies, managers, and workers adapt to this new reality?

Luckily, in 2019 you don’t have to start from scratch. A growing list of profitable remote companies  – including Doist, Buffer, Automattic, GitLab, Product Hunt, Stripe, HashiCorp, AngelList, Help Scout, Product Hunt, Toptal, and more – have built up a treasure trove of wisdom from both their tremendous successes and inevitable failures. All we had to do was ask.

Today we’re launching the Twist Remote Work guides – a collection of best practices, tactics, and tools from the pioneers of remote work. These guides are the blueprints we wished we’d had for building, running, and scaling a distributed company!

In our first seven guides, you’ll learn best practices honed from building Todoist and Twist with a team of 69 people across 25 countries and 53 cities along with advice from over a dozen other successful remote companies:

1. The Future of Work: The Guide to Remote Work
2. Remote Company Setup: The Remote Guide to Business Logistics
3. Remote Projects 101: The Remote Guide to Project Management
4. Scaling Your Remote Team: The Remote Guide to Hiring
5. Leading Distributed: The Remote Guide to Management
6. The Art of Async: The Remote Guide to Team Communication
7. Designing Without Whiteboards: The Remote Guide to Product Design

You’ll find best practices for managing others remotely…

“To be able to perceive the wellness of a teammate from a distance, you need to be 1) well versed in their communication style and 2) know them personally. If someone who regularly responds to threads hasn’t offered input in some time, I’ll sense that something is amiss and reach out. Or if someone who is usually very jovial starts responding to messages and threads more curtly, I’ll contact them to see if things are okay.” – Brenna Loury, Head of Marketing at Doist

How to communicate effectively as a distributed company…

“Regularly communicating work-in-progress has been the most effective way for designers and engineers to collaborate on a problem — plus involving engineering as early as possible, usually in the brief stage. Typically for a new project I’ll spend a couple of days in a ‘discovery’ phase which I’ll communicate with the team via a Paper doc and a handful of videos.” – Buzz Usborne, Principal Designer at HelpScout

Tactics for hiring and scaling a remote team…

“Have one teammate be the main point person accountable for recruiting and hiring, but have them enlist help from all over the team. Lots of teammates are involved in interviewing at Buffer as a way to grow their leadership, support our culture, and introduce candidates to our diversity.” – Courtney Seiter, Director of People at Buffer 

…and much more!

The Twist Remote Work Guides will help you prepare for a not-too-distant future with fewer offices and more collaboration across borders, cultures, and time zones. Whether you’re looking to start a remote company, grow an existing one, or collaborate more effectively with your current fully or partially distributed team, there’s something for everyone. Keep an eye out on the blog for more guides in the future!