Join us as we share what we’re learning as we build a company that approaches work from a fresh perspective. We write about workplace culture, our finances, and our business decisions and strategies.
Being spread across 50 different cities, we place a high priority on communication, going so far as to adopt it into our ten values. For us, communication tends to break into two types, asynchronous or synchronous. At most companies, synchronous communication is the norm. Everyone is online at the same time, chatting with the same tool, attending the same meetings and calls, etc. Asynchronous communication becomes more critical for distributed teams. Asynchronous means not everyone needs to b
Our company values are the foundation upon which our team has grown and our product has developed. They emerged in the early years of Buffer when we were a small team of 10 people, and they have guided us ever since, leading to a number of work culture experiments and lessons along the way. In all, we have 10 values that we aspire toward: To us, these values are motivating and inspiring. We talk about them all the time whenever we see a great example of a value in action or we experience a sit
Let’s say you’re a startup or early stage company and you’ve made it a priority to grow in a way that’s diverse, inclusive, and representative of its surroundings. That’s a great decision! Now, how do you make it happen? Do you tell everyone to say something when they see something? Create a committee? Appoint one person to create change? At Buffer, we’ve tried all 3 of these methods and even more mixed combinations between them. In the last few years, we’ve: * Allowed diversity projects t
It’s 10:00 a.m. here in England. Alfred and I have just finished our weekly content sync. Alfred is a content crafter here at Buffer and does an amazing job producing most of the content we post on our Social blog and I’m an editor focusing on our content strategy. We catch up for an hour every Tuesday to discuss the various pieces of content and projects we’re working on for Buffer’s Social blog. Alfred is based in Singapore, where it’s 6:00 p.m. for him when it’s 10:00 a.m. for me. He’s about
Before you say context-switching is the worst, hear me out — being a manager , I’ll often have several calls back to back and need to shift emotional context quickly. I sometimes carry the mindset and energy of one meeting through to the next and it leaves me less emotionally attuned. I was getting tired from the effort of context-switching and sometimes would be visibly drained or stressed. This is a catching disease: second-hand stress [
Goal-setting has always been one of my favorite activities. I love the feeling of accomplishing something within a set timeframe and getting to cross it off a big list of other goals. I love seeing the progress and celebrating the achievement — in fact, I love it so much that you’ll find me routinely setting and revising goals throughout the year, both at work and for my personal life. We recently made the shift away from OKRs as a company-wide goal-setting framework, and we started experimenti
One of the first projects I took on in bootcamp was helping to plan the next Buffer retreat. Along with my mentor, manager, and friend, Rodolphe, we started thinking about that retreat about a week after the Hawaii retreat wrapped up. I’d love to take you through exactly how we planned Buffer’s 8th retreat, from start to finish, from an operations perspective. Let’s dive in! Our Timeline for Buffer’s 8th Retreat in Madrid Here’s a rough timeline of how things unfolded for the Madrid retreat
As a company that already has all of their employees’ salaries online , we often get asked how far we will go with transparency . On the engineering team, this is challenging because we need to balance our value of transparency, with the security of our product and users, so the “how far” question is a tough one to answer. At our recent Madrid retreat , we aske
I never planned on being an entrepreneur. That label always sounded far too lofty for me. Entrepreneurs were guys in suits working everyone in the room. Entrepreneurs only got three hours of sleep a night because the rest of the time they were hustling. Entrepreneurs would look at someone like me and realize right away that I didn’t belong. But that picture – my picture – has changed. Women now make up 40 percent of new entrepreneurs in the United States. And startups these days don’t have to
Editor’s Note: We’ve switched our Investor’s Reports from monthly to quarterly.We’re excited to keep publishing them in full for our Buffer Open audience in keeping with our value of transparency . Buffer Investor Report Q1 2017 * Last month’s report * All Investor reports * All Buffer reports MRR $1.18m ARR $13.8m MoM 1.9% from
The phrase “culture fit” is a bit of an Inkblot test in the world of work—even when we all hear the same two words, we might be thinking entirely different things. There are countless filters and interpretations of the phrase—and a growing amount of interest in figuring out just what it means. When the phrase “culture fit” is thoughtfully and deliberately applied, it can mean a gauge for your company’s essential values. At other companies, it might simply mean, “Is this a person with whom you
Thanks for reading our equal pay report. See our updated 2021 pay analysis here. At Buffer, we feel a close connection to the conversation about salaries. We strive to pay all employees fairly and equally, as evidenced by our adoption of a transparent salary formula. We share this formula publicly (you can try it for yourself here), and we share the actual salaries of the entire Buffer team: Every one of our salaries is available in a transparent spreadsheet. We whole-heartedly embrace trans
We used to have no managers at Buffer. Now we have tons. And we all have a lot of catching up to do. For most of the leaders at Buffer, we are new to people management . We have a strong culture of nurturing people into more advanced roles and promoting from within. This is fabulous for the opportunities we can afford our teammates; however, it does lead to a steep learning
I’ve recently found myself reflecting a lot on being a distributed team and the nature of a company where the team works from remote locations to accomplish our work. Scaling remote working has been a challenge as the team has grown. Remote companies are still relatively rare, and therefore all of us who are choosing to have a remote-friendly culture need to do two things: 1. Work through the normal challenges of growing as a company and as a team 2. Put time into figuring out how remote can
The chance for in-person time is precious for a remote team. It had been over a year — 392 days to be precise — since saw each other at our last retreat in Hawaii . From Thailand to South Africa, Iceland to Australia, each of our company retreats has looked a little different. Our team of 75 around the world has just returned from our most
At heart, I’m a running purist. No headphones. No waistband for water bottles. No activity monitor or GPS tracker. Just my trusty Asics Trainers and a $10 Casio watch for pace. Seven hundred miles. At seven minutes per mile, that equates to roughly 4,900 minutes, 81.6 hours, or 3.4 days. That’s a lot of time to think. One of the secrets to running is the ability to lose yourself in positive thought; Brainstorming, reflecting, strategizing, and conjuring up crazy ideas while endorphins are go
By now we have a fairly long history of doing retreats at Buffer. We’re now a team of 75 who all work remotely, and we just wrapped up our eighth company retreat in Madrid, Spain. Here’s a quick history of retreat locations, timeline, and size over time: It’s been a wild ride for us at Buffer, and the regular company retreat is a very clear part of our culture. Each retreat has felt a little different, and the nature of the retreat evolves as the company grows
I worked myself into a lovely pickle at the end of 2016. I gave my manager feedback that I’d love to have a session on career planning and goals for my role in the company. I love these sorts of chats! Well, I used to. I’ve been so knee-deep in survival mode during my son’s first year of life, wrangling a puppy, and finding out that I was pregnant with number 2 when my son was 9 months old that I suddenly realized, while preparing for this chat, that I had no short- or long-term goals. “Well
tl;dr – Buffer experienced interrupted service due to the AWS outage on Tuesday. All is back to normal now, and all posts are going out as expected. We know how important a reliable social media experience is for you, and we recognize how interruptions to Buffer can have a significant impact. We’re incredibly sorry for the disruption we caused you today. Here is precisely what happened and how it may have affected you. What happened For several hours on Tuesday, one of Buffer’s main hosting p
tl;dr – Customers should not worry about their Buffer data after the Cloudbleed incident Several hours ago our team learned of a large security incident at Cloudflare , a service we use for Buffer. The incident, which you may have heard about, has been nicknamed “Cloudbleed.” Many websites, including Buffer, use Cloudflare to help handle web traffic more quickly and efficiently amongst many other th
Buffer People/People Ops Report January 2017 * Last month’s report Last month’s Ops report * All People reports * All Buffer reports Applicants 168-53% Open blog posts published 14-1 Open blog visitors 142,867 +19% Bimonthly team NPS score [https://buffer.com/resources/why-we-ask-our-team-to-grade-us-ev
Buffer Happiness Report January 2017 * Last month’s report * All Happiness reports * All Buffer reports Responses within 1 hour 35% 0% Customer satisfaction score 93+2% Email conversations 10,429 +17% Twitter conversations 6,801+33% Avg. Twitter response time 8 hr 58 min -20% Webinars hosted 6 Hello to live chat! At Buffer, we are committed to quality and s
Respond Report January 2017 * Last month’s report * All Respond reports * All Buffer reports MoM: +9% Paying customers 90(+3%) Bugs fixed 34+ It’s February. 2017. No, you’re not alone. It’s amazing how fast this year is moving. But with the holidays behind us, our team is kicking off 2017 with a bunch of great new improvements and updates just for you. Let’s dig in :-) Facebook comments rolled
Buffer Engineering Report December 2016 * Last month’s report * All Engineering reports * All Buffer reports Requests for buffer.com 215 m -13.7% Avg. response for buffer.com 262 ms +3.1% Requests for api.bufferapp.com 331 m +12.9% Avg. response for api.bufferapp.com 264 ms -1.85% Code reviews given 83% of pull requests +32% Quality * 3 S1 (severity 1) bugs: 18 opened, 15 closed. (83% smashed, 6% up from December) * 9 S2 (severity 2) bugs: 33 opened, 24 closed (73%