Since we first kicked off a 4-day work week in May 2020, people have had a lot of questions about it. What day are we taking off? How long will we continue this practice? Is everyone really working four-days a week or are some people working more? Some of the…
Inside Our Engineering Mentorship Program and How It Helps Our Engineers Grow
Our Engineering team is the largest team at Buffer. It has a lot of moving pieces and is composed of several smaller teams. As with any large team, we’re keen to make sure no one individual lacks guidance or an opportunity to grow. In this post, I’ll share a little…
4-Day Work Weeks: Results From 2020 and Our Plan for 2021
In March and April of 2020, work and life as we knew it was changing. I surveyed our team members (all 84 of whom are spread out across the globe) to understand the best way to help them cope with so many things shifting at once. I especially wanted to…
Reflecting on 10 Years of Building Buffer
Today marks ten years since I launched the first version of Buffer. What started as a landing page to gauge interest, and then a very basic product that I worked on alone, has become so much more. Buffer is now a leading social media management platform and a team of…
When We Need to Move Quickly We Work in Task Forces. Here’s How We Set Them Up
Making and communicating decisions across an organization can be a challenge anytime. Making decisions during a pandemic is a whole new level of challenge. When the impact of COVID-19 started to grow, we at Buffer, like many others, needed to move as quickly as possible, gather a lot of information,…
Why Transparent Email Stopped Working For Us and What We Do Instead
When I joined Buffer and opened my new Buffer email account for the first time, the email count read 200. I was momentarily stunned. That was way more emails than I’d ever had in one place before. Usually, when you set up an email account at a new workplace, your…
Buffer Is Moving to a 4-Day Workweek for the Rest of 2020
In May, our entire team experimented with a 4-day workweek. The intention of this experiment was to help us all manage the stress and changes to routine caused by living through a global pandemic. We initially rolled out the 4-day work week experiment for only one month, with the main…
We’re Trying a 4-Day Workweek for the Month of May
As April comes to a close, and we look ahead to another month where our global team is living in various forms of lockdown and isolation, I decided that for the month of May, Buffer will operate under a 4-day workweek (at full pay) across the whole 89-person team. We’re…
How We Hold an Engaging All Hands Meeting as a Remote Team
Many companies have a regular All Hands meeting. Generally, this is a company-wide gathering for all employees (‘all hands on deck’) to hear from the organization’s leaders and discuss the state of the company. At Buffer, the All Hands meeting is a key element of our communication and culture. As…
Is Remote Work Greener? We Calculated Buffer’s Carbon Footprint to Find Out
I wish I could tell you that I have always been an environmental warrior. But my story is a more common one. I’ve always done my best to care for the environment. I cycle, walk or take public transport as much as I can. I use my refillable water bottle…