Shopify is a leading commerce platform helping over one million business owners around the world . The company prides itself on its mission of ‘making commerce better for everyone.’
The culture at Shopify revolves around honesty and trust: the two guiding principles the company used to build its world-beating global engineering team — but why the focus on trust? In truth, it’s simple.
A lack of trust destroys collaboration.
In low-trust companies, employees tend to focus on their day-to-day tasks, effectively isolating themselves from their team-mates. The approach undermines a company’s ability to tackle complex projects that require people to work together.
That said, there is a way to overcome this: use Geekbot to create your own multi-dimensional, trustful remote working world.
Geekbot helps build trustful cultures based on insights and sharing.
Shopify has helped its distributed team become a single unit using Geekbot. Engineering teams spread across six countries now use the tool to keep track of what colleagues are working on.
5 timezones
6 countries
More than that, they use it to encourage collaboration across the board.
They’ve devised trust-building exercises using customizable questions (like the ones you see below), which are sent to teams every week — and people can choose to answer them in Slack.
Thanks to Geekbot, everyone knows that help is never more than a click away; feedback is on-tap, and countless surveys and questionnaires are available to entrench trust throughout the organization.
Every day, Shopify teams trust Geekbot to help them develop closer working relationships, using random surveys to encourage team-mates to share trinkets of personal information they might otherwise keep quiet.
Geekbot makes remote work feel human
Shopify has found that through nurturing team camaraderie, it has managed to build a high-trust culture, which it maintains by following these three practices:
- Constantly recharging the team’s trust battery
- Facilitating deep collaboration through tools like Geekbot and agile methods like daily standups
- Empowering workers by recognizing their excellence and openly sharing information within teams
Lawrence, summed up how this focus on trust has helped him enjoy work more: “The details that people have shared about their lives have helped me get to know people as individuals even when we can’t be together in person and has brought a lot of humanity to my team.“
“This humanity has charged our trust batteries — and it has got the team working more effectively together.” he concludes.
If we take anything from Shopify, it’s that building the right foundation from the start can be crucial for growth in a digital-by-default mode. And if past success is anything to go by, the commerce giant will doubtlessly stay ahead for years to come.
With Geekbot in tow — closer collaboration is certainly guaranteed!
