Shopify built a culture of trust using geekbot
"With remote employees across five timezones, it has been challenging to build a culture. Thanks to Geekbot, I've learned about the people I work with, and it's really helped bring us together."
Lawrence Mandel, Director of Engineering
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!
Built a Culture of Trust Using Geekbot
How does Shopify use Geekbot to build trust across remote engineering teams?
Shopify’s engineering teams, spread across 6 countries and 5 timezones, use Geekbot in Slack for daily standups and a customizable weekly question that invites people to share something about their lives outside work. Those personal details help teammates get to know each other as individuals, which Lawrence Mandel, Director of Engineering at Shopify, credits with “charging the trust battery” and getting the team working more effectively together.
Can Geekbot be used for team-building questions, not just status updates?
Yes. Geekbot lets you fully customize the questions in any standup or check-in, so you can add trust-building or icebreaker prompts alongside the usual “What did you work on?” questions. Shopify runs a weekly personal question this way. You can rotate questions, schedule them on specific days, and post the answers to any Slack channel so the whole team sees them.
Does Geekbot work for teams spread across many timezones?
Yes. Geekbot sends each person their standup at the time you choose in their own local timezone, and posts the answers to a shared Slack channel as they come in. Nobody has to be online at the same time. Shopify uses it across 5 timezones so teammates can follow what colleagues are working on without scheduling a call that suits everyone.
How does asynchronous standup software help remote engineering teams collaborate?
Async standups give everyone a daily, written view of what teammates are working on and where they are blocked. That visibility is what Shopify describes as the foundation of collaboration: in low-trust setups people work in isolation, while a shared, transparent record of work encourages colleagues to reach out and solve complex problems together. Geekbot automates the collection and sharing so the habit sticks.
How do I start using Geekbot for standups like Shopify does?
Install Geekbot from the Slack App Directory (or Microsoft Teams), create a standup, pick your questions, participants, days, and the Slack channel where answers should be posted. Setup takes a few minutes and there is a free plan for small teams, so an engineering manager can start with one team and expand from there, as Shopify’s distributed teams did.
