How Google Calendar and Slack integrations are helping Buffer with transparency and visibility.
Sharing is caring in the digital age. Thanks to social media, we're constantly sharing and engaging with stories that resonate with us. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have become our virtual town squares.
At Buffer, sharing isn't just about social media; it's deeply ingrained in their company culture. They provide businesses with the tools to manage their social media effectively, but their commitment to sharing goes much deeper.
Transparency is paramount. It's one of Buffer's five core values, and they live it every day. They publish their salaries, practice transparent email, and openly discuss their successes and challenges. This makes it much easier to pick things up if someone else is off sick. Handy.
Intriguingly, in one of a bunch of blog posts exploring the subject of transparency, Buffer admit they “don’t do it for anything”. There’s no immediate benefit to this level of openness, it seems, so why do they do it? In the spirit of transparency they are happy to tell us they do it simply because they “think it’s the right thing to do”.
Joel's vision
CEO Joel Gascoigne, a keen Twitter user, came up with the idea of Buffer in 2010. He’d grown frustrated with writing down when to send out his tweets on a notepad. He didn’t want to send them all out at once, so he resolved to find a way to send out a set number of tweets per day rather than firing them off at random. Today, Buffer is used by more than 80,000 businesses.
When it comes to transparency, Joel has found trust to be one of the biggest wins:
”One key reason transparency is such a powerful value for a company’s culture is trust: Transparency breeds trust, and trust is the foundation of great teamwork.”
So, what does the Buffer team look like?
Today we’re not taking a look at office rituals and tense negotiations over who’s making the next cuppa, because everyone at Buffer works remotely — all 80+ of them. PR manager Hailley Griffis tells us a bit more:
“We don’t have an office. Everyone works from wherever they feel happiest and most productive in the world. We even have one employee who lives and works from an RV while travelling the United States!”
The success of Buffer led to a growing and evolving team, a development worthy of celebration — but this also brought new challenges. Team engagement manager Nicole Miller explains:
“We used to announce any long-term absences through our forum/announcement tool called Discourse… you had to hunt and search through email threads to discover if someone was out of the office for the day.
“With a bigger team, we needed further opacity around days off and the ability to visualise how many team members might be gone at any given time before we could approve — or not approve — vacation requests.”
Evolution and the 'unsick day'
In September 2016, Buffer called time on their old ways of handling absence and gave Timetastic a go. This decision was “an evolution of many things”, Nicole says. One of those things was the need to keep track of how staff were using their annual leave after Buffer switched from ‘unlimited’ allowance to a policy featuring a minimum time off limit — encouraging people to use more of their allowance and not let it go to waste.
Another reason for the switch to Timetastic was to track people’s use of the ‘unsick day’ introduced at Buffer. We’ve not encountered this before; Nicole says it was brought in to “encourage people to focus on their health and preventative check ups,” which seems like a terribly nice thing to do.
How is Timetastic making a difference for the team?
Timetastic, a holiday management tool, has become essential for Buffer's transparency goals. It allows their team to:
- Track time off: With a distributed team, knowing who's available and when is crucial. Timetastic provides a clear overview of everyone's time off.
- Encourage work-life balance: Buffer encourages employees to take time off, even introducing "unsick days" for preventative health checkups. Timetastic helps track this and ensures everyone takes adequate breaks.
- Maintain transparency: Timetastic integrates seamlessly with Slack and Google Calendar, making time-off information readily available to everyone.
The benefits are clear:
- Improved communication: Everyone knows who's off and when, eliminating confusion and scheduling conflicts.
- Increased accountability: Timetastic helps track time off and ensures everyone adheres to company policies.
- Enhanced trust: Open access to time-off information promotes trust and transparency.
Timetastic is more than just a tool, it's an investment in employee well-being and company culture. Buffer's experience demonstrates how Timetastic can help businesses, especially remote-first ones, achieve their transparency goals. Why not try Timetastic for free?
What do the team at Buffer think?
“They find it really helpful to know where to go to see if someone is offline for the day or not,” Nicole says. “We particularly use the Slack integration to see the team-wide absences on a given day, and we also share a screenshot of the Google Calendar integration each week in our weekly newsletter for an overview of who is out of the office in the week ahead.”
It’s reassuring to read how well Timetastic’s features and information visibility have worked for transparency-conscious Buffer. But what would they say to someone who is considering giving Timetastic a go with a free trial?
“Timetastic is super user-friendly, easy to integrate into your other work tools and has helped create a universal time-off-tracker for our globally distributed team,” Nicole says.
“We consider this one of our essential tools for managing teams and keeping a thumb on the pulse of our team's health.