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Anna Debenham harnesses up the huskies and puts them to work to figure out how teams distributed across multiple locations can work effectively to all pull in the same direction. With modern workforces distributed from north pole to south, can they all be kept running in step?

Four years ago, I started working at a small startup called Snyk that’s based in two locations – London and Tel Aviv. The founders made it clear they wanted to grow headcount in both locations at the same rate, and for the design and engineering skillsets between the two offices to be evenly spread. We’re now at over 200 people and we’re still staying true to that vision, but only by completely changing how we were used to working.

The trend for fully distributed teams is on the rise – companies like InVision and GitLab have entirely remote employees. Snyk is somewhere in between, with small hubs of global team members in homes and shared offices globally alongside our main London, Tel Aviv, Boston, Ottawa and Bay Area offices.

Our R&D teams are based entirely in London or Tel Aviv, with a few employees working around Europe. Rather than have Team A working in one office and Team B working in another, we’ve deliberately designed it so that no R&D team at Snyk has all its members in one location. We could design our teams to be all co-located so that everyone’s in the same room, but we don’t.

When I explain this setup to people, I’ll often get a response of bewilderment – why do it this way? It sounds like a pain! Increasingly though, the reaction is positive – usually from people who’ve worked in a distributed team before where departments are split neatly between locations. They’ve experienced an “us vs them” culture, with work being thrown over the fence to designers or engineers in different timezones. They’ve been at the mercy of the decision makers who are all in the head office. This is exactly what we wanted to avoid. We wanted the company to feel like one team, across many locations.

It’s not perfect – I do miss the things that working in the same location brings such as collaborating on a whiteboard, or having planning documents stuck on the wall for the team to refer to. Pre-distributed working, I used to sit next to a designer and we’d bounce ideas off each other. Now I have to make the extra effort to schedule something in. Managing people remotely is also tough – I can’t easily see that a team member is having a bad day and make them a cup of tea.

But on the whole, it works pretty well for us. The time difference between London and Tel Aviv is a comfy 2 hours, and in Tel Aviv, the week runs from Sunday to Thursday, meaning there’s just a single day in the week when all our teams aren’t working. This makes the week feel like the ebb and flow of a tide – my Mondays are very busy, but on Fridays, half the team is off so there are barely any meetings – ideal for deep focus time.

So how do we make this distributed-but-also-co-located hybrid thing work?

Level the playing field

Firstly, that “us vs them” mentality I mentioned is the key thing to avoid to maintain a positive distributed work culture. Avoid the term “remote team”, as that has a sense of otherness. Instead, refer to your team as “distributed”. It’s such a small change that has the effect of bringing everyone onto the same level.

Also, consider your video conferencing etiquette – if you’ve got a large part of your team in one location, with just one or two members who are dialling in, you could end up with a very one-sided conversation. The room with the most people in it has a habit of forgetting the person they can’t easily see. Even if you’re in the same room, dial in individually so that everyones faces are the same size, and you’re addressing all the participants rather than just those in the same room as you.

Invest in tools that help communication

Early on, we invested in tools that would help make communication between locations as seamless as possible. I’m not talking about those screens with wheels that follow co-workers around a room to recreate a manager breathing down their neck (although now I think of it…). I’m talking about the familiar ones like Slack, Zoom and Notion.

Use a single tool where possible to reduce friction between teams so there’s no confusion as to whether you’re having a call over Google Hangouts, Zoom, Skype or whatever else is fashionable to use this year. Same with meeting notes – keep them in one place rather than scattered across Dropbox, Email and Google Docs.

Remote pair programming has also got a lot easier. We used ScreenHero before it got acquired and lost its remote control functionality – but there are some great alternatives out there like USE Together. You might also have collaboration tools built into your code editor, like Visual Studio’s Live Share, and Atom’s Teletype.

If teams are complaining about bad audio, don’t skimp – invest in better microphones, speakers and sound-proofing. You won’t get the benefits of working as a distributed team if there’s a barrier between communication. Ensure the internet is stable in all locations. Also, it sounds basic but make sure teams have somewhere to take a call in the first place, particularly 1:1s which shouldn’t be done in the open. Previous places I’ve contracted at had people dialling into meetings in stairwells, shower rooms and even toilet cubicles. Take care not to make the experience of working in a distributed team end up harming the experience of working in an office.

Open a window

For as long as we’ve had offices, we’ve had a fixed camera and TV screen setup between them that acts as a “window” between locations. The camera is on all the time, and we turn the microphone on once a day for standup (or whenever someone wants to say hi). When I turn on the TV in the morning, I can see the Tel Aviv office already working. At midday, our Boston office comes online, followed shortly after by our Ottawa office. It’s incredible what a difference this has made to make us feel more like one office.

Distributed meetings

With the time differences and weekday shift, there’s a condensed timeframe in which we can collaborate. It’s not as bad as it could be (I pity my fellow Londoners who work for companies based in California), but the hours between 9am and 4pm Monday to Thursday for us are at a premium. This means the meetings we have need to be a good use of everyone’s time. When we can’t find a time that works for everyone, we record the meeting. But even if everyone can make it, we still take notes.

The notebook brand Field Notes have a slogan “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”. This is a reminder that it’s not always the notes themselves that are useful, but the act of taking them. Where they’re really powerful is when you share them in real time. In Kevin Hoffman’s book ‘Meeting Design’, he recommends the notetaker shares their screen while taking notes so that everyone can participate in making sure those notes are accurate. Having the notes on the screen also helps focus the conversation – particularly if you have an agenda template to start with. It means you’ve got a source of truth for someone who mis-remembers a conversation, and you’ve got something to look back on in the next meeting so you don’t repeat yourselves.

Another tip we’ve taken from Kevin’s book is to have a kanban board for standing meetings, where everyone can add a topic. That way, you always have a backlog of topics to discuss in the meeting. If there aren’t any, you can cancel the meeting!

Don’t get into bad habits when you’re lucky enough to be sharing a single space – keep documenting conversations and decisions in the same way you would with a distributed team, so that future you can remember, and future team members can gather that context.

Team bonding

I always think the best way to bonding with people is over a meal – isn’t that what Christmas dinner is great for? As a distributed team, we can’t do that. We could try and recreate it (even just for the comedy value), but it’s really not the same. We have to try something different.

Enter Eurovision. For those of you outside Europe, imagine a cheesy pop song contest where each country performs their own song and everyone votes for the winner. This year, it was held in Tel Aviv, so dozens of us sat down to watch the live stream. We set up a Eurovision Slack channel and shared our horror in real time.

But Eurovision only happens ones a year, so we’ve extended shared experiences into multiple “hobby” Slack channels: we have one for food fans (#fun-foodies), football fans (#fun-footies), and even sourdough fans (#fun-sourdough). There’s also a weekly “drink and sync” where office-less team members join a video call and chat over a beer, coffee, or juice depending on the time of day for those that dial in. One team runs a movie club where they choose a video that’s relevant to their team’s work (such as a conference talk) and watch it together at the same time.

Onboarding new team members can feel quite impersonal if their manager isn’t in the same office. Starting your first day in an office full of strangers, where the only interaction with your manager is over a video call can feel daunting. And as a manager, I get anxious about my new hire’s first day – was there someone there to greet them and show them where they sit? Was everything set up for them? Did they have someone to eat lunch with? So we’ve been rolling out an “onboarding buddy” scheme. This is someone local who can help the new hire settle in to their new surroundings. It’s someone to chat to, share a coffee with, and generally look out for them.

We also use a Slack app called Donut which pairs employees up for informal chats to get to know each other. You get paired with someone random in the company and it helps you schedule a call with them. This is to encourage cross-pollination across teams and locations.

What distributed teamwork has taught us

There’s a lot that we’ve learnt about working well as a distributed team. We try and recreate the good things about sharing a physical space, and make them feel just as natural in the digital space, while also compensating for the lack of intimacy from being thousands of miles apart.

Mel Choyce’s 24 ways article Surviving—and Thriving—as a Remote Worker stresses the value of remote working, and the long term benefits it has had.

Working remotely has made me a better communicator largely because I’ve gotten into the habit of making written updates.

I think in a lot of ways, the distance has brought us closer. We make more of an effort to check in on how each other is doing. We document as much as we can, which really helps new hires get up to speed quickly.

By identifying what we find valuable about working in the same room, and translating that to work across locations, we find collaboration easier because we’re no longer strangers to each other. We might not be able to have those water-cooler moments in the physical realm, but we’ve done a good job of replicating that online.

About the author

Anna Debenham lives in London and is a Product Manager at Snyk.

She’s the author of Front-end Style Guides, and when she’s not playing on them, she’s testing as many game console browsers as she can get her hands on.

More articles by Anna

Eric Meyer gift wraps the most awkwardly shaped of boxes using nothing but CSS, HTML and a little curl of ribbon. No matter how well you plan and how much paper you have at your disposal, sometimes you just need to slant the gift to the side.

We have a lot of new layout tools at our disposal these days—flexbox is finally stable and interoperable, and Grid very much the same, with both technologies having well over 90% support coverage. In that light, we might think there’s no place for old tricks like negative margins, but I recently discovered otherwise.

Over at An Event Apart, we’ve been updating some of our landing pages, and our designer thought it would be interesting to have slanted images of speakers at the tops of pages. The end result looks like this.

The interesting part is the images. I wanted to set up a structure like the following, so that it will be easy to change speakers from time to time while preserving accessible content structures:

<div id="page-top">
  <ul class="monoliths">
    <li>
      <a href="https://aneventapart.com/speakers/rachel-andrew"> 
        <img src="/img/rachel-andrew.jpg" alt=""> 
        <div> 
          <strong>Rachel Andrew</strong> CSS Grid 
        </div> 
      </a>
    </li>
    <li>
      <a href="https://aneventapart.com/speakers/derek-featherstone"> 
        <img src="/img/derek-featherstone.jpg" alt=""> 
        <div> 
          <strong>Derek Featherstone</strong> Accessibility 
        </div> 
      </a>
    </li>
    <li>
      …
    </li>
    <li>
      …
    </li>
  </ul>
</div>

The id value for the div is straightforward enough, and I called the ul element monoliths because it reminded me of the memorial monoliths at the entrance to EPCOT in Florida. I’m also taking advantage of the now-ubiquitous ability to wrap multiple elements, including block elements, in a hyperlink. That way I can shove the image and text structures in there, and make the entire image and text below it one link.

Structure is easy, though. Can we make that layout fully responsive? I wondered. Yes we can. Here’s the target layout, stripped of the navbar and promo copy.

So let’s start from the beginning. The div gets some color and text styling, and the monoliths list is set to flex. The images are in a single line, after all, and I want them to be flexible for responsive reasons, so flexbox is 100% the right tool for this particular job.

#page-top { 
  background: #000; 
  color: #FFF; 
  line-height: 1; 
} 
#page-top .monoliths { 
  display: flex; 
  padding-bottom: 1em; 
  overflow: hidden; 
}

I also figured, let’s give the images a simple basis for sizing, and set up the hyperlink while we’re at it.

#page-top .monoliths li { 
  width: 25%; 
} 
#page-top .monoliths a { 
  color: inherit; 
  text-decoration: inherit; 
  display: block; 
  padding: 1px; 
}

So now the list items are 25% wide—I can say that because I know there will be four of them—and the links pick up the foreground color from their parent element. They’re also set to generate a block box.

At this point, I could concentrate on the images. They need to be as wide as their parent element, but no wider, and also match height. While I was at it, I figured I’d create a little bit of space above and below the captioning text, and make the strong elements containing speakers’ names generate a block box.

#page-top .monoliths img { 
  display: block; 
  height: 33rem; 
  width: 100%; 
} 
#page-top .monoliths div { 
  padding: 0.5em 0; 
} 
#page-top .monoliths strong { 
  display: block; 
  font-weight: 900; 
}

It looks like the speakers were all cast into the Phantom Zone or something, so that needs to be fixed. I can’t physically crop the images to be the “correct” size, because there is no correct size: this needs to work across all screen widths. So rather than try to swap carefully-sized images in and out at various breakpoints, or complicate the structure with a wrapper element set to suppress overflow of resized images, I turned to object-fit.

#page-top .monoliths img { 
  display: block; 
  height: 33rem; 
  width: 100%; 
  object-fit: cover; 
  object-position: 50% 20%; 
}

If you’ve never used object-fit, it’s a bit like background-size. You can use it to resize image content within the image’s element box without creating distortions. Here, I set the fit sizing to cover, which means all of the img element’s element box will be covered by image content. In this case, it’s like zooming in on the image content. I also set a zooming origin with object-position, figuring that 50% across and 20% down would be in the vicinity of a speaker’s face, given the way pictures of people are usually taken.

This is fairly presentable as-is—a little basic, perhaps, but it would be fine to layer the navbar and promo copy back over it with Grid or whatever, and call it a day. But it’s too square and boxy. We must go further!

To make that happen, I’m going to take out the third and fourth images temporarily, so we can see more clearly how the next part works. That will leave us with Rachel and Derek.

The idea here is to clip the images to be slanted, and then pull them close to each other so they have just a little space between them. The first part is managed with clip-path, but we don’t want to pull the images together unless their shapes are being clipped. So we set up a feature query.

@supports (clip-path: polygon(0 0)) or (-webkit-clip-path: polygon(0 0)) { 
  #page-top .monoliths li { 
    width: 37.5%; 
  } 
}

I decided to test for both the un-prefixed and WebKit-prefixed versions of clip-path because Safari still requires the prefix, and I couldn’t think of a good reason to penalize Safari’s users for the slowness of its standards advancement. Then I made the images wider, taking them from 25% to 37.5%, which makes them half again as wide.

Thanks to object fitting, the images don’t distort when I change their parent’s width; they just get wider and scale up the contents to fit. And now, it is time for clipping!

@supports (clip-path: polygon(0 0)) or (-webkit-clip-path: polygon(0 0)) { 
  #page-top .monoliths li { 
    width: 37.5%; 
    -webkit-clip-path: polygon(25% 0, 100% 0, 75% 100%, 0 100%); 
    clip-path: polygon(25% 0, 100% 0, 75% 100%, 0 100%); 
  } 
}

Each coordinate pair in the polygon() is like the position pairs in background-position or object-position: the horizontal distance first, followed by the vertical distance. So the first point in the polygon is 25% 0, which is 25% of the way across the element box, and no distance down, so right at the top edge. 100% 0 is the top right corner. 75% 100% is on the bottom edge, three-quarters of the way across the element, and 0 100% is the bottom left corner. That creates a polygon that’s a strip three-quarters the full width of the element box, and runs from bottom left to top right.

Now we just have to pull them together, and this is where old tricks come back into play: all we need is a negative right margin to bring them closer together.

#page-top .monoliths li { 
  width: 37.5%; 
  margin-right: -7.5%; 
  -webkit-clip-path: polygon(25% 0, 100% 0, 75% 100%, 0 100%); 
  clip-path: polygon(25% 0, 100% 0, 75% 100%, 0 100%); 
}

The separation between them is a little wider than we were originally aiming for, but let’s see what happens when we add the other two images back in and let flexbox do its resizing magic.

Notice how the slants actually change shape as the screen gets narrower or wider. This is because they’re still three-quarters the width of the image element’s box, but the width of that box is changing as the screen width changes. That means at narrow widths, the slant is much steeper, whereas at wide widths, the slant is more shallow. But since the clipping path’s coordinates were all set with percentage distances, they all stay parallel to each other while being completely responsive to changes in screen size. An absolute measure like pixels would have failed.

But how did the images get closer together just by adding in two more? Because the list items’ basic sizing added up to more than 100%, and they’re all set to flex-shrink: 1. No, you didn’t miss a line in the CSS: 1 is the default value for flex-shrink. Flex items will shrink by default, which after all is what we should expect from a flexible element. If you want to know how much they shrunk, and why, here’s what Firefox’s flex inspector reports.

When there were only two list items, there was space enough for both to be at their base size, with no shrinkage. Once we went to four list items, there wasn’t enough space, so they all shrank down. At that point, having a negative right margin of -7.5% was just right to pull them together to act as a unit.

So, now they’re all nicely nestled together, and fully responsive! The captions need a little work, though. Notice how they’re clipped off a bit on the left edge, and can be very much clipped off on the right side at narrower screen widths? This happens because the li elements are being clipped, and that clipping applies to all their contents, images and text alike. And we can’t use overflow to alter this: clipped is clipped, not overflowed.

Fortunately, all we really need to do is push the text over a small amount. Inside the feature query, I added:

#page-top .monoliths div { 
  padding-left: 2%;
  padding-right: 26%; 
}

This shifts the text just a bit rightward, enough to clear the clip path. On the right side, I padded the div boxes so their contents wouldn’t fall outside the clipped area and appear to slide under the next caption. We could also use margins here, but I didn’t for reasons I’ll make clear at the end.

At the last minute, I decided to make the text at least appear to follow the slants of the images. For that, I just needed to shift the first line over a bit, which I did with a bit more padding.

#page-top .monoliths strong { 
  padding-left: 1%; 
}

That’s all to the good, but you may have noticed the captions still overlap at really narrow screen widths. There are a lot of options here, from stacking the images atop one another to reverting to normal flow, but I decided to just hide the captions if things got too narrow. It reduces clutter without sacrificing too much in the way of content, and by leaving them still technically visible, they seem to remain accessible.

@media (max-width: 35rem) { 
  #page-top .monoliths div { 
    opacity: 0.01 
  } 
}

And that, as they say, is that! Fully responsive slanted images with text, in an accessible markup structure. I dig it.

I did fiddle around with the separations a bit, and found that a nice thin separator occurred around margin-right: -8%, whereas beefier ones could be found above -7%. And if you crank the negative margin value to something beyond -8%, you’ll make the images overlap entirely, no visible separation—which can be a useful effect in its own right.

I promised to say why I used padding for the caption text div rather than margins. Here’s why.

#page-top .monoliths div { 
  padding-left: 3%; 
  padding-right: 26%; 
  border-top: 2px solid transparent; 
  background: linear-gradient(100deg,hsl(292deg,50%,50%) 50%, transparent 85%); 
  background-clip: padding-box; 
}

It required a wee bit more padding on the left to look decent, and an alteration to the background clipping box in order to keep the purple from filling the transparent border area, but the end result is pretty nifty, if I do say so myself. Alternatively, we could drop the background gradient on the captions and put one in the background, with a result like this.

I have no doubt this technique could be extended, made more powerful, and generally improved upon. I really wished for subgrid support in Chrome, so that I could put everything on a grid without having to tear the markup structure apart, and there are doubtless even more interesting clipping paths and layout patterns to try out.

I hope these few ideas spark some much better ideas in you, and that you’ll share them with us!

About the author

Eric A. Meyer (@meyerweb) has been a burger flipper, a college webmaster, an early blogger, one of the original CSS Samurai, a member of the CSS Working Group, a consultant and trainer, and a Standards Evangelist for Netscape. Among other things, Eric co-wrote Design For Real Life with Sara Wachter-Boettcher for A Book Apart and CSS: The Definitive Guide with Estelle Weyl for O’Reilly, created the first official W3C test suite, assisted in the creation of microformats, and co-founded An Event Apart with Jeffrey Zeldman. Eric lives with his family in Cleveland, Ohio, which is a much nicer city than you’ve probably heard. He enjoys a good meal whenever he can and considers almost every form of music to be worthwhile.

More articles by Eric

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