Gone are the days of pizza parties, mandatory company-sponsored bake-offs, or awkward company-wide happy hours at the local pub. Traditional office culture has gotten a bad rap in recent years, and with good reason – it can be stifling, exhausting, and downright soul-sucking. It’s no wonder that [millennial participation in the traditional workforce continues to decline](https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/is-gen-z-dropping-out-of-workforce-5059609/?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_pulse_read%3BVE%2BSeoSmQPSuTsUmy9LAcA%3D%3D).

There’s a new kid on the block that’s giving office culture a run for its money: remote work. With flexible hours, the ability to work from anywhere in the world, and a more relaxed dress code, remote work is nailing culture in ways that office life never could.

Here are just a few of the reasons why we believe remote work has won the culture war.




## What even is company culture?

If you Google “what is company culture?”, you’ll get answers ranging from “clan culture” – one which encourages participation and company-wide commitment to success; to “caring culture”, which values creation of a welcoming environment. Essentially, it’s all the aspects of a company that make it a unique and desirable place to work.

The problem with culture is that many companies try to do all of the above – and they often fail at them all. Culture can’t just be a checkbox that has got to be ticked so it can be listed as a benefit on job postings. 

HR at your office job might tell you culture is created by playing awkward icebreakers before a meeting (bonus points if the meeting could have been an email), but in reality, it is so much more than that. 


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## Work-life Balance
What better way to nurture positive culture in the workplace than encouraging your team to have a life outside work. How often have you felt pressured to put in a couple more hours at the office, or nervous to ask for time off? 

A culture that encourages work-life balance is a focal point of many remote companies. After all – how many other jobs are there where you can wrap up your work day at 5pm, hop on a flight, and start work the next day in an entirely new country. A culture that promotes work-life balance gives you the opportunity to not wait for vacation time or holidays to take your next adventure. 

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## The Water Cooler Chat vs. Slack

The water cooler chat – those generic “office culture” stock photos weren’t lying, these are actually considered a critical part of office culture. What’s not to love about catching up on the latest office gossip or chatting about your weekend while you fill your Hydroflask.  

Save yourself the walk over to the office kitchen. Say goodbye to the water-cooler chat, and say hello to Slack channels. We can only speak for ourselves here at Clevertech, but we take full advantage of being fully-remote, and love sharing our adventures, hobbies, and passions with eachother. With Slack channels for photography lovers, globe trotters, sports enthusiasts and more, you get to join the conversations that you choose to join – consider it your own custom tailored water-cooler chat, for every topic you’re interested in.





## A Culture of Trust

Nobody likes their boss breathing down their neck, especially when they’re peeking over your cubicle’s walls (you read that right, some people are still stuck working in cubicles if you can believe it). Remote work relies heavily on a culture of trust – you’re on the team because you’re the best, so your your employers knows that if you’ll say the job will get done, it will be done. Whether it’s trust to try something new, or to work on your own schedule, knowing your company believes in you is a big morale boost and cultivates a positive culture.


## Skip the awkward staff parties

Let’s be honest, nobody wants to sacrifice their night for an awkward company wide happy hour, and there are plenty of ways we’d rather spend our holidays than small talk at the office Christmas party, 

When you’re remote there’s no need to pull the “I’ve got to pick up my aunt from the airport” excuse to avoid awkward company gatherings – you’re celebrated in the ways you actually want to be celebrated.

For example, Clever Night Out is Clevertech’s way of celebrating as a team, without the meet-up. Our team can take their loved ones out for a night, on our tab. Because let’s face it, you’d probably rather spend a night out with your friends than with Steve from accounting. 


## Our final thoughts

We may be biased, but remote work is winning the culture department. After being remote first for over 20 years, you can’t blame us when we say we’ll never be going back to the office. If you’re tired of the same-old-same-old of office culture, remote work might be a fit for you. 



## Think Clevertech is the right place to start your remote-work journey? Drop us a line.

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Office Culture is So 2019: Here’s Why Remote Culture is Taking Over

###### Stress and more bugs

After thirty minutes of being drilled by his boss, Dan, who served as the CTO, wanted to throw his computer across the room. His team had not been able to push all of the new features that he promised they would push before this meeting, and the ones they did push had bugs! 

Dan sat there seething. He couldn't help but wonder where he went wrong. His team had worked hard, long hours. They pushed many lines of code and closed heaps of tickets. How had the result turned out so grossly short of their ambitions and promises?

As he reflected further, he remembered his team ignoring the overload of monitoring alerts which caused them to miss the crucial ones. Their builds were taking what felt like forever so they couldn’t waste time updating minor bugs. They just kept moving forward, piling complication on top of complication in hopes of reaching the deadline. 

So where did Dan go wrong? What could he have paid attention to that would have saved him the frustration and embarrassment of that morning's meeting?

Ideally, he would be able to look at one keystone measurement that would have been indicative of the overall health of their software development. 

###### So, for a custom development company, what is the keystone measurement for health?


At Clevertech, this is build time. Since constantly delivering builds is at the foundation of what we do, our build time becomes a keystone indicator for the health of our code and production environment. Measuring how quickly we can get each build up into the system ensures that we identify bottlenecks in our production system. 



**We measure build time for three primary reasons: **

- Speed: One of our core values allowing us to operate at maximum efficiency. 
- Performance: If the build time is taking more than a handful of minutes it may reveal that we are using an old library and, instead of building on top of it, we need to update it so that we can drive build time down and performance up.  
- Developer Delight: If a build is taking 30 minutes and a developer has to push it three times in a day, they have now wasted an hour and a half of their time for a process that could have taken less than 10 minutes.  

To achieve this at Clevertech, we have a full continuous integration suite where software is constantly being compiled in a containerized fashion with a variety of tests that are run against it. After the tests pass, it is deployed in a way that allows for zero downtime in the system. This even allows for things like feature flags so that you can deploy to only 10% of the traffic before deciding to deploy to the full load.

Build time uncovers insights about where there is bloat in the production system. Ultimately, it allows us to use one keystone measurement that pinpoints speed, performance, health, and optimizes for developer delight with just one simple question.

If you’d like to find out more about our culture at Clevertech and current job openings, check out our [YouTube channel ](https://www.youtube.com/c/clevertechlife) and visit [clevertech.careers](http://clevertech.careers).

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One example of a keystone measurement is the temperature of the body. When you feel ill, one of the first things you do is take your temperature because it is indicative of health. When your temperature is high, it flags that something is wrong and needs to be further inspected and fixed.

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Office Culture is So 2019: Here’s Why Remote Culture is Taking Over

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Office Culture is So 2019: Here’s Why Remote Culture is Taking Over

One simple tool to diagnose the health of long term software development

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