Episode Details

In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and John (People Ops) discuss aynchronous working, no meeting days, and the role of face to face meetups.

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Beah: Hello, and welcome to DuckTales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. This is my dog, Friday. He’s appeared in other episodes. So in each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or our approach to AI.

John: Hello.

Beah: In this episode, you will be hearing about our approach to remote work. I’ll quickly introduce myself. I’m Beah. I am on the product team at DuckDuckGo. Then, John, I’ll let you introduce yourself.

John: Thanks, Beah. Yeah, my name’s John. I work on the People Ops team at DuckDuckGo. You can probably hear from my accent. I’m one of the couple of members of the team that’s based in the UK. So my job is predominantly around meetups and a little bit about culture, but predominantly about meetups and how we meet up in person and a little bit virtually as well. So yeah, that’s my role here.

Beah: Great. Yeah, so that is a good segue to jumping right into talking about how we work remotely and how we connect personally given the remote circumstance. So maybe just before we get too deep into the details and what we actually do, can you describe, John, just like what we even mean when we say that we’re a remote company?

John: Yeah. So in very simplistic terms, I would see being a remote company as us not all going to one central place to work. You know, we don’t have a big office building that we all come into either on a semi-regular or, you know, an everyday basis. So that is people probably predominantly working from home, but not necessarily. We have ways and means at DuckDuckGo for people to work, you know, in a co-working space with other people if they need that or if they have circumstances at home where they need to. Essentially, there’s a choice and a trust in where people work. We feel, you know, there’s pros and cons to that, but we feel there’s a, you know, overall a net positive, I think, to that way of working. So that’s the way I would think about it, that we work in that way. And then to facilitate that happening, you know, all companies will have tools to, you know, online digital tools to allow people to collaborate and move their work forward. But we maybe think a bit more or maybe have a few more tools that allow us to collaborate digitally and make sure that we do what we need to do online essentially and digitally.

Beah: Do you know, you might not, but do you know how many people do work from co-working spaces or somewhere social that is not their home?

John: Yeah, not too many in the company. So we offer a financial element for everybody if they want to work in a co-working space. I think we definitely have a handful of people, certainly in our organization, who pretty permanently work in co-working spaces. And that may range from family circumstances or living circumstances, whether it’s just difficult to work from