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“Every company has a poster on the wall,” says Matt Mullenweg in the latest episode of The Distributed Podcast. Matt welcomes Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder and CEO of GitLab, another pioneering company with Open Source origins and a long-running commitment to a completely distributed workforce.  Sid and Matt settle into a conversation about GitLab’s six values – which have been cut down from the original 13, and which are always visible in Sid’s video background – are reinforced in 20 ways at the fully-distributed company.  GitLab, now with more than 1,300 employees, updated its values over 300 times in the last calendar year. 

“They have to be reinforced,” says Sid, “and be alive in that way.”

And as for sharing just about everything publicly? “Transparency is sunlight.”

The values are part of the publicly-viewable GitLab Handbook that, with over 10,000 pages, details data both interesting and “mundane,” from compensation to how employees should interact with Hacker News. An example: “I think what’s really interesting is our engineering metrics. We pay very close to what we call the MR rate: how many merge requests did an engineer make over a month; how many did a team make over a month?” Sid shares.  “If you push on that, people start making the changes that they make smaller to kind of increase that rate.  The whole process becomes more efficient.”

Sid and Matt – an observer on GitLab’s board – get into the details: taking time off, leadership development programs, scheduling coffee chats that actually work, and much more. And they revisit predictions Sid made on Twitter in May, 2020, about the post-Pandemic future of distributed work.  Check out the full episode above, or on your favorite podcasting platform.

The full episode transcript is below.

***

MATT MULLENWEG: Howdy everybody and welcome to the Distributed Podcast. I am your host, Matt Mullenweg. Today’s guest is a like-minded leader of a software company that is driven by its values, supports open source and happens to be distributed too. Sid Sijbrandij is the Co-Founder and CEO of GitLab, a fast-growing company and a single application for the entire DevOps (life?) cycle. 

GitLab has been distributed basically from the beginning. But last May, two months into the pandemic, Sid made some predictions that we will talk about today. Even more so, Sid very often talks about the values that  drive GitLab and how they experience each day as a growing company, a really rapidly growing company, actually. 

So it’s rare to get to talk to someone who has been such an advocate for distributed teams as long. And also as full disclosure, I am a board observer of GitLab, so I have had an inside view to some of what y’all have been building and it has been amazing to have a seat at that table. So Sid, thank you so much for joining.

SID SIJBRANDIJ:  Yeah, you’re welcome. And thanks for being at that table at GitLab.

MATT:  Yeah. Talk to me. Let’s start off with just a little bit of the values that you hold as a company because I think every company has a poster on the wall –  and you have one on your distributed wall – but how does it actually come into play for y’all?

SID:  Yeah, I think you can tell how serious a company is about its values in two ways – how often they update the values, our values got updated over 300 times last calendar year.

MATT:  Wow.

SID:  So it is a living document. And then the other thing is how do they reinforce the values. We have now 20 ways to reinforce our values. So it’s not that that document doesn’t matter, it is are they really lived. And for them to be lived, they have to be alive themselves and they have to frequently be reinforced and be alive in that way.

MATT: I saw you could reinforce the values by complimenting people but you could also put a virtual background with one of the values on it as one of the 20 things?

SID: Yes. If you see my Zoom, I will always have six logos above me. And those represent our six values. And yeah, I like the complimenting as well. We have a thanks channel and in that thanks channel people thank each other and then people can comment and they frequently do that with emojis that represent our values and then we keep count of who was particularly good in expressing certain values throughout the year.

MATT:  Do you tie them into performance reviews? Like, do people talk about the values as part of performance reviews?

SID: With those emojis, that is linked to our annual event and we select the people who best represent a certain value and those emojis are used to create a short list and a group of people decides who best represented it. So it’s input. It’s not ideal but it gives a good way to make a short list. 

And then, yes, performance reviews, the values tie into that but also into hiring decisions.  And for example, I think the most important thing is promotion documents. Every promotion document at GitLab is shared with everyone in the company and its primary structure is the values. 

MATT:  To put you on the spot, can you name the six values?

SID:  Yes. We had 13 values before and even I couldn’t name them so that was a good reminder to rationalize. So our values spell the word credit. It’s the credit we give each other by assuming good intent. The first C stands for collaboration, the R stands for results, the E for efficiency, D for diversity, inclusion and belonging, the I stands for iteration and the T for transparency.

MATT:  I guess with D you kind of expanded it. It stands for multiple words, but that works.

SID:  Yeah, first it was D&I and now that we added belonging it.. I am open to changing the whole thing but I think having one letter per value is defensible. 

MATT:  Since you have a backronym or an acronym that spells things out does that make it harder to add values of certain letters or make it more incentivized, like certain letters to be added, like maybe it would be easy to add a value with an S but it would be hard to add a value that started with X. 

SID:  Yeah, Credits. Yeah. I guess there’s a certain amount of sunk cost there or inertia to overcome to change it. I think there hasn’t been a big push to add a value. We have had diversity changed to diversity and inclusion and now diversity, inclusion and belonging, that has been the major thing. Other than that, people talk about how do the values relate to each other and we have a lot of sub values. 

So for example, today I am having a call with Dara and Dara said, look, some of our sub values are more important than others. So the six values I mentioned are core values but then we have sub values that are kind of.. that relate to certain examples and that make it more concrete because otherwise it’s just words and they are very open to interpretation. The sub values makes them actionable. And Dara, her very good point was some of our sub values are more important and more actionable than others so maybe we should cull some of them or maybe we should elevate some of them.

MATT:  What were some of the values you got rid of or renamed? What were some of the seven that got cut out?

SID:  Yeah, I forgot about them so that’s good. But I think we found some overlap. The exercise we did is we wrote down all the values we had, we wrote down some that we thought we should have and started grouping them and we came to this. And actually it wasn’t a big exercise, it was me and my CEO coach who did that one afternoon in a couple of hours. And then I proposed it and it was clearly better and that’s how that happened.

MATT: This is probably a good time to introduce the GitLab handbook. So all of these values and the 20 ways you can put them into effect and everything like that is all  public on your website. 

SID: Yes. I think our handbook is now over 10,000 pages and it has all of our process and procedures, like how you work. And now just the boring ISO stuff but really what you would need to know if you join our company.

MATT:  What does ISO stand for?

SID:  Sorry, I’m from Europe and a lot of companies follow the ISO standards for documenting process. And that left a big impression on me because those ISO handbooks were not what really happened in those companies. There was the written ISO process which you could update once a year and the other was what people really did. 

So there was the paper handbook they haven’t touched in two months and there were the sticky notes on the computer how to really do things. And I was like, look, if you’re going to have something, it should be easy to change because how you work changes every day so it should be a living thing that people use every day and it gets updated every day.

MATT:  So let’s say I’m an employee at GitLab and I would like to update one of the values. Could I submit.. the entire handbook is in GitLab, I could submit a