How to understand a remote company's working culture

Similar promises of flexibility and autonomy can hide very different ways of working. Explore the choices behind remote company culture, with examples from GitLab, Buffer, and Automattic.

Remote companies often describe their cultures with the same words: flexibility, autonomy, transparency, and trust. Yet those promises leave room for very different experiences. Flexible hours can mean arranging work around your life, or choosing a start time within a day still shaped by meetings. Autonomy can mean having the authority and support to make decisions, or being left to work things out alone.

The differences come from how a company organizes work. Where does information live? Who can make a decision? How do people get help, build relationships, and progress in their careers? These choices determine how much freedom a remote job actually gives you, and what you need to do to use it well.

Understanding remote company culture means examining how those choices fit together. GitLab, Buffer, and Automattic publish enough about their practices to make that examination possible. Their examples show how to move beyond a list of values and begin understanding an organization.

How communication shapes the working day

Asynchronous communication lets work move forward without everyone participating at the same time. Its value is particularly clear across time zones, where requiring a meeting for every decision makes someone's working hours inconvenient. It can also protect concentration. A colleague can contribute to a discussion after finishing a difficult task, rather than abandoning it whenever a message arrives.

GitLab's communication handbook makes asynchronous communication its starting point. It favors discussions in shared work records, including issues and proposed changes, and emphasizes writing down the conclusions of conversations that happen elsewhere. It also states that colleagues should not expect replies outside someone's planned working hours.

Taken together, those practices address a problem that simply using Slack cannot solve. Information needs to remain understandable after the conversation has ended. A decision recorded alongside its context gives someone in another time zone a chance to contribute without first locating the person who knows the story. That is a substantial improvement over making attendance the price of understanding the work.

The arrangement also asks more of the person writing. A proposal needs enough background for colleagues to assess it; a handoff needs to explain what remains unfinished. Leaving a vague message and going offline transfers the effort to somebody else. A useful asynchronous culture makes good writing part of doing the work.

37signals makes a related choice in its internal communication guide. It describes keeping discussions, documents, tasks, and decisions together within each project, with comments attached to the thing being discussed. The useful detail is the connection between conversation and work. A company can use different software and still make that choice well.

Live conversation has a place in this model. GitLab explicitly recognizes situations where a call is more effective. The distinction worth understanding is how a company decides when to meet and how the outcome reaches people who were absent. A team that writes things down but still expects everyone to monitor chat continuously has left much of the benefit of asynchronous work unrealized.

What makes autonomy work

Freedom to make decisions depends on knowing which decisions are yours. Otherwise, employees can spend their supposed independent working time seeking permission or guessing what a manager will accept.

GitLab describes a system of directly responsible individuals, or DRIs. A named person owns a project or activity and has final decision-making authority, with some circumstances requiring additional approvals. That person is expected to consult relevant colleagues and gather their input. Responsibility therefore includes both a right to decide and an obligation to involve people whose knowledge matters.

For a job seeker, this is more revealing than a promise of a flat hierarchy. It describes how an organization can invite collaboration and still reach a decision. It also shows the demands of autonomy. You need judgment about whom to consult, confidence to choose a direction, and willingness to be accountable for the result.

Support matters just as much. GitLab's remote-management guide emphasizes manager availability, one-to-one time, onboarding support, and career development. Read alongside its decision-making guidance, it describes independence with people and practices behind it.

That combination is worth looking for elsewhere. Clear goals and authority make independent work possible; feedback and access to experienced colleagues make it sustainable. An employer that offers freedom without explaining priorities, providing help, or discussing development is leaving important management work undone.

Career progression is a useful test. There should be a way for your contribution to become visible, for you to learn what the next level requires, and for someone to help you get there. If advancement depends on informal access to a manager, the colleague with the most convenient time zone may have an advantage. Remote autonomy is more convincing when the company can explain how people grow as well as how they deliver today's work.

What transparency changes inside a company

Buffer makes one form of transparency unusually concrete by publishing individual salaries and explaining its approach to compensation. A prospective employee can examine something that is normally hidden until an offer arrives.

The cultural significance goes beyond knowing a number. A published pay approach gives employees a basis for comparing decisions. It makes it harder for a company to explain different salaries entirely through private conversations, and gives people something specific to question when an outcome seems inconsistent.

Buffer's own account also shows why transparency requires ongoing work. In a 2024 explanation of its salary system, founder Joel Gascoigne described how the earlier formula had struggled with new situations and acknowledged gaps in the company's transparency. The company published its reasoning for changing the system. That history is more revealing than a statement that openness is a core value: readers can examine both the intention and the difficulties of applying it.

Publishing pay does not settle every question about fairness. People can still disagree about how roles are valued, how experience is assessed, or which differences in pay are justified. Openness makes those choices available for scrutiny. The quality of the underlying decisions still matters.

This gives you a broader way to read a company's transparency claim. Look for what employees can understand, question, and influence. A salary range, an explanation of promotion criteria, or a written account of a change in direction each opens a different part of the organization. The interesting question is what access to that information enables people to do.

How distributed teams build relationships

Remote work removes many of the casual encounters through which colleagues get to know one another. A company needs ways for people to form relationships beyond the immediate demands of a project, especially when joining a team whose members already know each other.

Automattic describes using internal blogs for asynchronous communication alongside chat and other project tools. Its social-communication guide extends those channels into informal life, including interest groups, coworking calls, and introductions that pair colleagues for a conversation. Those practices create opportunities to meet people outside the small group you work with most often.

Automattic also gives in-person gatherings a role. Its hiring guidance tells prospective employees to expect three to four weeks of travel per year, and describes team meetups that combine strategy work and time together. Seen alongside its everyday communication practices, travel forms one part of an approach to maintaining relationships across distance.

The distinction matters. An annual gathering can help people strengthen relationships, but it cannot provide all the contact and support a new colleague needs between trips. A long list of online social events is similarly incomplete without time to participate and a way for newcomers to join. The stronger approach connects ordinary working life with opportunities to know people more personally.

For an applicant, this reveals a practical part of the job. Automattic's published model includes both a distributed working environment and a meaningful travel commitment. That commitment deserves the same attention as working hours, particularly if travel involves caring responsibilities or accessibility needs.

Where flexibility reaches its limits

Schedule flexibility, hiring location, and permission to work while travelling are separate choices. A company may organize work across time zones while still restricting where a particular employee can be based.

GitLab's relocation policy illustrates this distinction. It describes approval requirements for moves between countries, limits linked to where it can support employment, and roles that require a particular country, region, or time zone. International relocation can also affect compensation. Its global workforce does not remove those conditions.

For someone considering a move abroad, the relevant evidence is the policy governing that move and the requirements of the specific role. A map of where colleagues live answers a different question. Working hours deserve the same care: a globally distributed company can still need a support team to cover particular hours or colleagues to share a regular period of overlap.

Some coordination is necessary. The quality of the arrangement depends on whether those requirements are clear and proportionate to the work. Extensive mandatory overlap narrows schedule freedom; frequent meetings narrow it further. Those consequences should be visible in the company's explanation of flexibility.

How to investigate a company's working culture

Start by following a practice through the available evidence. A handbook describes the intended arrangement. A job description shows what one team needs from a new colleague. A company blog may explain a decision or change. Employee accounts can reveal how those arrangements are experienced, including details a policy leaves out.

Each source has limits. Company material presents the employer's account, and an employee's experience belongs to a particular team and period. Look for specific, recent accounts that help explain the same practice. A detailed description of onboarding is more useful than a collection of broad ratings about whether the culture is good.

Then use conversations to investigate what remains unclear. If the public material explains written decisions but says little about support, ask a future colleague how they got help with a recent unfamiliar task. If career development is vague, explore how someone on that team recently took on greater responsibility. The conversation can build on what you have learned rather than starting another checklist from scratch.

The most useful picture shows how practices support one another. Written decisions can make flexible hours possible. Clear authority can make autonomy productive. Accessible managers can help independence feel less isolating. Transparent expectations can make accountability easier to understand.

Remote work includes many different ways of organizing a company. The more convincing cultures can explain the choices that hold their particular approach together, including the work required to maintain it. That is what turns an appealing promise into something you can evaluate—and a company into somewhere you can begin to see yourself working.

Sources and further reading

Frequently asked questions

Does an asynchronous company let you choose all your working hours?

Asynchronous communication reduces the need to be available at the same time. A role can still include scheduled customer coverage, meetings, or required overlap. Look at both the communication practices and the hours specified for the role.

Can a remote company have a strong culture without a public handbook?

Yes. A handbook provides useful evidence, but its size or visibility does not establish the quality of management. A smaller company may explain its decisions and expectations through job descriptions, conversations, and examples of recent work. The important thing is whether the explanation is clear and supported by practice.

How can I distinguish autonomy from being left unsupported?

Look for clear goals, actual decision-making authority, and dependable access to help and feedback. Onboarding and career-development practices also matter. A company should be able to explain both what you will own and how colleagues will support you while you learn.