Working Remotely

Shoelace was founded in Toronto and although we still maintain an office downtown (at least until our lease runs out this year!), we actively recruit and employ people from all over the world who work from their homes, coffee shops, parks or maybe all three in a given day.

This “work from anywhere” mindset opens the talent pool from which we can draw and adds to the diversity of people and opinions you’ll get to interact with every day.

For our employees, it means flexibility. If they want to move to a ski town for 3 months they can. Work from a desk overlooking the ocean? Yep that too. Perhaps they want to do something less dramatic like replace their previous commute time with a new hobby or just get the laundry done - great! Work and life are supposed to be balanced and remote work helps create that balance.

How Does This Work?

With all the above in mind, there are a few practical guidelines that we all follow to ensure we are able properly collaborate with our peers and clients. Those are:

• Having a stable internet connection and a place to work without distractions for the length of the working day.
• Working hours have to have at least a 5 hour overlap with eastern standard time. Because the vast majority of our team and clients are in Canada or the US, we try to keep similar working hours. This ensures we can effectively collaborate with team mates, attend all hands meetings as a group and communicate with clients/the team in a timely way.
• This 5 hour rule applies to the hours that our employees work, not the time zone that they live in. If they are willing to adjust their working hours up or down, they may be able to move/travel a little further away than just 5 time zones and still achieve the 5 hour overlap.

The decision to move to a remote work style has been one of the best decisions we’ve made and hope you’ll find lots of value in the flexibility Shoelace has to offer 🙂