Not only is our team diverse, but so is our customer base. Our website has 16 languages in addition to English, so we have to have people that speak those languages to help customers — particularly the languages that our customers speak the most (i.e., Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German).

With all of these languages spoken in our company, many team members have taken it upon themselves to learn new languages. We supported them by providing access to app-based language courses in the past. But now they've set up language exchange groups on their initiative to be able to share their language skills with each other.

DiscoverCars.com's experience with remote work began before Covid. We had team members working remotely both within the country and internationally in different time zones. This led to us learning how to cope with the challenges of having a remote team before many other companies.

Even though we had most of our meetings in person, we still used zoom so that others not in our main office could participate. This was a challenge at first from a technical standpoint, but we were able to work out the kinks quickly.

The other challenge with hybrid meetings is making those that are joining remotely feel that they are participating at the same level as those in person. While we didn't have those joining remotely on screen all the time, they did have the ability to interject, ask questions, speak when it was their turn, and otherwise feel they were participating all the same.

The transition from having a team mostly in one place to having a team located across the world hasn't gone without challenges. Like many others, we've had to come up with new workflows, ways to keep employees engaged, and manage team and individual tasks.

One-on-ones
Whether to have team meetings, and how often, or whether to have one-on-ones with team meetings being more rarely, was a huge question when we became a remote team. Through trial and error, our teams found what works best for them. Some teams decided to have weekly or bi-weekly meetings. Others went for one-on-one meetings, especially the teams where the members have very different roles. Weekly or bi-weekly check-ins help everyone stay on the same page and be able to air any concerns or questions they may have.

Corporate meetings
Our large all-company meetings went from having a few members join remotely to having the entire company do such. We had to ask ourselves how to keep the same engagement and get the same out of it in such circumstances.

The answer was to have questions that participants could answer. These are both general icebreakers and feedback on what was relevant and what wasn't to improve future meetings. Many different solutions exist for being able to accomplish these. Our choice was Sli.do. This is a great tool for asking large groups questions during meetings or playing games together.

The key to remote meetings, like in-person meetings, is participation. We've found the more we are able to get participants to engage with the speakers, the better it goes for everyone.

Task flow
Keeping track of tasks and collaborating when working remotely meant finding better methods to do so. We started to use Asana to collaborate on tasks (and to be able to have ways of structuring one-on-one meetings). Using task management software greatly boosted our teams' productivity while working remotely — and we now see it as essential.

Our development teams eventually moved to Jira to be able to collaborate even more effectively. While this was primarily due to the nature of our software development rather than working remotely, it has the benefit of making tracking tasks while some team members work remotely even more efficient.