Macro Management

It’s been more than 5 years since I joined my current employer remerge and the reason for this long stay (relative to retention in tech industry) is the management style and company culture at Remerge, which I call macro management.

I found the company culture positive (and others agree if you check glassdoor). Most of my team members have been with the company for 4+ years, while the company itself was founded in 2014. If I ever start my own company, I would adopt Remerge's management style and culture. In this blog I try to write down what makes Remerge’s culture successful and how it benefits both the company and employees (and not a “look at my cool workplace” blog).

But first of all,

why does culture matter for a company ?

• Good work culture is a good intrinsic motivator that encourages people to go beyond in their roles. While extrinsic factors like salary and job titles can provide motivation to some extent, it's intrinsic motivation that sets apart good teams and drives sustained high performance.
• Attracts and retains talent, which also means that knowledge over time remains within the organization.
• If an organization can create a shared sense of values, this makes better teamwork and collaboration.

Below are my observation at my current org about why/how culture worked well.

• Thinking about culture from day 1

  • Company had a document outlining its desired culture from its early days, even before the company was profitable. Making sure culture is not a after thought from the start ensured it became a core part of the company. This commitment to culture isn’t just in words but is demonstrated consistently through the founders’ actions and management style, which helps propagate it across the entire company.

• Transparecny

  • All company information (strategy, guiding policy, current challenges, etc.) is accessible to everyone, including financial numbers. This transparency helps everyone make decisions quickly and understand the broader company context.
  • The CEO holds a team meeting every two weeks to share updates on market changes, company performance, and potential strategy shifts. These meetings are recorded, accompanied by meeting notes, and shared on Slack, so everyone stays up-to-date with any changes and feels aligned with the company direction.
  • Every quarter, the CEO publishes a document called “Heartbeats,” where each team summarizes its achievements from the last quarter in a few sentences. This allows everyone to stay informed about other teams at a high level..
  • This transparency improves collaboration between teams by fostering company-wide alignment

• Autonomy & trust

  • The company values trust and autonomy rather than directing people on what to do and how to do it. This approach encourages people to take greater ownership of their work and increases engagement.
  • Deep, focused work is encouraged over constant Slack availability. Its easy to do shallow work by showing yourself busy and doing multiple things at once but deep and focused work brings more longterm value.
  • The leaders in each team are competent, having grown with the company, and are there to provide context and guidance rather than micromanaging.
  • Often, employees structure their workday as they see fit, enhancing productivity than to add prove someone that they are working.

• No-Blame Culture

  • There is an understanding that everyone makes mistakes, and mistakes are seen as learning opportunities. This approach improves psychological safety and allows people to work and communicate with guards down.
  • For example, a production bug once cost the company nearly half a million USD in revenue, but instead of blaming the employee who built that feature, it was shared as a learning experience to prevent similar issues in the future. That employee continued to work at Remerge for over 5 years.

• Striving for excellence and efficiency

  • There is always focus on excellence and effienciency, this challenges you to learn and grow at work.
  • Doing experimentation and sharing with wider team is encouraged, this makes each new project interesting.

• Feedback culture

  • There is a tool which collects feedback regularly from everyone and often this is shared in compnay wide team meeting and addressed when there are questions.