How to Do Your Job

Purpose

Describing the processes and norms of getting our jobs done at Countable. Make sure to check out our Onboarding first!

Scope

Covers our team management platform Eightmeters, workflow checklists, remote work basics, professional conduct, setting up your desk, expenses, and a subcontractor’s guide.

Using Eightmeters

At Countable, we built Eightmeters to overcome some of the challenges of remote work. Make sure to log your time daily according to appropriate project tags, including links to appropriate Trello cards or document deliverables when possible.

Workflow Checklist

This workflow checklist covers mostly things we should already be doing. If it’s something we’re still working towards, it’s in italics.

Meetings

  • Be on time, or notify as early as possible about absence or lateness and offer something instead (here’s my summary so you can read it). See Commitments, below.
  • Everyone should share something. Prepare what you want to say (that fits the meeting agenda), and even send it to team members before the meeting.
  • If you have a proposal or idea, write it up in detail, and share it ahead of time. Indicate how it impacts something we care about (OKR).

Commitments

  • Be clear and specific about commitments. Say “I’ll send you a prototype link at 2pm” rather than “I’ll be done after lunch”. This should be in writing, such as in a Trello ticket (in this case, set a deadline on the ticket too.)
  • If you’re not going to meet a commitment, tell the team as early as possible, and explain what the gap will be, and how close you are. Explain what else you can do to help.

Every Day You Work

  • Share something with the team every day. The simplest way to do this is to report what you did on Slack in your team’s channel, and anything you’re stuck on. Shooting a quick screen cap video to share is a great idea to try out.
  • Check slack twice a day at least, and react/respond to some other team members’ posts.
  • Commit your code and push it to bitbucket every day.
  • Fill your timesheet (end of the day)
  • Check your company Email

Every Week

  • Communicate with each client you are working with. Send them an update on what’s done and what’s pending out of their current expectations. Include a link to staged work, and a screenshot or video. It’s best to do this Friday or Monday. Transparency

Do Not

  • Use private messages for things that don’t need to be private. Share your experiences on your projects in your client channel, and if it’s more widely applicable, (#client-) in #general. Transparency

Time Off

Countable’s intention is allow a great deal of flexibility to everyone, while ensuring we work at predictable times and can depend on one another. The important things are to make sure your team can rely on you being around when you say you will, and that you don’t burn out. So, you can generally work when you want, but you should communicate when that will be.

  • Employees (not subcontractors) based in Canada are subject to labour laws and as such have vacation pay, stat holidays, over-time, etc.
  • Sub-contractors may take unpaid leave any time, and should take at least 2 weeks throughout the year.
  • By default, assume your team mates won’t work on Canadian stat holidays or weekends, so don’t be surprised if you do not get a response to messages. However, you are welcome to work
  • Everyone must plan and document their regular hours in the staff schedule. These should comprise at least half of the hours you work.
  • If you are away during scheduled time, please let your team know in advance and help them plan. If it’s less than a day, same-day or one-day advance notice is fine. If it’s more than a day, notify your team members a few days in advance. Note your absence on the Countable Absences shared calendar.
  • We expect remote team members outside of the America/Vancouver timezone to have a 50% overlap with the Vancouver timezone (work half their time in PST).
  • Remove yourself from calendar events you won’t attend.

Remote Work Basics

Countable is a fully remote team, which has certain pros and cons. The top “cons” reported on other remote teams are:

  • Loneliness / Isolation
  • Collaborating / Communicating

Things to try.

  • Weekly team Lunch. Can we schedule a video call for a weekly lunch? Figure out what day works for everyone.
  • Shorter coffee-break video call, daily.
  • Video collaboration time on projects. Casual mob coding, async coding allowed too.
  • review: Gitlab Remote work tips

References

Quu Blog

Professional Conduct

How to communicate with clients, and general practices. TLDR: Act professionally with clients. You’re given flexibility (schedule, location, school) at Countable because we trust you to minimize the impact of those things on clients.

Maintaining Professionalism with Clients

As a team, Countable leans towards being casual with one another. In general, we believe this is a strength. However, we must keep in mind that we are also a consultancy, which means we offer high value knowledge based services analogous to those of a doctor or lawyer. In the same way a doctor’s work is of life and death consequence, our own work is critical for the privacy and security of our users, and critical for the business success of our clients.

It’s true we have a culture that is relaxed in terms of language and clothing among our team, have time off with flexible hours, and do our best to accomodate each person’s lifestyle.

However, we are very serious about doing high quality work for our users and clients, and maintaining their confidence by acting professionally. In practice this means:

  • We allow people to work from anywhere in the world, and have flexible schedules. However, we do our best to prevent our clients needing to worry about this.
  • It’s not a secret if you’re taking classes, travelling overseas, etc. But we don’t advertise these things to the client. If the client asks, you can discuss it, but don’t volunteer this information because the conversation should be about our client (not you, and not Countable).
  • If you can’t make a specific meeting time, do not offer the reason. The client does not need to know it’s because you have another business meeting, classes, or it’s the middle of the night where you are.
  • When meeting clients over video, work from a well-lit room, and wear clean, reasonable clothing that you’d wear to a job interview.
  • Never be late (even a few minutes) for meetings, especially when clients are involved. If you are, apologize because the reality is you’ve just wasted people’s time.
  • Always reply to clients’ emails or Trello comments within 24 hours with a resolution. This means, it should be clear what the next step is, by whom. If the item doesn’t require action, say so - “We can revisit this in the future.”

Setting Up Your Desk

Equipment Requirements

You’ll need:

  • Good quality headset with mic. Cheap options we’ve verified to work well: wired or bluetooth. Countable will reimbuse up to $40 on this.
  • A computer. If you’re a developer, it should have either Linux or MacOS (we don’t use Windows for work). If you’re a developer or designer, you want 4GB or more of RAM, 128GB or more of disk, and a core i3 or better CPU. We recommend dell XPS series OR a desktop. We recommend Ubuntu LTS or Elementary OS.
  • A quiet, hopefully cool, room to work from with a stable internet connection. When you ping 8.8.8.8 you should get no dropped packets or numbers over 100ms.

Equipment Expenses

  • Any expense over $100 must be approved in advance of the purchase in order to be reimbursed.
  • Countable will provide a (loaner) linux laptop if you use that as your primary work machine. We subsidize Linux because it helps the team learn about our servers, Docker and other critical components of our business that use Linux. We want a bias to moving as much infrastructure in that direction as possible but recognize not everything works there yet (Adobe, I’m looking at you).
  • Countable will pay 50% up to $1000 total every 2 years for computer equipment you use for work remotely, which is owned by you personally. If the expense would bring the total claimed over $1000 in the 2 year period prior to the current date, the claim is not reimbursed.
  • We studiously avoid Microsoft Windows at Countable. It’s not as automatable as Linux, and prevents people from learning Unix which is a core competency at Countable. To be eligible for resimbursement, Windows laptops must also have Linux installed on a partition (bootable, not a VM).
  • Special expenses may be approved if required for your job. These must be reviewed on a case-by-case basis prior to purchase. ie, Countable may pay for co-working space if you need one.
  • Expenses at or below $100 are not approved in advance but are reviewed instead for reimbursement (you can ask if you’re not sure, but if you can solve any real problem for $100 or less, ask for forgiveness rather than permission.) See the next section for guidelines.

Expenses

Examples of Things The Company Will Pay For

  • Grammarly pro
  • Adobe CS (if you work in a design capacity)
  • Professional Books
  • Other professional development costs (approval in advance is required)
  • Monthly company outings.
  • Small equipment or other costs for the office.
  • Any meals you share with your team members or clients.
  • Some computer equipment, see Setting Up Your Desk above.
  • Hotels/flights when travelling for business.

Claiming Expenses

Note your expenses in Eightmeters

Subcontractor’s Guide

Currently covers taxes, categorization as a subcontractor, and benefits of incorporating.

Also check out our template Subcontractor Work Agreement

Taxes

You have to claim self employment income once per year. We recommend using SimpleTax

  1. We suggest signing up with mint.com, as it makes tracking all your expenses simpler.
  2. Save all receipts for restaurants. You can deduct 50%
  3. Computer equipment, deduct % used for work.
  4. Internet, phone, deduct % used for work.
  5. Rent, deduct the percentage of the room used for work, times percentage of time working there.
  6. Deduct travel costs when working.
  7. Full list - CRA Business Expenses

Categorization as a Subcontractor

  1. You should supply your own computer equipment
  2. You should determine where, when and how the work will be done.
  3. Bears risk of loss, damage or delay.

Should You Incorporate?

This section is only if you’re in Canada for now.

  1. If you’re working full time, it’s likely worth it, otherwise probably not.
  2. It costs $400ish to incorporate (form a CCPC), plus $40/yr. You also need to spend a day or so on extra book keeping, and a day doing an extra tax return each year. You’ll likely want to pay an accountant $1000 to do the return for you, or get corporate tax software for $150 or up. The real cost is something like $2000 per year when you start.
  3. The main tax benefit is you can defer income to another year to stay in a lower tax bracket. The corporate tax rate for small businesses is only about 15%, so if you want to save money for several years it’s likely a good idea to leave that portion in your corporation rather than pay the 45% tax rate. If you’re going to save the money for quite a while, fill up your RRSPs first. Then start saving it in your CCPC.

Things You Can Deduct From Taxes

Countable doesn’t reimburse these things but if you’re a subcontractor you can deduct them from your income to avoid tax.

  • The percentage of your rent or mortgage interest used for work (divide the area and time you use by the total, ie 300 square feet out of 900 square feet, times 8 hours a day out of 24 hour a day, is 10% of your rent)
  • Any food or beveraged purchased and consumed during work hours.
  • Any equipment you use for work.