Tetris mavens know that the addictive 1980s game is best played with strategy. Each swipe brings a cascade of colorful tetrominoes, dropping the cubes into satisfying alignment with their cohorts.
The tactical maneuvers of the Soviet-born game are not unlike the careful plans that can build a successful, virtual-first workplace. Clearing online clutter with transparent goals mirrors dispersing a wall of cumbersome blocks with a well-executed stacking system.
Beyond the logistical Tetris that links remote workers across time zones and language barriers, CrowdStrike Chief Human Resources Officer J.C. Herrera advocates finding alignment through intentional emotional unity — which he believes is most present in the small moments.
“Setting up time to catch up with no agenda, checking in on colleagues at the beginning of a Zoom meeting or sending spontaneous messages to say hello can elevate the human touch points,” Herrera said.
While midday messages do not singlehandedly remove the obstacles to a thriving virtual culture, Slack channels like #pets-of-crowdstrike and #dad-jokes bring a shared sense of levity to the forefront of communication. Zoom serves as a vehicle for events like ERG webinars and CrowdStrike’s music festival, CrowdFest.
Herrera told Built In San Francisco that CrowdStrike’s values — like “relentless focus on innovation” — animate the virtual scaffolding of remote work and serve as a powerful driver for the Bay Area company.
As CrowdStrike demonstrates, intention — paired with connective technology and grounding core values — produces the necessary “line clears” to create digital space for a thriving remote culture.
CrowdStrike provides cloud-delivered next-generation endpoint protection, and aims to revolutionize endpoint protection by unifying next-generation antivirus (AV), endpoint detection and response (EDR), and a 24/7 managed hunting service — all delivered via a single lightweight agent. CrowdStrike’s technical product is bolstered by a strong work culture. Chief Human Resources Officer J.C. Herrera spoke to the gravity of the company’s core values: “Through continuous brainstorming, working sessions and iterations, and input from teams across CrowdStrike, we established a set of values that speak not only to what we do as a company, but who we are as people: ‘fanatical about the customer,’ ‘relentless focus on innovation’ and ‘limitless passion creates unlimited potential.’”
What is the biggest challenge to establishing a virtual-first company culture?
CrowdStrike has had a virtual-first culture since we were founded in 2011. However, when your company grows as fast as we have, it can be difficult to ensure both your tenured people and newer hires are grounded in a shared sense of culture.
You have to facilitate connection and collaboration logistically — across time zones and language barriers. But more importantly, you have to figure out a way to bring people together emotionally. That’s why we put a lot of emphasis on our core values. We recently undertook an in-depth, highly collaborative process to refresh our core values to ensure they represent our people and company well.
We integrate our core values into everything we do, so that all employees feel a deep connection to our work and each other — knowing no matter where we are in the world we are physically located, we are one team.
Meaningful moments help us maintain a shared sense of culture, belonging and camaraderie.”
What’s your number one tip for fostering connection and/or collaboration among virtual teams?
We have to connect with each other intentionally and thoughtfully if we want to build strong relationships among our teams. There aren’t spontaneous opportunities to strike up a conversation as there are in an office — like meeting in the break room, stopping at somebody’s desk for a quick chat or bumping into someone in the hallway.
Small things like setting up time to catch up with no agenda, spending the first five minutes of a Zoom meeting to check in on how your colleague is doing or even sending an out-of-the-blue instant message just to say hello can evolve the human touch points we take for granted throughout the day into meaningful moments that help us maintain a shared sense of culture, belonging and camaraderie.
What remote working tools do you lean on to reinforce culture?
As I mentioned above, communication is everything in a virtual-first culture. The creative ways we use Slack and Zoom allow our people to bring their authentic selves to work and feel connected across time zones. For example, CrowdStrikers can use Slack to find their niche within the larger company.
Our people have a wide array of interests, and they’re encouraged to embrace them. Having different channels for specific topics helps us get to know each other on a more personal level in a professional setting. This has led to the creation of some really fun and active channels like #nerd-tv-books-movies, #pets-of-crowdstrike, #dad-jokes or #cooking-baking-and-food.
As for Zoom, we not only use this as a primary meeting platform, of course, but also as a place to gather for global events like company-wide all-hands meetings, employee experience workshops, ERG-led webinars and, most recently, our multi-day, music festival-inspired, 10th Anniversary celebration, CrowdFest.
