Sneek is a game-changing software making it seamless to stay connected as a remote team.

At Croissant, we always enjoy catching up with fellow remote work aficionados about all the best parts of the digital nomad lifestyle. As a company that traverses international borders, we are so lucky to have friends all around the world to connect with over this very topic! We find all sorts of amazing similarities and differences in everyone’s experiences, which just goes to show how liberating and dynamic working remotely can be. This is exactly why we were so excited to catch up with our friend Joel Currie from Sneek.io. Sneek is a software company for remote teams that built the “always on video chat.”

Here’s a ~sneek~ at our conversation!

So can you tell us a bit about your background with remote work? How long have you been doing it, and what made you join the Sneek team?

I started working with Sneek in October 2016, and, at the time, I had no background in remote work. I was working in events crewing beforehand, setting up huge concerts around London and doing a lot of work based travel. I had spent time in cities like Paris for the Victoria Secret Fashion show, Rotterdam for the MTV Awards show, and met some incredible people along the way like Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, Adele, and even legends Elton John and Stevie Wonder! It was an amazing experience but it had its downsides.

I was in Paris for almost two weeks and I spent most of that time standing on the side of the stage, never having a chance to explore the amazing city. I was being sent to spectacular places but spending all day in a venue and I eventually realized that wasn’t how I wanted to spend my life. I was playing in and managing my own band at the time which led me to develop some skills in social media, so I decided to invest more time in honing those skills via online courses and eventually got hooked up with Sneek. I loved what the company was all about - trust, flexibility, teamwork, and creating your own environment to succeed. As soon as I started working with them I knew it was the right move, and I still love it four years in!

What do you love most about remote working? For you, what makes a great work day great?

For myself, what makes a great work day is the ability to make every work day different! When you work remotely you get to dictate your environment based on your mood and workload. If I’m working on something visual I like to go to a cafe with an atmosphere that reflects that - like a space with an art gallery room or somewhere playing music that inspires me. If I‘m working on a blog or video I prefer a workspace surrounded by other people working remotely, I can get really stuck into a project when there’s productivity in the air. I also like planning trips abroad just because I can! There’s nothing better than immersing yourself in different cultures and it inspires me to spread the message of how amazing the lifestyle can be. On top of all that, sometimes nothing beats working from the comfort of your home office space where the atmosphere is completely dictated by your own needs.

What advice would you have for someone just starting out with remote work?

The transition towards distributed teams has been happening slowly worldwide and throughout many industries, and with the unexpected pandemic of COVID-19 huge tech companies like Twitter, Facebook, Square, and many more have been making the permanent switch and even promoting working from home. The advice that I’d give to all forms of remote workers is keep your skills sharp! These days it feels like tech companies care less about a degree and more about your abilities. As CEO Ginni Rometty said, “Getting a job at today’s IBM does not always require a college degree.”

I think it’s also important to prove that you understand the nuances of working from home and are adapted by communicating regularly and efficiently. On a personal level, It’s important to implement your own work life balance. Getting up early to eat something and prepare for the day before signing on can have a great effect on the kind of work you do. Taking time to enjoy your work breaks is important as well.

Now about Sneek: Even though Sneek is “always on,” I get the vibe that this does NOT mean your team is “all work, no play” - or that you would encourage that at all. In fact, it seems like teams can have a lot of fun with the Sneek software. Can you speak to that?

For us, remote working is all about hiring people you trust to work without constant supervision and giving them the freedom to control the conditions that they work best in. I think some teams have a misconception that Sneek can be used as a surveillance tool but it honestly wouldn’t be a very good one! Sneek doesn’t have any employee monitoring capabilities, and we’ve added pixelated image options and Manual photo taking so it doesn’t have to be “always on” if you aren’t comfortable with that. We use Sneek to try and introduce human nuance back into the workspace, but our team has also found a lot of ways to have fun with it. Sending Sneeksnaps is one of our favourites, you can pair them with a hashtag like #yawnorsing when someone gets caught with their mouth open. Sometimes someone will change their status message and by the end of the week everyone has changed theirs to a variation of the original, little running jokes like that help keep our team close and laughing through the workday.

What kind of teams is Sneek perfect for?

Sneek is perfect for every team and the possibilities of how to use it are different for every company. One of the features that everyone can benefit from is one click call, being able to see that your coworker is at their desk with their status set to available and starting a call with them instantly. There can be a lot of waiting for responses and phone tag in a remote team and having everyone on Sneek definitely helps to save that time for something more important. Like we mentioned before there are a lot of ways to use the app to joke around with co-workers, but it can also be used as a serious work tool to cut down wait times and group calling makes it so you can have a conversation once instead of sending it through a pipeline which confuses important details.

What do you think remote working will look like in 5–10 years?

With the growth and evolution of new tech it’s pretty hard to try and guess what remote working will look like in one year! What I will say is it’s growing everyday and the amount of new spaces like the ones offered with Croissant that are popping up makes me very excited for the future of remote work. I guess I mostly hope that in 5 years any office job will have the option of working remotely with Sneek!

Catching Up with Joel from Sneek