Courtney Seiter

A collection of posts by Courtney Seiter

A collection of 188 posts by Courtney Seiter - Page 2

Self-ImprovementApr 19, 2018
The Surprising Power of Reading Fiction: 9 Ways it Make Us Happier and More Creative

“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.” ― Doris Lessing One of the most inspiring perks we’re lucky enough to have at Buffer is a free Kindle for each teammate (and her family!) and as many free Kindle books as you like, no questions asked. When we share what we’re reading at Buffer on our Pinterest page or in our Slack community, the selections often tend to skew more toward non-fiction—you can generally find teammates reading books that help us improve at our jobs, under

How We Hire: A Look Inside Our Hiring Process

Editor’s Note: We are so grateful to Deborah Rippol, Buffer’s former and beloved People Success Manager, for all of her contributions to our hiring processes and this post. She had a key role in creating and refining our hiring process, and her expertise continues to positively impact Buffer. P.S. We’re hiring right now; we’d love to hear from you! At Buffer, we try to keep a beginner’s mind: always experimenting, pushing the boundaries of the future of work and aiming for a “what if” mentality

Tips / How ToFeb 26, 2018
How to Gain a Massive Following on Instagram: 10 Proven Tactics To Grow Followers and Engagement

Instagram now has more than 800 million monthly users and sky-high user engagement levels . And with 80 percent of accounts following a business on Instagram, it seems like marketers might be more keen than ever to get acquainted with Instagram for their business 2Instagram , 2017. I know we are at Buffer! Lately, we’ve been sharing,

Self-ImprovementFeb 22, 2018
The 10 Words and Phrases That Motivate Us Most (and The 7 That Don’t!)

Have you ever been in a meeting where you felt the electricity in the room change based on a single sentence? Words are incredibly powerful: even a solitary one can win you over, put you out, set your boundaries, and change how others perceive you. With this kind of power, it’s in our best interest to try to understand the science and psychology of words. I went hunting for some of the top words and phrases that motivate people to be creative, work together and build relationships. These are

OpenFeb 20, 2018
40 Lessons From 4 Years of Remote Work

This month I celebrated my four-year anniversary of joining the Buffer team – or “Bufferversary,” as we fondly call them. All work makes an impact on you, as you learn new things, make friends, and grow in your confidence at the job. I’ve been lucky enough to have many memorable roles, and I’ve taken something from all of them. But my work at Buffer? That’s something else altogether. It’s mind-boggling to think of the impact Buffer’s culture and values [https://buffer.com/resources/buffer-valu

OpenFeb 8, 2018
Bias at Work: Three Steps To Minimizing Bias In Performance Reviews

Bias creeps into almost every area of our lives and decision-making, whether we know it or not. It’s not that we’re bad people, determined to pre-judge others. Rather, it’s our brains taking shortcuts that have been created over centuries. That makes it pretty tricky to undo effectively, but there are ways. When I last talked about performance reviews at Buffer here on the blog, I shared that one practice we’ve tried during the review process is t

Case StudiesDec 4, 2017
Case Study: How Business Insider Grew Its Facebook Page to 1M+ Fans With Buffer

When you’re a small news team with a big workload, how do you keep social media updates flowing steadily around the clock? For U.S. business and technology news website Business Insider , the answer was Buffer. Paul Szoldra was a fan of Buffer’s simple scheduling power even before he became Business Insider’s West Coast Editor. “Basically, I pitched Buffer to everybody,” Szoldra says. “Once I started at BI and took over with the social media, I recognized that

We Reversed Course on Performance Reviews – Here’s Why

The ability to change one’s mind, change course and try again is one of the things I like most about working at Buffer. It’s totally normal to share about not just successes but also times we didn’t know the answer, mistakes we’ve made and experiments we’ve tried that didn’t quite turn out like we thought they might. So even though the last time I wrote about performance reviews it was to share why we don’t do them, it’s not actually that weird (at least at Buffer) to return to the topic only

We’re Retiring The ‘Buffer Bootcamp’ Period For New Teammates – Here’s Why

The “Buffer Bootcamp” is a rite of passage that’s long been a staple of our culture at Buffer. This is the 45-day period that all new teammates at Buffer have embarked upon as they joined the team. Traditionally, the “bootcamper” has acted as a freelancer/contractor for their first 6 weeks, working on a probationary basis – no healthcare benefits, equity, or team retreats just yet. They generally receive lots of hands-on coaching and feedback as they learn the ropes of Buffer. It’s been a tim

OpenJul 13, 2017
The 3 Research-Backed Benefits of Diversity That Guide Our Team Growth

One happy side effect of Buffer’s value of defaulting to transparency and sharing lots of what we’re working on and going through as a company is that you get to have lots of great conversations. Folks from other companies read what we’re up to and share advice about similar situations, or share a challenge they’re going through and ask for advice. And the No. 1 question I get asked is this: How does a company begin to approach the topic of diversity and inclusion for the first time? Folks are

OpenJul 5, 2017
3 Ways We’re Experimenting With More Team Freedom

I’ve always been a person who follows the rules. No coloring outside the lines. Work within the system. At times, this has worked out fine. More often, though, I’ve had to work to retrain myself to take bigger risks, speak up more and be less afraid of “getting in trouble.” Especially at work, rule following can be a bit of a double-edged sword. Getting tough feedback for being out of line or overreaching is hard, but so is missing an opportunity you know y

OpenJun 22, 2017
From HR to People Ops: When and Why To Start a People Team

Startups get a lot of advice. And for good reason – there are millions of decisions to be made as you begin the journey of building a company. Some of the advice is clear-cut. More often, you’ll hear a chorus of voices with different experiences and points of view. Perhaps nowhere is the advice more confusing than when it comes to if, when and how a company should add HR or People functions into a team. (For a little taste, read through this Quora thread.) There are a lot of reasons why this

OpenMay 18, 2017
How We’re Focusing on Diversity and Inclusion Without Growing Our Team

Let’s say you’re a startup or early stage company and you’ve made it a priority to grow in a way that’s diverse, inclusive, and representative of its surroundings. That’s a great decision! Now, how do you make it happen? Do you tell everyone to say something when they see something? Create a committee? Appoint one person to create change? At Buffer, we’ve tried all 3 of these methods and even more mixed combinations between them. In the last few years, we’ve: * Allowed diversity projects t

Self-ImprovementApr 25, 2017
5 Side Hustle Lessons I Learned From My Day Job

I never planned on being an entrepreneur. That label always sounded far too lofty for me. Entrepreneurs were guys in suits working everyone in the room. Entrepreneurs only got three hours of sleep a night because the rest of the time they were hustling. Entrepreneurs would look at someone like me and realize right away that I didn’t belong. But that picture – my picture – has changed. Women now make up 40 percent of new entrepreneurs in the United States. And startups these days don’t have to

OpenApr 6, 2017
Why We’ve Stopped Saying “Culture Fit” and What We’re Saying Instead

The phrase “culture fit” is a bit of an Inkblot test in the world of work—even when we all hear the same two words, we might be thinking entirely different things. There are countless filters and interpretations of the phrase—and a growing amount of interest in figuring out just what it means. When the phrase “culture fit” is thoughtfully and deliberately applied, it can mean a gauge for your company’s essential values. At other companies, it might simply mean, “Is this a person with whom you

ReportsFeb 14, 2017
How Managers Can Support Family Leave + New Reflection Experiment

Buffer People/People Ops Report January 2017 * Last month’s report Last month’s Ops report * All People reports * All Buffer reports Applicants 168-53% Open blog posts published 14-1 Open blog visitors 142,867 +19% Bimonthly team NPS score [https://buffer.com/resources/why-we-ask-our-team-to-grade-us-ev

ReportsJan 13, 2017
New Family Leave Policy + A Peek Inside our Executive Meetings

Buffer People Report December 2016 * Last month’s report * All People reports * All Buffer reports Applicants 360-24% Open blog posts published 15 no change Open blog visitors 120,065-7.3% Bimonthly team NPS score 60% Launching our new family leave recommend

Self-ImprovementDec 12, 2016
Most People Don’t Have Transparent Salaries, So Here’s The Research on Talking About Pay

A while back, an awesome group of women in tech in Hamburg, Germany reached out to Buffer. They explained that they wanted to support women in being more confident about the money they make and negotiating, and asked if we would we be interested in talking about our journey with transparent salaries. And that’s how I, with a track record of literally never negotiating and a mostly hilarious salary history that looks like this: 1st job, NYC: Conde Nast editorial asst: $26K 7 yrs @Tennessean/G

ReportsDec 7, 2016
We Just Can’t Get Enough Of: Buffer Friends, Family and Babies!

Buffer People Report November 2016 * Last month’s report * All People reports * All Buffer reports Applicants 360-24% Open blog posts published 15-4 Open blog visitors 129,472-.6% Bimonthly team NPS score 60% Welcoming friends and family! As we build the futu

Celebrating Around the World: How Holidays Work on Our Distributed, International Team

Some people might be surprised to hear that we didn’t used to get time off for Christmas at Buffer—or for Hanukkah, Canadian Thanksgiving, Chinese New Year or any specific holiday at all! Instead, we had unlimited time off and the full trust of our teammates to make great decisions about how to use this privilege. Great in theory, but as it turns out, challenging in practice. Over time, we learned that unlimited vacation policies statistically

ReportsNov 8, 2016
Introducing the Unsick Day

Buffer People Report October 2016 * Last month’s report * All People reports * All Buffer reports Applicants 473 -6% Open blog posts published 19+2 Open blog visitors 130,210-2.3% Bimonthly team NPS score 60% If every American received their recommended cli

ReportsOct 6, 2016
Our People Team Explores: Does Transparent Communication Include Slack?

Buffer People Report September 2016 * Last month’s report * All People reports * All Buffer reports Key Stats Applicants 505 +49% Open blog posts published 17 +2 Open blog visitors 133,309 +2.4% Bimonthly team NPS score 60% If we’re known in particular for any of

When Unlimited is Limiting: Why We Changed to Minimum Vacation Recommendations

It’s one of those mythical and vaunted startup perks, and one of the Buffer perks that tends to entice folks the most: unlimited vacation time. When someone new joins the team, they’re immediately granted as much time away from work as they’d like, no questions asked. Under this non-policy policy, teammates have had some great vacations, including cruises around the world and even a month of sailing the Atlantic. But is it really that simple? Well, yes and no. Buffer’s unlimited vacation po

Leaning Into our Strengths: The Editor/Operator Experiment

Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate. Head to our homepage to view our most recent posts. What combination of strengths help a team thrive? We’ve written before about the “bias toward action” mindset that we believe creates a great fit on the Buffer team, and we’re always experimenting, evolving and fine-tuning the way