Since our founding in 2009, Grammarly has prioritized operational excellence. To accelerate our productivity and innovation, we have adopted a mode of working that we call “remote-first hybrid,” which enables our team members to operate at their highest potential individually and collectively.
Our remote-first hybrid model is another step forward on our 15+ year journey of helping people communicate and connect. Since our beginning, in-person interactions have aided our collaboration and resulting innovation. At the start of the pandemic, we began working fully remotely for the health and safety of our team and communities. Overnight, we had to adapt to new ways of working—and communicating.
Through this experience, we’ve learned and evolved. While the pandemic is behind us, the new collaboration methods we adopted remain central to our operations today. Our shift to more asynchronous written communication has created many opportunities to use—and improve—our product while facilitating better internal documentation and transparency.
We also have been able to empathize even more deeply with our users and with people everywhere experiencing new communication challenges and needs. We see an exciting future ahead that blends the power of digital communication with that of in-person connection. That’s why we are reshaping our workplace to welcome and resemble this future.
Our remote-first hybrid model
What do we mean by “remote-first”? Grammarly team members can work primarily from home. We recognize the many advantages of remote work, like commute savings and more focus time. We also believe that the most effective work happens when all Grammarlians operate in the same mode. By “remote-first,” we mean that our modes of collaboration will assume every team member is remote. We believe this helps us build an equitable workplace that ensures transparency and equal opportunity for each Grammarlian to learn, grow, and have the highest impact.
What do we mean by “hybrid”? In-person interaction helps us build trusting relationships and a welcoming, supportive culture that fosters innovation. That’s why our working model includes essential face-to-face collaboration among teams each quarter—such as for strategic planning, project kickoffs, brainstorms, and retrospectives. It also integrates a smooth flow of real-time communication by having each team’s members operate within three time zones of one another, to facilitate at least six hours of overlap each day.
To facilitate this remote-first hybrid model, we conceive of our office spaces as “hubs”—places for our team to gather, connect, and work closely together. A regular cadence of in-person collaboration takes place at our hubs in San Francisco, Kyiv, Berlin, New York, Seattle, and Vancouver, as well as a workspace in Kraków. Grammarlians can also work from our hubs anytime year-round if they prefer.
We believe this balanced approach gives our team members the best of both worlds: plenty of focus time as well as in-person collaboration that fosters trust, unlocks creativity, and accelerates innovation.
Building for—and as—users
We know that communication is both vitally important and astonishingly complex. Working remotely enhances the thought we put into our own communication as Grammarlians, and the remote-first hybrid model helps us maintain this focus. Our working model keeps us in tune with our users so we can meet the communication needs of people interacting across platforms, professions, and cultures around the world.
Since adopting this working model in 2020, we’ve found that it sparks product innovations at each stage of the communication journey. One example of this is communication tone, which can be very difficult to refine without body language or vocal cues. Working remotely has brought new context for our tone detector and tone suggestions. We have seen how important it is to facilitate positive human connections through intelligent digital communication support.
Supporting and growing our global team
Beyond aligning our working model with the future of communication and work, we’ve always focused on setting our team members up for success and supporting them both personally and professionally. Every Grammarlian brings something unique to our team, and we strive to build an inclusive culture that fosters everyone’s growth. Our remote-first hybrid model supports these principles.
We’re also thrilled that our remote-first hybrid encourages us to grow our team and bring aboard talented people who live further away from our hubs. Collaborating with team members from different places will bring fresh perspectives and ideas to the table and will help us to diversify our workforce in new ways. This will benefit Grammarly—and, ultimately, people using our writing assistant worldwide.
Looking ahead
What has not changed are our EAGER values: ethical, adaptable, gritty, empathetic, and remarkable. We live these deliberately in everything we do—from product development to team interactions to company operations—and they drive how we think about the future of work at Grammarly. Our remote-first hybrid model is tailor-made for a team that holds these values closely and lives them out day to day.
We’re excited about what our remote-first hybrid model unlocks for our users, our product, our team, and our mission to improve lives by improving communication. Our focus remains on achieving our vision of a comprehensive communication assistant that helps individuals and businesses worldwide move work forward. If you’d like to join us on this journey, please check out our open roles to learn more and apply.
