I’m the Head of People & Operations at Arena.im.

How big is it?‍

The company as a whole has 42 employees now. My team has 3.‍

Where are your teammates located?

Currently we have people across Latin America, US and UK. Coincidentally, my team is made solely by Brazilians now, but soon to grow and go global!

What does your team do? What are you responsible for?

In operations I work solely as an executive for the company, making a cross-functional effort to keep everything running smoothly in all divisions. From growth, to content, engineering and product. Its more of a backend job, making sure everyone has the right tools to perform at their best.

On people I get very excited to talk about how we’re building something more similar to a software house then a common HR department. We separate c,andidate experience (as it would be front end) and employee experience (backend). Everything held together by a handshake that signals that a candidate has become an employee.

Responsibility, transparency and trust.

My biggest effort currently has been to make sure culture is not only a set of words on the wall or the company page, but the result of everyone's actions on a daily basis.

Working remotely surely has its set of challenges, but compared to my past being a consultant and working long hours in an open-space, there is no doubt that it’s working more efficiently.

The hard part about it has been adapting some of the refinement we used to have in communicating, and making sure we’re not transferring “how it was done before” to the remote environment.

I tend to see that written and async communication forces you to get your thoughts straight, and on the other side is good to create a culture to always absorb information expecting a smile on the face of whoever's writing it.

Happy hours have been amazing and we’re implementing game nights right now, not only to get the stress out, but also as a serious bonding and leadership experience.

We may go from esports like CSGO (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive) to sync people up and trust one another, from more casual ones like Jackbox “date a monster” type of games, to strengthen the communication.

Some of the time a casual conversation may take place in some minutes before a call, on others we may start with someone DJ’ing some music they like before the time of the meeting. We’re planning on building a playlist of ours, and this also seems to be a good exercise for bonding. Building something together is always fun.

This may not sound so much business-like, but I really like long forms of communication with some jokes on the side, like Wait But Why.

In the past few years I also have enjoyed listening to technical influencers on subjects I was curious about. In tech I tend to follow many software engineers that just talk about random topics on YouTube, and in VC world I really like the view of Naval Ravikant. If I could share something from someone that helps me view the world in a better way, definitely would be his tweetstorm.