GitHub has operated as a remote-first company for years, but not every team started that way. For the finance, legal, and IT organizations, the sudden shift to mandatory work-from-home meant rewriting long-standing routines almost overnight. In this installment of our remote work series, three team leads share how their groups navigated the transition, what broke, and what they now realize they don’t need an office for.

  • Leithia Williams, director on the Commercial Legal team, joined GitHub over four years ago as the team’s first distributed member, working from a different state and timezone.
  • Shannon Hines, senior manager of revenue, leads the accounting team and was previously based entirely in GitHub’s San Francisco headquarters.
  • Adnan Alam, an IT support manager, now handles help desk tickets, new-hire onboarding, and event support from home.

When the Office Was the Baseline

Before the shelter-in-place orders in California, Shannon’s finance team was the only group at GitHub located entirely in the SF headquarters. Nearly everyone was in the office five days a week. The lockdown therefore hit them harder than most teams. But there was a silver lining: because GitHub is a predominantly remote company, daily interaction with distributed colleagues meant the tools and norms for virtual collaboration were already in place.

Adnan’s IT team faced a similar shock, compounded by a surge in support requests. The biggest change, he says, is in how they troubleshoot. Working remotely forced the team to be more deliberate about asking the right questions to identify root causes, and to explain why those questions matter.

Leithia’s legal team, by contrast, had been distributed from the start. Their workflow was already built around asynchronous communication and GitHub issues and repositories for daily tasks. They still hold synchronous virtual meetings for updates, discussions, and quick triaging, but the default is writing things down.

Empathy as a Team Practice

For Leithia, the biggest shift has been in the culture of meetings. With teammates juggling children, partners, or quarantine isolation, the team now leads with empathy before diving into the agenda. Simple habits—checking in at the start of each call, being transparent about capacity—have made a tangible difference.

Shannon’s accounting team struggled with something more fundamental: the loss of a clear boundary between work and personal time. Her team had a strong culture of unplugging after office hours, and the lockdown blurred that line. To recreate the face-to-face connection they lost, they started a daily 30-minute video stand-up. It’s part business update, part watercooler chat—sharing stories about home life, TV, and family. Shannon also models honesty with her direct reports, openly saying when she’s having a rough day or feeling unmotivated.

Adnan echoes the importance of boundaries. He stresses to his team that signing off means signing off—being near your computer doesn’t obligate you to work past business hours. “Having a healthy work and life balance right now is critical to our emotional well-being,” he says.

Relearning What’s Possible

Before COVID-19, Adnan’s IT team rarely worked remotely. Now they’re actively seeking advice from teams more experienced with distributed work—asking about tools and processes instead of answering questions. The forced change, he notes, has exposed issues that pre-existed the pandemic but were never addressed.

Leithia noticed her team gravitated toward synchronous communication when most members were co-located. Now they’ve deliberately refocused on asynchronous workflows to be inclusive of teammates and internal clients in different timezones.

The most dramatic turnaround came in finance. When the team was suddenly required to close February remote, Shannon says they were terrified about the risk of errors. After completing two month-end closes and a quarter close entirely from home, the fear is gone. “Everyone just assumed we had to be in the office to complete the month-end, and now we wonder why we would do a month-end close from the office ever again,” she says. The commute and stress of closing quarter no longer seem necessary when the process works from anywhere.

The Hardest Part Isn’t the Work

From a purely operational perspective, Shannon thinks the work will be fine. Processes have been figured out remotely. What worries her is the social and mental toll. Without the fixed schedule of a commute and an office, she struggles with self-discipline and learning to be patient with a new normal.

Leithia misses the in-person connection the most. Her team used to gather a couple times a year for planning and celebrations. “As much optimization as we have accomplished working as a remote distributed team, nothing replaces that in-person connection,” she says.

Adnan has had a particularly rough stretch: he cancelled his wedding and honeymoon and moved apartments to get a dedicated workspace, and several teammates have moved for similar reasons. Still, he resists losing perspective. His parents work in education and the airline industry, and he sees how much harder the situation is for them. “We’re very fortunate at GitHub,” he says. “This is an important thing to remember when we’re feeling down. We will get through this.”