Updated June 20, 2024

DiscoverCars.com's International Team

DiscoverCar.com has always had an international team over its almost decade of existence. That team has grown constantly over that time, too — starting from only 3.

The team now comprises more than 220 members hailing from 38 different countries across 5 continents. While most are based in Riga, Latvia where our company is headquartered, many are located throughout the world — a truly international company.

With such an international team come members with vastly different and unique skill sets. This includes many languages, as well as different professional skills that can be shared with others.

Like many companies that could, our team worked remotely during the pandemic. Now that we've emerged from it, many members of our team still work remotely — and many are located in different countries across the world.

DiscoverCars.com's International Team

By Aleksandrs Buraks | Updated June 20, 2024
DiscoverCar.com has always had an international team over its almost decade of existence. That team has grown constantly over that time, too — starting from only 3.

The team now comprises more than 220 members hailing from 38 different countries across 5 continents. While most are based in Riga, Latvia where our company is headquartered, many are located throughout the world — a truly international company.

With such an international team come members with vastly different and unique skill sets. This includes many languages, as well as different professional skills that can be shared with others.

Like many companies that could, our team worked remotely during the pandemic. Now that we've emerged from it, many members of our team still work remotely — and many are located in different countries across the world.

Countries represented

Languages

Not only is our team diverse, but so is our customer base. Our website has 16 languages in addition to English, so we have to have people that speak those languages to help customers — particularly the languages that our customers speak the most (i.e., Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German).

With all of these languages spoken in our company, many team members have taken it upon themselves to learn new languages. We supported them by providing access to app-based language courses in the past. But now they've set up language exchange groups on their initiative to be able to share their language skills with each other.

Remote by necessity

DiscoverCars.com's experience with remote work began before Covid. We had team members working remotely both within the country and internationally in different time zones. This led to us learning how to cope with the challenges of having a remote team before many other companies.

Even though we had most of our meetings in person, we still used zoom so that others not in our main office could participate. This was a challenge at first from a technical standpoint, but we were able to work out the kinks quickly.

The other challenge with hybrid meetings is making those that are joining remotely feel that they are participating at the same level as those in person. While we didn't have those joining remotely on screen all the time, they did have the ability to interject, ask questions, speak when it was their turn, and otherwise feel they were participating all the same.

What we've learned about having a remote team

The transition from having a team mostly in one place to having a team located across the world hasn't gone without challenges. Like many others, we've had to come up with new workflows, ways to keep employees engaged, and manage team and individual tasks.

One-on-ones
Whether to have team meetings, and how often, or whether to have one-on-ones with team meetings being more rarely, was a huge question when we became a remote team. Through trial and error, our teams found what works best for them. Some teams decided to have weekly or bi-weekly meetings. Others went for one-on-one meetings, especially the teams where the members have very different roles. Weekly or bi-weekly check-ins help everyone stay on the same page and be able to air any concerns or questions they may have.

Corporate meetings
Our large all-company meetings went from having a few members join remotely to having the entire company do such. We had to ask ourselves how to keep the same engagement and get the same out of it in such circumstances.

The answer was to have questions that participants could answer. These are both general icebreakers and feedback on what was relevant and what wasn't to improve future meetings. Many different solutions exist for being able to accomplish these. Our choice was Sli.do. This is a great tool for asking large groups questions during meetings or playing games together.

The key to remote meetings, like in-person meetings, is participation. We've found the more we are able to get participants to engage with the speakers, the better it goes for everyone.

Task flow
Keeping track of tasks and collaborating when working remotely meant finding better methods to do so. We started to use Asana to collaborate on tasks (and to be able to have ways of structuring one-on-one meetings). Using task management software greatly boosted our teams' productivity while working remotely — and we now see it as essential.

Our development teams eventually moved to Jira to be able to collaborate even more effectively. While this was primarily due to the nature of our software development rather than working remotely, it has the benefit of making tracking tasks while some team members work remotely even more efficient.

Aleksandrs Buraks

Head of Growth at DiscoverCars.com
Aleksandrs has over 10 years of experience in marketing with a focus on creating stellar content that provides topical insights using data. Having taken five road trips across Europe and one in the U.S., he is passionate about traveling by car. His favorite countries to visit are Denmark and Thailand. You can find him on Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter.
Top Related Locations
Here are some great places you could visit in the countries that our employees are from:
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