# Flexible work > "Most fears that have to do with people working remotely stem from a lack of trust" We genuinely value remote work, and it shows in how our team operates. Many of us work from different locations. Some from home, others from cafés, coworking spaces, or wherever they happen to be that month. That flexibility extends to your hours too. We trust you to organize your day around your life, not the other way around. Whether you're an early riser or hit your stride in the evening, what matters is the work you deliver and the team you support. That said, we're not strictly remote, and we don't pretend that screens can replace everything. There's something about being in the same room. The casual conversations, the whiteboard sessions, the lunches that turn into the best ideas of the quarter. We genuinely look forward to those days. So we come together at the office regularly, and they matter to us. They're not an obligation; they're part of how we stay connected as a team. So expect the best of both. The freedom to work from anywhere, on a schedule that fits your life, and the warmth of showing up in person when it counts. ## Advantages of Remote Being remote has lots of advantages: * We have access to amazing people globally. Having a diverse team is a strong competitive advantage and remoteness is an enabler of diversity. * It allows us to think more deeply on better asynchronous collaboration tools and processes, and also on how to maximize uninterrupted work, and to better communicate internally and externally. * It allows anyone in the company to choose its ideal work-life balance ## Communication With team members across a growing number of countries, clear communication is essential for us to stay connected and work together more efficiently. Therefore, we use asynchronous communication with tools that invite collaboration, commenting, and editing, such as Google Suite tools (Google Docs, Google Sheets, etc.), Google Meet and slack for direct communication and Gitlab for our code collaboration. These collaborative tools help us clarify our own ideas as we put them in writing, and give us all greater insight through the shared feedback. ## Fewer Meetings We firmly believe in the importance of the [maker's schedule](http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html). So we only keep meetings that we feel add value. We'll cluster meetings together as much as possible, so our day doesn't get split up. Every meeting has a pre-defined agenda scoped in a Google Doc, so the team can add questions and comments before the meeting. Sometimes, a meeting can even be cancelled if all issues were addressed in the document. Each meeting has a clear owner and the owner is responsible: * to have a small deck for the meeting in order to increase attention of the audience * to stick to the agenda and get each topics of the meeting covered in a timely manner * to summarize the meeting in a minute document with next steps and deadlines. We educate our customers to those best-practice rules in order to be as efficient as possible while working on their assignments. ## Social time While remote work has many benefits, extremes are never good, and we therefore encourage our employees to find the right balance. We make sure to keep connected with everyone via our team building and annual retreat. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.astrafy.io/handbook/the-company/flexible-work.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.