On Distributed Working
The Ori Diaries I: Mr Remote Working
I recently joined the team at Ori — the start up on a mission to build the next generation of the cloud. We’re currently a small team but we’re looking to grow! Over a series of blogs I’ll be chatting to my new teammates to share what it’s like to work at Ori. The team is a complete mixed bag of experiences and personalities, and I can’t wait to introduce them all to you. 👩🏻💻👩🏽🍳🧜🏼♂
In my first week, I organise chats with the whole team. It’s a get-to-know-you exercise but also a knowledge scouting expedition as I’m super aware of how much there is to learn. 🤯
As expected, I learnt a lot. Everyone had a different focus and a different approach to talking about what Ori is building, as well as our overall vision. But one team member stood out as not only extremely excited about what Ori is building, but also how we’re working together as a team, specifically, *buzzword alert*: the remote lifestyle.
“I love the remote first approach, I could talk about it all day! I have no doubt our commitment to remote working will give us the biggest competitive advantage.”
These are the words of Mael Valais, our remote-first junior software engineer.
Living in Toulouse, France, with his wife and two incredibly cute little girls, Mael spends his working hours in his home office designed to accommodate remote work: a standing desk for keeping a good shape, as well as the iconic Blue Yeti* microphone to talk with our globally distributed team.
Mael is the most passionate guy on the team: he loves working at Ori, and he loves being able to work remotely. He seems like the obvious place to start when sharing the Ori experience with the wider world, specifically what it’s like to be a remote based engineer. Below you can check out my chat with Mr Remote Working:
Is this your first remote working role?
Yep, my first solely remote based role. I used to work in an open source set-up, so I’m in some good habits, for example over-communicating. I’m really loving it.
How would you say the work you produce is impacted by working remotely?
Lots of things improve when you work remotely, some aspects aren’t as good, but the biggest improvement by far is in the quality of work I produce. Overall, I chose to do what I want when I want to do it. I can even have a nap, in a proper bed, with actual pillows, it’s great! That 20 minute nap can make the difference between an entirely useless day and a day when I can actually contribute.
It’s not just that though, my entire life has changed — it used to be that work would be my main focus, the core of my days, and life would just slot in when I had time. Now, my life is central and work happens when I’m ready and can focus.
That must be particularly helpful with young children?
Exactly — whatever my kids need, I can be there for them immediately. No time required to get back from the office or anything like that.
Ah yes the old commute time saving — tell me honestly, do you just use that for more work or do you reclaim it?
Honestly? It mostly goes on work. But overall that time gives me even more flexibility to react to whatever life throws at me — be that the undeniable need for a small nap, or a toddler tantrum. Having the flexibility of extra hours to play with is really helpful, the ability to focus when I want to focus, to be able to isolate myself and be in the zone when it suits me, it gives a much better quality of life, it’s great. Time is freedom.
It’s important that you can take control of your own work-life balance, but do you ever feel pressure to be ever-present, always-on, always available?
That’s all caused by bad management. At the end of the day, does management want you to feel pressured or happy? The focus should be on building a culture of respecting time outside of work. There should be no expectations, except for emergencies, where people should be available outside of working hours.
How has that been for you at Ori?
From day one that’s not been an issue here. I could feel it amongst the dev team immediately — we respect private life and don’t expect people to be working all day and night without breaks etc. I’ve felt so confident in the management that they weren’t looking for that.
At the same time I’m still human, I wanted to impress and I wanted to work a lot — my family were away for the first week of my job so I just got so stuck in as it was my first time expressing myself as a developer. I really enjoyed it!
But that feeling of needing to be always available — that’s not just remote working, it’s that there’s the issue of a lack of face time with remote working. It’s all about the management, when they trust you to get your job done like we have here at Ori — that’s the key to healthy working practises.
And what about another common issue — misinterpretation of written communications. When you’re in an office with someone you get lots of non-verbal cues that helps with interpreting the way someone has written a message. With remote working you don’t have those clues, how do you deal with that?
Firstly, emojis are really helpful to convey emotions, especially as a non-native speaker. Secondly, video calls are key. When I’m working with someone on a project or piece of work, we’ll video call at least twice a day. And as soon as you can feel miscommunication creeping in, jump on a call. If they can’t do it right then, it can be best to park it until you can talk face to face.
The last one is a biggie — there’s lots of talk of the inevitable loneliness that comes from remote working. As we have quite a few remote workers, how do you support each other against the feelings of isolation? And furthermore, how can the whole team support each other against these feelings?
I’m currently partnered with Jack and every time we need to talk something through, we video chat. Just knowing that someone is available to talk to on the other end of a video chat makes a difference, and that could also be someone in the office. I wouldn’t enjoy working entirely solo, I think that’s something we will need to look out for.
Overall I think we know we need to talk about loneliness, but we’re not sure when or how. I have individual chats with other remote workers about it, but it feels like we could do more. The new fortnightly lunch n learns are a really nice opportunity to just chat to the team. We also thought about having a structured regular ‘remote’ catch up but it needs to be something more reactive than just a once a week meeting or something similar. I’m keen to make sure we’re comfortable talking to each other about this kind of thing.
Mael and I then discuss various ideas as to how we can combat loneliness in the workplace:
- We’ve just launched our “wormhole” experiment, an always-on webcam to give remote workers a constant window into what’s going on in the London office. Mael is the main person who uses this, but everyone does get involved:
- We could introduce symbols to use in Slack when you’re feeling low — from ‘welfare hiccup’ 👋🏼 to ‘welfare emergency’ 🙆🏻♀🙆🏼♂ . You send the emoji to an individual or a group chat and it’s a sign that you need someone to reach out. The idea is the symbol helps you out when you don’t know exactly how to articulate how you’re feeling. Maybe it means you jump on a video call and just work whilst being able to see each other, maybe you talk about an article you’ve just read or talk about weekend plans.
- As an industry, we need to normalise the feelings of loneliness so that it becomes something that people feel able to talk about to whoever, whenever. It’s a human emotion just like hunger, and we certainly talk about when we’re hungry, so why is loneliness any different? This one will need some more thinking of how to execute. Maybe we can start sharing more content focused towards loneliness, maybe we focus on making that content ourselves.
We finish our chat and Mael thanks me for taking the time to talk about this with him — “I love this topic and I love that I work somewhere where we can talk about it.” Thank you Mael. 🤩
