FWIW: The Developer Society guide to working from home for charities, nonprofits, and social orgs

Not remote, distributed: working together while being apart

13 min readMar 30, 2020

Contents
• Remote work & COVID-19: Intro
• Principles for being distributed
• Expectations of a distributed team
• Newly distributed teams
• Calls & meetings
• Tips & tricks
• Challenges & mitigations
• More reading

Remote work & COVID-19: Intro

A lot of teams are now shifting to fully remote (or ‘distributed’ as we prefer to say, who wants to be remote?) working in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is going to be a big adjustment but there are big opportunities here too.

There are lots of great resources being shared around right now but for what it’s worth, here’s our short, action focused guide to how we think nonprofits and social orgs can deliver great results when working in a distributed way.

At DEV, we’ve offered distributed working as an option for our team for years because what works best for our team individually, works best for DEV. The aim for DEV is for everyone in the team to achieve autonomy, mastery, and purpose in their role while:

Being happy in their work
Feeling fully supported by the team
Performing their role to a high standard of awesomeness
Enabling the rest of the team to be high performing in their roles

Nowhere in our vision does it say anything about needing people to be in the same place. That is no longer a hard requirement for many organisations in general — let alone during this global crisis — and where it gets in the way of building a happy, healthy team we shouldn’t be held back by it.

To achieve all of the above, we know that different people will need different working conditions. Some common reasons that a centralised office space is not ideal for all people are:

Physical needs: Access to different workspaces or different challenges commuting.
Childcare: Inability to balance family commitments and traditional work shape.
Location: Great people don’t always live in the same location!
Working styles: Everyone has a different mix of focus time and social time that will help them produce their best work.

…but there are many more reasons why people might want to work outside of the Studio.

Advantages

It is important to state too that working in this way isn’t just an accommodation or something you should have to do because of government lockdowns, it offers some significant advantages over traditional ways of working (when done right):

Increased focus time
More time in total (no commute etc.)
Better working practices for the whole team (commitment to WoL etc.)
Location flexibility allows not for profit salaries to generate better quality of life
Increased flexibility to balance other priorities in your life with work

Making the best of it

These are strange, scary times. It’s not clear when offices will be able to return to normal so it is wise at this point to plan for an extended period of distributed working. Put in place the best practices that you can and you might find that the advantages of working in a distributed way mean you continue you to work like this long after you can return to your normal ways of working.

Doggo under the desk? Check! You’re ready to start!

Principles for being r̶e̶m̶o̶t̶e̶ distributed

These are some of the key principles for working away from the office that we try to follow and have found to be most important to us:

Don’t be remote, be distributed

This article sums it up well. You are still expected to be a full member of the team and ‘show up’, just using different means. Sometimes, this will require a bit more effort than if you are physically in the office.

2. Turn the challenge into an advantage

Distributed work requires skills you can avoid developing in an office. You have to have serious amounts of self-discipline and awareness, you need to plan ahead, you need to develop new communication skills, and you can’t rely on shoulder taps to get you out of trouble. If you can master all these skills and combine them with all the focus time you have, you can become far more productive than you might have imagined.

3. Practice the difference between synchronous and asynchronous comms

Some things need everyone present at the same time (brainstorming, for example). Most things don’t. If you have a question that needs to be answered but isn’t urgent, flag the timeframe you’re working with and don’t chase an immediate response. In an office, this can take the form of the dreaded ‘shoulder tap’ that breaks concentration and divides the day into tiny slices of unfocused time. Try to avoid doing this remotely if you can.

4. Accept it is different. Commit and don’t be guilty

If you’re going to do it, do it. And don’t feel like you need to try to replicate your in office working style while distributed because you will just end up with a poor imitation. It’s a different way of working, make it a success on its own terms. We have a distributed team because we believe it gets the best out of people, so you’re not ‘getting away with anything’ by being distributed. Don’t be afraid to push teammates for notes or to work out loud (see below) more. Don’t try and overcompensate for being physically absent by wasting your day on Slack. Take ownership of things in the same way you would in the office. Say what you need to help you thrive and then use all that calm, focus, and extra time to deliver great things for the team.

*From* Remote: Office Not Required *by Basecamp*

Expectations of a distributed team

These are some of the expectations we have of our distributed team:

You will still have a big presence in the team. WoL, get involved in discussions, share things you are doing on Slack — whatever you need to do. You are part of the team not only for what you can do but who you are and part of your role is about being part of the team.
You will be unavailable at times. Make sure people can still get you through one route (phone as backup perhaps). The output of your work should be how you demonstrate your presence, not the speed of your replies on Slack.
You will follow normal etiquette for meetings…and a bit more. You can’t fallback on the advantages of a face to face meeting, so make sure you’re on the ball for video calls.
Work hard to manage your energy and mood. Working by yourself — even in a co-working space under normal conditions — can get lonely and you need to be aware of this and try to manage it.
Also work hard to manage your energy throughout your workday. Dan Pink offers this insight: “The recipe for greater productivity and well-being is to do analytic work during your peak (typically in the morning), administrative work during your trough, and insight work during your recovery.”
Set a really great standard for how the team should work out loud (work in a clearly documented way so others can follow your work asynchronously) and model best practice for others.
Proactively communicate your needs. Others can’t see you in the same way, so try to flag to people what you are feeling and what you need so they can help support you.
Develop a good level of self-awareness of your working style. What are your energy flows like? What breaks do you need to take? Learn your own working style and then make the most of it.
Keep your brain fresh with lots of breaks! Again, Dan Pink sums it up well: “Breaks are not a deviation from performance; they are part of performance. And the most restorative breaks are social rather than solo, outside not inside, moving instead of stationary, and fully detached rather than semi-detached.”
Put a lot of effort into maintaining team culture & relationships. These are easy to neglect when you’re distributed but in these times we need to own this and keep the team a positive and supportive place to work.
Have your shit together. If you wouldn’t be late for a meeting in the office because you were just making a cup of coffee as the meeting is about to start, don’t do so for a video call. Keep standards up.

Newly distributed teams

Some short points of guidance for teams starting out as distributed:

Don’t let it be a free-for-all. Pick some guidelines and new ways of working that you want to stick to and share them clearly with your team. Give people the structures to work within.
Work hard to discourage presenteeism. This happens when people feel their value is measured by being present and available. Make that about the work delivered: try to keep your team focused on the work and not on instant Slack responses.
Once you have some guidelines in place, treat the whole team as if they’re new. Go through a simple onboarding process for your team and introduce them to the new ways of working. Give people the space to ask questions and then have a clear understanding that ways of working need to change to the new guidelines after the onboarding process.
Regularly review how it is working (once a week would be a good rhythm) through retros. These are structured meetings that typically follow a set format (what went well, what has been a challenge, what can we improve). Bring your team together, gather ideas in a shared doc, and discuss them. Use this process to make regular changes and improvements to your ways of working.
Really don’t try to make it the same as being in an office. It’s different, embrace that. Try to do this by focusing on the ‘need’ behind interactions. Awkward team lunches on video calls are not great but the ‘need’ behind them is real (to have non-work time to connect and maintain social bonds). How can you address this in a remote first way? Would you be better served by taking an hour to all play video games online together? Put the need ahead of trying to recreate office based systems.
Take the time now to see what small investments could pay off big time for your team. Do they need a second screen to work from home? Does someone need new headphones? If there are small additions you can make that will increase productivity and comfort when working from home, consider making them early.

Calls & meetings

You’re probably going to be having a lot more calls now. Here are some tips:

Most people know how to run a good call, few people do it. Try to stay on top of best practices when everyone is dialling in.
If calendars are full of calls, limit the length of meetings. If you need to do longer sessions, think about how they can be broken up over the course of a day or multiple days.
Clearly define the meeting, have an agenda, and send reading materials in advance.
Make video the default, with tools like Google Docs and Zoom to facilitate live collaboration and connection.
How to show up for calls:
- Look directly at the camera and try to keep ‘eye contact’.
- Use active listening techniques to show you are engaged and paying attention.
- Don’t also look at emails, Slack or any other distractions — it’s pretty obvious when you’re doing this!
- If you are on a group call, mute when you are not speaking.
When talking, you may need to project and exaggerate a bit to keep the energy up on the call. Make sure body language and tone of voice come across and you don’t seem disengaged.
If you are on a call with your team and someone external, try to stay on the line afterwards for a quick debrief and discussions of next steps with your teammates. If you can’t stay on the line, make sure you discuss this in the relevant Slack channel.

Hand signals

Large group calls can be chaos! To improve this, we’ve borrowed a hand signals system from Infinite Red (see below).

Notes on the system:

This system isn’t a replacement for empathy. It’s a tool to help us be more mindful. If we can make this turn-taking and interest in others’ viewpoints a habit, we won’t even need this system in the future — a great ideal to work toward.
From Infinite Red: ‘Since old habits die hard, we encourage the meeting participants to correct interrupters by saying “I don’t think Justin was done yet” or “Cindy had her finger up, let’s hear her first.” We have a meeting organizer whose job is to say “Thank you, Todd, now Silas, you’re up.” It only took one or two light corrections per meeting and then everyone followed the rules.’

Hand-queue illustration by Infinite Red’s Cindy Nguyen

If nobody is talking, you’re free to talk.
If someone is talking, raise one finger to indicate you want to go next.
If someone else has their finger raised already, raise two fingers (and so on).
If you need to “interject” something really quickly (no more than a couple seconds), then raise your hand in the shape of an “O”.
If you want to indicate support for something that has been said, either use a thumbs up or ‘jazz fingers’.

Tips & tricks

Some general points that may help you get the most out of being distributed. If you can ensure your team is sticking to these practices, you’ll have the best chance of making a smooth transition to being out of the office:

Have a morning checklist and use this to orientated yourself at the start of the day. An example is:
- Triage inbox move all emails that need response to a folder marked ‘today’. All other emails are deleted or go in a folder marked ‘tomorrow’]
- Move relevant emails that were in ‘tomorrow’ yesterday to ‘today’. Close emails.
- Check LinkedIn and Twitter for notifications and messages. Close.
- Check Slack, reply to messages. Close.
- Make a list of priorities for the day in order. Block out times you will work on these, break times, and when you will check in on messages. Start with the highest priority actions.
Save time and focus by batching your comms. Don’t flick endlessly between emails, Slack, Twitter etc. searching for a new message. Check them twice a day (or whatever rhythm you need) and respond to messages in one go.
Try to close out of unnecessary things. Do you need Slack open constantly? No!
Have a way that people can escalate problems to you if needed. Ideally this is via phone. That way you are reachable if anything serious happens and otherwise you can check messages in batches.
If a discussion on email or Slack is going back and forth…call it out. Text debates are rarely helpful or a good use of time. Suggest setting up a time for a call to talk it through.
Have a clear way to finish work. Some people like to change out of their ‘work clothes’ at the end of the day to signal a change of mode. Others do some exercise or meditation as a transition. Try to have a way to signal to yourself that work is over.
Don’t let work bleed into personal time. Try to have a dedicated space where you work and once work is done, move from there. Don’t stay on emails all night. Switch off in the same way you would on your commute.
Try to maintain as much discipline as possible for your own mental mental health. Get out of your pyjamas and dress for the office. Maintain your normal hours. Take lunch breaks. Don’t take personal calls during work times, schedule them for breaks like you would at work. Try not to let personal and work life blur too much.

Challenges & mitigations

Whether you’ve just started distributed working or have been doing it for years, there are significant challenges that come with working away from the central team hub.

In this article, research has identified four particularly common challenges of distributed working. Below are some approaches you can take to manage these.

Loneliness

This one is pretty straightforward. You aren’t working with your colleagues. Even if you’re working near others at home, you might not have significant interactions with them during the work day.

Be social with the team! Chat on Slack or even better, see if someone want to have a call. Find a few minutes in meetings to discuss non-work things. Catch up with your teammates.
Try to schedule lunch or coffee breaks with family or friends, use your flexibility to your advantage (medical and government advice permitting, of course).

Not being able to shut down

How do you know work is over if you work from home? Especially if your hobbies are computer based, this can be a particularly tricky one to manage.

Develop a strong routine and get serious about your finish time.
Get away from your screen, at least for a little bit.
Close all open tabs related to work, close your email, close Slack. Don’t have work notifications on your phone.
Try to line up something to do right after work: go for a walk, meet up with a friend, do something that isn’t work to get you into a different headspace (medical and government advice permitting, of course).
Ideally have a set location for where you work from at home and once work is done, move from there.
Try changing clothes. Having a ‘uniform’ to switch out of can cause a real mindset shift.

Lack of motivation/drive absent from in person interactions

It can be hard to get the same energy from calls as it can from face to face interactions, particularly with your line manager.

Follow best practice for calls to make the most of your meetings.
Be open and vulnerable about how you’re feeling. You are not alone in this, it’s a huge challenge for everyone.