Why everyone should use hand signals 🤙 and other remote working tips
For the past 2.5 years I’ve been working in a co-located squad in a tech start up. We’ve had half of the squad based in our London office, and half the squad working remotely from various countries. This definitely made the switch to full remote working (#stayathome) a relatively smooth one. Here are some top tips:
👐 🤙 Hand Signals 🙌 🤘
These have honestly been an absolute game changer. It takes a little while to get used to them, but they really make remote meetings go way more efficiently and gets everyone on an even playing field — introverts & extroverts alike.
Here’s a run down of the main ones we use and why they are helpful:
- “Approval” — If you’re making a point or putting forward a suggestion, and you see everyone waving their hands in approval, you know you’re all in agreement and just can crack on. Rather than each individual stating whether they are in agreement and why.
- “Disapproval” — Here is what my life is like as introvert in a face to face meeting: if I’m going to disagree with someone in a meeting, I’ll often spend a lot of time in my head crafting the perfect well reasoned argument and figuring out the exact right time to enter the conversation to say my peace. With this hand signal, it helps remove all that friction and extra worry and you can get straight into the meat of the discussion.
- “I want to speak” — Often in face to face meetings, it will be the extroverts who get to have their say first, and often extra space has to be created to allow the more introverted beings a chance to speak. With this hand signal it really evens the playing field and I’ve definitely seen an increase in more fair & even contributors in meetings.
- “You’re off topic” — Probably my favourite hand signal of them all. A polite way of saying STFU and let’s move on. Great if you have a person who tends to waffle and go off on tangents. It helps keep everyone honest and on track with the aim of the meeting.
Even on the occassions when the whole team is in the room face to face, we still use these signals. They’ve definitely sneaked out of meetings too and made the odd appearance on a team night out or in the pub…
📣 Overcommunicate 📯
- Don’t just rely on saying something once over a video call. We’re all pretty much drowning in information, so if it’s important make sure you follow up, write it down, share the relevant doc etc.
- I’ve always been a huge fan of Emojis 👻 — not only are they ridiculously cute & fun, but they help share context and emotion which we would have normally picked up from facial expressions and hand gestures 👹 🤟.
- Updates. All lot of updates. On our squad slack channel, we’ll say Good Morning 👋, usually with the relevant weather emoji from our individual locations 🌞🌦🌈☔️. We’ll let eachother know when we’re going for lunch and what we’re having 🥗🌯🍕🍔🍰. We’ll update when we’ve finished a task and what ticket we’re moving onto next ✅💥🚀. Makes us all feel in the loop 🔗 all the time 🕰.
💻 Remote Tools 🛠
Video Call Software
- I think we’re pretty much all Zoom pro’s right about now. It’s definitely my vc software of choice. The audio and sound quality is infinitely better than others out there, and the screensharing functionality is 👌 because you can easily see people’s faces too. The breakout rooms are fab for any larger workshop style meetings too. Oh, and not forgetting the custom backgrounds feature too.
- Just make sure you get your camera on — don’t worry about your surroundings, we’re all human and it’s super interesting to see people’s homes and the natural distractions that might be occurring through out the day.
Miro
- This has been a great substitute for whiteboards. So we’ll use this for any architecture sessions, retrospectives & visioning workshops. It’s super collaborative, easy to use, and has a bunch of cool integrations & features too. Check them out here.
Notion
- We use Notion as our internal wiki. Super easy to write notes and manage tasks on their Kanban boards. They also advocate the use of emoji’s too ✌️, so what’s not to love.
Other great resources about remote working
Obviously there are tonnes of other companies who do this stuff amazingly well. Here are some of my fave other resources on this topic:
