5 key takeaways from a year working remotely
I’ve been working remotely for the past year and with remote teams for the past four years. Here are my two cents on how to make sure your development team stays on track.
I am sure you’ve heard about the coronavirus and its consequences in China and Hong-Kong as an extension. But did you realize that one of the consequences of this virus outbreak was the boom of remote work? in a country where companies are not accustomed to it.
Some geniuses even heavily betted on Zoom (a video conference Saas) as its stock price skyrocketed in correlation to the news spread.
In Hong-Kong, this change of work habit is best illustrated by this funny story. Some banking interns have been caught hiking instead of working on Instagram: burned
For me, it has been work as usual, but for my coworkers forced to be at home, I could feel the atmosphere was different, and even for the team as a whole. I will thus speak about the advantages and challenges of remote work, and how you can smartly train your team to stay efficient.
Advantages of being remote
Here I will detail a few benefits of people working remotely and why it is the next big thing (if it already isn’t):
- The company will save money: from office space to pieces of furniture, if you have very little physical infrastructure, then you can cut down these costs. And you know better than an office downtown is a big expense.
- Productivity of your the team will be higher. Less interruption means more focus. It’s that easy.
- People will save time and money: no more commute to go to the office, which means more time for them to either work or do what they want. And if they have more time for themselves, they are happier. Happier employees = Happier customers.
Now you know why you should go remote, but let me tell you about the main pain points.
Challenges of being remote
In French there is a saying: “Far from sight, far from heart”. Well you ought to think this won’t happen in your company otherwise everybody will hate each other:
- Lack of informal relationships with your colleagues. Indeed, when you don’t have anymore this little coffee break (we the French like our coffee short and our coffee break long), this is the end of your social work interactions.
- Fusion of personal and work life, the work-life balance can be affected in a nonpositive manner, since you are physically bringing your work into your home. There are several ways to counterbalance this, though.
- Management will have less visibility on worker’s productivity when there is a lack of trust.
- Reliance on external infrastructures such as your internet connection reliability and speed, you might also need to be in a quiet environment to be focused.
But don’t get too worried, there are few techniques to successfully hedge yourself against these challenges and thrive as a remote team.
Communication
No questions asked, no stone unturned, communication is the key for your team to succeed even in a remote way of working. But easier said than done, how do you make sure everybody is on the same page and you do not have somebody heading in the wrong direction:
- Multiply the channels of communication: if you say one thing one time on one channel, you might not be sure about its reception. Use the chat, email, skype and why not a traveling pigeon.
- Set a daily recurring meeting (standup). Just like you would have done in your office, schedule the online meeting, it will help get visibility on the project.
- “Repeat yourself”. It’s not me, it’s all the Senior VP’s of engineering who said that in a Meetup about Distributed Teams I went to in San Francisco: Invision, Gitlab, Zappier are running distributed.
- Do not hesitate to hop on a call, it’s faster to get clarification with a quick phone chat.
- Find time for topics outside of a work-related discussion
Set up a frontier between work and personal life
You need to set boundaries; otherwise, you can become overwhelmed with work and it can easily become a slippery slope:
- Try to create a dedicated space in your home for remote working or get a co-working space desk.
- Respect a time schedule. I did not set one in particular for me, and I ended up overworking. Since I was working with Hong-Kong from France, waking up early is a good idea: 8 am sharp in front of my computer. However, after 1 pm I was becoming isolated since everybody was leaving work. With no distraction, I was able to tackle tasks faster but I often ended up working after dinner. I should have set a cutoff time like 7 pm to make sure not to overwork.
- Isolate yourself from work notifications. This is valid for non-remote workers as well, since it is easy to reply to emails from a mobile outside of working hours. It’s not because you are remote that you need to do more.
The new office: Co-working space
You might think it’s a silly idea or maybe you don’t have the budget to spend 200 USD+ per month for a co-working space. But remember some of those disadvantages: losing social ties, reliance on external infrastructure… Well, you can hedge yourself against this in a co-working space.
Because you will meet other freelancers in this space, and there is nothing better than being with your community to benefit from it. Get tips, colleagues and why not clients.
What’s more, co-working spaces are usually picky on the internet connection speed and reliability. And I didn’t even mention office furniture: printer, scanner, mail service, meeting room and so on…
This is definitely worth a try.
Distributed companies will thrive
We don’t necessarily think about it but some very successful companies are running fully distributed:
- Gitlab (software development): with 1100 employees in more than 65 countries, GitLab is now the world’s largest all-remote company. GitLab did a 50x growth in 4 years, hitting the $100M ARR (annual recurring revenue) mark in 2020.
- InVision (design software): has 5 million customers and raised a $115 million Series F round in December 2018.
- Zapier (web automation): 250 employees working distributed and reached profitability in 2014.
- Toptal (freelance platform): 100 M$ revenue in 2016.
Among those ones, Gitlab has a very strong approach and culture toward remote work which is summed up on their website. I recommend you have a look to understand more about the culture driving those changes of the 21st-century companies.
https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/
For example, you can find there their 9 points remote manifesto, how to build a culture based on values, or how to improve your processes to embrace remote culture.
Conclusion
I would say this is really about a mindset that management and employees need to have together: trust each other and understand that one’s work is not measured by the time one’s physically spending in the office, but by the results.
I would love to hear any feedback or tips you may have in the comment section. And if you want to know how I can remotely help your team to deploy great software in the cloud, shoot me an email at guillaume@dury.pro and check out my website: https://dury.pro
Remotely Yours,
