As COVID-19 descends upon us all, and drastically changes the nature of our day to day existence, many organizations are being forced to move rapidly into remote work.
For some, the transition is easy. The tools, process, and culture are already in place to support the shift. For others however, this change will be severe and abrupt.
Having worked remotely for several years in my career to date, I thought I could share some quick tips that may help ease this transition for others.
Communication is king. Over communicate.
With a reduction in serendipitous conversations and interactions, intra-organization communication can easily suffer. Everyone is now essentially working in a vacuum. No-one walking past your screen seeing what you’re doing. No casual coffee catch ups where the status of a project might get discussed. No water-cooler banter about new designs or solutions.
To improve communication remotely, the onus is on each individual to try and increase the flow of communication to pre-corona levels. This means over-communicating everything. Things such as:
- Inform your team of any help you need, as early as possible.
- Provide an update on the status of your work, daily.
- Check in with team members regularly about how they’re going.
- Keep the status of your work up to date on Trello/Asana/Jira. Leave comments as you go.
On a team level, it is about creating opportunities for more communication. This may be regular check-ins with everyone as the team lead. It may take the form of daily standup calls. Ultimately you want to create a continual “pulse” of activity in online channels so that everyone knows what’s going on.
Don’t change processes. Adapt them.
Just because you’re transitioning to remote work, it doesn’t mean completely changing how the work is being done. Ideally your remote work processes are simply a virtual reflection of your existing offline processes. Do you usually have a morning standup? Just do the same, but digitally (either via video call or chat). Weekly planning meetings now become weekly planning calls.
Try and change as few variables as possible as your transition, and only change things for good reason.
Define and respect the source of truth for work.
Your online workspaces are now the source of truth for what is going on.
Whether it’s Asana, Trello or Jira, this is the one place that everyone can go to to understand what work is currently in flight, its status, and what is coming up next.
As a team lead, that means keeping things up to date and constant pestering your team to do the same. On a daily basis, review all work in flight to ensure its real world status is reflected digitally. Make sure that the backlog of tasks are always prioritized and ready to be worked upon.
As an individual, it means updating stuff so you don’t get pestered! An easy way to do this is to do away with the separate, personal to-do list. Use the team tools to manage your own workload. This makes transparency the default.
Have most conversations in “public”.
As you can no longer rely on over hearing conversations in the hallway, or off hand coffee chats, you need to assume that people have no idea what’s going on beyond their own responsibilities.
By default, all conversations and decisions should happen in public. That means using public chat channels instead of DMs to team members. Even though the conversation may only concern you and one other team member, unless you have good reason to keep it private, don’t. It is a cheap and easy way to keep people in the loop.
Unify relevant conversations to one platform.
For simplicity of everyone’s life, it’s best to have a shared understanding of where their conversations should be happening. Email? Trello? Slack? Comments on a Google Doc? It does not matter what the platform is, but it matters that everyone knows which platform is the source of truth and how to use it!
The current multitude of digital communication options can be overwhelming and conversations (and therefore decisions) can get lost in the ether. Have a clear mandate of where to have conversations.
For some teams this may mean:
- All conversations happen in Slack, but please post a link to the Trello card, or
- Discuss tasks in Trello. code changes in Github, or
- Please comment on this google doc to add input
Whatever it is, there should be one right place to have the conversation and everyone should both understand and respect that.
Write better chat messages.
The vast majority of your communication remotely is chat messages. They matter, so write them well. Please. Make them concise, descriptive, and have a clear ask (or lack of ask). Here are two examples:
…as oppose to…
Hopefully the difference is clear!
- Ask your question up front in one message. Don’t drip feed information as you go. Multiple messages for one question is a massive distraction.
- Be clear of what you are asking for. If you’re just letting someone know, then make that clear. It as simple as prefixing your message with “FYI”
- Give them all the information. Include a link and a timeline. Empower them to decide when to respond.
Video on, mic off. Buy a headset.
Video conferencing is an absolute godsend in the remote world. BUT, with great power comes great responsibility. It must be used right. Any and all measures must be taken to set virtual meetings up for success.
Turn video on. A large proportion of human communication is non verbal. By seeing each other we can read the intent and expression of what is being said. As a bonus, everyone is far more accountable if they are on screen. They have to listen, pay attention or at least, be in front of their computer with a t-shirt on!
Mute your mic. Only the person speaking should be heard. There is nothing more distracting than background noise or the sound of someone else typing. Mute by default.
Get a headset. Everyone should have a headset or at least a super quiet environment. Why make things any harder than they already are. You should be heard clearly and crisply.
One camera. One person.
When on a group video call have every single person dial in separately. Firstly, you should not be that close to each other in these times of social distancing. But more seriously, having group videos is incredibly painful for everyone involved. Why?
- People in the room get distracted.
- The audio quality is usually subpar.
- It creates two classes of meeting participants.
Often those who dial in are secondary citizens, and the conversation just happens in the room full of people. For the sake of treating everyone equally, everyone should be on their own computer. Maintaining a one to one person to computer ratio keeps everyone in the meeting on equal footing.
Reliable connectivity.
One thing that should go without saying, is that in order to work virtually means having a reliable, fast connection to the internet. When it comes to video conferencing, individuals should have back a backup option readily available and tested (you can always directly call in to a zoom meeting).
For this to really be priority, an organization should be providing all its employees with monthly internet benefits.
Do not wait until the call to do the work.
As meetings move online, the nature of collaboration shifts.
Virtual meetings are inherently lower bandwidth than their in-person counterparts. This means collaboration during a virtual meeting is going to be harder. Bouncing ideas around is slower. White-boarding is near impossible. In order to account for this, each meeting participant has to turn up well prepared.
Do more upfront work for meetings. If it’s a brainstorming session, turn up with a few ideas on hand. If you’re running the meeting, share notes ahead of time so that people can turn up with a base level understanding. If you’re trying to make a decision, or determine a solution for a problem, have a single person take ownership of the agenda and come with a proposal.
Practice deep empathy.
As remote individuals we all need to adopt a practice of deep empathy for our teammates. This manifests in many ways.
Be respectful of their time. Do not message out of hours and if you do, be clear you don’t expect a response.
Understand that others in your team may not have as much context or understanding of what you’re asking or discussing. Again — over communicate!
Understand that this especially is a tough time for us all and that we may not all be 110% focused on our work.
Build trust and autonomy.
Ultimately, remote work succeeds when each individual is empowered to do their work remotely. Part of this is the tools and the process. But a lot of it is culture. Unfortunately this is the harder (and slower) part to shift.
By giving individuals trust and autonomy, they will take ownership for their work and ensure it gets done. A discussion on building this culture however is beyond the scope of this post, but is worth deep consideration during this transitory period.
Conclusion
Working remotely magnifies all the cracks in your existing team process. Things cannot just be solved with a quick impromptu desk side conversation. As you transition into a remote world, understand that your processes will have to adapt and your culture will have to shift. If you maintain a learning mindset however, and approach things iteratively, the roughness of transition can hopefully be smoothed out.
Finally, be safe out there. It is your social responsibility to practice social distancing and good hygiene. #staythefuckathome.
Also, if you’re looking for more advice or assistance on transitioning to remote, feel free to reach out.
