The challenges tech teams face with remote and flexible working

At comparethemarket we espouse the benefits of flexible working, encouraging people to work from home once a week. In addition to that my team is comprised not only of permanent employees working out of our own London and Peterborough offices, but also contractors working mostly onsite with us and occasionally from their own agency office at a third location.

All of this makes it very important to be good at connecting remote workers and satellite teams with the main office.

According to the 2016 StackOverflow global developer survey:

78% of developers work remotely some, most or all of the time.

37% of developers list flexible working as one of their priorities.

Remote developers are more likely to love their job than other developers.

Benefits of remote working:

1. Productivity — You may not be most productive in the office, maybe you work better from home, or the coffee shop across the street or that beach in Barcelona. Ironically many people work better when they’re away from office distractions.
2. Flexibility — If you regularly commute to work I’m sure you love those occasions when you can work from home and get a well deserved lie in, or maybe you’re not a morning person and get a lot more done in the afternoon.
3. Convenience — You might need to keep an eye on the kids, or let the repairperson in, or be at home to sign for a delivery. You should be able to do that whilst still doing a full day’s work.
4. Cost — You probably spend thousands of pounds every year getting to and from work, any reduction in this cost is welcome.
5. Environment — If 20% of our global workforce worked from home everyday then the environment would be a lot cleaner, and transportation and cities would be a lot less overcrowded.
6. Trust — Feeling trusted enough to work remotely can do wonders for your confidence and work ethic.
7. Happiness — All of the above.

“Work isn’t a place you go, it’s something you do.” — Mavericks at Work

Now that we understand why it’s good to embrace remote and flexible working let’s be aware of the challenges.

Challenges of remote working:

1. Workplace socialising — Modern tech offices are very social places (ours are anyway), ironically more and more people use the weekends to have some alone time. Working remotely isolates you from the social side of work and can lead to issues with you not really gelling with the rest of your team.
2. Communication — Being co-located has many benefits, when you lose the ability to simply turn to your side and ask a colleague a question then your workflow slows down. You also get left out of incidental conversations. You have to ensure the entire team stays on the ball, watching slack, checking emails, being responsive and updating each other with what’s going on.
3. Technical difficulties — Connectivity can be a problem, do you have access to everything you need from home? Is your connection stable enough to remote in for stand ups, pair programming sessions and team meetings? Do you have access to the right software and does it actually work as expected? If you’re in a noisy environment do you have a good set of headphones and microphone?
4. Distractions — Wherever you choose to work you must stay focused. It’s absolutely fine to let your mind wander now and then or get up to stretch your legs, but for some it can be a challenge to not let distractions drain them of their focus.
5. Conflicting schedules — The team in the office will probably go for lunch at the same time and probably attend showcases, brown bags and meetings at the same time as well. You have to be aware of this and make sure that remote people are aware of and work around this schedule.
6. Physical assets — Teams can get quite married to their physical kanban board, priority board, pairing board or other physical assets. I found switching everything over to virtual boards to be the hardest thing to get buy in from across the team.
7. Being forgotten — Out of sight, out of mind. It’s easy to lose context, awareness and feel left out of decisions and conversations. Team stand ups, cross site pairing and end of the day wash ups can help immensely. The best advice I can give here and the thing that worked wonders for us was an always on webcam and monitor facing into the various teams. That way you can actually see what everyone’s doing and just speak into the mic if you need to get someone’s attention.

All these challenges will require bespoke solutions based on the exact problem at hand and you may not get it right first time around, so fail fast and iterate.

How about you? Have you faced challenges with remote working or learned something that might benefit the rest of us? I’d sincerely like to hear from you.