Working better together, remotely
A peek behind the curtain of remote work at Basis as the newest member of the team
- The tools, routines and culture I’ve seen work well for us in a remote environment
- Reflections on the challenges we still face working remotely
- My recommendations for how teams can go about improving their remote working practices
‘Congratulations! We’re offering you a job’
I was so excited to receive this message from the Basis team after weeks of interviews and performance tasks. There was just one catch, though. The job would be mostly remote. No office; no shared working space.
If you’re like me, the idea of being stuck in my room all day doesn’t sound very fun, especially based on my experience working from home during the pandemic. While there are tremendous benefits to remote work, if not done in the right way, it can be isolating, stressful and negatively impact the collaborative potential of a team or organisation.
In a post-pandemic world, many organisations have moved to hybrid and remote work set-ups. However, the degree to which organisations have been successful in such transitions varies tremendously.
Now that I’m a month into working with Basis, here are my reflections on working for a fully remote organisation, what works well, where there is still room for growth and how we can go about working better together.
Tools, routines and organisational culture
‘Meet us at the table in the garden’
On my first day, I received an email saying just that — ‘Meet us at the table in the garden. It will all make sense once you sign in’.
Basis uses a virtual office space called Welo, which can feel a little like playing a simplified version of the Sims. When I signed in, my personal icon dropped into the lobby next to the organisation’s logo. I simply dragged my icon to the conference table in the green space and was immediately thrust into a virtual meeting with my new colleagues.
This was my first introduction to the power of Welo, or simply a virtual office for that matter. In many ways, having this shared digital workspace serves as the basis (no pun intended) of what allows our organisation to work successfully online.
‘Just knock on my door’
What makes the virtual office so impactful is not only the ability to more easily meet with colleagues, but for creating a sense of togetherness.
At any moment in time, I can click on my Welo tab and see my fellow colleagues dotted around the office working away, whether it’s on the couch, in the kitchen or at the picnic table. What’s even cooler is that if two people are meeting on the couch for example, you can see their little icons pulsing red when they are talking. It’s a simple thing, but it goes a long way in feeling like no one is too far away, even though we have colleagues scattered across the UK, as well as one who’s all the way in Mauritius!
What is particularly nice about having everyone within (a virtual) arm’s length is that it makes collaboration far easier. If I want to chat with someone quickly, I can simply ‘knock on their door’, and if they accept, we are immediately in a meeting together. This is much more seamless than what I’ve experienced in other remote settings where it can feel somewhat intrusive to message someone out of the blue for a quick chat and set up a Zoom meeting which ends up feeling far too formal.
So far, I’ve talked a lot about Welo, not because I’m trying to sell it (although I’m happy to give you a personal tour of our space so you can see it in action), but because it makes the rest of what I’m going to talk about possible.
‘Hello, good morning!’
As important as it is to have the right tools in place to work remotely, the organisation’s routines are equally important for ensuring consistency day-to-day.
A pleasant surprise working for Basis was our daily ‘hello’ and our daily ‘downtime’. Every morning, we gather at the table in the garden around 9am. Rather than talking about work, we shoot the breeze chatting about anything and everything, from our most embarrassing childhood moments to whether we think there are other life forms in the universe. We do the same thing a little after 5pm where we tend to talk more about how our days went and any fun evening activities we have planned. Of course, not everyone goes to every ‘hangout’ if they have more urgent responsibilities or are simply a bit worn out at the end of the day, but it is a consistent daily habit within the organisation.
You might think, ‘Basis better not be billing me for these silly conversations’ (don’t worry we don’t), but they serve a number of incredibly useful functions. For one, the daily hellos and downtimes establish a clear start and end to the working day. I’ll be the first to admit it can be difficult dragging yourself out of bed when the first thing on your calendar isn’t until 11am. On the flip side, it is common when working remotely for the work day to bleed into evening hours, because there is no clear end. By saying hello and goodbye each day, I have something to look forward to first thing in the morning, and I can confidently sign off once I’ve explained to everyone why I’m having chicken and rice for the fifth night in a row.
Another important function of these daily hangouts is that it satisfies the need for those infamous water cooler conversations. As humans, we are naturally social creatures who crave connection. By having intentional time to scratch our social itch, it neutralises that distraction throughout the working day. Because we’ve already had those informal conversations and know we’ll get another chance at the end, meetings and interactions during core working hours are more efficient, and people are more keen to do deep, purposeful work.
Finally, carving out time to connect on a more human level each day is fundamental to fostering staff camaraderie in a virtual setting. Because we can’t physically run into our colleagues in the hallway or go grab a bite to eat together, that dedicated time allows us to form bonds and develop chemistry that allows us to work more effectively as an organisation.
‘You’re much taller in person’
Even though the vast majority of our time is spent in the virtual office, we make it a priority to meet in-person at least once a month (unfortunately, this proves difficult for our colleague in Mauritius… but I guess that’s the price they pay for living in paradise). As great as our digital workspace and organisational routines are, nothing can match the value of face-to-face human interaction.
I’ve been fortunate since starting with Basis to have been in-person in some form or fashion each week, whether it’s been an in-person training, co-working at a cafe or meeting with a colleague for a client project. While it usually adds up to less than a full day working in person, it is always something to look forward to as it breaks up the monotony working from home can bring if not done well.
Talking to colleagues who live further afield and can’t make it in-person each week, they say they still feel equally connected in large part due to the culture we have created in our virtual space. That said, we are investing in cloning and teleportation technologies so one day our colleague in the southern hemisphere can experience London’s beautiful climate alongside us.
Taking off the rose-coloured glasses — areas for growth
So far, I’ve painted a pretty rosy picture of working remotely at Basis. And while it is sunshine and rainbows most days, there are still some things we could improve.
Because we are in a fully remote environment, we rely on notifications from a number of different channels, including email, Slack and Welo. Most of us don’t want to miss out on anything so there is a general hesitation to turn notifications off completely. While staying available is great for collaboration, it can sometimes get in the way of deep work. Some of us are better at this than others and will simply tell the group they are in focus mode. But not all of us feel comfortable doing that, especially if we are doing deep work on a regular basis.
One way we could get better at communicating our availability throughout the day is by using our Welo space more intentionally. As you can see in the Welo image at the beginning, there are different spaces within the office for Zen time, in a Zoom meeting and for lunch. However, we don’t really use these spaces much, which kind of defeats their purpose. Having a space dedicated to deep work that people actually use could help let people know not to bother you without the need to send everyone a notification.
On the topic of notifications, Slack can be great for separating conversations into different workstreams and projects, but when you’re a part of nearly a dozen channels, it can start to feel overwhelming and become difficult to determine what is relevant and what isn’t. Unless I’m tagged in something or it’s in our main updates channel I tend to ignore it otherwise I could spend my whole day caught up in different (albeit interesting) threads.
Important messages can also risk being missed as new posts come through. For example, if someone has been on leave, rather than sorting through emails upon return, it is more challenging to sift through all the Slack notifications they’ve missed. In fact, recently, a colleague who had been on leave was unaware of something I had shared in the main updates channel while they were away. It wasn’t a big deal, but it shows there is room to figure out how to better communicate certain messages, especially important ones. Sometimes Slack isn’t always better than an old-school email.
Another area for growth, which is a tricky one, is the flexibility in our working hours. According to organisational design expert Linda Gratton, the most digitally mature organisations allow their employees to work anywhere, anytime. Not everyone is equally productive between the hours of 9 to 5.
Technically we can work at any time of day, but given our daily hellos and downtimes bookend traditional working hours I do feel a pressure to be at my desk between those times. It’s a trade-off given the benefit of starting and ending the day together, but I think we can explore ways to build in a bit more flexibility. It would be awesome to hop over to the gym for a midday workout to bypass the afternoon slump and work a little later into the evening riding that post-workout high. But, I’m not sure we are quite there yet (and even less sure if it is actually in our best interest to have everyone on different schedules).
How to make remote work better — for everyone
When it comes to making remote work both fun and effective, there is no magic bullet. What might work well for one group of individuals may not work well for another. This is true across organisations in different industries, but even between departments and teams within the same organisation.
The best thing a team can do to improve how they work remotely is to take an agile approach that emphasises people’s needs and builds in regular feedback. Finding solutions to working better together remotely should be a collaborative and iterative process.
The easiest way to do this is to dedicate time to reflect as a team on what’s going well and what can be improved. I could sit here and list out a bunch of recommendations for how we as Basis can address some of the challenges I pointed out above, but it would be much better for us to come together as a team, identify some new things to try and then reflect on how that went the next time we meet. More digitally mature organisations may only need to do this once a quarter, but those who are either newer or transitioning to remote work will want to do this more frequently until they identify the routines and practices that work best for them.
Parting thoughts
Having been a little nervous about working a fully remote job, my time working from home has been surprisingly enjoyable. The virtual office powered by Welo is a game-changer that brings us closer together and streamlines our ability to collaborate with colleagues halfway across the world. That said, good digital infrastructure is nothing on its own if the organisation doesn’t have the right routines and culture in place to make the most of it.
This is not to say we have all the answers. Although much of what we do works well, there are still ways we can get better. While I hope the reflections in this blog serve as inspiration and offer some ideas to try, it is important to recognise that our ways of working might not work for everyone. For this reason, taking a more agile approach by testing things out and setting aside time to share feedback regularly as a team is crucial for identifying what works best for your specific organisation and context.
Here at Basis, we are fortunate to have our own in-house remote work guru, Matt Barnaby who runs our Dutch subsidiary ImpactBasis specialising in online collaboration and ways of working. If you’re interested in learning more about how your organisation can get better at remote work, you can contact Matt at matt@impactbasis.com.
If you have thoughts or questions about this blog post, feel free to drop them in the comments below or email me directly at aaron.teater@basis.co.uk.
