Tips to Being Successful in a Remote Workplace
A few words from a current remote Product Manager @Lambda School.
When you go online, you see all the benefits of working remotely, but to be honest, it can get really lonely and demoralizing. It can make you end up hating your job. I know this because it happened to me.
Last summer, I was a Course Architect Intern at GitHub. My job was to develop computer science courses through the GitHub Learning Lab platform. I was super excited about this since I had previously done a curriculum development internship at Codecademy and I studied computer science & education in college. But after four days on the job, I could tell I was going to hate the summer.
My entire team was remote, which didn’t bother me when I got the offer. I thought it would be pretty much the same as my fun New York Codecademy office environment. However, that was far from the truth. My days were spent developing the curriculum by myself and going the whole day talking to very few people. I didn’t think to ask for feedback early, so when I finished writing my course, I had to do an entire rewrite after some harsh feedback. This ended up making my job uninteresting to the point where I thought of leaving the technology industry entirely.
Flash forward 5 months later. I’m a senior in college recruiting for full time roles. I took an offer as a Product Manager at Lambda School where I get to define project based learning experiences for software engineering students. When I took the job, I was nervous because almost my entire team was based in a different location than me. I didn’t want to fall into the same trap as I did at GitHub, but I learned from my mistakes, and these past 7 months at Lambda School have been phenomenal.
I wanted to share some advice that has uplifted me during my remote work experience.
Documentation
When you are on a remote team, your written communication skills become your superpower. People will read your code, your comments, and all the documentation that supports it. Therefore, it’s important that you are as clear as possible when sharing your work. Here are some tips for great documentation:
- Document and share ASAP. Everything that you work on should have documentation. When you are finished with your work, document it immediately. Share that work along with your documentation.
- Give context to the document. People hate reading, so don’t be confusing. Provide context at the top of your document as to what your document is about.
- Be concise. Again, people hate reading. Use proper headings to make your document scannable and don’t fluff your paragraphs. This isn’t a high school essay that you are trying to BS your way through.
Here’s an example of documentation that I wrote for Codebase about creating curriculum for developers: Curriculum Development for Developers
Communication
When you are a remote worker, communication has now become effortful. You can’t just quickly call someone over to help you as they are walking by or casually discuss the problem you are working on over lunch. Here are some tips to help you communicate effectively:
- Ask for help publicly. Don’t be afraid to ask for help! If you feel like you’ve been stuck for a reasonable amount of time, reach out to your peers and/or mentors. In your team channel, clearly state the problem you are working on, any documentation associated with that problem, and the solutions you have tried.
- Hold yourself accountable. What I like to do is message my manager every day about what I worked on and what I plan on working on the next day. This creates a healthy form of transparency and accountability.
- Praise others. In a remote setting, people often don’t feel recognized. Praise your coworkers publicly who help you. Write a slack message in your team channel or privately message them with how they helped you and how much you appreciate it.
- Take initiative. Lead meetings with purpose. Meetings can be BORING in a remote environment if not run properly. My advice is to only hold meetings where you are shipping something. Meetings for status updates should not be meetings. At the end of the meeting, go over what you shipped. It makes people feel a lot more productive.
- Get to know your peers. Being friends with your peers and mentors will make the remote experience a lot more enjoyable. You’ll be able to communicate more easily and comfortably. Randomly reach out and schedule 1–1 zooms. Plan the questions you want to ask beforehand to avoid awkward conversations! Again, you’ll have to make more effort to reach out but trust me, it’s worth it.
These tips have without a doubt made my work experience amazing and productive. If you have any questions or you want to chat, DM me on twitter @party_shah.
