Ten tips for a more productive and enjoyable ‘virtual’ working life

By Abi Birrell and Nicki McGoh

A typical scene for our remote team: coffee and a video call.

Having operated as an entirely remote company for the last 6 years, with 20+ people across multiple time zones, Caribou Digital has a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to working from home.

As we come to the end of month three of lockdown, we find ourselves being asked the same question: “How have you managed to work like this all this time?”. The truth is, we haven’t. Lockdown is new for us all. There are no trips to the local coffee shop, no midday gym sessions to break up the day, no international travel and no option of taking in-person meetings if we fancy a change of scenery. There’s also the added anxiety of a global pandemic.

We haven’t got all the answers, but we thought we’d share what we’ve learned so far.

Give yourself the right tools

A lot can be achieved with the right tools. We’ve tried pretty much every CRM, conferencing, project management and document management tool out there in the quest to find what works best. For us, it’s Slack, Google Suite and Zoom.

We have a lot of slack channels. Many of them are work-related, of course, but we have an equal number of life-related channels; dog owners, parents, sharing cooking tips and recipes, Coronavirus memes and news — the list goes on. Working remotely removes the ability to easily connect on a personal level with your colleagues to build rapport, so we have created a virtual space in order to do so. The great thing about it is that you can dip in and out of conversations as you wish, depending on what topic is of interest. It’s the equivalent of the watercooler moment, but you can engage in your own time. It’s fun and it gives people an insight into your life, and vice versa, which is so important when you are working remotely and means that, when you do come together in person, a strong working relationship is already there.

The Google Suite: drive, docs, sheets, presentations, calendar, etc are all accessible by anyone at any time. The ability to collaborate, even synchronously, without worrying about version control or lost documents makes it an invaluable tool for employees with flexible working patterns, including those trying to snatch blocks of working time throughout the day. Giving yourself a document management system that is as flexible as you need to be is essential. And when used in conjunction with a call, is a strong substitute for being together in person.

Which leads us nicely on to Zoom. Brilliant for video conferencing with built-in chat, polling, annotating and breakout room functionality. But, as great as it is, it’s not right for everything. Replicating back-to-back meetings in an office by spending the entire day on a Zoom video call is not going to be sustainable.

Working flexibly is more than just working remotely

In any virtual, geographically dispersed working environment, the 9–5 is almost meaningless. At Caribou Digital, we have a mix of morning people and night owls and everybody is working around timezones, family life, travel, hobbies and other interests and commitments. During lockdown, everyone has needed to be even more flexible about what their working day looks like to fit in the additional tasks required of them. Many find that their attention span is compromised. Employers are competing with homeschooling, toddlers in the background, pets sharing office space, and let’s not forget the glorious weather we’ve been experiencing (in the UK at least) which means we want to soak up as much of the sun as possible.

Although many more companies are now remote working in a physical sense, many are falling into the trap of trying to recreate a day at the office at home. We’ve gathered some top tips from our experience that we hope can help more people to embrace a more productive and enjoyable ‘virtual’ working life:

1. Be respectful of other people’s working patterns and routines. If you know that, for your colleague, 6–8pm is ‘get the kids fed, bathed and into bed’ time, don’t bombard them with direct messages during that period.
2. Being able to see people makes meetings more personable and less lonely, but it can also be tiring. We use video only when everyone is expected or invited to speak.
3. Try to limit video calls to 6–8 people. Having more people on the call can be quite daunting (depending on how well you know the group), particularly for introverts, and often leads to a couple of people dominating the conversation and a lack of interaction — the opposite of what you want to achieve.
4. Ask people to ‘raise their hands’ if they want to speak. Depending on the conference tool you are using, multiple voices can get blocked out and sometimes the conversation has moved on before everyone has been heard.
5. Don’t make final decisions on a video call like you would in a face to face meeting. Follow up with an email or Slack discussion to give everyone the opportunity to think about what has been discussed and voice their opinion on it.
6. When it is not required that everyone contributes to the conversation, consider using a webinar platform instead, or record the meeting so that people can listen at a time convenient to them.
7. Where possible, find ways to package up information for people to digest in their own time. And in shorter time slots. Record short videos — 2 to 4 minutes depending on the type of content — and share them on social media, as part of a series, or via a newsletter.
8. Podcasts are also great! They are something people can listen to while walking their dog, on their daily walk/run, or while getting dinner ready.
9. There are countless tools available for remote collaborative working these days. Virtual whiteboards, event platforms and project management tools can all be used when you need to replicate those sessions around a flip chart.
10. Not everything translates perfectly from face-to-face to virtual but with a little creativity you can still do many of the things you did before. For example, twice a year we come together as a whole company. This allows us the space and time to collaborate in person and have the all-important in-depth conversations. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, this wasn’t possible so, this Spring, we held our team retreat virtually and worked across time zones from Amman through Nairobi to San Francisco. We shared team runs on Strava in the ‘morning’, held games nights in the ‘evenings’ and fitted working sessions in between. Each session was an hour long but we made sure to have an hour’s break in between. It wasn’t the same as being with each other in person, but it worked! And it was productive and fun. Throughout the lockdown, we’ve continued with a weekly social event on a Friday afternoon when we get together to chat, to do yet another zoom-enabled quiz or even for a company bake-along. The main purpose is to have time just to unwind and to check-in on how everyone is doing at this strange time.

One of our virtual game nights on Zoom. How many movies could we find in this image in 1 minute?

Where do we go from here?

Although we are a virtual company, we still rely on travel and in-person meetings in the course of our business. We are currently trying to figure out how to be more present in a virtual world. How do we do international business development effectively now that we are unable to travel? What is the best way of hosting a virtual event? One of our services, Live Learning, is based entirely on immersive experiences — how do we bring this into a virtual world? We are trialling everything from Keynote to Hopin, to Teeoh and Miro. As soon as we land on something that works, we’ll be sure to share it. Stay tuned!