DNC Tech Team Guide to Remote Work

The DNC Tech team spans 19 states and 4 time zones

As many organizations transition to working remotely in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, we wanted to share some of our tips for working efficiently and collaboratively — and taking care of yourself — while working from home.

The DNC Tech team is made up of 55 people in 19 states. Much of our work requires collaboration across this majority distributed team.

We’ve each built remote work routines and figured out some things that work (and some that don’t). We hope you find these notes and recommendations helpful. Stay safe!

Creating structure at home

Creating structure to separate work time from non-work time can be especially difficult when working from home.

Here are a few things that are helpful for our team:

• Have a routine at the beginning and end of the day. The act of getting ready and wrapping up your day is critical.
• Try to have a separate space for working, if you can. Don’t get in the habit of working from bed.
• Create a clear separation between when you’re working and when you’re not. If you have a separate work phone, keep Slack/email on it, not your personal devices. Try to close your computer at the end of the work day. Be sure to make it clear to your colleagues how to reach you outside of normal hours (we use Signal along with PagerDuty).
• Take walks. Give yourself moments to breathe and take a break.
• Remember to eat lunch. Blocking off time on your calendar each day can help protect that time (and remind you to eat).
• Do or don’t do chores. Our team is split on this one. For some they play the role of a helpful break, for others they’re a distraction. If doing chores as a break helps you make sure the time is structured and time bound.
• Communicate clearly with colleagues and collaborators about when you’re available and when you’re not. We’ve found Slack statuses to be helpful for this.
• Have a daily standup meeting. This should be short and just focused on what people are working on today or have top of mind.
• Set hours or other ways to communicate to family/roommates when you’re working and can’t be interrupted.

Building camaraderie and culture

With a team distributed across the nation, we’ve learned to make space for the water-cooler chat that foster closer connections.

• Set up #social Slack channels. Our team’s social Slack channels include #dogs, #tech-social, #bachelor-chat, and many more. Our team also has a #mental-health channel for discussions about general wellbeing and stress reduction.
• Create a specific #covid-19 Slack channel people can join if they do want to talk about coronavirus and/or play Working From Home During A Global Pandemic Bingo. Keeping pandemic-focused conversations to that channel — and out of general social channels — will let people self-moderate and proactively opt in to the conversations they want to be in during this high-stress time.
• Schedule social hangouts with coworkers to talk about non-work topics. It’s important to cultivate and continue your social networks and support system.
• At the start or close of a meeting, make time for a few minutes of social chat. A few minutes of “how was your weekend,” “it is very snowy” helps build social ties with coworkers.
• Say “good morning” to your teammates when you start your day. It simulates the feeling of walking into an office.

Tips for conference calls

Our team is reliant on video calls to get our work down. Here are a few guidelines for productive calls:

• Use video! Seeing each other face-to-face makes collaborative conversations much easier, especially in group conversations.
• Have headphones with a mic and don’t rely on the speakers and mic in your laptop. Your voice will be clearer and people will better understand you with a separate microphone. Headphones also help keep your conversation private (and keep you from bugging your roommates or family members).
• Mute yourself when you’re not talking. This helps solve background noise and echoing that can be really distracting during calls. It also can be helpful to use un-muting as a signal that you’re about to say something.
• Be a cinematographer. Check the preview view of your own camera. Are you in frame? Can people see you or is it too dark? If you can arrange it, light coming from behind your monitor, especially a window, works very well.
• Use the chat feature to tee up questions and to drop quick comments on what’s being said. This is the video conferencing equivalent of the implicit communication that happens in person— nods of agreement, confused looks, etc.
• Create agendas in advance; circulate them to all attendees and add them to the calendar invite.
• Follow-up after meetings with written summaries. Either adapt that agenda or create a new document of what was discussed in a meeting and the decisions that were reached.

Staying vigilant to security threats

Having more people working remotely may draw attention from people or groups seeking to undermine your security posture. These adversaries may be just as interested in your personal devices and accounts as they are your work tools.

We urge you to check out our Security Checklist here, and to have everyone on your team complete each task.

Our remote toolbox

Here are a few of the tools our team has come to rely on for remote working.

For communication:

• Zoom for video calls
• Slack for day-to-day and project communications
• Signal and PagerDuty for critical alerts

For productivity:

• Jira for project management (it allows you to see what everyone is working on)
• Google docs for meeting agendas, notes, and next steps

For security:

• DNC Security Checklist

Remote work with us!

DNC Tech is a diverse team that provides the technology used by candidates and organizers in all 50 states and all 3,413 counties across the United States to analyze data, organize campaigns, raise money, and get out the vote on election day.

If you’re interested in making a difference in this election cycle (and those to come!), join our team.