Tips for working from home from a remote-first company
Civic Eagle is a remote-first company, meaning every single employee works from their home office, neighborhood coffee shop, or local co-working space — we don’t have a dedicated central office. Over the last couple of years, we’ve more than tripled our team and during the course of this growth we’ve experimented with different software tools and company policies to ensure three things:
- Efficacy: making sure that our entire team is operating as efficiently and as effectively as our office-centered peers.
- Transparency: making sure that everyone in the company knows what’s going on with the core drivers of our business.
- Accountability: making sure that everyone is held to the same level of responsibility and accountability for their work and for the overall health of our company
Below are the tools we use and why we use them. Hopefully this can be of help to you and your team(s) as we all adapt to working remotely.
15 Five
15Five helps us keep track of employee feedback, scheduled 1:1s, and monitors the “pulse” of our team. Are people feeling great, terrible, in between? Tracking the pulse of our team allows us to put in place interventions that can reduce turnover and ensure the health of our [virtual] working environment.
Civic Eagle 15Five Policy: Mandatory participation every single week.This ensures efficacy.
Airtable
Airtable is a flexible collaboration platform that helps us work together as we keep track and edit company data sets. We’ve used Airtable for project management, data visualization, and everything in between.
Civic Eagle Airtable Policy: Everyone has access to every Airtable “base”. This ensures transparency.
Elate
Elate is one of my personal favorites. We use Elate to track key KPIs over time in a clean and easy to use dashboard. Elate is incredibly easy to share with stakeholders so everyone on our team knows where we are as a company and where we intend to go. Elate keeps us aligned.
Civic Eagle Elate Policy: Everyone can look at our KPIs and metrics at any time (not just the management team). This ensures transparency.
Enview by Civic Eagle
Enview, of course, is my favorite tool. As the creators of Enview, we were very intentional in ensuring that it would give policy professionals the best remote-collaborative experience on the market. Over the last couple of years, we’ve doubled down on collaboration and communication features, giving our customers the perfect tool for tracking legislation, managing policy positions, and collaborating with teammates and stakeholders.
Parabol
Parabol powers our remote/virtual meetings. We use Parabol for our action meetings as well as for our retrospective meetings. Having what is basically a virtual conference room makes all the difference when you want to run an efficient and effective virtual meeting.
Civic Eagle Parabol Policy: Everyone must add their thoughts and ideas to at least one discussion/agenda topic. This ensures accountability.
Slack
Slack is our primary business operations communication tool (not email). We share documents, chat, and strategize, all on Slack.
Civic Eagle Slack Policy: Share your status (offline, not available for chatting, traveling, etc.) This ensures transparency and efficacy.
Zoom
Zoom is the best video-conferencing tool we’ve used…and we’ve tried everything. Zoom is simple and does what it was meant to do very well: quick and easy video conference with your team. There are some great 1:1 video chat tools out there, but when it comes to teams, Zoom wins.
Civic Eagle Zoom Policy: Video must be on! This ensures accountability.
You’ll notice the two common theme throughout all of these tools are communication and collaboration. To be effective working remotely, communication and collaboration have to be prioritized. It’s one of the reasons we built Enview by Civic Eagle. If you work in government relations, advocacy, or are a lobbyist, check out Enview by Civic Eagle to learn how it can help you and your policy team iwork remotely more effectively as you build impactful policy.
