Remote Work — Our Team’s Experience

With current circumstances forcing those of us who can to work remotely, many of us are totally at sea, trying our best to adjust and indeed get used to just working from home.

Of course, a good way to learn how to handle remote work better is by speaking to people who’ve gone through the entire process and have learned what works for both them and their teams.

Vidya Ramakrishnan, HasGeek’s front-end developer, has been working remotely for over two years now. She shares some of her experiences switching to a remote working arrangement, with its myriad challenges and rewards.

Her decision to seriously consider remote working was primarily because of her three hour long commute, something anyone familiar with Bangalore and its gridlocked traffic would empathize with. Apart from the inconvenience, it was also a waste of precious time that could be better put to use with productive work.

Of course, Vidya’s initial transition to remote work was filled with challenges. Finding a space to work from took some time, and household distractions kept cropping up. One way she managed to do this was by creating a dedicated space at home to work from, one insulated from outside distractions.

In addition, Vidya stuck to a fixed routine that gave her a sense of how her time was being spent and for what, planning it around chores, family time, and getting her daughter ready for school in the morning. This also helped demarcate time spent working from personal time, to get into work mode even outside an office environment, and to prevent work from encroaching upon personal time.

Communication in particular proved tricky, she adds. Text as a medium just isn’t as expressive. Generally, face-to-face conversations also come with context, in addition to non-verbal cues like tone and body language.

Interacting over text frequently requires filling in these contextual gaps before you even get started, and the risk of miscommunication is always there. Plus, timings have to sync, so that time isn’t wasted in messages reaching people. It takes time and patience to figure out a communication protocol that can ensure smooth and sustained conversations over text, but doing so is essential.

To make up for this, Vidya’s team started having their stand-up meetings a lot more often, from weekly to multiple times a week. This, and keeping a record of the week’s work helped fill these gaps as well.

As a front end developer, Vidya’s work requires her to interact with both designers and a backend developer. The team is quite small so it is much easier, she says, while admitting that this would pose a challenge for larger teams. The visual elements of her role in particular required some workarounds, with the team devising a system around screenshots.

Teams working remotely also miss out on water cooler talk, the social aspect of work interactions Vidya’s colleagues at the office were still taking part in. Adding this light-heartedness to their digital channels helped offset this, by bringing these interactions online as well.

The team also tried incorporating a host of tools to coordinate remote work. Different messaging platforms and work planners, with their own learning curves, features, and ease of use.For example, Vidya mentions that the team tried Slack and Telegram for messaging, but found that it was easier to stick to just one platform, so they stuck with Telegram. They also tried Trello, but ended up using Todoist and Asana.

Although in the end, Vidya says, it takes discipline sticking to any tool the team chooses.Indeed, most of the team at HasGeek eventually switched to remote working following her lead, with the option extended to new employees as well.

Naturally, spending all these hours at home can take its toll. Vidya dealt with social isolation by going on walks, talking to people from the neighborhood, going for yoga class, and even playing sports. Like other aspects of the remote work culture she built for herself, this took a conscious effort, especially since colleagues were no longer a source of social interactions.

Vidya reiterates that discipline and transparent communication remain the foundations of a smooth remote working experience. Having both non professional commitments and lists of work tasks for the week anchor everything else in place. Setting timelines and tasks is key to a functioning workflow, although this can involve a fair bit of experimentation, as in her case.

As Vidya’s experience shows us, remote working takes some conscious rethinking of both individual and team work culture to get used to.

On Friday, we hosted the first JSFoo Reboot Fest on navigating changes in work culture, and we had our speaker Nikhil Lanjewar, former CTO Jombay, share his insights on lean practices! You can watch a recording of the session on HasGeek TV.

Read this lucid post by Steve Glaveski for its multiple perspectives on what it takes to make the transition to remote working as a team.

Are you a seasoned remote worker too? Have you given it a shot before returning to a traditional office setting? Or was the idea always appealing to you?

Share your experiences with us!