Effective Remote Working for Product/Engineering Teams
In light of the current COVID-19 epidemic, remote working is a much talked about topic. For some businesses, it’s not a problem to work in this arrangement, for others it’s a bit of a struggle. I’ve worked as a remote engineer/architect/CTO since 2010 across many different companies with different policies, setups and arrangements.
In 2010, remote working appeared to be the exception for specific people, rather than open to all. I moved back from Canada to the UK around that time and as part of that move attempted the remote working practice for the first time. It lasted six months (or thereabouts), was somewhat of a bumpy ride for both parties, with lots learned along the way.
For the next few years, it was office work, all the time, in an open-plan office, with one company. There were lots of unnecessary interruptions, 50–60 hour weeks, lack of focus strategy and company-wide, lots of on-site client visits. Remote working would have worked well here, but there were much bigger people education and org issues to deal with. I left in the end.
Post “major dysfunctional company”, I joined a sensible, tech-first B2B SaaS company. Remote working was initially frowned upon until a change in the executive team brought about some forward-thinking ideas. That coupled with the formation of two remote teams forced the issue of remote working. That allowed us to work where we felt was more productive — and that meant two/three days remote as opposed to the office.
Personal Views
During my time with these companies, I found the following:
- On company types, tech-first companies (and B2B more-so) generally adopted remote working with little problem. B2C companies and those where the tech team is driven by another department (e.g. eCommerce and marketing which I still find totally laughable) really struggled with this. I had one company mandate a five day a week, 3-hour commute round-trip in one case. Yes, they had an outsourced team in Kiev also! #fml
- If you’re in a senior technical role the remote working part is crucial, particularly if you have a heavy coaching routine with your team and need to get your head down to solve a difficult problem sometimes.
- Remote working (or more specifically) a change of environment does great things for my personal productivity. That said moving from the office to the dining room to the local coffee shop also helps massively when I’m unmotivated.
- On different counties and cultural beliefs, I found Germany (and Berlin) circa 2016 was utterly against remote working. I once queried this with someone who explained that “what they do not see, they do not trust). That may be a cultural thing, but I turned down a £130k a year job on the basis of “no-remote working” to see my family one week out of four. That’s how important flexibility is, and that’s how you lose in terms of talent acquisition. It’ll be interesting to see how the current situation changes this.
- On the time split between remote working and face-to-face working, I found three days in the office and two days remote worked well from a productivity point of view. Or, working from home in the morning and heading into the office for midday to avoid the commute problems (thanks a lot Bristol for your awful public transport setup) — wait till we get a monorail!
Advice for Engineers
As an engineer my advice is as follows:
Adopt remote working partly
I’m not a fan of fully-remote “all the time”, (the current situation with COVID-19 aside). Why? Firstly it’s a preference, I like being in the office and talking to people face-to-face. Secondly, I find it pretty lonely for long periods of time. The ping of Slack, email and the other “boring machines that seek to disturb your sleep” might be your only company as well. Not everyone has a partner, children and pets. Also, I find specific meetings easier on a face to face basis, particularly if you need to work through difficult conversations and deal with conflict.
Get an hour of sunlight each day
Make sure you have social events once or twice a week outside of work — that might be organised around exercise, hobbies, food or the inevitable and very Britishly common pub. In the winter months you should optimise around the sunlight hours and start early if you have to, or later to take advantage of the sunlight. Personally, my best work is done later on in the evening — particularly technical tasks such as coding, infrastructure etc… I haven’t quite figured out why, other than it’s an old hangover from my days of school and then computer science/coding in college. I also find getting up way earlier in the morning (not more than twice in a row) also help me to be productive. That old “Don’t burn the candle at both ends” moral is definitely applicable here as well!
Strict start and end times
I am particularly bad at this often starting at 7am in the hope of finishing early and finding myself still at the keyboard at 8pm. That’s all good two days in a row, but the third day you’re going to suffer in terms of productivity. Make sure you’re strict with your work hours. Also, make sure your daily events are rigorous (and in the calendar so people know). I’m talking about exercise, lunch at a normal time and getting into a rhythm where you plan your events. It’s very easy to sit there in front of the computer and neglect/skip over these events to get more into the day. If you do this you’ll end up with decision fatigue, eye fatigue etc…
Be careful about your base
in terms of rental/purchase housing. Make sure the location has good transport links, especially if you have to travel two/three days a week. Bear in mind what you’re going to do after this job, because they might not allow remote working. Ten years, I almost ended up moving to Monmouthshire in Wales, figuring I’d be with my current company another few years. It would have been a disaster trying to find similarly paid work. Bristol was a good compromise from a work/life perspective, instead of moving to London. I still have to travel once a week and stay over, but it’s not that bad. I’ve also only had one job in Bristol over the last ten years, but that’s a different story…
Over-communicate
on Slack/email with your team members. Don’t be terse/brief with answers and updates. Don’t leave people guessing and having to ask two more questions to get to the root of the problem. Also, remember my point about the German trust problem. I think it’s a massive worry for people who’ve never had employees work remotely before. There’s an automatic distrust from the outset. Make sure you have effective touchpoints for communication and relationship. Also, turn your camera on when you’re doing a call with the team or one-to-ones.
Eat Well, Exercise Well
I didn’t notice until a few months ago the impact of working, and living in London and effect the effect it had it had on my mood (because of my commute) and also my health. If I had a good commute, via boat up the Thames and then walking), it had a significant impact on my first part of the day — especially if the alternative was the tube. In terms of exercise, I found myself walking more in the city — often clocking up 10000–20000 steps a day. Compare that to home and your commute (from the bedroom to the study) and you have to be much more careful about what you eat at home in relation to how many calories you burn. Adjusting your exercise schedule helps here to compensate for this — even if it’s an hour a day. Hacking your lunch/dinner and reducing the number of calories you eat is another way, but the exercise method is much better.
Effective Meetings
As a fractional/interim CTO, but also as a remote worker, there are a number of ways in which you can keep up-to-date with what’s going on. The most effective meetings for me are as follow:
- All-hands update — with dialogue from each department — I really need to learn more about what’s going on with our operations team at the moment and help them out for example.
- Weekly tech meeting — attempting to provide answers on the bigger picture to the engineering team in terms of initiatives, understand their problems and get their feedback on what we should be doing
- One-to-ones — with each of my tech leads to understand problems, with the other execs to make sure we’re aligned and to generally improve how we communicate.
When it comes to meetings, my advice is as follows:
Be clear on your communication policy. Respect the boundaries of other people, especially if they reside in other countries and are three hours ahead.
Minute your meetings and put them in Notion/Confluence so that people can refer back to them. This is super helpful for me when I’m only working two/three days a week with a company and have an audit trail I can refer back to on what has happened.
Put your lunch break and post-work items in your calendar, particularly if you’re in a management role and work outside of the 9–5pm time slot. Lunch is so important. I haven’t tried doing “remote lunching” with colleagues yet, but do want to give this a go. Anyone up for Zoom beers after work?
Fix your hardware and software setup at home. Get a decent chair — your back, neck and shoulders will thank you when you get to 40+. Make sure your desk is at the right height (I’m 6ft 4in so this makes a big difference to me). I actively had a founder refuse to raise the desk height because he wanted all the desks to be at the same height once. Erm, WTF?
Encourage regular visits with your remote teams so that you can build a relationships, especially early on. It helps to have a remote-working setup plan with a set of items in it. Make sure you run retrospectives to understand how you can improve better as a team.
Don’t pretend your home environment is a utopia with zero interruptions. We have two basset hounds, they howl at the door. Hell, they howl sometimes because there’s no-one around. Muting Zoom is a standard thing for me to do, but sometimes you can’t help the distraction. I think the patron saint of remote work — Marion the Great demonstrates this best. How he handles the situation here is terrible — don’t push your kid away, you’re on national TV — embrace the distraction and work through it.
In Conclusion
I’m a consulting CTO working on an interim/fractional basis through HWIntegral. Drop me a message if you want to speak to me about remote working, specific challenges you have or how you should prepare to work remotely — fully distributed, over two offices or through an outsourcing function.
