Effective Home Office - How to Get the Most out of Your Remote Working Experience!

In this article, as an employee, you will learn how to boost your home office experience. If you are an employer, you will learn how to teach your teams to excel at remote working.

It is getting more and more common. While there are still a bunch of employees and employers that see home office somewhat skeptical, more and more people realize the benefits. As CEO of a software developing company, I highly appreciate and encourage remote working, because:

• We need fewer office resources (which keeps the costs low)
• Our teams maintain an awesome work-life balance
• We can employ and work with people from places that are hours away
  and much, much more.

But working remotely comes with a few changes in work-life balance and the way you are going to work. In this article, we are discussing five essential tips and strategies on how to improve your home office experience by being more productive while also maintaining a high work-life balance. Here are the 5 tips:

1. Stay in touch, but take your time
2. Make your work transparent
3. Set goals!
4. Use the right tools
5. Get together from time to time

I have over six years of experience in working remotely with teams from all around the world, and I had a lot of fears in the beginning. They were all proved wrong.

As a CEO, I want my developer teams to have the highest degree of freedom possible while enjoying work. Working from home is not a privilege in our company; it is a basic right. When hiring a new team member, we always include the following 5 tips in our introductory training.

Stay in touch, but take your time

The fear: We are losing contact with our team members. When working remotely, team members don’t communicate well with each other.

I understand that fear, but in every single team I have worked with as a remote developer, I have seen that the quality and quantity(!) of communication was often better compared to on-site teams.
The key phrase here is “communication culture.”

Remember: You can also not communicate while sitting next to each other!

The team itself defines the quality and quantity of communication. As part of the team, YOU are therefore also responsible to keep communication on a high level. In tip 4 we will talk about how to use tools that support communication in your team. For now, I want to point out something important that is often missed while defining a comunication culture:

Define when and how fast you want to respond to each other.

It sounds simple, but it’s vital. Typically, you will have many tools in place, like an Instant Messenger, Email, voice tools/phones, etc.
It is critical to define which medium you want to use for “synchronous” or “asynchronous” communication.

• I often use voice tools/phones as “synchronous” tools in the sense that I usually (but not always) expect my peer to instantly answer or at least call me back after I pinged him or her.
• On the other hand, Emails are typically an asynchronous means of communication in the sense that I do not always expect a quick answer from the person I write an email to.
• In my teams, I consider Instant Messagers to be somewhat in between.

The general rule-of-thumb is that whenever you want to contact somebody, you try to reach out over an asynchronous channel first (email or Instant Messaging) while not expecting an answer right away. We all know that software development demands a high level of concentration and focus on details. Therefore, the less a developer is disturbed with having to reply to some random questions, the more productive she/he can be.

If you need a quick response, you can always “escalate” to the more synchronous communication channels. But use that only for things that are both really important and very urgent.

Make your work transparent

The fear: People are lazy, they don’t get anything done if they are not checked on.

Do you admit it? Or not? Yes, you also thought that, right? I want to debunk one of the biggest misconceptions in software development history.

If you are an employer, it is your responsibility to make people love their job! Somebody who loves their job will be productive. It’s as simple as that.

But guess what, also employees often ask themselves: Will my work be appreciated, or will “they” think I’m just lazying around?

There is a simple solution for both sides to all of that: Make your work transparent.

It should be the case even for on-site teams, but even more for remote ones: Document (and communicate) what you have done.
Use a ticketing system like Jira or Trello, mention your work in your team meetings/calls, and keep in touch with each other.

It doesn’t only show what everybody does; it also helps distributed teams to keep up-to-date on the latest developments of your software or whatever product or project you are working on. Every team member, as well as your bosses” must have a chance to know what user stories you are working on, what features you implemented, and what to expect in the next couple of days.

Set goals!

Fear: I am alone in a room; there is so much work to do. I’m sure I’ll get crazy!

What appears to be a big problem can be solved pretty easily: Set yourself some goals. Weekly goals, daily goals, hourly goals, whatever suits you.
You can plan your day so much easier if you know in advance what you want to achieve. This way you don’t get lost under a big pile of work.

Communicate your goals to your team. In most cases, you should have a daily-standup call (even if you don’t to scrum) to stay in touch with your team. This is where you can tell others what you are going to do on that day.

And you should try to achieve your goals. It’s like a promise you make to the other team members and yourself.

That being said: Don’t forget your work-life balance. If for any reason, it is not possible to accomplish your goal on time, you should, at some point, stand up and leave your desk.

Use the right tools

Welcome to the 21st century! Although it is possible to write great software remotely even without using modern communication tools (think of all that great open source projects of the last century), they are making our lives as remote workers a lot easier.

The most useful tools are:

• An instant messaging tool like Slack, MS-Teams, Skype, etc. ideally with call/voice functionality
• Project Management / Ticketing software like Jira or Trello
• Software for technical and organizational documentation. Ideally a Wiki (Confluence, MediaWiki, …)
• Software to share and manage files (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, …)
• Any other collaboration tool you’d like to try

Obviously, if you are a software developer, you need to work with a version control system. This is not optional, also for on-site teams.

Do you have any favorite tools/categories that are not listed above? Feel free to leave a comment below and tell me what you think!

Get together from time to time

Working remotely is fun, but nothing beats going out for a beer or a strawberry milkshake (greetings to Mr. Stoll). You should get together with your team — ideally on a regular basis. Depending on how distributed the team is and how easy it is to meet physically, it could be once a week, once a month or once a year.

But these get-togethers glue together. Just tell your boss, you’d like to have a team-building event.

And you can have a great dinner and drinks with nice people.
And your boss pays.
And what’s better than that?