My [Short] Experience as a Remote Engineer
After joining the engineering team at OpenGov, I was in a unique position. That is to say: I was literally located in a state without other team members. Given how long relocations can take and how anxious I was to get started, I jumped online and so began my first experience as a remote engineer…
This wasn’t my first foray into geographically dispersed teams, but it was my first time being alone in a timezone. Though my tenure working from home was limited, a few pain points and helpful tricks stood out which helped guide me towards success in this experiment. I’ll start with what I did wrong and close with how I modified my habits to make me more productive. Whether you’re stuck away from the office for a month or are starting off on a fully remote work-adventure, hopefully my story can be of some help.
What Doesn’t Work
I made a few mistakes my first couple of weeks working from home which, unfortunately, led to some days that were less productive than I liked. The first of these issues, sadly, came in the form of my favorite part of office life: chatting with coworkers.
Casual Conversations
Water coolers don’t exist online. This took me a couple of weeks to grasp, but the hard truth is that I couldn’t see if a coworker was hard at work or taking a coffee break. This made it tricky to strike up a casual conversation at a convenient time. Instead of using chat for casual pleasantries, I tried to bake banter into the beginning of a meeting; however, that didn’t work too well on busier days.
This is not to say you can’t just say hello, but it is a warning to choose your timing; I liked to catch up with coworkers during one-on-one calls when no one was in a rush. If you’re part of a widely distributed team, a tool like Sqwiggle, which offers the digital equivalent of a tap-on-the-shoulder, might be a better option than a standard chat client.
Waiting for Feedback
My next mistake was waiting too long for feedback. Most of the time I had enough work that I could pivot onto another task until my coworker became available, but occasionally I was completely blocked. An easy solution is to ask multiple people for help and hope that someone comes to your aid quickly, although that might not work every time if you are alone in your timezone. Sometimes there is no other way except to provide your own feedback, which I’ll come back to a bit later.
Staying Online All Day
Lastly I noticed that, since I didn’t have an office, it was easy for work to follow me home. Especially when considering time zone differences, it was common to get Slacked when I was not available. At first I didn’t mind not having a do-not-disturb time set, especially when I really needed to talk with someone, but it also led to some surprisingly late nights dealing with low priority issues. Personal time should be sacred and, even if I’d been waiting for a response all day, I let non-critical messages go unanswered until I was ready to get back to work, or at least back on a computer.
What Works
Yes, working remotely is difficult, but no, it is not impossible. I am confident that given another couple of months of practice I could be as productive at home as I am in the office given a few tactics I used on a regular basis.
Email Is Your Friend
One that made the biggest impact for me is email, most of which went unsent. Sure, Slack is easy and an unassuming, “Hey”, can be a great way to grab someone’s attention — but typing is slow and the attention was often lost. If I had a question or a comment, fully detailing my concerns in a well thought-out letter ensured I could deliver my ideas without losing the attention of my coworker. The best part is how carefully crafting an email forced me to see the problem from a different angle, which occasionally brought a new solution to light. Remember how providing your own feedback can be a good way to avoid waiting for it? This is how I did it.
Email also kept me from over-communicating, something which I’ve read is both a good thing and a bad thing. I tend to agree with the latter — if my coworkers are anything like me a constantly blinking notification does damage to productivity — whether remote or not.
Change Up Your Environment
A great feature of working remotely is that you can be anywhere, unlike an office which provides only a couple of work spaces. Though I did spend a lot of time in my home office, I also frequented a number of coffee shops in my neighborhood. As long as the environment was not distracting, moving to a new work space was enough to get me unstuck a number of times.
Schedule All of the Things
My final thought may be obvious, but it is nonetheless an important one: schedule all of the things. Especially since I was in a different timezone from the rest of my team, dropping an appointment on our calendar was the best way to ensure the conversation actually takes place.
Using specific tools like Screenhero helps too, for when a simple video call or screen share won’t do.
What’s more: I even got in the habit of putting personal events on my work calendar if they overlapped with regular work hours in another timezone. There was nothing worse that scheduling dinner with an old friend just to find I’d been invited to a meeting that I can’t miss. Remember: personal time is sacred.
What This Means For You
Going remote? Great! Some features, like the ability to switch up your environment, can make working remotely an awesome experience, but be ready for your communication skills to be tested to a-whole-nother level. You may also want to check out Trello’s blog — it has a lot of great articles regarding remote work and covers several suggestions which I omitted from this piece.
Working with a remote coworker? Fortunately for you the hard part is on them, but Slacking them just to say, “Hi”, might be the best way to make their day better.
