My ❤ Workstation: Simple and Sweet 😊

The Remote Way

Firstly, I would like all of us to be thankful at this time of global crisis that we are able to continue our daily job from the comfort and security of our homes. I am thankful to my employer for this. 🙏

Utmost respect to the brave souls at the frontline and to their families. You all are awesome! 💛

Practice remote work

This article is for my friends, trying fully remote for the first time or thinking of taking a remote job. In the current time of global crisis, I am sure it might not seem like a perfect setup without the right tools and culture. I used to work from an office with occasional remote days for 5 years before I took up this fully remote job at Over. Now, even after being completely remote for the last year and a half, I am still adjusting to it in some ways. Here are a few tips which might help you with your work from home set up :

• Keep your workspace separate from your daily lifestyle as much as possible. If possible, utilize that small study room or clean out a corner, but try and keep it separate.
• Try not to get intrigued by that perfect work-station or that perfect standing-desk picture you saw online. As long as you have a table and a chair to keep your back straight, you should be good. Or you might like to hack up something for yourself as my husband did for a while :

Setting up a standing desk, PC: Ritesh Gupta

• Try to complete your housework at a stretch in the morning or when you take a break in between, try not to be distracted with it time and again.
• Do not work all day long, try to decide on working hours and stick to the routine. It is fine to take a break in between and tend to the needs of your family and then readjusting your working hours, but remember not to stretch your working hours indefinitely or you might end up feeling that you are working all the time.
• Make sure to convey your working hours to your team. In Google Calendar, there is a way to mark your working hours, so that your team knows when you are available and get notified automatically if someone tries to schedule a call outside your working hours.
• Try not to bring your lunch to your workspace, instead eat in peace and come back with full focus. This might depend on personal preference. This is my view.
• Use the time saved in commute to exercise, take up some dance classes, join a gym, learn yoga. There are a lot of tutorials online as well.
• Try to make time for hobbies or things you enjoy doing every day. Learn to draw, take up gardening, improve your cooking skills, learn a new technology, whatever makes you happy. Remember, this is as important as your daily job.
• If you can follow most of the above tips, then surely you will end up feeling a bit better about your day. So,

Self-discipline is the key

The cherry on the cake

Apart from just working from home, remote work is a totally different lifestyle. Try to enjoy and appreciate the positive things of remote work like maybe :

• being with your family in this time of global crisis and be able to keep your jobs at the same time, not everyone can do this
• it is THE best thing ever for our furry friends to have us at home all-day
• home-cooked food, properly heated up food with fresh home-made yogurt and salad
• self-made tea and coffee. Is there anything better than that?
• mid-day showers 😜 (Some of my coworkers totally love this, so much so that we even added a custom emoji with their face on Slack)
• mid-day naps 😜
• private washroom
• private washroom, yes this deserves to be written twice
• For some, better focus
• Commute-time: 10 seconds with 0 traffic
• Our own office space, decorated in the way we want to
• No stress of rushing to work, less stress is healthy for our body
• No stressing over when your domestic help comes in late, chill 😎
• Work from bed 😜, just kidding try to set up a desk and a chair, oooo work from couch
• Morning meetings from bed 😜
• Less money spent on office clothes, as your wardrobe changes from outgoing clothes to comfortable indoor clothes
• You control your office temperature, (of course, only if you are temperature compatible with your partner, who might be working remotely as well. Looking at you Ritesh Gupta)

More than just working from home

Meme Credit: The Idealist

What I would also like to point out here is that this quarantine life is not exactly what remote work is. It is more than that. I request you to not associate the current situation completely with remote work. Like, the following things are also a part of remote life which might not be true in the current circumstances.

• Being able to travel to a conference and continuing to work from a different state/country.
• Picking your own office. My husband likes to work a few days a week from a cafe, he has his favorites and also likes to explore new ones from time to time. Enjoy, a picture from his Instagram #remotework collection.

Champaca Book Cafe, Bangalore. PC: Ritesh Gupta

• Meeting work-buddies and working together out of these self-picked offices. (You get to pick your own coworkers as well 😜)
• Being able to run some mid-day errands, like picking up kids from school or taking a walk to free your mind, listening to a podcast and then coming back to your office tasks with even more focus.
• Making more time for family and for yourself, just being present at home with your family could be quite supportive.
• Being able to travel to your hometown and continuing to work from there.

Unlike this quarantine life, in remote work, you still get to travel, go outside to exercise/walk, etc without worrying or risking your life, meet your friends in your regular cafes/restaurants in the evening to relax, buy groceries and stuff in the mornings/evening instead of stockpiling, like in the current situation.

Things one might miss out

Remote work has a lot of perks, but at the same time, I would also mention a few things which you might miss out on and how to maybe work around them.

• You might miss the company of coworkers or just someone to discuss things with. For this, I suggest hopping on a video call with your team members. I emphasize on video since it becomes a bit more personal that way since you get to see others' faces. Also, attending meet-ups at weekends and going to conferences also helps.
• No Table Tennis or foosball, This might be the thing I miss the most, but on the other hand, now I get to pick different activities of my own choice which I can participate in during the commute time I saved.
• No office parties like the Secret Santa for Christmas, Diwali ethnic dress-up party, etc. Well, for some people this might be a gift, anyway, for this, I would suggest occasional office retreats, meetings would help.

Building a remote culture

It is as important for managers, team leads to learn about remote work as their employees. This culture and best practices can only be propagated from top to bottom. Most of these tips are not just my own. These are practiced by most remote-first companies and especially at Over.

For employers, managers, leads, and employees here are a few tips to build up a remote work environment within the team :

• Communication is the key, over-communicating doesn’t hurt (Thanks to Julien Veneziano for teaching me this). This is why we have these asynchronous means of communication like Slack.
• Let your team know of your whereabouts when you need to be AFK for long.
• Set up weekly / biweekly knowledge sharing sessions, it is important to share knowledge for team growth.
• Set up pair-programming sessions, hop on a call to debug that issue, do not hesitate to ask for help over a call. Hop on a meeting to discuss a PR which introduces some cool new things or when the review comments might be going out of hand.
• But, at the same time, value other person’s focus and try not to ping them time and again, instead leave a message that they can come back to when possible, unless absolutely necessary.
• Keep the video on for most of your meetings, this is important since you do not meet these people on a regular basis and it is always good to put a face to that name.
• Readjust meetings to finish them off at a stretch and then find a continuous focus-time slot for your work.
• Do not overlook documentation, it is the key. Take that important conference or phone call and document it as minutes of the meeting. Also document the outcomes. Document your code. Document All the Things!
• Have casual chat with your colleagues once in a while via video meetings.
• Trust your employees to get the work done and be a bit flexible.
• Start those longer meetings with icebreakers or maybe even a game online. Recently, in our cool-down week, we hopped on a call and played Drawful 2. (Totally love this online game btw, Credits: Rebecca Franks)
• Celebrate a new release with themed meetings. Here’s us celebrating the release of our masking-tool at Over last year :

I can go on but this section might need a post of its own :) One thing that attracted me the most when I decided to go fully remote was this practice:

Whenever a single person in a meeting is remote, everybody jumps on a call and the meeting itself is then conducted remotely. In this manner, nobody feels left out and encourages remote-first culture.

Remember, remote work is a culture that cannot be built overnight, it takes time, patience, trust and support from the team. Hopefully, you might end up building a process that could support your team in the future as well, hopefully by going remote.

Support them to support you.

This brings us to our last but definitely not the least topic. Importance of enabling employees to work remotely.

Enabling the team

Remote work enables your employees in the following ways:

• Mothers of new-borns get to spend more time with their kids while working.
• Employees can be more involved with their families in time of need and even always.
• Better focus for some people.
• Employers can even hire talent from around the world/country.
• Stress free employees.

Please know that these are my personal opinions and what I have learned while working remotely for a year and a half. It might not be applicable to everyone and in every circumstance. With this, I just hope to help at least someone out there struggling to adjust to this new way of work, The Remote Way.

Thanks, Sanchita Agarwal for an inspiration to write this article.