Designing remote work (part1)
I am sitting at my kitchen table and just finished a conference call with my colleagues who are respectively at home, in our studio in Milan, at a conference in Lisbon.
Remote work is one of the hottest trends in the organizational management field, a quite straightforward consequence of a few undeniable elements of our age: digitalization, globalization, pollution and, last but not least, employee welfare.
Sketchin has been applying for remote work from the very beginning, some 10 years ago, simply because it felt natural — and sometimes necessary — to work from different places: at the client’s, at home, on a trip.
Nurturing a flexible and constantly evolving culture and continuously shaping our organizational model around it, we have always embraced practices aiming at increasing efficiency and well-being.
However, this time our approach is different: Sketchin is shifting from ‘happening to practice remote work every now and then’ to ‘deliberately designing remote work practices’.
We know that doing remote work is not so straightforward when your whole value proposition is about close collaboration within the team and frequent co-design sessions with the client.
Nevertheless, we believe we have the right tools to make it work: agile methodologies, efficient team communication, and reliable planning tools provide us with the right mindset and assets to approach the challenge successfully.
Is remote work for everyone?
Beyond the obvious — that is, working remotely requires a large dose of responsibility, proactivity and self-organization skills — if I ask my colleagues’ opinion the answer is no, remote work is not for everyone. Many of my fellows value the fact of being together in the same room on an (almost) daily basis and feel estranged and isolated when they are not physically with the team. This makes very much sense to me too, as design is a collaborative discipline by definition: brainstorming, co-designing, and pair reviewing are fundamental practices for delivering valuable design work. So the challenge is: how can we keep collaborative practices at the core of our work even when we are physically distant from each other?
Our reasons to go remote
Sketchin aims to find a reliable remote work environment in order to embrace the new market challenges such as international clients and multinational issues as well as reducing travel and lodging expenses and standard office places. The natural consequence was to create a Sketchin team made of people who shared the same interest and motivation to make this experiment work.
In September, after some internal reshuffling within the teams, the newborn team Orion (yes, our teams are named after space missions) started practicing remote work in a structured and measurable way.
Sketchin has given us the opportunity — actually the mission — to carry out this experiment because of the following reasons:
- To formalize an existing practice: we’ve been doing it and saying it for years, now it’s time to approach it with structure;
- To take care of our well-being as people consistently with Sketchin’s motto: ‘be responsible, enjoy freedom’;
- To make it a scalable practice: once we find the right recipe, remote work can be applied to distributed teams worldwide (Sketchin has design studios in Switzerland, Italy, Spain and the US);
-Because we are a mature studio who masters all the tools that can actually make it work: agile methodologies and ceremonies, a streamlined design process, a structured approach to problem-solving, strong team ties and, last but not least, a good dose of self-awareness by us designers.
Our colleague Francesca has been working remotely for more than a year.
One year ago I moved 300 kilometers far from work, in the hills between Tuscany and Emilia Romagna. I want a more healthy environment for me and my family and I was looking for beauty, freedom, and wilderness. For me it has been also a sort of social bet: rural Italy is depopulating and people are moving toward the big cities. Technology can invert this trend and save large portions of the land from decadence.”
Orion numbers, so far — aka ‘Remote work is not working from home’
5 team members (1 architect, 1 visual designer, 1 service designer, 1 interaction designer and waiting for the second one to complete our team)650 km separating us from the HQ
3 months experimenting remote
3 projects in our portfolio
7 business development projects
1 coach following us on a monthly basis- 66 standups
1 futurespective
3 retrospectives
2 team lunch
3 live team meetings
78 days of business trips, including night-stays
Our challenge as Orion team
The challenge we are embracing as a team — Serena, Stefano, Arianna, Francesca, Clizia — is about finding new ways of collaboration in order to deliver design-driven value even if we are not sitting next to each other. And we try to do this by making the most precious and efficient use of our time, for instance by conferring special importance to the moments we physically spend together (quality over quantity) and learning to be very intentional about the way we communicate (when, how, why).
How many times have we all been working in the same office and yet experienced a fragmented, non-efficient and poorly organized workday? How frustrating can this be when it implies, on top of everything, long hours spent commuting? What if this model could be changed? This is where Orion is heading to.
In the next paragraphs, I will address pains and challenges of remote work in our context and industry and share with you the solutions we’re experimenting in order to face our first challenges as successfully as possible.
We’re a newborn remote design team: how to get to know each other?
Every time I move to a new team I need some time to get to know people, understand team dynamics, learn to relate effectively and feel at ease in the new environment. If the team is brand new and its members have never worked together before, this process might take longer. In any case, there are some helpful activities that can speed up this process.
As a fresh remote team, we picked a date on the calendar and decided this was our first live meeting. We choose to meet in our studio in Milan as this was the most accessible option to meet for most of us. The goal of our meeting was to get to know each other by understanding what it meant to each of us — and as a team — to ‘experiment remote work practices’ in Sketchin. We wrote down on post-it notes our individual thoughts about personal needs, expectations, potential risks, questions, and doubts. As a team, we then clustered the notes and searched for common patterns.
The main topics that came to light were a strong desire for reliability and trust within the team, the need for a thorough planning, new tools or ceremonies that would enable us to work more efficiently and the (on demand) involvement of a Sketchin coach in our journey (more about this later). Among the risks and doubts, we had the fear of isolation (especially by people in the team who were new to Sketchin), the challenge of gaining credibility as a team in Sketchin and the chance of remote work not being viable for specific clients/projects.
This activity allowed us to make our expectations, needs and fears tangible, to verbalize them and put them on the wall where everyone could see them. This got us on the same page and created a first sense of sharing and belonging. Some of the things we mapped out were too big and did not have an answer by that time, so we knew we would have to address them separately one by one, which we started doing step by step, later.
How to create an environment of reliability and trust?
This was one of the main needs uncovered by our first activity. To address it, we decided to establish a common ground, an unquestionable and solid baseline preventing misunderstandings and unmet expectations. We discussed, negotiated and defined a set of team ‘game rules’ in the form of a working agreement, which we saved to a shared Google Doc in our team folder.
We agreed on the following elements:
- Our goals as a team;
- The KPI’s that would help us measure how well we were doing over time (more about this later);
- Our working times (including guaranteed availability time slots) both for remote work and for ‘live’ work (which were different depending on which Sketchin office we would reach);
- The ceremonies we would adopt (more detail about this later);
- Which tools to use and how to use each of them (the list included Slack, Hangout, Email, Trello, Google Drive, Basecamp, iCloud, Whatsapp, and a couple of other new tools to be tried out).
This activity was helpful to define our everyday practice and it represented an onboarding moment for new colleagues in the team. Today — 3 months later — we give this all for granted, but if we hadn’t been so meticulous about it to start with, we would have experienced more misunderstandings and frustrations along the way, than we actually did.
How to shape a shared vision?
Throughout these months we have been followed by one of our Sketchin coaches. The role of coaches in our studio is to take care of employees’ well-being, to make sure company culture and values are properly spread internally, and more in general to enable a healthy evolution of individuals, teams and of the company itself. In order to start shaping a shared vision and to give us the right energy boost to start with, our coach Gianni led us through what we called a ‘Futurespective’.
We ‘virtually’ met in Hangout (for logistic reasons 3 of us + Gianni were in our office in Switzerland and 2 of us were in our office in Milan) in front of a canvas.
The futurespective canvas was made of 4 quadrants to be filled in, namely:
- Heroes (us, the team and its core values);
- Guides (all those elements that would accompany and help us along the way);
- Caves (the threats and challenges we would face during our journey);
- Treasures (our objectives and goals).
Individually, we generated a lot of post-its and stuck them on the canvas (those of us who were not in front of the physical canvas wrote down the sentences on our team’s Slack channel so all of our thoughts were properly recorded). As a team we then read all the notes, discussed and fine-tuned our thoughts, moving around some of the post-its across the different sections where necessary.
In this way, we created a story, which we then noted down with all its elements on a shared Google Doc. The story sounded something like this: “Our team, composed by [names] and [values], constantly guided by [list of ‘guides’], throughout its journey will meet [list of ‘caves’, threats and challenges] which will not prevent it from heading towards its achievements [list of ‘treasure’ elements].
As childish as this might seem, this activity enhanced our sense of belonging to the point that — when Gianni read the story aloud — it felt like an epic moment: we had shaped our team mission and we were together in it, working our way through obstacles and achievements, side by side.
How to communicate our vision to the rest of the company?
How to make sure our colleagues would know what we were doing, how we were doing it and why? How to make sure they thought what we were doing was valuable? These were some of our main fears as a remote team in a non-remote working environment.
What we did: following Gianni’s suggestion, we decided to create our own team value proposition. First of all, for us to touch base and refresh our shared vision, and secondly for sharing it with the rest of Sketchin during our monthly studio gatherings, usually on the last Friday of each month.
This is where we are 3 months after starting our experimentation of remote work. We got to know each other, we got to know each other’s strengths and we start to understand how to deal with each other’s weaknesses. We know where we stand as a team and shared our first findings with the rest of Sketchin and now with the Medium community.
Evidence so far shows us remote work is possible — and effective! — for a strategic design team. However, we are aware that we’re still at an early stage of this experiment: more findings, challenges, and learnings will come in the next months. And we promise we will come back and share them here with you. In the meantime, drop us a line if you would like to share your insights about this topic or get to know more about Sketchin!
The Author
Clizia Welker, Service Designer at Sketchin, is passionate about co-design and group facilitation. She loves to work at the intersection of disciplines and cultures and believes in design as a tool for creating value and empowerment, a tool that is applicable to services, business and society to make things more simple, more accessible, fairer.
Orion team
Stefano Vetere, Senior Visual Designer at Sketchin, is a detail-obsessed geek who is passionate about too many things to count. He strives to achieve the utmost quality and value in every project and appreciates genuine human relations above all.
Francesca Maina is a dreamer and a passionate Interaction Designer who has managed to turn her passion into work. She loves exploring new innovative concepts and comes up with creative solutions to problems revolving around user’s needs, business goals, technical constraints and, more in general, life.
Serena Tonus, Experience Architect & Senior Service Designer at Sketchin, is a passionate design thinker. She loves to play with service design tools and she is always looking for new creative concepts and solutions to implement innovative processes into her digital and non-digital company transformation projects.
Arianna Salvetti is a senior UX Designer with 8 years of experience in design and implementation of digital products and services. She loves practicing human-centered design and following a decision funnel based on users’ needs and business goals. She is very passionate about her job and likes learning and experimenting with new methodologies and techniques.
