Lessons from Remote Work after 3 years of living it daily

Some tips to keep your team productive and united, on remote work.

Team together for TC Talks on Monday morning =)

As Coronavirus (COVID-19) panics the world, companies try desperately to keep their employees safe while running business with as little impact as possible for clients, suppliers, and investors. Their goal is to survive through this mess we live right now. For that reason, companies are aiming to adopt a work from home option, even if they haven’t done it before, as an alternative to stop operations entirely. In this article, I’ll share some lessons about remote work, after having many years of living it daily.

Here at TotalCross we decided to adopt remote work from the beginning of our startup journey, in 2017. Our teammates were in different cities then (Fortaleza, São Paulo, Goiania, Seoul) and different countries (Brazil, South Korea, Portugal). Our team’s locations have been changing since then. Nowadays, we have people in 3 different timezones, working with clear goals, OKRs and performing better results than if they’d been working together in the same office.

This post doesn’t intend to be a guide on how to implement Remote Work. Instead, we want to share some issues and lessons learned over the years and hopefully help other startups and companies to adapt faster to this new challenge/opportunity.

Remote Work = Culture Change

First of all, remote work will change the culture of your company. It will change: how people behave, how decisions are made, how teammates work together, how results are measured and achieved, among other things. Basically, everything that needs human interaction will change =) Challenging, right?!

If we needed to choose just one tip, we would say: “Focus on communication!” People are used to turning to their teammates and to ask questions about daily stuff and to arrange unscheduled meetings with the entire team. As one works remotely there are a lot of barriers for that. That’s why choosing a good communication channel should be one of your top priorities.

It’s also extremely important that you find an efficient way to set goals and manage your team as well as processes to keep a strong and positive culture even if people don’t know each other in person.

Let’s talk a bit more about each point.

1. Communication Channels

In the beginning, when the team only had 3 people, we picked Whatsapp as the primary communication channel. After a while and as new people started to join the company it became painful, because it’s really easy to mix personal and professional groups there.

Then we switched to Slack, but we didn’t adapt well. The mobile experience wasn’t as fluid as Whatsapp (surprisingly even the developers wanted to change).

After talking to a lot of startups (including Mercadapp, our Remote Work Mentor) and after adapting it to our own needs, we switched to Telegram, Discord and Hangout (meetup):

1. Telegram: one group for every team (marketing, product, board, etc) and two groups that include everybody (one for serious matters and another one for fun);
2. Discord: used by the development team to talk and help each other. They are connected most of the time;
3. Hangout (meetup): For daily meetings with team, partners, and clients.

2. Set Goals, Define Management Processes

Managing people is not an exclusive challenge of a Remote Work company, but different processes need to be applied in order to guarantee productivity and more than that, to guarantee that the team is in the right direction.

Most startups we know adopt a “goals” system instead of an “work hour” system. For tech teams this is a basic concept but for teams used to be from 9 to 5 at the office, a mindset change should occur in order for this to work properly.

We decided to work with OKRs, the Objectives and Key Results methodology from Google. It’s really simple and easy but super powerful to make the team focus on what needs to be done.

The first time defining OKRs was great, a lot of excitement. The entire group defined 10 objectives (or more) per team and a lot of key-results. At the end of the sprint we achieved less than 10% and people were really divided between a lot of different goals and felt super frustrated! We really messed up there.

But we kept improving our system. Today we have an average of 70% of achievements per sprint but we define only 3 objectives per team, with no more than 3 Key Results per objective. This way we manage to stay focused on what really matters.

3. How To Keep a Strong and Positive Culture

Culture: so hard to build, so easy to break. It all hangs on the right or wrong behaviors in your company. As Ben Horowitz said extensively in his new book, What you do is Who you are, culture is defined by how people behave when you are not looking, and when working remotely we are barely “looking” at our team.

At TotalCross, we defined a “remote touch point” to reinforce Culture, Communication and Goals for everybody. This is how we did it:

1. A 20 minutes meeting every Monday morning. We call this meeting “TC Talks”. It happens every 9am Mondays with the objective to warm up the team and to talk about our values, vision, changes in the company etc. Mostly, it’s the CEO’s time to talk but eventually we have other team members presenting specific subjects on marketing, product, finance, etc.
2. A 1 minute audio daily, twice a day. Every team member needs to send a one minute audio on Telegram before starting work and another one after the working day. This audio helps the leadership to track daily activities of all members without a meeting. This audio also helps the person to organize what he/she needs to do before starting to work and, at last, teammates can help each other when someone is stuck.
3. OKRs Meeting: Every Friday we have a 90 minutes meeting with all the company. At the beginning of the meeting, we talk about our Values and Vision to reinforce the path we want to build. After that, every team presents its weekly results and other teams can ask questions and discuss it. At the end, every team member has to make a final comment, talk about his/her thoughts, and changes that need to be done. This is particularly important to hear everyone’s opinion and integrate everybody.

These 3 “remote touch points” helped us to keep our pace even during critical moments, like when pivoting happened.

Conclusion

There are a lot of processes to support and help keep high efficiency when teams are geographically scattered but focusing on COMMUNICATION, CLEAR GOALS and CULTURE are the basics for every company to get started.

One last piece of advice is that you will make a lot of mistakes when implementing Remote Work in your company. Don’t give up. Check what is working, change what is not and keep pushing. You will not regret it!!

These were some lessons and tools we learned about remote work from other startups and we improve our own process constantly. We are not “reinventing the wheel”, just using public knowledge and adapting to achieve big results REMOTELY =)

TotalCross is a Free and Open Source GUI Creator For Embedded, Mobile… Everything!!

Bruno Muniz, CEO at TotalCross, entrepreneur for over 12 years, 4th company founded with over 15 years of experience in software development, especially mobile applications. Master Degree in Computer Science and Startup enthusiast, with strong actuation in the startup scene in Brazil.