Let’s stay together: running Community remotely
It was almost 6 P.M. when Camila, my manager and Director of Community at Unbabel, read to me a draft of the email she planned to send to the team. It was official: due to the COVID-19 outbreaks, Unbabel had decided to close its offices and what we already knew was inevitable, was happening — we were going full remote.
“You know what… it’s the first time ever our team is going fully remote, just like our editors and freelancers. We can now say the Unbabel Community is running 100% remotely”, Camila said.
“Oh. Yes. That’s true!” That tiny moment of realization was getting bigger in my mind until I got distracted by the landscape that could be seen through the window behind our seats: “wait a sec, come and look at this sunset.”
We grabbed our phones and shot multiple angles of that pink-colored sky, then we posted it on our personal Instagram accounts. Camila’s caption was “Lisbon doesn’t require any filters… just masks.” Mine was “quarantine, day zero.”
We’re all in this together — each in our own homes
Here at Unbabel, we are distributed between several offices — in Lisbon, San Francisco, New York, Pittsburgh, and Singapore. Five of our offices (or “towers”, in a callback to the Tower of Babel story) are located in the same quarter of central Lisbon. Oftentimes this requires us to walk from one Tower to another: for a meeting, to grab coffee or lunch with our colleagues, or just because we gave the incorrect work address to the shipping company.
Having our offices located within walking distance ends up being a balancing act between having over 200 people working in the same open space (which would be noisy and distracting), and being so far apart that you only meet some people in person two or three times a year. However, this only applies to the Lisbon team. Our colleagues based in the US and Asia are, well, no matter in which world-shape you believe, still geographically far away from most of Unbabelers.
Despite the number of offices, remote work has been always something natural (and encouraged) practice at Unbabel. In the Community team, our tasks can be done 100% virtually and in any timezone, so it was not unusual going for a long weekend and ending up spending a couple of days working remotely, be it from a tropical island or our childhood’s bedroom.
Like any other tech company, we rely on virtual tools to stay connected. Slack and Zoom became even more relevant since we started social distancing, but I do admit I miss reaching out at a glance to my teammates to ask quick questions when we were all at the same space!
But the ease and the need to be connected with our teammates, and to what’s going on in general, can be quite overwhelming. Suddenly, I found myself responding instantly every time I was tagged in Slack channels — which wasn’t my normal attitude back in the office days — until I realized this was some sort of FOMO reaction. But what was I so afraid of missing out on?
The truth is, working remotely is not the issue here. Rather, it’s how to keep ourselves sane while working during an unprecedented pandemic. Some people and companies are using this time to preach the benefits of remote work. Don’t get me wrong — I do believe it’s important to raise awareness about flexibility (in location, hours and many other instances) in the workplace. And, in this crisis, being able to work from home is a blessing and privilege.
The thing is: you and your company just might not be “remote-native”, and that is totally ok. It’s acceptable to miss the dreadful commuting, office noise and healthy snacks. We were sent home to diminish the proportion of widespread virus. It’s naive to think everything will be “business as usual” as when I was was working remotely from a villa in Bali, exactly a year ago. Therefore, this conjuncture requires all of us to adapt to new ways of working together, from afar.
Respecting nap time
Our team daily syncs have become a space to share our challenges with this new routine. One thing that I noticed is that our “personal updates” time during those meetings has stretched. Some of us are going through the isolation alone (or in the company of plants or pets), and it feels good to be able to talk about nothing. We even did a live unboxing of the time one of us managed to buy wine and chips, after three weeks in lockdown (ok, before you start wondering who was the person of the team who did it: yes, it was me).
I remain a morning person so, to get the most out of my productive hours, I’ve developed a kind of “extended Pomodoro”. It consists of only checking Slack during the last quarter of each hour I’m online — and only if I have notifications. Then, I save afternoons for meetings, which in addition to coffees are a good way to keep myself awake.
Due to this global crisis, some of us traveled back home to be close to our loved ones, so the range of timezones can also be challenging. This is where we moved from “remote work” to the idea of asynchronous work. We created “core hours” agreements so during at least four hours of a day one can reach out to another for meetings and quick brainstorms.
The rest of our Google calendar now has also been filled in by our personal activities, like having lunch with family, taking a nap, attending online classes, homeschooling the kids or… getting some wine and chips from the supermarket. To have this on our calendar gives us a routine, but it also allows us to respect each other’s time. Just as I feel overwhelmed by Slack, it’s easy to fall into the trap of pinging my coworkers whenever it works for me, even if it’s 6 A.M. and I’m the only one online. Without visual indicators like headphones to tell me when someone is unavailable, being able to check their calendars and know when I should leave them alone is important for the team’s mental health.
A chance to put ourselves in Editor’s shoes
We’ve been experimenting with working remotely for around a month now. While we’re still figuring out some communication flows and deadline adjustments, we can say in one single voice: we all miss the office space.
However, thinking about our Community, most of them have been calling their own home as “office” way before we heard about viruses and lockdowns. For our team, this experience became an opportunity for us to understand a little more about how our editors feel about working strictly in the online world. When they ask for support and do not know when they’d be expected to have an answer is like me with my Slack anxiety, as I’m sure editors are also missing interacting with someone from your field to talk about side topics.
It took us a forced shift to an unprecedented scenario to be more aware of the “normal” reality of our Community. This experience shed a light on which things we take for granted, and how to keep evolving our product (and everyone’s experience) to make working remotely with Unbabel brighter and better, regardless of where we are.
To everyone out/in there, stay safe, stay connected (if you feel like), and most importantly: wash your hands!
