Working Remotely

Intended Audience

Whether you’re considering working remotely, will be doing so in the near future, or have been for some time and want to hear the advice and experiences of others, this is your guide to all things working remotely.

Remote Work Experience

I have worked at Zynga for the past six years. Almost two years of that time have been spent working remotely from my home in Colorado. I received additional input on this article from a handful of others in the software industry with remote work experience ranging from several months to ten years. This range of experience working remotely should provide you with a diverse knowledge pool from which to draw.

Why Work Remotely?

You’ve heard the hype about working remotely but just don’t understand what all the fuss is about. After all, you’ve gone this long working at an office. What could possibly be the benefit of working from home? Though the benefits will be different for every person, here are some that might apply to you and your situation.

More time for life outside work

1. Things that either don’t take much of your time but require your presence or can be multi-tasked no longer have to be done in your personal time:
   i. Laundry
   ii. Package deliveries — no worrying about thieves
   iii. Ironing (during a meeting)
   iv. Third party monitoring (being present for the plumber, electrician, maid, painters, etc.)
2. You won’t have to spend time commuting to work. Again, more free time for you (or more time to get work done if that’s what you’re into).
3. If your family gets sick or otherwise needs your attention, there won’t be a last-minute scramble to either find a sitter, get the OK to work from home, or take a day off of work.
4. No longer a need to hire a dog sitter since you’ll be at home with your furry friend. It’s like getting a small raise.
   i. About that dog thing — been wanting to get a puppy but don’t want to leave the little guy at home by himself? Problem solved.

Comfortable environment

1. Prefer a quiet space over the hustle and bustle of an open office floor plan? You can go weeks without seeing anyone in person if you so choose (though I don’t recommend it).
2. Want to own a home, but like many in the tech industry you live in a big city and can’t afford one? If you’ve never looked at homes outside your area you should check out different cities and states on Zillow. Be warned: It can be depressing seeing the difference in housing costs.
3. You can decorate your home to be more comfortable and better looking than cubicles.
4. Because it takes extra effort to type something out vs. turn and ask or walk across the office and ask, you’ll receive fewer interruptions and random requests from folks. The ones that you do receive will tend to be more important.
5. If you have a specific diet that is difficult to follow, having your own personal kitchen will be wonderful.

Why Not Work Remotely?

After hearing all the positives about working remotely, what’s stopping you? Before you take the leap, here are some things you should consider before making that major life decision.

Communication can be more difficult

1. Not being in the office to interact in person with others can get lonely.
2. The average round trip on communications will slow down. Because you can’t turn to the person next to you or walk over to someone across the office, you rely on people regularly checking and responding to messages on a messaging platform or email.
3. It can be difficult to develop new friendships with coworkers while not in the same physical location.

Your career is more limited

1. If you decide or are forced to leave your company, you may have to move again depending on what other opportunities exist in your area.
2. If you want to go down the management track, it is more of an uphill battle. Not only do you have to prove that you are independent and trustworthy enough to work largely unsupervised at home, you also need to show that you’re capable of managing others AND that you can do so while not in the same physical location.

Your work and life are more tightly coupled

1. If your life outside of work is stressful, tying that life more closely to your work will eliminate what might have otherwise been a break from that stress.
2. Your family may be on a different schedule than you (e.g. kids coming home from school at 2:00 pm), and them wanting to interact with you can cause distractions.

Setting Boundaries

If you’re not careful, “working from home” can actually be closer to “living at work”. In order to maintain a work-life balance (probably important to someone who’s wanting to work remotely from home), you should set boundaries both for yourself and for others to follow.

1. If you have the luxury of having a space to work in that isn’t your bedroom, do so. The physical separation between where you sleep and where you work assists in separating the two in your mind. The Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard states that performing more stressful activities in your bedroom (like working) has a negative impact on your ability to fall asleep at night. If your brain is used to having debates, getting bad news, and stressing to solve a problem in your bedroom, it is difficult to not carry that elevated stress into your after work hours when you are trying to relax.
2. Similar in effect to the above, have a routine for the start and end of your day. Following a routine that distinctly separates your work life from your home life can help you de-stress, gain focus, or even just ensure that you’re not working too long of hours by forcing you to keep appointments and end your work day.
   i. Are you a coffee hound? Walk to a nearby coffee joint in the morning before sitting down to work.
   ii. Like to stay up to date on current events? Read/watch/consume your news in the morning before opening your laptop.
   iii. Health nut? Go to the gym after work before calling it a night.
3. Make sure that you, your manager, and your coworkers are on the same page in terms of the hours you’ll normally be working and how (if at all) you’ll be reachable outside those hours. Especially if you’re not an hourly employee, there will be times when you have to work later (or earlier) than you’d anticipated. What you don’t want to happen is for someone who tends to work late at the office coming to depend on you responding up until he heads home at 7:00 pm while it’s 10:00 pm where you live and you’ve been working since 8:00 am.
4. On the opposite end of the spectrum, it can sometimes be difficult to ensure you’re devoting enough time during the day to work. It’s incredibly easy to check Facebook, email, read the news, throw some clothes in the laundry while you’re up, call your ISP about the problems you’ve been having with the internet…and then it’s 6:00pm. To make sure you’re neither working too much nor too little, you can track all your time spent working (whether in your company’s designated system or your own personal time tracker). Don’t include ANY time when you’re not working, and don’t forget to do this. Developing this as a habit is essential for it to be effective.

More Advice

Video conferences

1. When setting up a video conference with participants in another location, use a one-time designated meeting number. This allows you to have a meeting number that’s guaranteed to not be used for anything else — it’s neither a personal meeting number (bad if the associated person has another meeting that runs long and overlaps your meeting), nor is it a meeting number tied to a specific room (bad if someone dials in early to the next meeting and hears/sees something they shouldn’t).
2. When joining a meeting, join the number listed in the meeting invitation. Don’t simply start a different meeting and send the number for everyone else to switch to. This wastes time and is rude to everyone else that was able to follow directions.
3. If you are in a meeting with participants in another location, sit in front of the camera and near the microphone. Don’t sit off camera if you are going to speak. Don’t hide off camera to eavesdrop.
4. Unless you want to have to constantly repeat yourself or shout over the sound of your laptop’s fan, purchase a quality microphone.
5. Also note that most high quality earbuds and headphones with attached microphones have decent quality microphones. However, know that there will likely be times when you want to roam from your laptop while talking (pouring yourself a cup of coffee, grabbing a bite, etc.) where the headphones won’t work.
6. Purchase quality, noise-cancelling headphones. There will come a time when you have an important meeting and an uncontrollable, unforeseen disturbance makes it difficult to hear. Some things that have happened to me are
   i. A neighbor’s dog barking incessantly
   ii. Garbage collector making his rounds
   iii. High wind
   iv. A roommate who stayed home “sick” to play video games (without headphones)
   These are actually not only good for when you have a meeting, but can be great for preventing headaches like the above from driving you crazy while you go about your work. If you can, purchase wireless headphones so you can also walk around while listening to a meeting.
7. Purchase a camera cover. There are lots of options out there. Don’t rely on your video conferencing software to not inadvertently turn on your camera. There will be times when you are in a meeting where you are not ready to be on camera — just rolled out of bed, going to the bathroom, etc. Save yourself years of therapy by always covering your camera unless you specifically want to be seen. While you’re at it, throw one of the extras that you’ll have left on your phone.
8. Similar to the above, always mute yourself unless you specifically want to be heard. A meeting full of people doesn’t want to hear you shouting to your roommate, typing, eating, talking poorly about the presenter (yes, it’s happened), etc. This is also where something like an external microphone with an off switch comes in handy — it allows you to turn off your microphone via hardware rather than relying on your video conferencing software. Being unmuted can also cause audio feedback.
9. If you’re not able to maintain a stable connection to a video conference, disable your video. Ideally you should let others see you when you talk. However, there are times when either your processor can’t handle everything you’re doing or you don’t have high-enough bandwidth on your internet to both download and upload video at the same time.

IT

1. Unlike those who work in locations staffed with IT members, those of us who work from home don’t have the benefit of being able to physically walk over to a member of IT to ask for help. A lot of times this isn’t a problem. However, this can be a problem when:
   i. Your password expires
   ii. Your laptop dies
   iii. You’re otherwise unable to send or receive emails
2. You’ll want to have external contact information for someone in your physical office who’s willing to coordinate with IT on your behalf should something like this happen.

Face Time

1. Gradually over time, people can begin to subconsciously treat you worse when all they see of you is words on a screen. This can occur in either direction (the person working remotely or the person in the office). It has to do with starting to think of a person with whom you only interact via a keyboard as less of a person and more of a tool. To keep this from happening, show your face during meetings as often as you can, even if you’re not presenting. In a morning stand up? Turn on your camera. Presenting at a meeting? Turn on your camera. Merely a spectator at a meeting? Turn on your camera.
2. Similar to how this should be handled in the office, if you have a disagreement with a colleague (for example, a debate with multiple back-and-forth exchanges), offer to talk it over in video chat. This ties into the above point. Additionally, it’s easier to let your emotions and imaginations run rampant when starting off disagreeing (what did he mean, “Have a NICE day?”). Communication is mostly nonverbal (one study famously posits that only 7% of communication involves the actual words spoken), so communication via text greatly handicaps us in situations where we need all the help we can get.
3. Plan to travel to the office with folks you interact with most at least once a year (though once a quarter is better). If your company has an end of year holiday party, that’s generally a good choice as it allows you to catch up and mingle with a lot of coworkers (which is really the point of traveling to the office in the first place).

Helpful Traits in a Remote Worker

1. Reliability/Trustworthiness. If you don’t show up to meetings on time, don’t consistently put forth as much effort as you should, can’t be counted on to deliver results on time, or are generally not dependable, you will not thrive working as part of a team let alone as a remote worker. This trait is especially important when working remotely as you will by nature of your location receive less oversight and guidance than your on-sight counterparts.
2. Self Direction. Because there is a longer turn around time in communication when working remotely, if you need to be told what to work on next whenever you complete a task you won’t be as productive as you would if you were in the office and could simply turn to your manager/lead to ask for more work.
3. Patience. While organizations are learning to accommodate remote workers, there are still pain points that remote workers need to deal with. Failing conferencing technology, slower communication, and misunderstanding in communication because of lack of nonverbal queues can all be frustrating. An inability to deal with those frustrations in a healthy manner will lead to problems.
4. Self-discipline. It’s all too easy to work too many (or too few) hours when you work from home, depending on your personality. You have to have the self-discipline to stop yourself from tending too far in either direction.

Thank you for the read! If you found this post interesting or helpful, give it a share. If you have any input you’d like to give us, reach out to us at Poker-Engineering-Blog@zynga.com or shoot me an email at jarredwsimmerengineering@gmail.com.