/remote

Remote work pointers

Working from home should not involve doing the dishes

Communication

  • Calls take away non-verbal communication from the process. This is an obstacle that must be overcome: getting the wording right becomes more important, because we can't rely on body language, intonation and other nuances.
  • Video calls make room for some non-verbal communication, but it is not equivalent to physically being in the same room.
  • Slack is a great tool, but it can become your enemy by inducing an anticipiation for distractions.
  • Over-communication might be necessary, especially in writing.

Due to a lack of verbal and emotional cues: One person may perceive a chat convo as an argument when the other person perceives it as a discussion.

Resentment builds over time due to underlying issues not being addressed. Digital communication gone rogue can breed misunderstandings and hurt feelings.

Remote Work Guide, Trello


It is important to establish communication rules in a joint team-code-conduct manner that includes teams and their wishes directly in the creation. When do we use chats? Why do we write emails? At what point do we pick up the phone? These answers should be a joint effort and one that is reflective of the team’s efforts versus that of one person.”

Beat Buhlmann, General Manager EMEA, Evernote

Meetings

Something radical which we might or might not follow:

Unless every person is in the same room, all meetings are held over video conference. We’ve all been that one person dialing into a call only to hear a room full of noise, echo, and side conversations on the other end. It’s a terrible experience. So when one person is “remote” for a meeting, everyone is.

Justine Jordan, VP Marketing from Litmus


Meetings are an awful place for information sharing. When we did so, we spent the entire meeting talking at each other about tasks we completed rather than discussing tasks that could drive significant results for the company.

Zapier

General considerations

  • Start of the day: saying hello on Slack. Standup with the usual content, but with more details for each point, as required. Details can be added as a thread, so that the summary is still easy to parse for those not interested in the finer details. Signal any potential need for help.
  • During work hours, it's business as usual: development, testing, support, etc as required by the business. Communication mostly done on Slack either in written or verbal form (Slack calls).
    • During development, a heavier emphasis on pull request descriptions: more background, more "why is this required", most context, the better.
    • Pair programming can be done without difficulties if we have an appropriate videconferencing and screen sharing tool available. Slack is perfect for this.
    • During support, a heavier emphasis on communication of progress of tickets is required, either through Slack or on Jira. I suspect that Slack calls with screen sharing enabled will be popular when on support (eg., to show how a feature is supposed to work and what is happening instead).
    • Increased communication regarding availability.
      • For longer breaks, I suggest signaling them in the specific team channel. "Heading off for lunch, will be back in around 40 mins.".
      • For shorter breaks (cofee, bio, etc), I suggest just updating your profile status (Cmd + Shift + Y)
  • Clocking off: be clear about when you are finishing work. No "Irish goodbye".
  • End of day update (optional): summarise what you worked on that day and what you have achieved, and what the challenges were.

The Engineering Guild

The Engineering Guild & the Architecture Guild are wonderful initiatives that facilitate remote work as well. The chance of someone being left out of a discussion becomes minimal as we have the dedicated channels (Slack channel & Google Docs) to discuss technical topics.

Lunch & learn

aka. afternoon tea & learn or lightning talks

I think we are already doing this well and we should keep doing it :)

A fantastic opportunity to show off what you & your team have been working on. Can be just a 2-minute status update or a 10-minute talk about a tech/product topic.

Trust

Because there is an implicit trust in your teammates and because there is no other way to measure results in a remote team, the team inherently evaluates each other on what was completed that week. We do this by sharing weekly updates on our internal blog (P2) every Friday— I bet you can imagine how it would feel to be the only one with nothing to show. That feeling creates a desire to finish something important each week.

Wade Foster, Zapier


If someone shows up in the morning dressed appropriately and isn’t drunk or asleep at his desk, we assume he’s working. If he’s making spreadsheets and to-do lists, we assume he’s working really hard. Unfortunately, none of this gets at what an employee actually creates during the day.

At Automattic we focus on what you create, not whether you live up to some ideal of the ‘good employee,’” explains Mullenweg. For developers, that might mean looking at how many commits they’ve had over a given time period. For the support staff, that could be total number of tickets answered. The underlying message is to find a metric outside of hours spent to evaluate productivity.

Matt Mullenweg, Automattic

Tree time

“Tree time” is what we call our uninterrupted work time. I don’t remember where the name came from now, but I think it had something to do with a hypothetical scenario where one of us runs up a tree to get away from the other… Regardless, this is now our code word. If one of us asks the other for some “tree time”, it means “don’t get offended, but I’m finding it hard to concentrate and I really need some uninterrupted time to focus on what I’m doing.”

Belle Beth Cooper, Exist co-founder

I suggest going offline for at least an hour every day. It works like magic.

Pair buddies, aka. Mr Rogers

There is an interesting thing that both Trello and Zapier embrace, and that is a random pairing of people for a short, informal chat:

As we’ve grown, it can be harder to know all your teammates. One easy way to mitigate that is to have folks on the team get paired up with one other teammate at random each week for a short 10-15 minute pair call. We use this to chat about life, work or whatever random thing seems interesting. Sometimes cool new product features come out of these, other times it’s just good fun.
Zapier


As companies grow, you can’t guarantee everyone knows or talks to everyone else. Enter “Mr. Rogers,” a 15-minute weekly random grouping of team members who connect on a video chat to, well, just chat.

  • Trello .

Read more at https://blog.trello.com/how-15-minutes-each-week-keeps-our-distributed-team-connected?utm_source=ebook&utm_medium=internal&utm_campaign=remote-work-guide


Mr. Rogers has given me the humanity behind the computer screens. The work we all do together is great, but it's way too easy in any job, especially one working remote, to view people as input/output devices. Taking 30 minutes to hear about their lives makes them human again. There are huge sets of amazing people at Trello that I would never get a chance to know."

Ryan Sorensen, Server Developer, working remotely from Los Angeles, California


We try to make sure that we're intentional about informal communication, want to make sure that we stimulate informal communication because that tends to get lost if you're remote.

Sid Sijbrandij, GitLab

This can be easily put into practice with the Donut app for Slack: https://ometria.slack.com/apps/A11MJ51SR-donut

hardware

https://www.wework.com/ideas/best-headphones-work

I inherited a Plantronics Voyager from Matt D, and I really like the quality and comfort of it - I highly recommend it.

Best USB headset: Jabra UC Voice 550 Duo at $69 For use in customer call centers and for anyone who spends a large portion of the day on the telephone, this is the headset of choice. Calls are crisp and clear on both ends, plus Jabra’s Peakstop technology actively prevents any sudden, loud, or jarring background sounds from reaching your ear.

Best budget headset: Logitech ClearChat Comfort at $39.95 Logitech is a major player in the office headset market, and for almost half the price as the Jabra, the Logitech ClearChat Comfort offers great features for the price. It has padded ear pads, rotating microphones with noise-canceling technology, inline controls with mute and volume buttons, and is compatible with most operating systems.

software

Video conf

My suggestions are:

  • Slack calls for ad-hoc, shorter calls between few people. Simple and quick to initiate a call.
  • Zoom for larger meetings. it's the only tool that I have used extensively for this purpose, so I'm biased, but I have found it very performant and easy-to-use.

Learn from others, but experiment as well

The biggest wins aren’t usually found in a post on the internet, but in what you discover on your own.
Wade Foster, Zapier

Stress and remote work

TODO expand upon this article: https://theconversation.com/how-remote-working-can-increase-stress-and-reduce-well-being-125021

With better work-life balance we would expect employees to enjoy lower levels of work stress. Once again, the data agrees: Fewer teleworkers (26 percent) than traditional employees (32 percent) report unreasonable work stress. However, the headline figures do not quite tell the whole story. When we look at the breakdown, it is the full-time teleworkers (more than 70 percent of time spent teleworking) that are much less stressed (19 percent) than the part-time teleworkers (31 percent). In fact, part-time teleworkers are just as stressed as their office-bound co-workers.
IBM Whitepaper about remote working

Resources