Remote Work Tips

Many companies have adopted remote work polices due to COVID-19, some years have passed and it become clear that, it may not be ideal for everyone, yet It is a sustainable model for people and companies, but it is not easy to develop a culture that supports effective remote work, and we can see many companies questioning the effectiveness of this model, either because of hidden interests on the office space market, or because of genuine concerns about collaboration.

Since I've spent many years working 100% from home and also many years working from an office, I'll try to collect here some tips that helped me personally to be productive from home and and also my teams to have very effective work and strong collaboration while being remote!

Your work environment

It's easy to assume that, while working from home you can basically sit in bed, in front of the TV, or in the kitchen table… well, I can assure you that it doesn't work at all!!

• If you intend to work for more than a couple hours, it is a game-changer to set up a proper environment, at the very least a proper desk and chair, where you can sit for the day without needing physiotherapy after.
• Other accessories that will help a lot: external monitor, keyboard and mouse and the most important one: a good headset!!
• You will also need a stable internet connection and energy supply, that's usually available in our homes, but you can see that remote work is not exactly working from anywhere, working from a cafe with an uncomfortable chair, noisy environment and weak internet will get old very fast.

extra: If possible set up your environment in a separate room or corner, this will help a lot to separate your home and work areas, I'll get back to it later.

Work-life balance

Another myth about remote work is that you work less, in my experience is very easy to end up working way more than in the office, and you need to pay attention to avoid working extra hours in an inefficient way or mixing your working time with personal time.

My main tips to help with that:

1. Organise a separated work environment, It is very important to have a clear separation of what is the workplace, and the resting place in your home, if there is no specific room for that available, try to organise at least a desk that is exclusive for work.
2. Have clear working hours and routine, try to start and stop working around the same time every day, that is important not only to separate concerns but also for your team to know when to find you online.  Some people even like to have a work start ritual, like changing to work clothes, pouring some coffee, etc.. find what works best for you.
3. Inform your partner and family members about your working hours, and that during this time you are not available, just like if you were out to the office. Having a separate working space will also help a lot to make this clear.
4. Try to plan your day with activities that are feasible to finish, if there is none, maybe your team activities should be smaller… also, keep your team posted about what you are doing and planning to do next, to avoid that two people work in the same thing.
5. Keep your activities updated and visible!! As we are not sitting in the office, It is harder to others to know on what you are working, so it is very important to have clear and visible tickets for your work. If you spent the day in meetings that are not linked to any tickets, or helping someone else, it is easy to end up compensating with extra hours or to feel unproductive, even that it is not the case.
6. Switch-off! It is common to keep thinking about or working after you should have stopped, so it is also important to have a clear end-of-business in your day, what about using the extra time from not commuting to do some activity outside, to relax, spend time with a loved one, meditate, yoga… anything that will help you to disconnect.

Communication

I believe it is a myth that doing home-office the communication between teams is worse, in fact, It can become even better, if the proper effort is done to make sure all information is available to everyone at any time!

We need to always keep our teams posted about what are your current and next activities, plans for later and blockers, It seems like a lot of information to pass right? but we have plenty of tools to support that, like Slack, Jira, Trello, Confluence, Miro, email, etc… but how to separate things between all those??

I used to separate communication like this:

• EMAIL: Asynchronous communication and Informations (I don't expect an answer soon or at all) ex: I need to inform my whole team about an update in our monitoring tool.
• SLACK/TEAMS: Synchronous communication but not urgent, questions, reminders, and notifications (I expect an answer soon or that people will get notified) ex: I want to inform my team that I'm online and available ex: I want to notify my team that I've added a blocker in a Jira ticket. ex: I want to notify my team that I'll be offline the next hour for lunch.
• JIRA/TRELLO: Tickets information and questions (the answer affects how the ticket is going to be done) ex: I have a question about the ticket description ex: I've noticed a blocker on the ticket
• Google MEET/ZOOM: Synchronous and more urgent communication or long topics ex: A talk about a test is getting big in slack, it is already difficult to keep a context and the channel is flooded: time to move to a call! ex: I need to align a rule change between me and other 3 people, most probably a quick call will be faster than other tools. important: All information discussed must be updated after in the proper tool: jira/trello/confluence/miro etc…
• Confluence/Miro/Notion: Documentation

Main communication tips:

1. Define a strong pattern for tools, there are multiple options to each type of communication, and most of them are fairly good, but it is important to define which the team should use consistently, so everyone knows what to use for each situation, and how to proper configure the local setup.
2. Keep your team ticket board as updated as possible all the time! Independently of which tool your team is using, this will give the whole team a clear vision of what is going on, and it will be the single source of the truth of all teamwork.
3. Avoid mixing information between tools, if you need to discuss a documentation topic, do it in the proper tool, or at least keep the information updated there, otherwise, the information gets scattered all around and it is very easy to lose it. ex: An important business requirement will get lost in slack very quickly, it must be in the ticket.
4. Use calls as much as possible, written communication is slower and it is easily misunderstood, just be sure to update documentation and tickets after any agreement, or preferably during the call, written documentation should be always the source of truth.
5. Remote First, plan communication as if everyone is working remotely, having the team in a meeting room while someone else is remote without the proper tools to interact will never work, it's a bad experience for the people on the room and on the call.

Collaboration

One important topic to clarify is that remote work is not the same as distributed work, having teams distributed across different countries and timezones is a different challenge, that also includes working remotely but is not limited to that, I will stick to a scenario where a team works remotely but in the same general working hours and timezones.

Collaboration is very complex, so of course it's not down only to the geographical position of the team, but there are some topics to pay attention, for example, when working remotely the barriers to ask for help, or invite someone to a meeting or a pair session are usually higher, for many reasons... there is the concern that we will disrupt the other person time, it's harder to know everyone else and how they prefer to communicate, specially in other teams and we tend to bump less into people, create less connections.

This may create a false sensation that collaboration in an office is always better, but the fact is that it is easier to collaborate with people that you know, and it's easier to get hints about other people in the office. That was pretty clear when companies moved from office to remote after COVID, and teams continued to function well, but as time moved and new people started to join in this remote environment, collaboration becomes a challenge again.

Some things that can help:

• Providing opportunities for the team to meet in real life through team events, conferences, etc. those don't need to super often, but meeting the people on your team for some activity will drastically change the way online collaboration happens for a long time.
• Actively managing team building as natural interaction don't happen at all, team must actively look for activities that will promote some time together outside of business meetings, things like coffee chats, trivia games, ice breakers, etc.

Further reading

Trello ebook about remote work: https://blog.trello.com/remote-work-team-success-guide
A few tips from the MIT Media Lab: https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/a-few-simple-tips-for-better-online-meetings-covid-19-edition/
How to Communicate in a Virtual World by Adobe 99U: https://99u.adobe.com/articles/59994/the-new-rules-of-communicating-in-a-virtual-world
Some tips for mixed teams (office + remote): https://blog.trello.com/6-mistakes-when-you-work-in-office-but-have-remote-team-members
GitLab's Guide to All-Remote and extra GitLab resources

Please comment below with other reading materials and your own tips, and I hope your team will have a good experience with remote work, and will come back from it even stronger!