Out of sight, out of mind, or How to be productive when working remotely
We live in a world where technology seemingly lessens the need for actual office space. In IT industry especially, there seems to be less and less sense to actually come to work. At some point, telecommuting was all the rage, to the extent that a lot of big software companies offered unlimited remote work possibilities as one of the main perks. A few years back though this trend shifted a little bit. First Yahoo shut down its remote work back in 2013–2014, then this year, IBM did. Amazon planned to hire a lot of remote workers in 2017, but with the catch of those position being rather low-paid.
However, there are companies like Trello who actively promote remote work and whose entire or almost entire team consists of remote workers. They have recently published a whole guide on the topic, and this is what I would like to review here and compare to my own experiences.
Trello argues that hiring remote workers allow them to have better quality of the workforce, since they have a much bigger pool to draw upon. They also have more diversity, which brings more creativity and different perspective. (They don’t say it but I suspect that the financial considerations might also play a role — after all, there are countries where programming talent comes cheaper, without any significant loss in quality).
I have worked with my team remotely for two years. I didn’t start as a remote worker though, I just relocated a few years after I was hired, but didn’t want to leave the company. We had a very small team and one of our developers preferred working from home all the time. Then, we hired one more developer in another city, and the team became even more distributed. The last half year (or a little longer) I was also leading this team, so this quite challenging task of making a remote team effective fell to me at that time.
What challenges have we faced?
- Obviously, there was a problem with communication. When you work in the office, you can just come up to the person and ask him a question. When all you have is a chat, you can send a message… and wait. And wait. And wait some more, wondering where the hell the team member in question got to.
- There was a problem with hours. The team itself had only 1 hour difference in timezones, but the client was 10 hours off and was taking a very active part in the meetings and discussions. Basically, we didn’t have a manager, we worked directly with the client — a CEO of the company, selling the software which we produced.
- There was a problem with team building. People just don’t feel as a real team when they can’t celebrate events together or do some out-of-the-office things together from time to time. (By the way, there’s a quote in the document referenced above that talks about it: “Oh, and we all get to eat cake. Everyone gets a cake delivered to their place on their birthday.” — Michael Pryor, co-founder of Trello.)
Personal problems/factors might also arise, making it more difficult to work from home.
- For example, it is difficult to concentrate on your work when there’s a sofa and a TV set close to you (or if, for that matter, you have a screaming baby in the room).
- You may find it difficult to keep working hours in check, since the whole point of working from home seems to be flexibility. It becomes easier to allow yourself to oversleep or to work late.
- You might feel out of the loop and disconnected. You might feel like everything happens without you. It is relevant for the cases when only a part of the team consists of remote workers.
So, there seems to be two sides to the challenges of remote work: first, how to keep the team productive as a unit; second, how to be productive yourself.
Let’s look at the personal side first. When I worked from home, I found that the following things helped most:
- Have a dedicated space. It is perfect if you have a separate room for a home office, however in our cramped European space it isn’t always possible. You should still try and find at least a corner where you can set up your desk, external screen, headset, printer, fax, whatever you might need. Try not to do work in other parts of your house. The Trello manual also mentions this one, but calls it “Never work from bed”.
- Needless to say, your office space should be quiet (unless you prefer to work with music). No screaming kids, barking dogs, bothersome relatives allowed. It is your work sanctuary. If you have no way to ensure that, better find a coworking space.
- Dress up. Never, ever work in your pyjamas or loungewear. This makes the borders between your work and home activity way too blurred and you less concentrated. You don’t have to wear anything special, the jeans and a jersey will do, but these should be the ones you’d wear to go outside. (Chances are, if you are working from home, your profession doesn’t have a strict dresscode to follow.)
- Set a schedule. Same as with your space and your looks, your time should be structured and separated from your “at-home” hours. You may not follow the schedule to the minute because, as always, life happens and you might need to run an errand, go to the doctor, etc — same as you might have to do while working at the office. But you should strive to keep your work hours and leisure hours firmly separated. The Trello manual also mentions this one in myth #4.
If you do these simple things, you will give you brain a clear and distinct way to switch from work-related stuff from just being at home. You put on your work clothes, you sit at your desk — you are in the work mode. Five (or six) o’clock, you get out of your office space, change into loungewear and go start some dinner — because you are now “at home”. The brain makes this transition much more easily, when allowed some explicit factors to base on.
So, this was how you can help yourself be more productive. How, then, can you help your team keep together and make things come true, as if you weren’t just some individuals sitting in their rooms thousands or miles apart?
This is what we found to work for us:
- Video chat is king. You should conduct all your status meetings and the other meetings using a video call. You should see the faces of the people you work with, their expressions. The non-verbal signs are just as important as the verbal ones.
- Do not gather your in-office people in the conference room while plugging others in as video talking heads. This makes the meeting experience terrible for the people calling in. The Trello manual talks about it in detail, and states that if you have even one person calling in on a video, then all the meeting should be conducted over a video call. I would say that this is very true, but there are still some situations where “most people in the meeting room, some people calling in” might be useful. For example, if this is a talk someone gives at the office, and the people calling in are list listening and not expected to take an active part in the discussion.
- Be accounted for and make all team members learn to do this. You don’t have to be present at the screen every minute of your time, same as you don’t have to be glued to your chair at the office. But since you are not visible, people have no way of knowing where you are and what you are doing, whether you ignore them or just nipped out for a cup of coffee. (And it is sometimes very easy to assume that the other person is there and just won’t look at his messages.) So, when you step off the computer, change your status to let people know where you are and — this is very important — when you are coming back, or post a message to the shared chat. Try not to make your status message sound like “Back in 15 minutes” because people might have no idea when it was changed — rather, if you do it as a status message, specify the concrete time you’ll be back. (If you send a chat message though this form is acceptable, since the messenger with tag the message with the start time.)
- Try to have regular team-building events. If at all possible, the company should provide for the budget for the team to meet from time to time, either to have some fun together or to have regular planning/review meetings, or both. In Parse.ly, where the whole team is also distributed, they have an annual outing, when the whole team travels to some remote location (which may be in tropics) to get some sun, drink some cocktails and in between, organize some face-to-face meeting time.
- It also helps to do something extra for the team members. For example, if the team members have a shared birthdays list and chip in to send everyone a present for his or her birthday. This help feel as if people really cared.
These are all things that we did and found working. The Trello document also gives some more tips that we haven’t tried, either because we haven’t thought of them or they weren’t relevant for us. For example:
- “Mr. Rogers chat” — random grooping of team members to just chat on video. This helps to make people better acquainted with each other if, for example, the team is really big and not everyone is working (or has worked) with each other.
- “Town Hall” — a company-wide forum of questions, discussions and presentations, occuring once a month (instead of a traditional quarterly review done by one of the big bosses). People in the Town Hall talk about proirities, company values, anniversaries, and new hires are introduced.
- Remote team offsites — flying the team over to some exotic location to work and communicate for a few days or a week. Expensive, but might be worth it.
But all this is only working when you accept the remote culture, which mainly consists of the following principles:
- Remote workers can and will work as effective (and may be more so, because they are able to work in a peaceful and quiet environment, as opposed to the crazy open space at the office) as the in-office people.
- Remote workers are not slackers and are not just napping there behind their remote screens.
- It is possible to achieve the team feeling and synergy with the contemporary communication tools.
- The remote workers don’t have to prove that they really work. They don’t have to stay online every minute of every day. They should have the same hours as in-office people do, notwithstanding that they save time on a commute.
If the team can accept that remote work might make it more effective (or at least not less so), then they can conquer the challenges related to it and be both productive and satisfied with their work and their life.
At the very least, it is worth a try. Or more than a try.
