A colleague of ours recently asked us about the challenges of doing “remote work”. Obviously, in the current health environment, a lot of organizations are considering doing remote work for the first time. For those of us fortunate enough to be knowledge workers, working from home is pretty accessible. At Learn Leap Fly, we’ve been doing remote work since the company started in 2015. We built our model by borrowing heavily from companies with far more experienced than us (e.g. Automattic, Mozilla, Basecamp), and then iterating on those practices based on our own experiences.
Here are some of the things we’ve learned, both as remote workers, and as remote team managers, over the last 5 years.
On Culture
Be intentional and deliberate about fostering your team culture. One of the big liabilities of remote work is that it’s easy to lose the human side of interactions. To keep your culture in a remote work environment, you have to be intentional and actively foster it.
Culture is what you do, not what you say you do. Culture is made up of the shared practices that you have in common, and what they reflect about your values as a team. Do you silently tolerate an in-crowd or do you actively practice and foster open communication channels that include everyone on your team? Do you favor extroverts, or do you give a voice to everyone? Remote work is a great opportunity to reflect on different ways of working and interacting. Whatever practices you adopt will inevitably reflect and determine the culture of your team.
We recommend you use the remote work opportunity to be deliberate about what you value, to document these values, and develop processes that nurture and reflect the culture that you wish to have in your organization.
On Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Communication
I’d go out on a limb and say that every successful remote-work organization has a asynchronous most-of-the-time communications culture. That is, if asynchronous means will get the job done, do it asynchronously. Practically speaking:
Don’t hold a meeting if you can do it another way. This is a general rule of thumb for productive work, period. Use remote work as an opportunity to break your meeting habit, and to develop more productive, asynchronous communications habits.
Recognize the true cost of meetings. In addition to being hard to schedule (especially across timezones), synchronous meetings far more costly than anyone remembers to factor in. As Basecamp puts it: “five people in a room for an hour isn’t a one hour meeting, it’s a five hour meeting”.
That said, face-time is important. Learn Leap Fly has one regular meeting: the weekly standup. It’s easy to start feeling a lonely and isolated without laying eyes on your coworkers once in a while.
On Meetings
If you do want to hold synchronous meetings, here’s our advice:
- Share the agenda in advance. For regular meetings with a set agenda (e.g. Sprint Rollovers) it’s sufficient to share the agenda once. We keep them on our wiki, and evolve them over time as we need to.
- Use the highest quality audio and video platform you can afford. We use zoom (which has easily the best multi-party video quality).
- Make sure everyone has good quality headphones and mics. Don’t skimp out here. Buy them for your employees if you can.
- Connect from someplace quiet. No coffee shops. In a pinch, use a car, or even a closet. (But please, don’t use a bathroom. That’s just… gross.)
- Use one screen per person. Even if more then one person happens to be working from the same space, require everyone to have an individual connection to the video chat. This puts everyone on the same footing. There’s nothing worse than watching an off-camera, hard-to-hear conversation from across a bad quality video-feed. One screen per person levels the playing field, letting everybody feel like an equal contributor, regardless of whether they are remote or local.
- If you can’t find a regular meeting time that fits everyone, alternate meeting times. That way, it’s not always the same people who are being left out.
- Take and post meeting notes. Rotate this responsibility to ensure everyone has a chance to participate at some point.
On Email, Blogs, and Wikis
Don’t use email for internal business communication. Just don’t. Use it to communicate with those outside your business if you must, but use an asynchronous messaging tool (e.g. Slack, Skype for Business, Basecamp) for conversations, and a documentation platform (e.g. blogs, wikis) for more permanent team communications.
Write things down. Basecamp likes to say: “Speaking only helps who’s in the room, writing helps everyone.” Think about the people who couldn’t make it to a meeting, future employees or contractors, and even future you.
Pick the tools that work for you. Internal blogs are great for more detailed ongoing posts about your work. A Wiki can be great for long-form, archived information. Automattic uses a wordpress theme called P2 to merge their chat, checkins, and blog posts into a single interface. Atlassian has confluence. Learn Leap Fly uses MediaWiki and Notion. There are lots of options.
Record daily check-ins. It’s really easy to lose the serendipitous advantages that come from running into each other at the office and chatting about what you’re currently working on. The informal and unplanned sharing of information is key to productivity and creativity of teams. Whether this is jotting down a few notes on the corporate wiki every day, or using the wonderful “automatic check-in” features of products like Basecamp, set aside a few minutes at the end of each work day to share what you have been working on with your colleagues.
Digital Watercoolers.
Work isn’t always just about working. Have places where people can interact informally and let off steam. At LLF, we have a #feeds channel in slack so people can share interesting things they’re reading online. Some companies have a #watercooler or #random channel for off-topic chat. The point is, people need to interact about things that aren’t mainline work (and this is a good thing).
The Arc of Work
Work in sprints, with a specific goal and specific end date. Ours are either 2 or 3 weeks long, and we identify specific success criteria to make sure our sprints aren’t overly ambitious. Whenever we hit these goals, we have a mini-celebration at the sprint rollover.
Document your successes, and failures. We have everyone write up a sprint report as part of our sprint rollovers. This is a little post that answers the following questions:
- What did you set out to do?
- What did you actually do?
- What’s blocking your progress?
- Are there any process changes that would help you?
- What’s your morale (1-10)?
Finally, organize sprints into larger arcs. Ours are roughly 3 months long, after which we prepare a more detailed summary of what we accomplished and learned. Basecamp calls these checkins “heartbeats.” The act of reflecting on a larger arc is really, really useful to keep you from losing the forest in all those daily trees.
For the Remote Worker
Have a dedicated personal work space. Home offices are amazing for productivity. If you don’t have room for an office, create a space somewhere in your house that you only use for working.
Think about ergonomics. Invest in a properly set-up desk, a great chair, monitor stands, and a good keyboard. Companies like Automattic give stipends for home-office setup costs. This is a great way to help people build a productive and ergonomic home office.
Get dressed for work. We don’t mean “dress up.” We mean, “get changed out of your pajamas”. Having a transition from your “home day” to your “work day” is important. We’ve heard of people that will go to a coffee shop first thing, read the paper, and then come back to their house to start their work day. Whatever works for you, try and establish a routine around starting, and stopping work for the day.
Have dedicated work hours. This is as much for other people as it is for you. Plan when you are going to start, when you are going to stop, and communicate these times with everyone who needs to know them. At Learn Leap Fly, we use a shared Google calendar for this.
Speak up! One of the drawbacks of remote work is that no one can see you beavering away. Share what you’re doing on the group chat. Post your daily checkins and weekly updates.
Stay logged in to the group chat whenever you are working. For some reason, seeing that little green dot that tells you other people are online—even if you’re not actively talking to them—is super comforting when remote working. Stay present, but don’t constantly check your messages, and get sucked into side conversations if you’re trying to do deep work. Most messaging tools let you turn on a “Do not disturb” knob that silences notifications for a while. Use it.
For the Remote Team Manager
Trust your team members. One of the first questions we get whenever we talk about remote work arrangements is “what do you do if someone starts slacking off.” They don’t. The whole magic of a flexible work arrangement is that so long as you are meeting your objectives, we really don’t need to know how you’re doing it. Presumably, you already have mechanisms to review work, with performance reviews and the like. Trust them. If the performance reviews are broken, fix them. In the meantime, trust your team members.
Don’t let your people work too much. Ironically, with all the questions around remote workers slacking off, it’s working too much that often ends up being the real danger. It’s really easy to get sucked in to working too much when you live in your workspace. Keep an eye on your workers. Make it a cultural badge of honour to not work more than 40 hours in a week.
Don’t require a fixed work schedule. Let people define the hours that best work for them. Trust them to do the work the way that suits them best, and you’ll be amazed at the results.
Don’t try and replicate the in-person office experience remotely. In fact, you should use the remote work experience to improve your in-person office work environment. There are a lot of unique advantages to remote work. Take advantage of these advantages. Get your team used to them, and use the change of setting to apply them back to the office setting. One of our favorites is opening up the decision-making process and letting more people in to see how decisions are made in real time. Distributed tools allow everyone to be in the room, not just “management.”
Tools We Use
No talk of remote work would be complete without mentioning the tools we use. Likely, every remote work scenario will use tools to implement at least the following functions.
- Real-time team chat (e.g. Slack, Skype for Business, Mattermost)
- Shared calendar (Basecamp, Google Calendar)
- Videoconferencing (Zoom, Google Hangouts, Skype)
- Information Repository (MediaWiki, Notion, Confluence)
- Team blogging platform (Confluence, Wordpress)
If you’re a technology shop, you’ll likely also need these:
- Shared Kanban / Sprint boards (Trello)
- Brainstorming Tools (Miro, Mural)
- Code Repo (GitHub, Gitlab, BitBucket) and CI
Here are some of our favourite tool combinations:
- The Free Tier: slack + mediawiki + zoom + trello + miro + google cal + notion + github/bitbucket
- The All-in-one(ish): Basecamp + zoom + slack + github
- The Atlassian: Confluence + Bitbucket + Trello + slack + zoom.
- The Self-Hoster: Mattermost + wordpress/P2 + MediaWiki + GitLab + zoom
Tools we use but don’t want to talk about here
- Shared Todo Managers. Actually, we use them all the time, but this level of personal productivity tends to be very personal. We’d recommend you leave this part of the stack up to the individual. (We currently use Nozbe, though we’ve tried Asana and OmniFocus as well.)
- Time tracking and Reporting. We use toggl, if it matters.
- Customer Relations Management (CRM) tools. We use Mailchimp.
Tools we don’t use
- Ticketing (e.g. Jira, Zendesk). We’re simply not in that business. Besides, that’s more of a business function than a remote-work enabler.
- Single Sign-on. We use a password manager (1Password) and generate unique random, strong passwords on every platform or website we use.
- Corporate email. Hopefully you’re sold on the virtues of not using email for team communications.
Good Remote Work References
Don’t take our word for it. Here is some good reading on the various topics covered in this post.
- Remote: Office Not Required
- Basecamp’s How We Communicate
- Mozilla Best Practices
- Remote Work and the Coronavirus
- Distributed with Matt Mullenweg - Great podcast with Automattic’s Founder
- Behind the scenes: culture and tools of remote work at Automattic
- Building Remote Office Culture with a Watercooler Channel
- Extreme Remote Work: Steven Wolfram’s CEO Livestream
- Paul Graham on The Maker’s Schedule
- Auto-checkins in Basecamp