Remote working… when you’re the one who isn’t remote
I frequently feel jealous of my colleagues who work remotely.
While I travel in on a crammed tube train to the same office in grey London, they join via video chat from locations all over the world. One moved to a Greek island with his family for several months, rock-climbing each morning before joining the daily stand-up from a taverna. Another is a true digital nomad, always popping up in a new city, one week in Berlin, the next in New York, Belgrade, Budapest, or Tokyo.
It looks dead glamorous to me. But I know they are not having a holiday because they are scarily productive. While some companies have started to backtrack on remote working, our experience — at least within our digital teams — has, so far, been wholly positive, and we are doing more and more of it.
It has, however, required a slight change in approach. Not for those who work remotely (they are flexible professionals who already know what they are doing), but from those of us left behind in the office.
So I have put together a collection of my top tips so far, most of which will be obvious to those who do this already. Then I have asked a few of my remote colleagues to add what they think I’ve missed or got wrong
My six tips
1. Use a decent microphone
In the world of film, one of the instant giveaways that a low-budget movie will be amateurish and student-y is if it has poorly-recorded audio. The same goes with remote collaboration.
The microphone in your laptop is so-so if you are joining from a quiet room at home. When you are the non-remote-worker joining from a busy open-plan office your audio will be awful.
So if you are joining solo, use the mic on a headset — even in-ear headphones for a phone can be OK (though I’m told the default iPhone ones pick up too much background sound). As well as more closely recording your voice, it reduces the chances of echo, plus you won’t annoy colleagues in the building. Regular use of the “mute” button will help too.
If a group of you are joining from the office, the best #RemoteFirst practice is for each of you to join individually on your own laptops with your own headsets. There is an egality to this.
However, sometimes one-person-per-screen is not practical. You may not have reliable enough wi-fi for lots of you video chatting simultaneously. If you can hear someone else on the chat In the room, you may find the delayed echo effect irritating. Or there may be other reasons why it is better to get those in the office gathered round a single screen, such as a large meeting. In those cases it is definitely worth using a decent microphone. We have bought several of the Blue Snowball variety, which cost about £50; other brands of microphone are available.
2. Make collaboration visible
Many of the conversations on the digital side of our business already take place on group chat systems like HipChat and Slack. These tools become significantly more important when there are remote members of your team. Anything you’d say across a desk to a colleague about a project should be on there so your remote colleagues can see it and join in too.
Yes, there will be times for private conversations and exchanges — especially around sensitive topics such as performance management. But most everything else deserves to be shared. I have been surprised how often something I have mentioned in group chat to Colleague X, that I only thought relevant to his bit of a project, turned out to be helpful to Colleague Y — or led to Colleague Z jumping in to point out she’d already done it.
Shared tools are also crucial for project planning. Like most folk working in product land, I enjoy scrawling things on Post-Its then moving them around a board. But when a new colleague in the office suggested doing this for a team’s plan recently, I talked him out of it — because it ignored the remote members.
Even if he’d rigged up a webcam to film the board, those outside the office could not have moved or changed the cards themselves. Much better to use a digital board that can be accessed anywhere (having used Trello and Asana before, most of the teams I work with now prefer just using the Zenhub boards in Github, which also has a project feature now) (for those focussed purely on product, the newcomer tool ProdPad is pretty handy too).
3. Care more about timings
When a group of you are in an office together it is easy for you to decide to delay the start of a stand-up, or allow an earlier meeting to over-run. If one of you is busy finishing something, the others can see when they are finally ready and you can all gather.
However, this must be extra annoying for those joining remotely, who can be left waiting patiently for a video chat and wondering what the rest of you are doing. Of course if you’re discussing everything on group chat, they should know about any delay and be more understanding. But having joined hundreds of video chats, I have noticed that it is almost always the internal teams that join the video hangouts late.
The other key reason non-remote-workers need to think about timings is time zones. When you are in the UK, and working with team members in San Francisco, it is hard not to be aware of the time zone differences and the hours when it is too early or late to have live chats with colleagues.
The subtler problem is when you have colleagues elsewhere in Europe or in Africa. While the small time differences make collaboration much smoother, it can be easier to forget the difference of an hour or two, and set a meeting slot that is in the office working hours, but when your remote colleagues should be with their families.
4. Have back-up plans
Video chat systems are far more reliable and high quality than they were, but can still be flakey for unexpected reasons. You don’t have time to be faffing around with that if you are talking to remote team members regularly. So our teams normally have at least one back-up plan, and quickly switch to that if the first system is playing up for whatever reason. Some start using Zoom, and then switch to a preset AppearIn room if that does not work. Others do the opposite, or use something else.
One of the times where back-up plans are most crucial are when you have meetings or presentations. Too often a slight technical hitch can cause the remote team members to be cut off from the discussion. At the very least, all presentations should be recorded and shared afterwards (the Youtube live events feature is good for this). That way those who drop out of the live event can rewatch it later — and it is often a help for those on different time zones.
5. Give space for coffee machine chat
When you are not in the same physical space as your colleagues, the opportunities for chat by the coffee machine disappear.
You need to make space for it. Take time to talk nonsense in video hangouts. Make liberal use of emojis. Your remote team members are part of your team and everyone needs to feel that.
Some of our remote colleagues actually do arrange a time each day to join by video and just drink coffee with each other.
Of course, the best option — if you can arrange it — is to have a coffee together in real life. It won’t be possible every day (otherwise they wouldn’t be remote working) and it can be expensive to arrange for remote colleagues to fly over if they are a long way away. But just a short period of time face-to-face in the same space can provide a sense of connection that makes video chats feel more natural for months, even years afterwards.
6. Work from home yourself
Yes, you may be the one normally stuck in the office. But just a day or two joining in conversations and events from an external location will make you more appreciative of the annoyances your colleagues face. Plus it means you can get the plumbing done at non-weekend prices.
Now over to my remote colleagues. What did I miss?
What my remote colleagues say I missed
David (who has worked remotely from Greece and Canada) said the biggest thing I’d missed was “the cultural aspect of it”. He explained that remote working was especially reliant on a culture of autonomy. “It’s around freedom to make decisions and fail without having to wait for permission from a manager. That’s critical for everybody.”
Rachel (based in Edinburgh) said: “The one thing I would add (and you’ve touched on this when talking about collaboration) is to recognise that there will always be conversations happening in the office that remote workers will miss out on. If something important comes out of these you should relay it to the remote workers, who are not able to pick up on things from the office in the same way. There have been times when I feel like I’ve missed some context that people in the office have because I wasn’t part of a casual conversation around a desk or in the kitchen!”
Andy (based in Cape Town) said it was especially important with remote teams for everyone to be willing to drop what they were doing and answer other people’s questions. “A team I worked on had the simple rule: if someone asks whether you have a minute, the default answer is ‘Yes’; maybe, ‘Give me five minutes’, if you are in the middle of something. Essentially, while the person being interrupted often bears a context-switch cost, it means that we don’t have people sitting around stuck on problems for too long before getting some assistance.”
Andy added that the extra emphasis remote working places on group chat meant teams had to be alert to “the difficulty with tone in public written communication, especially in the absence of established rapport within the group”. “I would encourage people to exercise caution with sarcasm,” he said. “Even if they think that 70% of the audience knows them well, and will understand, there might be people in the audience who misunderstand the communication, and potentially be discouraged from contributing if they are uncertain.”
My favourite tip is from a colleague who said “Just treat everyone like they’re a remote worker”. If there were one takeaway message, it would be that. Those of us who aren’t officially remote will still be remote to someone.
