Practical guideline to make remote work effective
Remote work is still relatively a nascent style of collaboration. Many adopted it, others still resist it.
From my experience collaborating, building and leading teams remotely for 4 years, in order to make remote work effective some rules and guidelines are needed. The following are the ones I shared with new hires in my team.
Context
Remote work is a privilege that we want to keep as it benefits us as a team by giving us more flexibility especially for those who can’t go to the office.
The only way to not lose this privilege is to ensure that our collaboration is at least as smooth as if we were all working together in the office.
The guiding principle is that none of us should feel the need of being at the same place to do our work effectively. Generally this boils down to getting any ‘information’ that we need -or feel we need- almost immediately during the work hours, as that’s what being in the office offers by design.
As the remote context adds lots of friction to enable this synchronous access to information (by design it is more favorable for asynchronous autonomous work), we need a common frame to abide by. Hence the following rules
Rules for effective Collaboration
Overlapping availability hours:
- The minimum is that all of us need to be available for almost immediate interactions from 09:30 to 12:00 and from 14:00 to 17:00.
- These times are CET times. Those working in other timezones need to adjust to those hours
Staying online and immediately active on slack:
- During the above mentioned hours, it is expected that everyone is active on slack and will reply almost immediately in case of a question
If the person who tagged you waits more than 30 minutes to get a response, you are expected to give an acceptable explanation
- If the status on slack is active, it is expected that the person will reply almost immediately in 90% of the cases
- A reply could be a simple acknowledgment to initiate the communication with the other person and plan it for another time (in case of deep work for instance)
- If you are not active, make sure your status captures that, and that people know when they can get your attention (see next point)
Tactic: Link google calendar to slack and whenever you are in a ‘long’ meeting make sure it is in the calendar so that others see it and don’t expect immediate interaction from you
Use slack status effectively when you are not immediately ‘reachable’
- If you are focused on a task and won’t look at slack for some time, change your status to something like — don’t just go offline
- Any interruption for longer than 1 hour during overlapping hours needs to be mentioned as a status on slack. Do this at least one day in advance. If this came up abruptly during the day, you have to inform your manager as well.
- Errands for more than half a day have to be communicated to your manager before hand to get approved
Connect everything to slack: Slack indicates where you are like if someone sees you (or not) in the office
- Put slack on your phone and laptop → MUST
- Active notifs on both → MUST
- Connect google calendar so that your status changes when you are in a meeting → MUST
- Connect Linear → Recommended
Always update on Linear (our project management tool)
- Slack or offline sync calls do not replace linear → Summarise important points in the respective card
- The absolute minimum is 1 update per day. You should rather aim for 2 updates is a day.
- It is also important to share your plan at the beginning of a card and update if new friction arises
- Add useful links and context. Don’t just write something like: ‘I am having an issue and I am working on it’ → Add more context and specify further
- You should aim to minimise the interactions that revolve around asking for sharing context/updates from your direct collaborators (reviewer — manager)
Exceptions to the above mentioned rules are ok, but have to be communicated on and agreed upon before hand. No exception to this final rule
Conclusion
In case of confusion, always ask yourself: how would we communicate/collaborate if we were in the office. That’s the bar we shouldn’t go below.
- If done effectively, remote work should improve our effectiveness as a team (more deep work, more flexibility outside overlapping hours, etc..).
- If done poorly, our effectiveness will suffer the bigger we grow → This won’t happen though as we won’t tolerate it — even if that means stopping remote as a whole (Don’t think we will get there, but it is important to know that this is possible if we don’t succeed as a team to make this work)
