Remote-able | How to create teams that work better apart
I have been working to build a “Remote-able” software delivery team in an otherwise office-based company for the last 12 months.
Now, as the COVID-19 pandemic takes hold, we are able to share a set of successful practices with other teams making the transition to remote.
Why Remote?
For the individual, remote working offers huge value, most notably in freeing up time otherwise spent commuting. In the UK, 3.7million people commute for 2+ hours / day. The second order benefits are more interesting however; whether greater work-life balance, flexibility around other dependencies or simply being trusted to accomplish tasks without someone peering over your shoulder, they act to satisfy the esteem and self-actualisation needs identitifed in Maslow’s hierarchy.
For organisations, the value of a distributed workforce can simply be derived from reduced cost. Fewer people co-located means reduced requirement for office space. Again we see more interesting second-order benefits. As workers don’t need to live in close proximity to an office, they can avoid high property prices and wasted time commuting, both of which drive up compensation. A company that doesn’t self-impose a geographical mobility barrier will have better access to talent.
Remote working is increasingly popular. In fact, 70% of people globally work remotely at least once per week. It’s predicted that half of the UK workforce will work remotely by the end of 2020 and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is only acting as a catalyst.
What is “Remote-able”?
Remote-able means having the tools to be able to work remotely at the drop of a hat, even if the wider organisation is not set up for remote working.
A Remote-able team is still predominantly office based but they can operate as effectively when co-located as they can whilst distributed.
Remote-able teams use a range of technology to facilitate team members. This can be standardised across the organisation or specific to the team.
Members of a Remote-able team are skilled communicators and are as comfortable collaborating over electronic means as they are in person.
Remote-able teams can operate asynchronously to ensure team members are not blocking each other, even when operating in different time-zones.
Working Better Apart
If there’s one thing to learn from this piece, here it is:
We all need to to be better communicators.
Of course, if it were that simple we’d all be remote working gurus by now. There’s a ton of research on effective communication so in order to distill it into a mantra I can use daily, I go with the BC2 model:
- Brevity - Your audience is busy; get your key point across early.
- Clarity - Limit your content to 3 main points and keep it digestible. It’s really hard to balance clarity with brevity so just aim not to waste time with waffle.
- Context - anyone who’s sent an email, WhatsApp, Snap etc. knows that context can be easily lost. Choose the right tone for your audience.
So with that in mind, what are the things you can do as a team to communicate effectively.
Level the playing field - “Musketeering”
From experience, if there are three or more people in a meeting and one is dialled in by VC (video-conference), those in the room will be the decision makers.
In order to overcome this, embrace “Musketeering”; the all-for-one-and-one-for-all practice of putting everyone on the same footing. The best example of this is to say that if one person is on VC, the whole team should be on VC.
My team groans everytime I call it “Musketeering”…
Show your face
Non-verbal communication and in particular facial micro-expressions are fundamental to judging tone and context so if you can, aim to get face-to-face with your audience. For a bit of fun, have a watch of the 2009 series Lie to Me to see that illustrated.
Establish the VC Etiquette
You may feel that there is nothing worse for a presenter than being distracted by background noise. Or you may find that when everyone is on mute your VC is like shouting into the void. Whichever way it affects your team, establish the mute/un-mute rules.
Show up on time or send your apologies in advance. Perhaps you will establish that your VC starts when you have a majority of people.
Share your screen
Which ever tool you use for this (and I’ve identified some below) the benefits are huge.
Some people (the author included) are far more responsive to visual clues. I talk with my hands and draw on the whiteboards a lot in the office. So why not do the same remotely?
Set expectations
For general or quick conversations, where in an office setting you might casually walk up to a colleague’s desk, establish a rough but team-agreed response time, e.g. for Slack messages, and let the team know when you’re not at your keyboard with a simple “AFK” (away from keyboard) message in a team channel.
There are two reasons this is important. Firstly, you’re not blindly forcing yourself into someone’s train of thought and interrupting their focus. Secondly, you aren’t blocked for extended periods by unresponsiveness. You can safely try and get their attention again after the time you set has elapsed.
If you do need to grab attention more urgently, “@-message” them but beware of overuse.
Agree default tools
It is essential that the team agrees on tools for messaging and therefore knows where to meet remotely.
Aim to cut out the 5mins at the start of each meeting where the host has to say “we’re just waiting for so-and-so to join”. It doesn’t sound like much but if you’re averaging 4 remote meetings a day, that’s over an hour a week you could have spent more productively.
Create a forum for questions - “the Afterparty”
After a larger meeting, say company wide, there will inevitably be questions. There are no stupid questions but recognise that not everyone needs to hear them asked or answered.
One way to remove the inefficiency is to throw an “Afterparty” whereby the meeting organiser and speakers congregate in a Zoom chat to answer specific questions.
Team members can then drop in and out as they wish.
Use the right tool for the job
In-person meetings have different pre-requisites, audiences, material, delivery styles and outcomes. Remote meetings are no different; take the time to consider how you can best deliver content without the constraints of having to gather in a large room or print handouts.
There are some really incredible collaborative tools out there so here is a quick summary of those I have used and how to get added value from them:
General, quick conversations - Slack.
- I could do a whole article on “Slack etiquette” but they have already done one and it’s well worth a read.
- As well as using threads and replacing follow-up messages with emoji, we set Channel Topics to keep people up to speed at a quick glance. You might use this for your sprint goals, stock picks or this week’s sales targets.
- We also set reminders in the team channels for ceremonies and other team events with a Zoom (video-conference) link attached.
Ceremonies / Wider Meetings - Zoom
- We prefer Zoom over Slack for group meetings. Slack has a good video chat but the noise cancelling is a pain in a noisy office.
- Join promptly, start on time, appoint a moderator to keep the meeting on track.
- Record your larger group meetings. They can then be shared on a collaborative platform like Confluence, thus preserving the content and allowing people who couldn’t attend to catch up later.
Retrospectives - Miro Board
- Generally these combine Zoom with another tool to illustrate the topic.
- For Retros, we use a collaborative drawing board like Miro and a Stop-Start-Continue approach but other formats are available. For a bit of fun, check out the sailboat retro.
Estimation - Async Poker
- This is one of the aforementioned extensions in Jira. Instead of all gathering on a VC to estimate tickets, which can be tough to coordinate and a distraction for those that only have partial input, Async Poker allows you to estimate a convenient time for you.
- The coord meeting is spent sweeping up and ironing out those trickier items. We’ve found this takes 1/3 as long as running the whole process in one VC.
- Refinement Breakouts in smaller teams can be run ahead of time to ensure all team members understand the work to be done ahead of the sprint. This helps clarify the task, requires less of a dependency on peers explaining mid-sprint and enables people to work independently.
Workflow — Jira
- Some teams will be familiar with Kanban. For those who aren’t, it’s a discipline of Agile that helps to visualise the team’s workflow.
- Jira isn’t the most user-friendly but it’s getting better and has a ton of extensions.
What About Email?
The more astute will have noticed that I don’t mention email in the above toolset. Email is overused and inefficient. It is one of the most common triggers of social anxiety disorder and requires time and energy spent filtering out the noise. So before you compose that email, ask yourself, “is this the right tool for the job?”
The truth is that of course we still use email, everyday for a range of things. In our company, however, email is tacitly understood to be a more formal, recorded document and therefore used externally only and in the few cases that require a more formal communication.
Look after each other
Everything we’ve talked about so far is about increasing efficiency but of course there is another factor in the productivity equation. The human element of remote working often remains unconsidered until the team is a week in to their remote practice. In those cases, energy drops, motivation dies and productivity falls off a cliff.
There are some awesome tools out there for keeping track of how you and your team are feeling, both in a work and personal context, like the Form Score.
I’ll discuss how to look after your remote people (and your remote self) in more detail in a follow-up piece. Suffice to say take the time to check in with people on a frequent basis.
