The Shift Toward Remote Working

The internet has revolutionized the delivery of software, and it’s also revolutionizing where we create it. The proliferation of high-speed internet connections and collaborative software for doing our jobs is creating opportunities to shed the burdens that faced previous generations: the need to live a commutable distance from a busy city, the need to spend hours daily on commuting itself, and the preconception that the only way in which high-quality collaborative work is done is when humans physically exist in the same space.

At the time of writing, numerous notable software companies are fully or mostly distributed worldwide. At Mozilla 46% of their 1,000 staff members don’t work in their offices;^[36] 85–90% of Hashicorp’s 800-plus staff work remotely;^[37] and 100% of Automattic’s 1,150-plus employees are remote.^[38]

It isn’t just fully remote companies that are beginning to change the way in which they work. The demands of everyday life, especially when children or elderly relatives are present, combined with the current ease of being productive away from the office, are forcing an evolution in how even traditional companies operate. It’s common to have employees working more flexible hours and working designated days from home.

You may already be used to working with a distributed team. However, supporting remote workers well, especially as their manager, is a learned skill. We’ll be looking at some of the nuances in this section. Remote working is a subject that has numerous excellent books written about it, so we’ll only be skimming the surface. If you’re interested in seeing more about how a remote-only company documents their culture and processes, then you should check out Gitlab’s Handbook [Git19]. If you’re looking for a deep dive into the culture shift of remote working, then check out Remote: Office Not Required [FH13] and The Year Without Pants [Ber13].

It’s Not as Easy as It Looks

Being able to work from anywhere benefits both employees and employers. Employees gain more flexibility over where they live and how far and often they need to commute. Typically, fully distributed companies employ staff over multiple time zones which means that typical office hours begin to shift and communication becomes more asynchronous. Employers dramatically widen their talent pool by being able to hire from all over the world, reducing competition for staff in small geographical areas and increasing workplace diversity.

Great, huh? Mostly. It isn’t straightforward. Adapting to support remote working is a culture and mindset shift that many companies find too challenging. It requires more effort in communication and documentation, a rethink around interruptibility and availability to others, and the use of clear priorities and goals to focus staff so they can operate independently rather than relying on interactions around the office.

It’s unlikely that existing non-remote companies will pivot to being completely remote. Many people are happy with the status quo. However, it is likely that we’ll see more companies becoming hybrids, where part of the workforce works out of company offices, part of it is fully remote, and the remainder split their time between both.^[39] This is the future that you need to prepare yourself for. How do you make it work for everyone? How can you manage people well when they’re out of sight?

Priming Yourself for Supporting Remote Working

As a manager, you owe it to yourself to understand and support remote working because of either of these reasons:

• It’s already happening in your company and team.
• Given the shift taking place in industry, it’s likely you’ll be working with distributed staff before you know it, even if it starts small with your team increasingly working from home.

We’re going to touch upon the following topics:

• Organizational inertia, where you find your staff increasingly wanting to not be in the office, which is causing tension with how the company currently operates.

• Good communication practices that allow staff to feel included no matter their location.

• The importance of trust when managing distributed staff.

• Why values and goals have to trump informal interactions.

• The importance of face-to-face time and what that means for your travel budget.

Fighting Organizational Inertia

If your organization doesn’t already support remote working, then it’ll only be a matter of time before your staff begin to ask you about it. You may find yourself caught in the middle between requests from your staff and an organization that believes that the only way in which it can be productive is when everyone is co-located in the same office. This is simply not true: supporting flexible and remote working models is the future of work, and you need to create the environment within which your staff can get used to that way of working.

If your organization is resisting, then put your own reputation on the line as a manager. Try to pitch an experiment where each person in your team—should they want to—works one day at home every week. Tell your organization that you are responsible for their output. It’s up to your team to decide which day of the week works for them best. For the true distributed working experience, see if everyone can work from home on the same day. If the company is still resisting, then be radically candid with them: to be unable to support remote working is a death knell. The industry is leaving them behind.

If you can proceed with this experiment, you’ll see that it isn’t so bad after all; it’s likely that many of your staff, depending on their setup at home, will find that they can focus more when they’re not sitting in a busy office. After a period of time—say a few months—do a retrospective on how the experiment is working out. What do people like about being remote? What do they dislike? What are some of the challenges of not being physically present? How could you overcome them as a team? Has it developed empathy for staff who are permanently remote?

Hopefully your organization will see that there’s nothing to fear about people occasionally working remotely, and that they might even be able to solve some of their hiring problems if they look beyond a twenty-mile radius of their office! Who’d have thought it?

Communication Practices for Distributed Teams

If the primary forms of communication between workers physically sharing an office is spoken and synchronous, then the opposite is true for distributed teams. The primary forms of communication are:

• Written. The majority of communication occurs via emails, chat, direct messaging applications, and pull requests.

• Asynchronous. Staff may not necessarily be available to talk at a given time or even on overlapping time zones.

For particular individuals—notably extroverts—shifting to this mode of communication can be a challenge. Writing succinctly doesn’t come naturally to everyone and can take practice. However, there are ways to begin practicing this within your team right away:

• Encourage your team to work in the open by regularly sharing what they’ve been doing to a team chat channel. This can be pointers to tickets, pull requests, or ideas that they’ve written up for distribution.

• Adopt a culture of documenting thought processes. For example, when working on a ticket, document the steps that you are going through via the comments so that others can see how you explored and solved the problem.

• Take the time to write up decisions, priorities, and actions for sharing to the team using written communication. Sharing these via email is archival and gives staff equal access to information regardless of their location. This is especially important when conversations happen informally and without the whole team present.

Using more written communication solves some of the issues with asynchronous communication, but not all of them. Two of the main challenges it brings are:

• Some distributed staff have minimal overlap between their time zones. This can be challenging when there are dependencies between two distributed staff, such as needing specialist knowledge or waiting for a prior piece of work to be completed before starting another.

• The feeling of anxiety when you or one of your staff get blocked and need help from others who are not immediately available. You may also feel this anxiety as a manager because it’s harder for you to see what others are up to at any given time.

The solution to these challenges, other than it becoming more bearable with time and experience, is to encourage all staff to take complete ownership of unblocking themselves, thus not requiring you to be the center of all communication, and also to have multiple items that they can work on at a given time. This way if they become blocked, they can simply pause that piece of work and start on another. Again, this may be uncomfortable at first if you or your staff have been used to being able to reach the rest of the team immediately by swiveling around on your chair.

Trust Is Essential for Remote Working

Organizations that expect bodies in chairs at a fixed time every day will struggle the most with the shift to remote working. Working with staff in other parts of the world who do a majority of their work while you’re asleep requires a great deal of trust. You must resist the urge to constantly prod and poke those who are out of sight and let them get on with their work. That’s meddling and micromanagement.

You need to shift your attitude to be positive. You haven’t heard from Alice in six hours since stand-up? That’s good, as she’s probably focused on her work. Check in with her after stand-up tomorrow. As a manager, before you panic over getting an update to satiate your own needs, put yourself in their shoes and consider what it’s like to receive what you’re about to send them. Also consider why the tools that you’re using are unable to satiate your desire to check in. Can the software that you use for tracking work be better so that you always have a stream of up-to-date information on hand if you need it?

Trust enables your staff to do their best work and be bold in their choices and actions. Don’t undermine it because remote staff aren’t as visible to you as the person sitting next to you. It all starts with you: be positive, trust them, and encourage autonomy.

Values and Goals as Guidance

With fewer opportunities for informal interactions, formal values and goals for your staff become more important.

• Values define the way in which the team works so that people can asynchronously make progress in a unified way. For example, is it important to bias toward action rather than asking permission, or is consensus always required? Should you move fast and break things or tread carefully as a team?

• Goals define what the team are aiming for so that everyone is aligned. With a distributed team, goals become more important since they allow staff to work autonomously. As a manager you should be working with your team to set goals collectively and individually. Then you can refer to them when planning iterations of work and also in your one-to-ones with your staff. Where possible, link goals back to measurable company metrics: are you making the company more money, or increasing the time that users spend in your application?

Defining Team Values

You can run a workshop to define team values. By taking half a day, for example, your team can learn about each other and suggest and discuss values that you feel are important. For each, you can then define:^[40]

• What does this value mean to us?
• What does it look like in action?
• How might it be misinterpreted?
• How will we evaluate adherence to it?
• How will it change our relationships or our interactions?

These can then be drafted, worked on further, and ratified so they can further help remote workers understand how to act independently and autonomously.

Working Toward Goals

Setting a clear goal for each iteration or milestone that your team is working toward can be a uniting force that enables autonomy. Be clear and understand how to measure it. Perhaps for this iteration your goal is to ship a new feature into production or to speed up data ingest by 50%. Having this defined allows remote staff to work more independently and creatively. You can choose how formal you want your goal-setting to be. It could be as simple as a short sentence that you define when planning iteration (increase the number of users that login daily by 10%), or it could be a formal framework such as OKRs (objectives and key results).^[41]

Face Time

Even when teams are fully distributed and predominantly interacting through written communication, seeing and being near each other never loses its importance.

Video calls are essential for resolving conflicts and discussing open-ended issues. They’re also one of the few ways in which you can truly feel connected to the human at the other end of the computer. If you’re managing remote staff, one-to-ones should be done this way.

When participating in video calls with a mixture of office-based and remote participants, pay attention to the amount of opportunities that the remote participants have to join the discussion. Those sitting together in the meeting room will more naturally bounce off each other with no lag in the conversation. You can have one person act as a “spotter”^[42] to ensure that the remote participants are getting enough space to speak by watching visual cues.

Additionally, if you’re one of the office-based participants, before the meeting starts, ensure the room has a good AV setup, that the microphone and the camera are working, and that you’re all sitting in a place where you can be seen. It’s the many little things that send the message that you care about those that are on the other end of the line. Don’t tap on the table or bounce your leg. You can’t hear it, but they can.

Remember: as soon as you have regular remote workers in your company, you’ll need to treat all meetings as if they have remote participants present.

Video Calls: Do’s and Don’ts

A few small tweaks can make the video-call experience dramatically better for all participants. Do: Normalize the experience as much as you can. If you’re sharing a video camera in a big room, then it’s a better experience for remote staff if you’re all partaking individually via laptops. If you have to use a shared webcam in a meeting room, arrive early to set up and test the equipment so that remote participants can see and hear you properly. Use collaborative drawing software or shared documents where possible, rather than pointing a webcam at a whiteboard. If you have to use a whiteboard, ensure you write and draw in a way that makes it clear for those that are remote. Occasionally experience what it’s like to be a remote participant by being one yourself. Switch up days working from home so that you have to be remote in that group meeting. How does it feel? Don’t: Ignore remote participants. Have one person act as a spotter to bring them into the conversation and watch for physical cues that they want to talk. Talk over each other. It’s hard to pick apart the noise and also reduces the spaces in which remote participants can contribute. Fiddle with pens, tap your fingers or feet, or doodle aimlessly near the microphone. Those small, unnoticeable sounds on your end are distracting and annoying on their end. End an important meeting and forget to follow up on the main points that were discussed. Writing a few bullet points to participants ensures opportunities to increase understanding and to ask questions.

The other part of face time is real face time. Where possible, get any remote workers on your team into the same physical location as the rest of the team a few times a year. Yes, the travel is expensive, but it makes all the difference. Meeting people in person adds a whole additional human dimension to your relationship, diffuses months of tension in an instant, and builds trust and rapport. It’s well worth it. If your department does quarterly or annual meetings, fly them over to be there in person.