With 8 years of experience in working remotely in cross-functional teams, both nationally and internationally, Niklas has solid experience in how to stay productive and motivated as a team, from your home office. We have asked Niklas to share some of his best advice on working remote.
“Working remotely does not mean working alone, but an opportunity to work with your team in a new way.” – Niklas, Software Developer & Architect at Jayway.
Clear communication is key:
How can you play a part in the success of your team?
1) Set up working agreements.
When and how do you communicate? What platforms do you use for what, what is your preferred way of communication, when are you available and how can your team see your availability?
2) How is it going?
Schedule a daily sync meeting with your team to discuss how your remote work is going.
3) Face-to-face is important.
Keep your meetings, daily sync, and chats with colleagues instant and with as much face-to-face communication as possible. Turn on video in meetings!
4) Stay connected – Say good morning!
Make an effort to be visible when working remotely. Say hello in the morning and goodbye at the end of the day so our teammates know we are available. Transparency is key and increases trust.
5) If in doubt, call.
Invite your colleagues to be overly communicative and make sure you all know exactly what is expected of you. If in doubt, ask. Text increases the likelihood of misunderstandings from which conflicts can arise, a phone call is much more efficient than mails and chat messages.
6) New routines take time.
Creating new teams and getting used to a new setup, demands a lot of communication – remote or not. Make space in your calendar to meet with your team on your internal communication tool like Slack or similar. Do not hesitate to move the conversation to phone calls or video-meetings through tools like Google Hangouts, Discord or Zoom.
7) The more the merrier.
Rather ask too many team members to join a meeting than too few. If you are having a meeting about a project that does not seem relevant to all team members, invite them to join anyway. Otherwise, you create silos and an unnecessary feeling of exclusion. At the office, you would just stay in the meeting even though the subject is outside your field, but when everything happens digitally, you need to send the invitation and actively include your team, also in the small discussions.
8) “Wow, those meetings really could all have been emails.”
Sounds familiar? No one is wasting your time on purpose, so if you feel a meeting is irrelevant to you, do not just decline. Ask what your purpose for this specific meeting is and reconsider. If you do not find it relevant, it is OK! Just let your team know why.
6 ideas to crank up the team spirit!
It can be difficult to get used to being away from your colleagues – but remember you are still a team! Here are 6 ideas of what you can do, to feel connected to each other.
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Invite your team to meet for a non-work-related chat 5-10 minutes before a meeting.
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Have remote coffee breaks with your team. Tell everyone to bring their favorite snack and have a social video chat.
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Suggest social events as you used to at the office, be creative with what you can do in these digital times – remote breakfast, Friday Bar, quiz & pizza nights, or a live yoga session during the day.
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Keep cheering and celebrating each other for birthdays, new projects, milestones, great team effort, etc.
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Be kind. Now, it is more important than ever to check in on your colleagues and show a lot of empathy. More than just a heads up on slack. Smile, be open and patient. You do not know how your colleagues’ days have been at home or what is on their mind. Maybe they feel stressed, anxious or just really hung op in work.
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Again, text can cause many misunderstandings and conflicts. Call each other, as soon as you sense something is off. Some will find this situation more difficult than others. So, be open, show empathy and trust each other.
Keep motivation on top: you’re doing OK!
You are probably already more productive at home.
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It is very common to feel you have to perform even more when working from home. You want to do at least as good as usual. 1 hour of work, easily turns into 1,5 home office hours. Adding up, your days will be very long, without necessarily feeling more productive. Remember how a typical day is at the office. Usually, there’s many interruptions during the day, so chances are that you are already performing better at home… home with the kids? We will come up with more family oriented advice in our blog post tomorrow. Stay tuned!
What distracts you?
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Allow yourself to get used to your new routines and take your time to notice what distracts you from being productive and focus on limiting whatever prevents you from feeling motivated at home, working by yourself.
Be strict with your own time.
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When sitting alone it is easy to get immersed with a task. Focus is great, but if there are other things that need your attention during the workday, set a timer on your current task so there is time left to do the other tasks too.
Track yourself.
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Make a bullet journal to keep track of what you have actually done throughout the day. Start every morning by reviewing your bullets and mark what you think is realistic you will get done today. Then aim for half of those things. Anything you achieve above that is worth a mental high-five!
Share your work.
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Share your progress. Ask someone to review your work, use bullet journaling or Trello board.
Remember to stop.
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Stop working when you usually would, even though you did not manage to do everything on your list. Close down and do something to put your mind off work mode.
Hopefully, this gave you some guidelines for how you and your team can adapt and get used to working together from a distance. Of course, there are endless ways of doing this and no right or wrong. You need to find out what works best for you. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.
