How to work in remote? - PART I

I started to work from home on 2020, during this time I created some methodologies and habits, in this new post I will try to explain how to apply them to your daily-basis.

First I was thinking how to structure this post and I will divide this in two articles, the first one can be applied for all the people that is working remotely, a second post will be just for developers.

I will try to sum up this post in a kind of an index:

1. Your home now is your office.
2. Change your mindset.
3. Communicate effectively and avoid the thought “this meeting could have been solved with an email”.
4. My personal opinion/vision of working in remote.

The goal of this post is to help you with your remote job and work more effectively from home. Many people have started working remotely due to the COVID crisis, but before we dive in, let’s take a moment to ask ourselves: what measures have we taken to adjust to this significant change?

🏢 Your home is now your office

One thing is obvious right? We can’t work on all the spaces, I mean, you can work where you want, but how can your mind work effectively if you’re “seeing” a TV in the background, a washer making some noise and your grandmother laughing at a joke of your brother?

In our homes we have a lot of distractions and the discipline of work without beeing distracted is the key to be productive. Which things we can do?

1. If you’re living with more people explain on which hours you’re more productive and try to avoid to talk with them in these hours, for sure we can talk if is needed, this is way I’m saying “productive hours” instead of “this is my time schedule, please do not disturb me”.
2. Visual and heard noise, you should have a room for work with as little noise as possible, active noise cancelling headphones can be helpful for this. The other point that is important is the visual noise, you can’t work in a desk that contains a lot of stuff or a room that is continously visit by other people.
3. Make a setup that work for you, this is super personal but I can share a post that I made on dev.to regarding this: https://dev.to/crisoncode/my-software-setup-as-a-web-dev-in-2022-4l1d

🤯 Change your mindset

Now you’re working from home, great, that has a lot of benefits, but let’s remember the question that I made some lines before. What measures have we taken to adjust to this significant change?

When we was working in an office we was always exposed to a social interaction, talking with our workmates and create better relationships with the people near to us. How this can be applied from our homes?

☕ Create coffee times and talk with your workmates about things in general, series, books, etc.. This coffee times can be mixed, starting by our personal things and going to more work stuff like giving a hand or asking for help.

👁️ If you see people introverted in your team that needs an extra effort for talk with people help them!

🙈 On the contrary, if you happen to be introverted, I would advise you to initiate interactions through the process of acquiring knowledge. Should you encounter any obstacles, you possess the ideal pretext to engage in conversations. It is crucial not to succumb to isolation, given that our work involves collaboration with a diverse range of individuals. Inevitably, the need to communicate with others will arise, making it prudent to commence this journey of self-improvement.

🗣️ Create communication channels in slack, teams or whatever communication app that you’re using. Going deeper, create a channel and allow the people to share posts, jokes and memes

🧠 Create habits of communcation like retrospectives, fun times and kahoots for giving the space to express you and your time in terms of feelings and so.

🏢 Communicate effectively

I heard a lot of times the phrase “This meeting could have been resolved with an email”.

Well, we thought this a lot of times but who is the brave guy who is going to challenge the boss by telling him that his meeting is pointless? 🤣

Jokes aside, the first question is wrong, you can change the perspective a lot and the key are the the next questions:

• Which things can be communicated asynchronous?
• Which things should be communicated in a meeting?
• Which things should imply the both ways?

📡 Asynchronous communications

We can classify async communications by emails, messages on communication tools, etc.. Things that you “fire” and the people will read when they can. Let’s analyze a bit this way of communicate things:

• Asynchronous means time, you don’t know when the people will read that and you’ll need more time to write clear and effective emails, messages, about the things that you’ll want to explain.
• Implies the probability of misunderstoods, it’s in our nature to talk by voice, when the people should make questions by other ways the effort is higher than in a meeting.
• Fall in “fire and run”, it’s common to see emails that are sent and nobody answered (and probably nobody read it) and the most important thing, the mail owner forgets the goal of the mail because nobody is answering (seems an infinite loop I know 🤣). Creating interest over a topic in a mail can be really hard, if you want to improve your writting skills on that topic I can recommend the course made by Pat Kua, Communicate like a CTO.

Well, but Cris, you’re only saying bad things about asynchronous communications, on which moments we can use them and more important, how we should use them?

✅ Notifications and News.

For example when someone joined the company, a new offsite organized by our HR departments, things that does not need feedback.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 First contact, first step

When you need to present yourselve and made a kind of an introduction, for example when you need to talk with an external company, the first step can be a mail presenting yourselve.

🏃🏻 Non job related things

For example if you need to go to your daugther school for an urgency or you have a medical appointment.

😆 Fun and trolling

Sending memes to the team, sharing music, etc… (Check the people that is on the group first, seriously, check it)

❓ Doubts

When you have a doubt, regarding a task or a process or whatever and is not urgent to solve.

Probably I missed a lot of situations that you can use asynchronous communications, but we can get some conclusions with the things that I mentioned.

• We can’t use asynchronous communications:
  • When we should take a decision that implies a debate
  • When we expect feedback
  • When something is urgent to solve.
• We can use them for:
  • Share our thoughts
  • Notifications - Statuses

🔄 Synchronous communications

When we talk about this kind of communications working in remote, we’re talking about meetings. It’s typical to see meetings without an structure, time consuming, etc….

Here I can list the guidelines that I followed on my daily-basis work:

• Try to create a meeting agenda with timings and follow them.
• Avoid discussions in circle.
• Take care of the calendar. Try to make meetings in a row and avoid fragmentation.
• Make breaks on each hour (maximum hour and a half).
• Prepare the meetings, use tools like miro, canva,etc.. for explain your thoughts and ask for feedback about it.
• Before schedule a meeting explain to all the people which is the goal of the meeting and explain which things they should prepare.

💭 Conclusions

Work from home or in a cowork, etc.. Has a lot of benefits in our life, a lot of people started to work in this way by the covid crysis, but I thought in this question a lot of times “which things we changed in our work for adapt ourselves to this big change?”.

I can list a lot of things that we lost leaving the office, but we can resume it in human interaction. We should make an extra effort for keep and take care of this interactions when we’re working from our homes, the “key” from my point of view was the urgency of the change, normally the companies are planning big changes step by step, testing it and see how is affecting the employees, but in this case was from 0 to 100 in just one month and for sure this had a lot of consequences some of them positives and some of them negative, with time we’re improving it a lot I think, but we’re just starting the change (just 3 years vs all the time before?¿). So my next question is, how this will evolve in ten years? which things we will invent for work more effectively in remote? Let’s see.****