How to scale & adapt remote work in your team?
By: Jean-Charles Sorin
Tags: Startup, Remote Working, Covid 19, Organization, Work Life Balance

The facts to resolve

Here are some facts and quotation from people talking about remote work:

“We have no personal connections with people, it’s easier physically!”

with people, it’s easier physically!” “I feel more tired when working remotely”

when working remotely” “We have more meetings compared to IRL mode!”

compared to IRL mode!” “I cannot be focused on when being remote”

on when being remote” “I feel disconnected with some managees/my manager”

If you are saying one of those or similar, well, it’s time to change the situation.

COVID-19 lockdown IS NOT remote work

Before continuing in this guide of remote work, it’s important to insist on the COVID situation. Working from home with your kids to watch, to help them making their homework, not being able to go outside except with a government paper and a good reason, wearing a mask, etc. All these facts due to COVID don’t help your mind and your work spirit, at all.

“Working from home, during COVID restrictions, is not the casual remote work mode.”

You need to adapt your thoughts about working from home when all those constraints are applied against us. Remote work is a specific way of working: from anywhere, at any time, and with as few constraints as possible. So, to people who said during this 2020, “Working from home, with my kids, in my bedroom, uh, the remote work is not for me”, I would say to them that there were wrong, or maybe they didn’t have the chance to perfectly adapt their work mode when working from home. You’ve missed the period (prior-COVID-19) and perhaps you missed some best practices.

Being that said, let’s continue!

Stop observe remote-work. Practice.

“Do not criticise something or someone that you don’t know yet.”

It’s like riding a bicycle: if you don’t practice it, you will never have the opportunity to refine & adapt your skills. By trying again and again, you will fall. Falling is learning how to stand up. Of course, remote work is not for all people, all teams, all domains, but you need to practice it with the whole team before saying “remote work doesn’t work/ is not for me”.

To help you practice remote, it’s really simple:

Offering two days/week of remote, for your team members. It’s something that we are offering at Back Market for our collaborators, since a few years. It also helps to have a private life & work balance. Commuting can be exhausting, and carbon footprint is higher when using your car or motorcycle to come to the office. Why not reducing carbon emissions by working from home regularly?

It’s something that we are offering at Back Market for our collaborators, since a few years. It also helps to have a private life & work balance. Commuting can be exhausting, and carbon footprint is higher when using your car or motorcycle to come to the office. Why not reducing carbon emissions by working from home regularly? Synchronizing the remote days with the whole team. By being at the same time with all contributors, it will help all of you to learn and detect what is wrong, and what doesn't work.

By being at the same time with all contributors, it will help all of you to learn and detect what is wrong, and what doesn't work. Hiring one or more full-remote contributors! Obvious, of course. Working with different cities office and country can also help, in a “default way”.

Shortly: give the chance to your team to practice remote work. Together, the better.

“Why not reducing carbon emissions by working from home on a regular basis?”.

Trust. Giving + receiving = building

Same as in the office

It’s the same as working at the office: trust others!

As a manager with your managees, or between individual contributors, what’s the difference to work together, if you are not in the same room or place? Did you follow everyone in a meeting room to check if he or she is working? No. Did you watch the screen of someone the whole day? No (and if you do, you have nothing to work on).

Working from home, working in a meeting room, working in an open space, in an open world, in the space... Anywhere you are working, you are working for and with people with whom you are giving trust. It’s the structure of a team, if the trust is not here, performance & productivity will be away too.

Avoid the bottle in the sea syndrome

Over-communicate when working remotely is a no brainer. By not being present physically, you are forgetting some obvious discussions, which can contain some important details for your coworkers. Ask yourselves, use empathy, to determine if you need to share something with the team. If no need for sharing, what would be the impact and misunderstandings? Meeting recording (with Zoom for instance) and meeting notes are the tools to help you.

On the opposite way, full-remote workers can ask questions and do not receive answers, even reactions. This is something I’m calling the “Bottle-in-the-sea-syndrome”. Asking, waiting, and waiting a lot. With tools of asynchronous and writing communication, like Slack or Microsoft Teams, it has been easier to communicate with others, react, and using threads. Those tools are providing you some tips to no forget messages and react as soon as possible to your colleague:

Reminder option on a message

option on a message Emojis reactions (loading gif, 👀 to indicate that you are reading, checkmark ✅ , etc.)

The reminder action on Slack is highly productive. We are constantly interrupted and receiving a lot of messages. Stop saying to yourself that you will respond later, you will forget it. Remind you with a tool will be more efficient.

Transparency is trust: AFK times

Transparency is about small details, big impacts. As detailed in the over-communication section, you need to ask yourselves what is important for others to know, or not.

About “being here”, people may not be “here” too. We are humans, not robots, and we have a life too. We are at home, commuting, doing our break, picking up the kids at school, etc. A lot of personal and healthy tasks are part of a working day. We are calling it the AFK (Away From Keyboard) times.

By working with an entire team at a distance and in an asynchronous way, it’s important to share transparency of your absence, pauses, and interruptions. The more you are sharing that you will not be available, the more you will be transparent with the team. Then, the more other understanding why you are not responding, the more you will build trust together. For that, you have your calendar to show AFK to others, or Slack to communicate quickly (“we’ll be back in 15 minutes because of”).

“Be transparent, people will understand and it will reinforce empathy.”

We are still human remotely.

As humans, we are made to be socially connected. We need social interactions: speaking, feeling, listening, seeing, touching. It’s the force of humans, by communicating and interacting with others. Here are the basics of the human being.

That’s why working behind a computer screen, lonely at home, it can impact us a lot. But there is a lot of ingredients that can be counter-productive to help to cultivate human reflexes and habits when working together behind our screens.

Switch your brain & body for work

It’s a big pleasure to sleep one more hour and wearing what we want in terms of clothes, but in the end, it’s not necessary helping people working remotely.

In fact, you need to help yourself (your brain) to switch to a work mode. To help you switching mode, simply dress yourselves as you are going to work in the office. Keep your morning rituals (shower, face washing, etc) and rhythm (fixed hour of wake up).

We are not anonymous

We all have a name, a face, a job position, a location, speaking languages. Update them on your Slack client! Everywhere people can see you discussing and react on several topics, it will be easier for everyone to understand your discussion, by giving your position and your context. It’s even better compared to real life because you are giving more precision and context than being in a real meeting with new people in the room!

Clarify your message: enable your camera, please!

By masking you, you are masking your presence and sharing less impact. Show people that you are here for them, and to help them. It will help to build empathy and understanding reactions in a better way. The key to communication, when speaking, is also about observation, expressions, smiling, eye-contact, etc. A lot of messages can be misunderstood without contextual human behaviors.

Disabling your camera? Imagine the same bad habit in the office: all people have their entire face covered with a giant empty page. Are you going to enjoy speaking to anonymous people? Probably not.

Don’t forget to use a background image, or dynamic blur effect like in Google Meet if you need some privacy. It’s okay! In addition to privacy effects, you can also bring some fun, as described below.

Sharing fun at Back Market is part of our DNA. Better than real life, pimp your face! Add some fun during a team off-moment. Softwares like SnapCamera car help you doing that.

In addition to your video, improve your voice. Cleaning the output and input audio will help you and your receivers, a lot. We all had those moments when the cat says “Meow”, baby crying, neighbors doing some noise with a hammer, etc. Those noises can be canceled thanks to the software you are using, like in Zoom audio preferences, or with additional ones like Krisp. Very powerful and useful!

Working like you are sleeping on the night.

Well, I’m not saying that it’s time to sleep the whole workday 😅. I’m talking about interruptions here.

As a sleeping night, the most you’ll be interrupted in your working day, the most you’ll be tired.

It’s something that Jason Fried perfectly explained during his TED talk, “Why work doesn’t happen at work”.

Working on a train, a coffee, a beach, etc. Those places are the first ones that people mentioned about the places they like to work. Never the office is mentioned.

Moreover, there are a lot of tips to work on:

Disable notifications of most toxic apps (especially notifications sounds from Slack 🙄)

of most toxic apps (especially notifications sounds from Slack 🙄) Use “ Do not disturb ” mode on your phone and Mac to build a focus time for you.

” mode on your phone and Mac to build a focus time for you. Hide Dock icons, app badges, app icon bouncing, etc. Anything which can interrupt your vision is a counter-productivity killer.

Last but not least: meetings can be a huge source of interruptions, especially when switching to remote mode. We tend to naturally think that, because of seeing us less than in an office, we need more meetings. It’s not the case, it’s a completely different way of working.

If you want to perform your meetings, I advise you to read the excellent post on our Meeting Philosophy at Back Market:

The power of asynchronous work.

Writing power

If you are working in an engineering team, you’re probably doing some daily asynchronous meetings. Those can be counter-productive in real-life, as in a video-conference mode. By asynchronously doing them, you can improve them.

We are regularly adapting our rituals to have a great balance of asynchronous & synchronous mode:

3 days a week: synchronous stand-up ( speaking & seeing )

stand-up ( & ) 2 days a week: asynchronous stand-up (writing & reading)

By having this balance, you are building strong skills for your team: being able to speak, to write, to see, and to read each other. A perfect balance of human beings and work habits.

“Writing is synchronizing our mind, and asynchronizing our time.”

The advantage of writing is also by reading. When writing something to the team, you are synchronizing your mind to prepare a clean message and precise communication to your team, with less noise than possible. When speaking in a daily Zoom meeting, generally more than 50% of people are doing something else with their computers.

On the other side, by receiving and reading a clear message from your colleague, you will synchronize your brain, and better retain the information. Those two tasks can be done in a flexible period of time, with better efficiency, compared to a synchronous meeting.

Find the synch balance of your team rituals

Use this asynchronous/synchronous balance also for your workshops. Why not put a slot of 45 min of the workshop, composed of 30 min thinking or writing on a document, to finish with 15 min to debrief?

Existing software can help you achieve your asynchronous goals. We are using Parabol for instance, to improve our daily and workshops meetings.

We are also using a specific canvas for asynchronous daily meetings:

Reminder & channel. We still have a calendar reminder and a place (Slack channel) to put our messages.

We still have a calendar reminder and a place (Slack channel) to put our messages. Mood . This first step is to share some fun, love, mood spirit of the day. We all have our bad and good days, vibes, or facts. Sharing it with the team will help empathy & transparency. It will help your manager and teammate to better fit with your mood, by adapting their messages, helping or support you. It’s easier by writing, less comfortable in a video. We regularly use an emoji to resume our mood, no big description.

. This first step is to share some fun, love, mood spirit of the day. We all have our bad and good days, vibes, or facts. Sharing it with the team will help empathy & transparency. It will help your manager and teammate to better fit with your mood, by adapting their messages, helping or support you. It’s easier by writing, less comfortable in a video. Content : Achievements & Blockers for instance.

: Achievements & Blockers for instance. React . All readers react with ✅ emoji or any related reaction when reading the message. It shows that people read your message and the content. No excuses.

. All readers react with ✅ emoji or any related reaction when reading the message. It shows that people read your message and the content. No excuses. Thread first. If something creates misunderstandings, try to resolve them asynchronously in thread discussion. If it’s not resolved in less than 5 minutes, create quick Zoom synch with stakeholders of the topic.

Write emotions & formatting

Be careful with writing. By writing, you will become more precise, but less emotional. We are in 2020, and there is a great invention which exists for many years: emojis 🤗!

Use emojis to add context and emotions into your message. Don’t abuse emojis, of course, it will be counter-productive.

In addition to emotions, structure your message. Add some space and air between important sentences, use bold, italic, etc. The better your message is structured, the better is the reading.

Do not synchronize when writing

It happens regularly. Someone sends you a message on Slack. You are interrupting your work after several minutes, you open Slack, find the conversation, and reading a simple:

“Hello”

No more additional messages.

WTF people 😅 ?

Let’s keep it short:

DON’T : Sending a hello message, and a few minutes after sending your message. You are making 2 interruptions. You are making your receiver synchronizing too soon, by letting him waiting for the next and more important message that you want to share.

: Sending a hello message, and a few minutes after sending your message. You are making your receiver synchronizing too soon, by letting him waiting for the next and more important message that you want to share. DO: “Hello + your message” at the same time.

Ok, sometimes you just want to give some news to a colleague. Good! But it’s the same, bring precisions to your message even if it’s a completely friendly “Hello”. “Hello 👋! How are you today?” is much better.

Protect yourself, protect your time.

It’s weird, but by working lonely at home, we are forgetting ourselves, a lot.

Here are tips and rules to apply to yourself to succeed in taking care of yourself and your health:

Optimize your environment . Of course, we do not all have a big house with a dedicated room for work. Please try as possible to build your workspace, with a desk and a comfortable chair. Create a dedicated space. Use stand-up desks, move your body. People are also more comfortable when working outside, in nature, or in a coffee-shop. Try it!

. Of course, we do not all have a big house with a dedicated room for work. Please try as possible to build your workspace, with a desk and a comfortable chair. Create a dedicated space. Use stand-up desks, move your body. People are also more comfortable when working outside, in nature, or in a coffee-shop. Try it! Open the windows! A lot of people are complaining about a headache or no-productivity moments. It’s pure physics: opening the windows cuts indoor carbon dioxide levels. Lower carbon dioxide levels mean higher levels of cognitive performance.

A lot of people are complaining about a headache or no-productivity moments. It’s pure physics: opening the windows cuts indoor carbon dioxide levels. BREAKS. TAKE BREAKS PLEASE! It’s one of the first moments we forgot when working remotely. We rush on our computer, without time to breathe. It’s pure science again: the human brain can focus up to two hours, after which it needs 20–30 minute break . It’s the same when you are switching to a topic or being interrupted, it takes 20 minutes to re-focus.

It’s one of the first moments we forgot when working remotely. We rush on our computer, without time to breathe. It’s pure science again: . It’s the same when you are switching to a topic or being interrupted, MOVE . Walk outside & stand-up as as possible, take fresh air, move your muscles, particularly in those COVID times. Again, science fact here! Standing up has clear benefits for the oxygen supply to the brain.

. Walk outside & stand-up as as possible, take fresh air, move your muscles, particularly in those COVID times. Again, science fact here! Coffee-team breaks. Easy to set up! Just say on Slack to the team that you are going to make a coffee, and ping others if they want to join a quick 10 minutes break and discussion.

Now, you know why you are exhausting if you are not practicing those breaks. Listen to your body.

Sharing love and social connections are possible remotely.

Sharing off-moments

A remote team doesn’t mean a team of robots. The fact that interactions are less present than in real life is that we, as humans, are not made to talk to a screen.

That’s why it’s very important to define the social virtual places of your team. It can be a WhatsApp group, a Slack group. Find yours. Ask the team members how they want to discuss together, outside of work’s topics.

I insist on “outside of work”. The first rule to apply here is to speak on non-work topics. Share facts, fun facts, life facts, opinions, cooking times, etc. Share social facts but not work facts. It’s important to split them.

Be comfortable with this type of place. Each team member is different and has the right to disconnect, even if it’s a non-work topic. You can disable notifications, not reacting, or being pro-active. It’s okay to be socially distant VS pro-social.

Play & Share!

A lot of asynchronous team-games are existing on the Web. Skribbl, codenames, Chess, etc. Find with the whole team which game they want to play together.

For instance, I always put a mid-week break on Zoom with the team, each Wednesday at 5:45 pm. During 30 min to 45 min max, we have fun together, laughing and challenge ourselves on fun games, simply discussing, or sharing drinks.

It’s okay if someone is still working on an urgent task, it happens. Encourage people to de-focus and share fun, share energy, and laughs.

Meet and discover others

If your team is mostly remote, I encourage you to put 2 days per month of a real-life meet. Share a restaurant, beer time, Some Hands, etc.

For newcomers, especially when you are in a fast-growing company, Slack add-ons like Donuts! can help to create connections and to share moments with others, knowing newcomers, and discover that you are sharing the same hobbies or motivations!

Onboarding newcomers remotely

Onboarding newcomers, in the office or remotely, is an important period for them and you, as a manager or an existing teammate.

As a manager, I always put those meetings for newcomers:

The first day — In addition to the company’s onboardings, 30 minutes with the manager + up to an hour with the team for a team tour and presentations (at the end of the day).

— In addition to the company’s onboardings, with the team for a team tour and presentations (at the end of the day). During the first two weeks — In addition to company meetings onboardings, put team scope meetings. I’m adding also a donut meeting with 3 or 4 other people of a larger scope. Ones with who he, or she is going to work for, sooner or later but not on a daily basis.

— In addition to company meetings onboardings, put team scope meetings. I’m adding also a donut meeting with 3 or 4 other people of a larger scope. Ones with who he, or she is going to work for, sooner or later but not on a daily basis. Last day of the first week — 1-hour connection with the manager: 10 minutes of onboarding connection, 20 minutes of issues resolving and sharing, an ice-breaker for personal connection. Find inspiration here.

— 1-hour connection with the manager: 10 minutes of onboarding connection, 20 minutes of issues resolving and sharing, an ice-breaker for personal connection. Find inspiration here. Regular 1:1’s — At least 30 minutes per week, then every two weeks starting the next quarter if everything is OK (up to an hour, to adjust).

Your turn now!

This is it! I hope it helps you to identify and pick some tips to improve remote work in your team & company. If you have some best practices to share, you’re welcome with comments!

In addition to this post, I encourage you to discover some resources and readings. It helps me a lot during my previous experiences, to refine the remote & office work-balance: