7 tips to help your team thrive when working remotely
Before the lockdowns hit the US, in March just 2% of office workers logged on from home. By May, more than two-thirds of Americans were remote working. In July 2020, Lenovo published findings from a global study of 20,000 office workers. Despite covid-19 distractions, 63% reported they were more productive than ever.
Many employees believe that remote working is the future.
As technology continues to improve how we communicate, the need for physical offices and daily on-site attendance will continue to diminish. Some companies, Facebook, Apple & Twitter among them, are now offering employees the option of working from home permanently. In some form, it appears remote work is here to stay.
One organization ahead of the curve is Gitlab, a company that makes an application that enables developers to collaborate while writing and launching software. Founded in 2014, the company is now valued at $2.8 billion, employs 1,300 people across 67 countries; and has never had an office.
Sid Sijbrandji, the companies CEO and founder has a radical take on remote work — it’s only effective if you go all in.
Partial measures will create tiers of employees who will split the workforce over time, driving away top-performing remote workers who don’t want to compete with on-site colleagues.
Sijbrandi has raised concerns that as offices start to open back up, it will create hybrid in-office versus remote team structures “hybrid companies are very, very hard to run, and the remote people will feel left out” he says. “Productivity will drop, and they’ll [managers] conclude ‘Oh, we have to be co-located again, which is the run conclusion”.
Done well, remote working has the potential to deliver real benefits to both companies and employees. For companies, there are operational efficiencies, huge cost savings on expensive office space in expensive cities, and access to a global pool of talent. For employees, remote working offers family-friendly work schedules and improved work-life balance.
As companies start to consider how remote working can be part of the new normal, Gitlab’s experience offers some useful lessons.
1. Put structure around remote company culture
Traditional on-site companies often take processes, camaraderie, and culture for granted. Company culture is easy to reinforce when we all share the same square of carpet five days a week. In a remote environment, there are no corridors for colleagues to cross-paths in.
Leaders in remote companies need to be proactive and create opportunities for informal communication to happen, designing an atmosphere where team members feel comfortable reaching out to each other to converse on topics unrelated to work.
Numerous studies have shown that informal communication is essential for creating team cohesion, as it enables friendships to form at work. Those who feel they have genuine friendships at work are more likely to enjoy their job, feel committed to the company, and perform at a higher level.
At GitLab, employees are encouraged to spend a few hours a week having social calls with others in the company. Specific actions they recommend include:
· Setting up virtual coffee chats with others in the company
· Using the slack donut app to randomly choose a coffee partner to facilitate introductions
· Informal social calls organized within specific teams to get to know each other on a more personal level
· Using slack channels for informal communications throughout the company, whether it’s a team-specific channel or a channel dedicated to a specific hobby.
2. Establish a remote leadership team
Whether your future organization is all remote or a combination of in-office and remote workers; GitLab recommends establishing a remote work leadership team. Bringing together a team of champions who have expertise in remote working can act as a powerful resource for the organization, ensuring that remote workers aren’t overlooked.
In GitLab, a core part of this team’s role is to document remote-work challenges in real-time, transparently prioritize those challenges, and assign direct responsibility to individuals to find solutions. As we transition out of the pandemic and into a new way of working, having a proactive process such as this in place could prove invaluable to companies.
3. Make documentation everyone’s responsibility
GitLab thrives on documentation. Employees update documents, take notes and share information in slack channels and video messages. Documentation provides GitLab with an essential competitive advantage.
Employees that rely on vocalizing information in meetings end up repeating themselves, as the discussion is limited to those present. When vital information is not written down the only way to consistently learn is to ask other people. At scale, Gitlab found this a hugely wasteful process that led to watered-down instructions, incomplete information sharing, and knowledge leaks as people cycled in and out of roles.
While documenting everything may feel like a burden, in GitLab’s experience it prevents a toxic cycle of meetings and touchpoints which are only needed to “bring people up to speed” and “make sure everyone is on the same page”.
Sijbrandi makes the point well, be saying the motto for remote work should be “the faintest pencil is better than the sharpest memory”. Documenting everything enables a stronger, more informed, and more trusting team.
To make this work it’s crucial that the entire company is committed to documenting, creating a virtuous cycle of self-searching and self-learning. At GitLab managers continuously reinforce this expectation by telling employees to assume their question is already answered. It’s not what you know, it’s knowing where to look.
4. Establish a handbook
The challenge of having everything documented is of course version control. To overcome this GitLab has implemented a ‘handbook-first approach’. Once information is captured and decisions made, resolved decisions get merged into a handbook that tracks it all. The handbook then serves as a single source of truth for all information and prevents individuals from asking questions repeatedly.
5. Make meetings optional
Anyone who has worked in a corporate environment likely knows someone who could have received the “I held another meeting that should have been an email” award. At GitLab staff do not book meetings by default, they strive to make meetings optional.
The main impetus for this is that GitLab’s employees are dispersed across 67 different time-zones. They needed to find a way to allow people to contribute to meetings, even when they were sleeping.
Each meeting has a clear agenda and a Google doc attached. Before meetings, leads ask participants to review the agenda and add any items for discussion. By attaching a Google Doc attendees are forced to brainstorm in text, rather than by doodling on a whiteboard, which ensures ideas and actions are clearly captured with less room for interpretation. Having a shared document for every meeting also allows people to contribute questions and input in advance of the meeting and follow up on actions afterward, without having to attend the meeting at a set time.
If done well, GitLab has found that meetings can be eliminated, and problems solved by brainstorming in writing rather than by attending long-winded sessions.
6. Practice asynchronous communication across time zones
The working world is driven by outlook calendars and schedules. People are conditioned to operate in synchronicity – to be available in the same place and at the same time.
With employees working across so many time zones, GitLab has had to master the art of asynchronous communication — with staff dealing with tasks when they are available, but not when you are ‘online’, or even necessarily awake. This also means GitLab employees are not immediately expected to respond to a colleague’s messages or emails; they reply when they have the capacity to do so.
According to Sijbrandi, asynchronous communication has a pre-requisite. You guessed it, documentation. At its core, asynchronous communication is documentation. It’s delivering a message that doesn’t require recipients to be available at the same time.
While communicating asynchronously requires a mental and cultural shift, the benefits can be significant. Reduced meetings mean people can work more flexibly, with fewer interruptions. And by documenting rather than holding meetings companies are able to better retain knowledge as people move between job roles.
7. Establish overt processes around mental health
Last but by no means the least important message to take from GitLab is a proactive focus on mental health. Burnout, isolation, and anxiety can impact anyone in any company regardless of organizational structures. While people are working remotely there is less chance for managers and peers to pick up on warning signs that a colleague might be under undue pressure.
Gitlab has three extremely helpful practices it uses to protect the mental health of its staff:
· Document all processes around mental health: Ensure that employees are aware of all professional assistance available to them and that these resources are documented and captured so that individuals can access them whenever they need them.
· Don’t celebrate working long hours: When working remotely it’s easy to do an extra hour here or there to get a project over the line, which can move the baseline of what is deemed a normal working day. Managers need to be careful when thanking someone for working overtime not to send a message that work should always take priority.
· Prevention is a team sport: Managers must be proactive in sensing the signs of mental strain, and team members must feel comfortable raising concerns while they are still manageable.
Parting thoughts
The pandemic has led to the biggest remote-working experiment the world has ever seen and proven that while it may not be perfect, remote working at scale is perfectly feasible. All the evidence indicates that people would like to continue to remote work after the pandemic, at least for part of the week.
Whether your company chooses to become all-remote like GitLab or adopts a hybrid approach, the reality is that as of now almost every company is already a remote working company.
If you have more than one office, more than one floor in a building, or have employees working while traveling you are already remote working. As the use cases for remote working technologies continue to evolve companies need to consider how best to utilize them for the benefits of employees and organizations and think intentionally about the role of physical office space.
To quote Darren Murph, head of remote at Gitlab:
“COVID has accelerated the embrace and understanding of remote by at least 10 years. We’ve catapulted beyond a discussion about whether remote work is good, bad, or feasible. The question now is, is your company going to embrace it? Or are you just going to ignore it?”
