WORKING FROM HOME

The working remotely cheatsheet 2.0 for teams

Yes, yet another handbook full of tips and tricks trying to help your team and yourself to make working from 🏠 great again!

The new normal: working from your little kitchen table? — Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

While more and more teams at Nectarine Health started working remotely 100% earlier this year, we — as many other teams, companies, and individuals — faced many new and unforeseeable challenges. Having the luxury of being part of a growing IoT health-tech startup (based in lovely Stockholm, Sweden) gave us the opportunity to adapt to this new situation quickly while being open and agile enough to try out different ways and approaches of working from many different kitchens and living rooms.

After the first — back then maybe even exciting — weeks and months of adapting to this new situation and working environment, the overall momentum feels to decrease again (especially after a probably slightly different summer gap). Combined with current developments and new government-based regulations and guidelines in different countries the urge to gather and summarize different hopefully supportive ideas seemed to be even more omnipresent.
Keep in mind that not all of them work for all teams and groups and that some have to be executed by yourself, some by your current team, and some even on a company level.

Therefore, the following tips, tricks, and ideas assume that you (and your team) are already making use of an existing remote work IT infrastructure incl. collaboration tools like Zoom or Meet/Hangouts for instant video meetings and Slack or Teams for real-time business communication and workspace organization, you name all the others...

But now, let’s not waste any more time ⛷️!

“Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.” (Stephen Covey)

Part 1 — Productivity

• HFB (high-focus-blockers): Set yourself small calendar-based blocking events for up to ca. 3 hours once or twice a week so you can focus on some nice tasks rather than jumping from one meeting to another. This works even better when syncing and doing it as a team.
• Aim for your always-up-to-date, public, and synced calendar. More or less every time-management and scheduling calendar service has a feature called Find time which is extremely useful for teams.
• 👉meet.new (a simple click here will immediately create a new Meets meeting session)
  This and many more cool .new domain shortcuts (partially Google Services focused) for yourself and your team members can be found here: https://github.com/QAInsights/.new-shortcuts-domain-list
• One (or even two) daily sync meeting(s) can be worth a mint: either as a start in the morning, right before/after lunch, or as a team-based finishing time event. Keep it crisp!
• As many video communication tools support permanent meeting-room IDs, simply add one to your messaging tool profile for faster video chats.
• Have tools like TeamViewer installed and configured (as long as this complies with your software and settings policies) in case simple screen sharing solutions don’t do the job.
• Try staying connected via a constant video meeting (only suitable for smaller teams) as this can give you an improved feeling of working together → but switch to a private session once more specific questions or discussions arise.
  Play around with the lengths and frequency of such meetings and the microphone settings: all team members keep their mics on all the time vs. only turn it on if you have a question etc.
• If you are not sure that you should attend a bigger and broader meeting or not, ask the host to record it and watch it later with a faster playback speed ⏩.
• There are rumors out there that not having any meeting before your daily lunch break boosts productivity and especially focus quite a lot. Try it out for yourself, within your team, or even on a department or company level.
• Check out favorite Slack (or equivalent) productivity apps 👐
  One of my favorites is the reminders for open (Github) pull requests as well as the integration with Jira/Atlassian (check their access rights, settings, and data usage before installing in bigger workspaces ⚠️).
• If possible, try to meet one or two colleagues or team members in a co-working space or their or your own working space/location for one afternoon ☕️.
  Warning: Always try to stay safe when it comes to the health of yourself and others and don’t provoke or push for unnecessary meetings.

Part 2 — Communication (which might overlap with / extend part 1)

• Don’t @all or @here
  …unless your messages are so insanely important to wake everyone up, break their power nap, or interrupt their yearly salary revision conversations.
• Set accurate chat status (and use emojis like ⛔, 🛒, 🚶‍♀️)! It takes seconds (even milliseconds when using auto-features) for you but saves others many minutes when trying to find or reach you.
• Don’t rely on decisions made in chats (and even worse in sub-threads). Communicate that clearly on a team or company level and define a space for documenting decisions that are accessible for everyone.
  This only works with smaller teams or within smaller companies as it otherwise would result in too much communication overhead again.
• Retro retro retro: regardless of maybe already existing retrospective schedules (which are a great way of reviewing a predefined amount of weeks) together with your team, try an additional one with the only focus on remote work and the exchange of ideas and thoughts.
  → There are different (free) tools out there which might help you organize such retros like https://funretro.io/, https://miro.com/templates/feedback/, or https://reetro.io/.
• Feedback is 🔑: give even more feedback than before as it’s easy to not reach out with an additional text message to one of your colleagues just to show some quick appreciation.
• Say “Here’s a video link, let’s sync there” faster and more often, and don’t lose momentum by defining how, where, and when to meet up mixed with the 5th small-talk that morning (this is a great use case for the above-mentioned meet.new shortcut 😉).
  Besides, a 2-min sync-meeting can save you several minutes of texting and/or emailing.
  (And if your interlocutor is busy, simply send her/him a quick calendar invite.)
• If you’re not doing that already: at least bi-weekly syncs with your mentor, manager or leader is even more important during remote working circumstances.
• Look for the best remote work practices for the communication tools you are already using (here is one for Slack for example). Besides, share this information so all team and/or company members are on the same page with that.
• Arrange pre- and post-vacation, parental leave, and other sync-meetings (and hand-overs).
• Try out “ ☕️of honesty” meetings: comparatively direct, open and valuable feedback not wrapped in anything. Make sure that every participant knows the exact outline of those sessions.
• Before a video-based team meeting starts, show your current mood, stress-level, or something else by showing that with your fingers (scale 1–5). This might be only applicable to certain meetings but will immediately give everyone a feeling about their workmates’ current feelings.
• Stop 🔴 apologizing for the new normal: we are all used to a miaowing cat in the background, a blurry laptop-camera, or the beeping cleaning robot in the back by now.

Part 3 — Fun (because that’s what makes your team a team)

• Try out little daily or weekly challenges like a daily lunch-plank challenge which is not only super fun and connects you with people from your company you normally don’t talk to a lot but also pushes your blood circulation 🏃 💪! Ideas or exercises can vary of course!
• Why not watch movies together remotely (again with the help of tools like https://www.netflixparty.com/)?
• Thanks to Spotify, it’s now possible to listen to the music of someone else in real-time. So why not nominate a rotating team-DJ 🎵?
  (Their new feature is called Group Sessions)
• Define a theme if you have (bi-) weekly virtual coffee session or similar: e.g. bad hair day, best Christmas hoodie, or combine it with a quiz (with the help of tools like Kahoot). A little gift or present (sponsored by the management) for the winner as a little incentive is even more fun of course.
• Try Dinner Takes It All/Come Dine With Me with your team members or colleagues (again: the highest priority especially right now should always be the health of yourself and others).
• If resources and circumstances permit create monthly or quarterly challenges team- or company-wide (like funniest joke, scariest selfie — during the Halloween time only — , or the most creative code commit message).
• Find similar hobbies among your team and company members and meet for virtual yoga or cooking sessions, for discussing or watching sports together, or for hanging out for a few min after work together with your pets 🐶.
• In case you didn’t try out the currently booming group fun online game Among Us: try it! Other fun games for a coffee break or a nice virtual after work could be https://www.spyfall.app/ or https://jackbox.tv/.
• Regardless of your living situation, try playing (and surviving) the floor is lava🌋 for one full day.
• If you are ambitious: try out an after-work Zoomlympics tournament: a friend of mine created one and with some smaller adaptations this is a guarantor for fun. Check out this link for a template.

Part 4 —For the (tech) engineers

• Try out tools like CodeTogether for a way better pair (and mob) programming experience when not physically sitting next to each other (BTW: this actually works and is way better than sharing your multiple monitors/screens with at least 7 different applications open each)!
• Meet for mob or pair pull request reviews (rather than doing that on an irregular individual basis). Especially for smaller teams, this might be way more efficient and distribute knowledge and upcoming discussions even better.
• Do knowledge sharing sessions between the engineering chapters/tribes/teams sharing the latest challenges faced to foster the growth of craft within different parts of an organization.
• In case you are using Slack: this very nice and simple article shows you how you can set your Slack status with two swipes (and a zapier account) on your iPhone (sorry non-iOS users 😢)

Part 5— everything else (and some health-related points)

• Clean your home workspace after your (main) work of the day is done. It takes a few seconds but gives you a fresh feeling tomorrow morning (same goes with shutting down your PC/laptop every day rather than once every leap year).
• Ensure psychological safety with everything you do (← yes this link is clickable 💡, give it a read, really).
• Instead of drinking 6 ☕️s a day, try a 20-min power-nap during lunchtime!
  (Or even one coffee before the power-nap → 🔋)
• Even a 5-min walk🌤️ can work wonders.
  And combining that with a little chat with some colleagues is even nicer!
• Check out browser extensions like a reminder for taking water breaks or blinking your eyes. Your 🧠 will thank you later.
  On the same note, tools like f.lux are real life-savers as it adjusts your screen colors according to the sun which as a result helps you to sleep better and get less headache!
• So-called blue light blocking glasses go one step further and help you to block potentially harmful blue light waves constantly (and even off work). 😎
• Communicate success stories even more (it’s difficult to keep up to date with each teams milestones and successes). Even hearing from others about their success can help you push your own motivation!
• The 4 items which have improved at least my home office experience by at least the factor 4: a propper chair, a suitable screen, and a mouse and keyboard gel pad. Even if you are sitting in the middle of a (busy) kitchen, this does miracles.
• Make use of the increased flexibility and try out different main working hours for yourself (and as long this can be combined with your team and company): for example, shift the start of your day 2 hours earlier (and stop earlier, jay!)
• If you already tried out more and other approaches, share them with other teams, the whole company, or friends (or leave a comment here as well ⭐️).

That’s basically it! No more conclusion section, happy hustling 🎉, ciao!