In this article, as an employee, you will learn how to enhance your home office experience. If you are an employer, you will discover how to guide your teams to excel at remote work.
It's becoming increasingly common. While some employees and employers remain skeptical about home office setups, more people are recognizing the benefits. As the CEO of a software development company, I highly value and promote remote work because:
- We require fewer office resources (keeping costs low)
- Our teams enjoy a fantastic work-life balance
- We can hire and collaborate with people from locations far away and much more.
However, remote work brings changes to work-life balance and how you work. In this article, we discuss five essential tips and strategies to improve your home office experience by being more productive while maintaining a high work-life balance. Here are the 5 tips:
- Stay connected, but take your time
- Make your work visible
- Set goals!
- Use the right tools
- Meet up occasionally
I have over six years of experience working remotely with teams worldwide, and I had many fears at the beginning. All of them were proven wrong.
As a CEO, I want my developer teams to have the greatest freedom possible while enjoying their work. Working from home is not a privilege in our company; it is a fundamental right. When hiring a new team member, we always include the following 5 tips in our onboarding training.
Stay connected, but take your time
The fear: We are losing touch with our team members. When working remotely, team members don’t communicate well with each other.
I understand that fear, but in every team I have worked with as a remote developer, I have seen that the quality and quantity of communication were often better compared to on-site teams. The key phrase here is “communication culture.”
Remember: You can also not communicate while sitting next to each other!
The team itself defines the quality and quantity of communication. As part of the team, YOU are also responsible for maintaining high communication standards. In tip 4, we will discuss how to use tools that support communication in your team. For now, I want to highlight something important that is often overlooked when defining a communication culture:
Define when and how quickly you want to respond to each other.
It sounds simple, but it’s crucial. Typically, you will have many tools available, like Instant Messenger, Email, voice tools/phones, etc. It is essential to define which medium you want to use for “synchronous” or “asynchronous” communication.
- I often use voice tools/phones as “synchronous” tools in the sense that I usually (but not always) expect my peer to respond instantly or at least call me back after I pinged them.
- On the other hand, Emails are typically an asynchronous means of communication in that I do not always expect a quick response from the person I email.
- In my teams, I consider Instant Messengers to be somewhat in between.
The general rule of thumb is that whenever you want to contact someone, you should try to reach out via an asynchronous channel first (email or Instant Messaging) without expecting an immediate reply. We all know that software development requires a high level of concentration and attention to detail. Therefore, the less a developer is disturbed by random questions, the more productive they can be.
If you need a quick response, you can always “escalate” to more synchronous communication channels. But use that only for matters that are both truly important and very urgent.
Make your work visible
The fear: People are lazy; they don’t accomplish anything if not monitored.
Do you admit it? Or not? Yes, you thought that too, right? I want to debunk one of the biggest misconceptions in software development history.
If you are an employer, it is your responsibility to make people love their jobs! Someone who loves their job will be productive. It’s as simple as that.
But guess what, employees often wonder: Will my work be appreciated, or will “they” think I’m just slacking off?
There’s a simple solution for both sides: Make your work visible.
This should apply even to on-site teams, but even more so for remote ones: Document (and communicate) what you have done. Use a ticketing system like Jira or Trello, mention your work in team meetings/calls, and keep in touch with each other.
It not only shows what everyone is doing; it also helps distributed teams stay updated on the latest developments of your software or whatever product or project you are working on. Every team member, as well as your bosses, must have a chance to know what user stories you are working on, what features you implemented, and what to expect in the coming days.
Set goals!
Fear: I’m alone in a room; there’s so much work to do. I’m sure I’ll go crazy!
What seems like a big problem can be easily solved: Set yourself some goals. Weekly goals, daily goals, hourly goals, whatever suits you. You can plan your day much easier if you know in advance what you want to achieve. This way, you won’t get lost under a mountain of work.
Communicate your goals to your team. In most cases, you should have a daily stand-up call (even if you don’t do Scrum) to stay connected with your team. This is where you can share what you plan to do that day.
And you should strive to achieve your goals. It’s like a promise you make to your fellow team members and yourself.
That said: Don’t forget your work-life balance. If for any reason it’s not possible to meet your goal on time, you should, at some point, stand up and leave your desk.
Use the right tools
Welcome to the 21st century! Although it’s possible to write great software remotely even without modern communication tools (think of all those great open-source projects from the last century), they make our lives as remote workers much easier.
The most useful tools are:
- An instant messaging tool like Slack, MS-Teams, Skype, etc., ideally with call/voice functionality
- Project Management / Ticketing software like Jira or Trello
- Software for technical and organizational documentation. Ideally a Wiki (Confluence, MediaWiki, …)
- Software to share and manage files (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, …)
- Any other collaboration tool you’d like to try
Obviously, if you are a software developer, you need to work with a version control system. This is not optional, even for on-site teams.
Do you have any favorite tools/categories that are not listed above? Feel free to leave a comment below and share your thoughts!
Meet up occasionally
Working remotely is fun, but nothing beats going out for a beer or a strawberry milkshake (shoutout to Mr. Stoll). You should meet up with your team — ideally regularly. Depending on how distributed the team is and how easy it is to meet physically, it could be once a week, once a month, or once a year.
But these get-togethers create bonds. Just tell your boss you’d like to have a team-building event.
And you can enjoy a great dinner and drinks with nice people. And your boss pays. What could be better than that?
