Nailing remote-first culture

It's needless to say that the world of tech has become accustomed to the regime of remote work, especially over the past 2 years. With so many inspiring tech businesses from basement start-ups to huge multinational corporations, nailing the decentralized workforce culture - there are so many resources out there to make remote working the norm.

Remote-first is an amazing business model from a growth perspective. Firstly it depreciates the cost of physical office space, needless (and pricey!) commutes and most importantly of all it allows companies to attract great talent for their businesses from a much wider talent pool.

In this brief article, we'll explore:

• Values that will help to increase the productivity of your remote workforce
• Best practices/tools to encourage inclusivity amongst remote teams
• Methods that can help to retain your people
• Ways to build a strong remote-first culture

People in tech want remote work.

Allowing employees to work remotely means adopting the right mindset and organizational structure to do so. Successful remote tech teams demonstrate that effective communication is the substance behind building a great remote team. The right tools can be a huge aid. Think collaborating on projects, reaching out for support, virtual breaks, sharing memes, and everyday business updates.

Communication channels like Slack, Asana, MS Teams & Cloud tech dictate that work habits and productivity can now be measured by output, not time spent - the things that really matter.

Check out the top 31 remote work tools in 2022

Affinity - "A natural liking for and understanding of someone or something."

Affinity is a working value that you should encourage your employees to embody. Welcome the creativity from the members of your distributed team. This will ensure that people speak up on matters whenever they need to and bring new ideas to the table. Even if their ideas might not be perfect or even feasible - promoting open communication allows for employees to learn from the good & bad, something that is difficult when working alone in a home office. This will also have a huge influence on successful projects too.

This kind of mindset can hugely contribute to your staff's hierarchy of needs, keeping them content in their role and ultimately prompting employee retainment.

• Encourage employees to have open discussions on what they are working on.
• Ensure that senior members of your team will pick the brains of those more junior, regularly.
• Employees should feel at ease with sharing their ideas openly, on a regular basis.

Blue Skies Thinking

This is a great way to increase the innovative output of your tech team. On a frequent basis, set time aside for blank sessions. Encourage teammates, junior to C-level to engage with one another to throw around some loose ideas.

Spontaneous brainstorming can be the force that powers new ideas and developments amongst tech teams. It allows for people in the team to feel like they are adding value creatively, to understand how others work, and to even unwind from some of the usual repetitive daily tasks.

I've seen some of the most inspirational tech businesses out there take up a similar approach, it can influence a huge increase in morale amongst a team.

• Try setting aside 20-minute sessions on a bi-weekly basis, where employees can freely throw ideas around & have discussions based on them.

The role of a senior

Senior-level developers and product people have much more experience with your company’s product and work structure.

By getting them to support and partake in the day-to-day work of the junior members of the team, you can ensure a huge increase in productivity. Junior members of the team can reap more of the benefits, working one-to-one with their superiors to effectively learn and develop the right skills needed to succeed.

This isn't so much about micromanaging or even about maintaining the level of hierarchy. This is up to you & what works best for your business. What's needed is to ensure that your junior staff knows what they are doing and feel at ease when requesting support on even the smallest of matters.

• Try to provoke an ownership mindset amongst the senior members of the team.
• Conduct weekly sparring sessions amongst senior and junior employees.
• Encourage seniors to share their previous experiences, good & bad.
• Regularly track & log where junior team members feel like they are excelling & areas where they could use some more help on.

Feedback

Think about employee self-actualization - ensure your employees feel as though their voices are heard.

A lot of businesses struggle with this and it's especially difficult to achieve in a remote working environment.

Your employees aren't sitting next to you anymore. This has changed the way that some of the best and most influential technical leaders work with their teams. So much as a weekly 15-minute schedule to touch base with members of the team to talk through the good and bad can really help them to feel as though they are firstly contributors but most importantly that they understand the path ahead of them.

Your culture will improve exponentially when people feel like they matter and that they belong to the business.

• Feedback should be at the forefront of your core values.
• Pair team leaders with their delegates regularly in pre-empted schedules, to openly talk about progression and areas that they might need some more support on.

Less standups - more action.

Whilst a lack of standups/team meetings can also be a huge problem in itself, striking a sweet balance is key.

There are businesses out there that practice 60% meetings and 40% hands-on work. If this is the case for you, you might be seeing issues that are likely a result of spreading individuals (Leads, PMs) across multiple Scrum Teams - and whilst this is not a direct result of Scrum in itself, It's a difficult constraint to manage when single-threading individuals across multiple teams.

On another note - the best meetings are focused around either sharing information, decision making, or prompting synergy amongst the workforce. Trying to do all three at the same time ends up having too many strings, pulling in too many directions.

But it's only a 10-15 minute standup, are we really wasting that much time here? A study from the University of California revealed that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the tasks at hand after a standup meeting.

Simply put, the time someone from your team needs to recover from a stand-up is likely longer than the stand-up meeting itself. That’s 23+ minutes taken from each of your team members each time. So if you have 10 team members, that’s collectively 4 hours wasted. Is the cost of the interruption worth it?

What can we do instead? Well, status updates can be highly effective to ensure everyone on the team is on the same page. They don’t need to happen during a daily stand-up.

Instead, people can set aside a few minutes to write a few bullet points on what they've been working on, what they plan to work on, and any issues that they face AND this can be done in their own time - it doesn’t interrupt their workflow.

GitLab

Looking for an example of an exceptional remote tech business? Look no further than GitLab.

• They are handbook-first. They have an employee handbook that allows them to collaborate, onboard new people, and think collectively.
• They are family-first. Remote work doesn't replace the need to take time off of work and when family-related conflicts arise. They will give employees ease of mind to take time away when needed. Check out how time off works at GitLab.
• They dedicate time for health & fitness. Encouraging employees to step away from the computer and stretch every hour. They believe it's important to be intentional about modeling self-care and overall wellness habits, encouraging employees to for a walk or do a short exercise for at least 15 minutes a day.
• They believe that asynchronous work is the future of remote workflows.

There's much more to add on the topic of building an effective distributed workforce in the tech space, of course. Perhaps there are some points mentioned that might make you approach things in a different way.

I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences on how remote working has impacted your business and how the future of the working environment may look for you!

Over & out.

- Pierce Johnston

#Remote #RemoteWork #WorkFromHome #DistributedTeams