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Remote Work Tips for Teams

Laurie on March 09, 2020

Originally posted on laurieontech.com As you've probably seen, a lot of companies are moving towards remote work in the midst of coronavirus. Ther...
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Frank Szendzielarz

Great to encourage remote dev. For me the whole idea of working in offices at fixed hours and daily commutes is bizarre.

On the video calls I would say that this superfluous and most teams I work in rarely use it. Basically it is all IM until a conf call speeds things up.

One thing to avoid is trying to transplant the office culture of pointless meetings, chit chat and "face time" into remote working. This is an opportunity to change the work ethos as well as the workplace.

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Laurie

For some people yes, but for others no. It depends entirely on what type of collaboration makes your work more effective!

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Olivier Chauvin

Wonderful tips, Laurie!
Working remotely has its pros and cons.
You can have more time for yourself, enjoy the flexibility, and wear whatever you want. But you may also feel quite lonely and lack motivation.
One of the biggest problems is that it is hard finding the best remote work tools for your work. It it also better if the tools have integrations with each other.
My team ended up using Quire for task management, and Slack for communication. We also use Zoom for video meetings.

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zoebourque

I'm also a Quire user! I agree finding the right project management tool is very hard. My team is divided into two different countries and we were struggling with communication, schedule, and trust issues. But after we finally build trust, work on our roles, and use a comprehensive tool, we are on track and unstoppable! One of the best tips to boost remote team productivity was having a 1:1 review session with my team member to encourage strong bonds among team members and provide support as needed.

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Dan Silcox

Great set of tips :)

Remote work can feel isolating to a lot of people! You're used to spending some of your day catching up and making jokes and walking about. You should still do that, but doing it alone isn't quite the same.

Yes! Do this - in fact, my team (distributed across 2 countries and often with many people working from home anyway) have 2 "private" channels for our team - the "work" one and the "cat pics" one (which of course has way more than just cat pics - it's really just the fun one!) - a great way to build the team morale and break down barriers that can naturally start to occur when remote teams only ever talk work - when things feel almost "transactional" it is terrible for morale and (ironically) gets in the way of good teamwork.

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Laurie

Love that! We have random-pets haha. Same idea but my dog is allowed :)

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Dan Silcox

Haha yes I'm all for pet diversity ;)

Pet diversity

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YuanHao Chiang • Edited

Being a remote team I'm surprised I never even thought of finding a plugin such as Live Share -- we were mostly using screen sharing. Looks amazing, I will give it a try.

The part I like the most is how your remote colleages should be your friends too and actually many of our meetings are just to catch up on life. Remove can quickly become very isolating indeed.

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Robert Marshall

It is brilliant. Far quicker that screen sharing. Allows people to dive right into the code.

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dennisma

Years ago (as in 2000) I worked on the other side of the country from my team. It was a disaster because I'd miss out on so much information that they did not feel inclined to share. Remoting was a real hardship.

However, now the tech is better and the people are more tech-savvy and I find it preferable to being in the office.

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panthablack

Thanks for the article!

...you're going to have to do this intentionally or it won't happen.

I think that sometimes this happens more naturally depending on the group dynamic and how used to flowing in and out of the 'acoustic' and 'digital' worlds everyone is, e.g., between the 'audible' convo in the room and what's happening in the slack channel.

If the remote tech tools are a part of the everyday communication when in the office, like some people conferencing in for a standup, or the conversation moving from chatting with fingers to chatting with mouths, fluently, then I think the move to remote feels more natural. This is my recent experience, anyway! :)

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panthablack

P.S. Cool tip about Live Share for VS Code!

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Philippe Bourgau

I love your mention of tools, especially IDE and pair plugins like VS Live Share.

Regarding remote pairing and mobbing, we found out at work that using a continuous git-pull-push-loop enables everyone to work from his own environment, with almost no extra setup. I wrote a full blog post about the Best open source tools for remote pair programming

Thanks a lot for your post

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Julia Moskaliuk

Great tips, thank you, Laurie. In our team we used to track our hours with time recording systems which can be easily integrated with other software. We chose TMetric for this year. tmetric.com/

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Julia Moskaliuk

Hello, Laurie! Great tips. I'd like also to add an article which tells about remote work trends and tips for ideally balancing. I'm sure, you'll find interesting information there - blog.tmetric.com/remote-jobs-3-tre...

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tohqjvit

Awesome article, help me how to remote work!