Remote work tools, or the sofa toolkit

EN

In these turbulent times, the question of remote work is becoming more and more relevant. We practised this way of working long before the pandemic, so we have gained some experience both with the tools and with how to use them. Hoping our experience may be useful to someone, I decided to share my thoughts on why remote work is a challenge for many teams, what you can do to make working remotely easier, and which tools we use.

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Why remote work doesn't work

1. No dedicated workspace: It is very important to set up a workspace where you are disturbed as little as possible. This is the foundation: without a place of your own to work, no tool will help. A workspace gives you the feeling that right now you are at work, not just relaxing on the sofa.

2. Company culture is so geared toward working in the office that managers cannot stop constantly micromanaging their people. That approach does not suit remote work. The kind of synchronous communication that is so familiar in an office will not work remotely. When working remotely, most communication should be asynchronous, because each of us works to our own rhythm and our own schedule.

3. Lack of trust: The part of work culture we now need to cultivate is trust: trust that colleagues and employees will complete their tasks, and do them conscientiously, without constant supervision.

4. Unsuitable work organization tools: they are not accessible outside the office and are not well integrated into everyday work processes. For example, if the team has no suitable tool for meeting notes, everyone will keep them wherever they happen to. Or there is a tool, but not everyone knows how to use it, or there is no shared view of how it should be done. The result is fragmented information, misunderstandings and, in the end, chaos.

5. Relationships: Changing work culture is much harder than changing work organization tools. Mutual trust and respect can be encouraged in different ways. One of them is agreeing on rules, for example that meetings start at a set time and always end on time. If someone is late or breaks these rules, they get a small penalty – in our company that is 5 push-ups or 5 squats. It's nothing nasty, more a small, motivating nudge to help everyone follow the rules. Gradually this builds trust that everything will start on time, and so on. Especially right now, it is also wise to arm yourself with patience: until we get used to the new reality, there will be times when something is misunderstood, left undone or delayed.

Tools for the company

Resources

Time is one of our most valuable resources, so I want to share both how we can organize our personal time and how to manage time better across the company.

For managing your personal time, I would definitely recommend starting to plan your own time, especially when working remotely. It is very easy to burn out from overworking, and without a structured daily plan that happens all too easily. It is just as easy to fall into the opposite ditch – working too little and ending up with too much left undone. That, too, can lead to stress and burnout.

Every employee, and every manager, needs to make sure that everyone understands that time must be planned and that there has to be some kind of routine: when you start and finish work, when and how often you take breaks, and so on. It is also important to make sure there is time set aside for physical or mental activities in between.

To structure my time, I recommend the Pomodoro Technique, which you can read about here.

I would also recommend keeping your own personal time log: how much time you have spent on each activity. I use a tool called https://toggl.com/, which helps me measure how long an activity takes: I press play and type in the name of the activity. It's useful because at the end of the day or week I don't have to try to remember how much time I spent on each activity. Other options are Harvest https://www.getharvest.com/ or, often, the systems you already use. For example, you can log time both in Standard ERP by HansaWorld, which we use (https://www.hansaworld.com/lv/products/standard-erp), and in Jira (https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira).

I can also recommend a “getting things done” app called Things https://apps.apple.com/us/app/things-3/id904237743, which has radically changed my productivity. It helps me not forget things and get them done sooner or later.

In a company, it is important to introduce a shared calendar, whether in your ERP system, Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar (https://calendar.google.com/calendar/r). Any shared calendar will do – the main thing is that you can see when a colleague is available, when they have personal time, when you can schedule a call and so on. A shared calendar removes the need to keep asking “when are you free?”, which matters a lot for managing time across the company.

Communication

For smooth team communication, I would recommend Slack (https://slack.com/intl/en-lv/) or, if you already subscribe to Office 365, Microsoft Teams (https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software).

I should point out, though, that writing is a fairly inefficient way to pass information to another person. It is an efficient way to store information, but speaking is 6x faster than writing, and talking avoids the misunderstandings that can creep into written messages.

Call, agree on a time to talk and have your screen share ready – communication will be much simpler.

Three different kinds of calling tools:

  • Slack, Teams and Skype are handy for a quick synchronous call with someone to show them the issue on screen. You were chatting and realised it wasn't working – so you agree to hop on a call.
  • If the conversation is scheduled in advance and several people take part, a good choice is Zoom (https://zoom.us/), GoToMeeting (https://www.gotomeeting.com/en-ie) or any other webinar technology.
  • If the communication is asynchronous, tools like Loom https://www.loom.com/ are a better fit: Loom lets you record what's on your screen together with your face and voice, and the recipient can watch the video whenever it suits them.

Content

Working remotely almost guarantees misunderstandings. You can reduce them by making information accessible and centralized. It is important to define that each type of information lives in one specific tool. That applies to meeting notes, decisions made, documents written together and any other kind of information.

For most of our internal content – documents, instructions, decisions, meeting notes – we use Confluence (https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence). If you use Office 365, SharePoint https://products.office.com/en-us/sharepoint/collaboration could be an option. There are many other intranet and wiki apps too, but what matters is that the tool is accessible from anywhere to all employees – and possibly to customers as well. It helps us a lot that we can write a specification for a solution, or instructions on how to use something, and send the customer a link to the document. If the customer doesn't understand something or the instructions need to be expanded, we update them, and all the customer has to do is reload the page to see the latest version.

It is very important that everyone in the company shares the same understanding of where each type of information “lives”, so I suggest agreeing with the whole team where each type of content is stored and maintained. Internal wikis like this are also great for documenting internal company procedures, so everyone knows how things should be done, where content should be saved, what to do in a crisis, and so on.

Some content is better stored together with the task or deal it relates to. For example, we use Jira to keep the solutions to specific tasks, because they need to be understood in the context of the problem. We use Standard ERP for notes on specific quotes, invoices or customers.

Tasks

Tasks vary a lot, but in my view every task has three important things.

1. Status – does the task have just one stage to get it done, or is it a multi-step process that could have, say, 10 possible statuses? It is very important to know which stage a task is in so you can properly follow its progress.

2. Owner – every task needs a clearly assigned owner, because if no one is responsible, most likely no one will do it.

3. Volume – an overview of how many tasks there are, how long they take and, accordingly, how much work is still left.

Working together

If you have a lot of tasks to manage, I would recommend using one of the Agile methods, such as Kanban (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_(development)), Lean (https://blog.kainexus.com/the-fundamentals-of-the-lean-methodology) or a similar methodology that gives you a framework and helps you work out how to tackle them.

In a company, it is important for everyone to sync up regularly, for example in a morning stand-up meeting where you find out what everyone has done and plans to do. In remote work this becomes even more important, because more of the work happens asynchronously. If you have a tool where all tasks are collected in order of priority, employees will find it easier to understand what they need to do and what their colleagues are doing, and syncing up becomes much easier.

Recommended task management tools:

Analytics

Each of these tools generates a lot of valuable information. Put it to work for you. I mainly use it for three purposes:

1. Monitoring the day-to-day operational situation

2. Setting shared, transparent, measurable and trackable goals

3. Answering questions that come up in everyday decision-making

There are several ways to bring all this information together for analysis. Probably 90% of companies use Excel, but most often that is a fiddly, manual process where it is very easy to make mistakes and you have to repeat the same steps again and again. When working remotely, the risk of errors grows because information is harder to reach and miscommunication is more likely.

That's why it's worth looking at a more robust and automated solution. That could be SQL, connecting directly to the database with a reporting tool – or even with Excel itself. But a better option is business intelligence tools. If you are a heavy user of Microsoft tools, PowerBI (https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/) could be a good fit. We prefer the Latvian-made flex.bi (https://flex.bi/), which lets us combine data from all the tools we use – Jira, Confluence, Standard ERP and others – in one place. It lets us automate data loading, makes defining reports easier, gives us control over data access and, most importantly, means we do all this once in one system instead of trying to build reports in each tool separately.

As a result, monitoring a great many processes takes seconds: I open the relevant dashboard and see whether everything is fine or something needs attention. There I can also create a team goals dashboard so everyone can see it and work towards the goals we have set.

I can also quickly get answers to questions as soon as they come up, for example:

1. Which products should I order with the remaining budget?

2. How long will our current workload last?

3. How does one customer compare with the others?

Team

To keep the team spirit alive, it's important to think about spending time together virtually – Friday morning breakfasts, online games or any other time together that isn't directly about work.

Tools like Zoom or Slack work well for this – Slack has a great giphy integration (https://giphy.com/) for a bit of fun. You can even set up a special channel just for jokes.

When working remotely, there's often no chance – or we simply forget – to say thank you when someone has done something good. In the office we can say thanks out loud or show our appreciation in other ways, but when we're remote and working different hours, it's very easy to forget. That's why we created Good job Pal (https://goodjobpal.com/), which lets you say thank you in any of the tools we use.

Conclusion

  • Look at the positive side of this crisis – working from home will give us more freedom, and work will become more flexible and focused on results rather than on activity for its own sake.
  • A crisis shows the level of mutual trust. If you need help, lean on your good relationships with employees, customers and partners – and remember that now is a good time to make those relationships even stronger.
  • You now have time to introduce new systems and processes, and suppliers have time too, so look for mutually beneficial deals – discounts, instalment plans and other arrangements.
  • Evaluate “crisis offers” carefully. Think long term, so that three months from now you don't have to introduce something new again because the crisis-time “free” has turned into “can't afford it”.
  • Prepare for the time when things return to normal, because sooner or later they will.
  • And finally – do all those things you've been putting off for ages and never had time for. If not now, when?