How To Work From Home Productively in a Time of Social Distancing

Our regular company policy includes the ability to work from home, and most of the individuals and teams have the experience working remotely, and the switch to remote work of the whole team went well. So, we are doing the same job using the same online tools that we were used to before the pandemic. Thus the changes didn’t significantly affect our timelines, deadlines, and effectiveness. That’s why we would like to share with you how we work in quarantine and what we’ve done to continue to do this effectively. 

What about you? How do you educate and work remotely? Please share your experience by taking part in the quick 3-minutes survey below: 

Be Like a Raccoon: The Experience of RG Team

In spite of the Covid-19, we don’t feel strong changes, we’ve just begun to work from home more often. WFH experience was the part of our corporate culture before and our friendly team of raccoons continues working in a safe and comfortable way. 

We’ve joined WHO recommendations of staying at home to stop pandemic:

• We’ve temporarily closed our office for quarantine – all the team members of all the departments work from home now 

• We’ve provided everybody with the office furniture and electronic devices if there was a need

As it has been said, we are used to working from home as it is a part of our corporate culture and we have remote work experience since 2015.

So we decided that it would be useful to share with you our work-from-home habits.

How To Be Like a Raccoon While Working and Studying From Home

Virtual Presence

• Define core hours for your team – the fix hours when the whole team is available online 

• Agree on sending emails to all the team instead of personal email correspondence

• Communicate in the general channels of the messenger, but not in private ones 

• Upload your real photos in the Messengers and Task Trackers

• All calls should be conducted with the camera switched on and the colleagues dressed accordingly, at least their upper part of the body

Emotional Connection

• Even a virtual team requires someone who will play the Scrum Master’s role

• Provide more RealTime feedbacks

• Emotional Check In and Check Out on the Meetings

• Don’t forget about humour, jokes, funny memes

• Propose to create a virtual “coffee-break room” where colleagues can discuss common topics

• Online team buildings where you can play games or chat (for example, we have an “Online Raccoon Pub on Fridays” when everyone prepares cocktails at home or opens a bottle of beer and communicates online with the camera switched on, someone shows their pets, etc.)

Self-discipline and Rules

• Pomodoro Technique

• Do not shift deadlines and milestones in order to not generate the feeling that everyone can relax

• Limit the number of communication channels

• Mute the messengers and set up the "control-points timer" for checking messages during the day

• Think about “Plan B” in case the Internet is over at home 

• Time Tracking should be held as usual 

• Get some tips about remote teams from such world-famous companies as Hubstaff, Stack Overflow, GitLab and Trello

• Create chats for solving separate problems, not related to a certain project, like “DevOps”, “Cloud”, “Admins”, “Support”, etc.

• At RG, we have the following rule: a raccoon should warn others that he will be unavailable for an hour or so, thus nobody worries and just wait when he returns

• We also have a Secretary – a person who scribes a protocol of the meetings

• Everyone should write their own “To-Do List” (a checklist) for a day and follow it on one’s own without any micromanagement from aside

Toolset

• In addition to a regular Macbook Pro, we allowed our gangsters to take home a monitor (or two), a chair and a working table from the office

• #Accounting Slack Channel where we inform all raccoons about Sick Days, Day Offs and Vacations

• Google Calendar for the meetings (btw, check this cute example of what we’ve developed for raccoons onboarding process – learning and gamification in one)

• Daily Syncs are conducted in Google Meet with screen sharing

• Quick web calls are conducted in Slack with screen sharing which allows highlighting the places on the screen with a virtual pencil

• For gamification we use Kahoot

• For retrospectives we use Funretro

Fun/Positivity

• Online board games where you can play with the teams 

• Tech Talks and Seminars online

• The #rg_wfh_challenge, where everybody should make a picture of home working place.

By the way, you can join our challenge on Facebook and Twitter or Instagram 😉