Remote work best practices, part 1: Communicate
/
We have capital-O Opinions about remote work. As a remote organization since inception, we've had over two decades to find the fatal flaw in the distributed approach to knowledge work. There isn't one. Which isn't to say that success is guaranteed to all who go remote. But when remote work fails, the failure is likely one of culture, context, or operator error. Teams that want to get the most out of distributed working would do well to accept without fuss the fundamental differences between office life and home office life and leverage those differences for organizational betterment. To that end, we offer our time- and battle-tested remote work best practices in this three-part series.
Best practices for remote teams
The practices that have proven crucial to our remote success are the same ones we see other successfully-remote companies herald:
Communicate. Do it asynchronously by default and always in context.
Collaborate. Work with others without interrupting them. Use tools that make work visible.
Congregate. Meet sometimes, and make that time count.
We’ll start with communications best practices. (We suggest you start there too.)
Communicate asynchronously by default
Nearly every anti-remote work rant we've read lately unknowingly exposes its grievances for what they really are: failures to accomplish what should never have been the goal—recreating the synchronous office, only with everyone in different places. Consider Zoom fatigue. Friends, that's not a byproduct of remote work; it's a natural consequence of trying to force synchronous communication into a framework better suited to asynchronous communication. You don't need videoconferencing. "But we need to work together!" Then work together. Asynchronously. Learn to think, communicate, and execute tasks with your mouth shut. And for the love of all that is holy, stop scheduling meetings just to give people feedback on their work. On those occasions when a real-time discussion is genuinely more efficient, hop on a voice call and leave video—and the exhaustion it engenders—out of it.
But back to our assertion that recreating the synchronous office remotely shouldn't be the goal... why shouldn't it? In a word, productivity.
We need our teams reasonably productive in order to achieve business initiatives and maintain profitability. That's a given. What's less obvious:
Distributed workforces (the ones that function asynchronously, that is) are uniquely positioned to leverage productivity-enhancing conditions that simply aren't available to co-located teams, e.g., the freedom to work when and where you can deliver your best, fewer interruptions, a reduced performative burden—no need to put on a fashion show or modulate your facial expressions, etc.
Forcing synchronicity on remote teams squanders those productivity-enhancing conditions and introduces a further burden: You must turn your home into an annex of the corporate campus, which is not only unfair, it's also deleterious. Where can you go to relax now? When can you 'turn off'?
Asynchronous communication allows remote teams to pursue the balance and focused work necessary to deliver their best. It communicates respect for other people's time. More importantly, it allows teams to deliberately use their time. Effectively. Judiciously. Not fielding ill-timed interruptions that could just as easily have been emails.
Some tips for transitioning to async as your default way of communicating:
Write well
Superlative written communication is one of the most valuable skills your remote team can cultivate. (We're not talking about artistic expression here; we're talking about clarity.) Why is it so important?
Poorly written communication wastes time. And not in a good, 'time you enjoy wasting isn't wasted time' way. Bad writers create confusion for their colleagues, derail otherwise fruitful collaboration, and communicate (albeit unintentionally) disrespect for others' time and attention. These are folks who do not edit, who write whatever thoughts come to mind in whatever manner and order in which they occur, never stopping to consider the decoding effort it will require of their audience to extract meaning from the mess. Do not hire them. The biggest risk isn't that they'll waste their own time, but that they'll waste everyone else's with endless, confusing back-and-forth email or chat exchanges that could—in the hands of a better writer—be significantly truncated (or in any case more valuable) with concise, clear, structured thought.
Written communication is easier to share. Unless you record all your real-time discussions, you can't very well pass them along to team members who weren't present without playing a game of telephone. Even so, written communication that's garbled and difficult to understand is, as previously mentioned, frustrating and inefficient. Don't waste the silo-busting benefits of written communication by accepting subpar writing.
Good writers care about how they communicate. Written communication is a skill. As such, it requires effort to develop and improve. People who are willing to put in that effort see the value of communication and are more likely than those who don't to consider questions like, 'Is this the best channel for my message?' and to try new ways of thinking about communicating, e.g., instead of asking yourself which teammates need to see your message, ask yourself which teammates, if any, shouldn't see your message, and choose your channel accordingly. In other words, a team of good writers is a team that's consistently getting better at working together.
If you're embracing async—and again, you should—you need your team to write well. That means everybody. Otherwise, you'll become so frustrated and inefficient that you'll start relying more and more on real-time meetings to get things done. Which is arguably not best practice even in a collocated office, but it definitely isn't when working remotely.
Plan ahead
Forget ASAP. From now on, urgency is reserved for truly urgent situations, which, with proper planning, should be few and far between. Perhaps your biggest hurdle here will be finding the willingness to invest time on planning. We get it. We want to “just do it” too. Resist the urge. Plan. Everyone on the team should make time to plan daily.
To illustrate why planning ahead—both long- and short-term—is so important, here’s an excerpt from our time management eBook, 6 Things Effective Time Managers Do Differently:
Imagine you’ve decided to take a road trip across Canada from Vancouver to Montreal. You do your research, plan your itinerary, and set out in your camper van with your dog and a carefully curated playlist. At your first overnight stop, you find the campground unexpectedly full and spend two hours searching for an alternate site before giving up and pressing on to your next stop six hours down the road. You could use an extra day of rest and sightseeing after that marathon drive, but you have an itinerary to keep. You’re behind the wheel again at the appointed hour, only to lose time to road construction halfway to your next stop. On and on it goes. By the time you hit rush hour in Montreal, you’re exhausted, twelve hours behind schedule, and no longer interested in exploring the city. You turn around at your first opportunity and head home early. You need a few days to recover from this ‘vacation’ before going back to work.
This is exactly how so many professionals approach work—crafting a beautiful grand plan and then calling the planning done. When executing the plan proves more difficult and time consuming than anticipated, struggling time managers assume they didn’t prepare thoroughly enough. Or they blame outside forces, unaware that the real culprit is their own misprioritization.
Let’s re-imagine that cross country trip….
You’ve got your itinerary, but instead of enshrining it on your dashboard, you treat it like a sketch and redraw the picture bit by bit each night as you plan the next day. That’s how you discover that a major sports tournament in Kamloops, B.C. has drawn spectators from across the province who’ve filled up all the campsites in the area. You reroute and replace the hike you’d planned in Kamloops with a visit to a dog friendly winery in Kelowna, camping there overnight instead.
You avoid road construction the same way, and when you eventually arrive in Montreal, it’s midmorning—the traffic is still intense compared to the rural stretches of your trip, but it’s not rush hour. Besides which, you’re well rested and ahead of schedule, ready to enjoy your visit.
The difference is not a better plan; it’s continual planning.
Though collocated teams would no doubt benefit from continual planning too, it’s a game-changer for remote teams because it tends to prevent urgent situations from arising and demanding real-time discussion in the first place.
Communicate in context
When a team’s communication is randomly dispersed throughout email, chat messages, and phone calls, it’s A) hard to find and B) not widely accessible. This is not an efficient way to communicate even in collocated offices, but it’s a surefire way to fail utterly at working remotely. Remote teams that habitually communicate out of context are slow, siloed, and often frustrated.
Instead of hobbling yourselves, think about where you communicate as much as what you communicate. For example, communications about a document or pull request are best shared within said document or pull request. Communications about specific projects or tasks are best delivered within the project or task write-up, which should be housed in the responsible department’s project management software. By keeping all notes, discussions, and records tied to their original source material, your team will save time, reduce duplicative effort, and overall be better positioned to collaborate.
It perhaps goes without saying that in order to communicate in context, you have to have context. Organizing and centralizing work by department, project, client, or other categories will take thought and effort. It may also require investment in tools you aren’t currently using, e.g., project management software or chat apps. This is a best practice that teams brand new to remote work may find confusing or consider a waste of resources; it’s so contrary to the way they’re used to working. If that’s you, drop us a line before writing this one off. (We don’t sell project management software, chat apps, or other products designed to keep your communication in context. We’re just passionate about remote work and are eager to help other firms reap the rewards of this way of working.)
Communicate to collaborate
Asynchronous, in-context communication paves the way for remote collaboration. If you insist on trying to be a synchronous remote team and/or you allow yourselves to communicate out of context on a regular basis, you will struggle to collaborate, if for no other reason than you all end up with nasty cases of burnout. Working from home offices is fundamentally different from working in corporate offices where proximity shapes communications practices. To ignore that is to place unnecessary obstacles in your remote team’s path and ensure your organization’s experience with remote work is harder than it has to be.
Do yourselves a favor: Learn to communicate differently.
Part 2 | Part 3 | Photo by Kyle Glenn
If you have a harder time getting things done at home than you do in an office because you feel less accountable working from home, this post is for you. Short version: accountability has nothing to do with where you get your work done, and it’s more discipline—not more accountability—that can help.