Embracing Remote Work: Benefits, Challenges, and Effective Solutions for Software Engineers and Companies

Working remotely offers benefits for both companies and software engineers. According to readily available data on LinkedIn, approximately 50% of software jobs are on-site, 30% are hybrid, and 20% are fully remote. With a focus on software engineering teams, we have optimized specific tips since the start of our remote culture in 2016, aiming to benefit from remote work. While Elon Musk rightly suggests that remote work may not be ideal for highly complex projects like the Starship, where engineers practically “live in their offices”, from experience we can say that hiring remotely should be considered by looking at the benefits first, and working with the Cons later. Embracing a remote work culture has proven to be advantageous for companies, especially in markets where talent acquisition in specific areas may be limited. The greatest value of remote work lies in its ability to provide quick access to a wider talent pool, enabling faster hiring processes compared to the minimum 1-2 month timeline, and accelerating the translation of business requirements into code while minimizing latency.

Remote work can create barriers to effective communication and collaboration among team members.

Solutions:

1. Effective use of communication tools (e.g., video conferencing, project management software such as Jira, Google Docs, Notion, etc.).
2. Regular check-ins can help maintain clear and consistent communication. Establish dedicated communication channels for each topic where developers can engage with each other, ask questions, or browse code bases. The creation of specific tutorials for more junior members, like “how to run a docker image” is very helpful and time saving, more elaborated tutorials based on past challenges and complete documentation is a very smart step that requires time upfront, but decreases latency 10 times later.?
3. For optimal communication between software engineers, we suggest our developers leave audio messages on Slack, especially when working in different time zones.
4. A quick meeting can save hours of conversation, useless problem-solving, and billable hours. We have an important rule for all developers: if you can't solve a task within 30 mins, ask on the dedicated channel first or request a quick meeting from your PM and Tech Lead.
5. Weekly individual meetings (available upon request) with tech leads and PMs to solve persistent issues.
6. Team managers must keep an eye on developers' performance and struggles. These challenges must be reported during weekly meetings among all managers.

Work-Life Balance: Remote workers often struggle to maintain boundaries between work and personal life, leading to longer working hours and burnout.

Solutions:

1. Establish a clear work schedule and employ a flexible work model while monitoring performance.
2. Set boundaries. We ask our employees to track their work hours using time tracking tools, which is standard nowadays. We discourage overtime unless it is very critical. Detailed reports using TEMPO on Jira allow tech leads and project managers to identify not required overtime on each task, and we investigate the reasons for such situations, there is always something new to learn. If you use a reporting system that tracks the time on each task, your team and the whole organization will know what’s the real state of the project based on real data.?
3. Separate workspace from living space to help maintain a healthy work-life balance. We encourage our staff to create a dedicated workspace away from their daily lives. We also promote non-required office work (Hybrid) from time to time. Our employees mostly work from Warsaw, Tallinn, and Tbilisi, where the offices are available for their use.
4. Promote self-care practices to mitigate the risk of burnout. As a bonus, we provide gym and spa memberships to our team to boost their well-being.
5. Regularly seek advice from other companies to learn and implement new good practices.

Loneliness and Social Isolation: Remote workers may feel isolated and disconnected from their colleagues, impacting motivation and overall well-being.

Solutions:

1. Conduct regular virtual team meetings, including daily standups, sprint planning, sprint review, and grooming meetings for the professional side.
2. Create various informal chat channels for software engineers to facilitate communication on slack.
3. Promote virtual social events to foster a sense of belonging and combat loneliness. Encouraging virtual water cooler conversations and providing opportunities for virtual team-building activities promotes social connections. Coding challenges are a pure example.
4. Organize quarterly meetings in your offices where leaders pitch new ideas and projects to all the staff with the goal of enhancing purpose.

Technology and Connectivity Issues: Remote work relies heavily on technology, and technical difficulties can hinder productivity and communication.

Solutions:

1. Provide necessary technological resources and support, offer training on remote work tools, and have backup solutions in place to address technology-related challenges.?
2. Additionally, you can offer reimbursement for home internet expenses and provide employees with reliable hardware to improve connectivity.

Supervision and Performance Monitoring: Remote work can make it challenging for managers to supervise and assess employee performance accurately.

Solutions:

1. Set clear performance expectations and establish regular check-ins and feedback sessions.
2. As we mentioned before - utilize remote work monitoring tools like JIRA’s extension “TEMPO”, which tracks hours spent on each task, to help managers effectively monitor employee performance.
3. Focus on outcomes and results rather than micromanaging, promoting trust and autonomy.
4. Engage tech leads in monitoring the necessary learning areas for each employee. Conduct interviews with each employee to boost their learning and development. If an engineer decides to learn a new stack, allocate learning time and track the outcomes.
5. Understand the level of well-being for each employee. Tech leads, HR managers and PMs should always be engaged in understanding and measuring well-being during daily work. In the past, we have experienced situations where individuals worked on a project for over two years, doing the same tasks repeatedly. Therefore, a change is imperative to maintain purpose.

More important than remote work is the principle of the lean organization.

While it is common for organizations to hire the right people for new projects, with a focus on effective skills that can thrive in the market, it is crucial to avoid investing large budgets in unproven projects that may or may not offer actual usefulness on the market. Particularly in current times, the key suggestion is to adopt a lean approach and consider hiring remotely for experimental projects. By embracing a strong remote company culture while keeping the lean methodology in mind, you can save time, money, and enhance team engagement in learning, ultimately leading to valuable experiences. The biggest challenge in talent retention is exactly learning and development, in fact most employees leave their companies because of the lack of such incentive from the company’s side.?

Conclusions

In conclusion, remote work presents inherent challenges that require dedicated effort for efficient implementation. However, companies should prioritize the benefits it offers, with a primary focus on employee well-being. By prioritizing employee well-being, companies can achieve the desired benefits of remote work.

Access to a wider pools of talent

As mentioned previously, one of the significant advantages of remote work is the ability to access a broader talent pool. Organizations can seek talent from different countries while still providing comprehensive social security benefits and mitigating large budget commitments. As an IT company specializing in providing official employment for our clients-partners, we prioritize employee well-being by implementing each point expressed above. We offer a complimentary test case where we showcase profiles that align with your job description and technical requirements. You have the opportunity to assess their skills at no cost, and based on the results, you can make a decision to hire your new team member within a week. We handle payroll, provide learning materials, manage HR, and contribute to the development of your remote work culture. if you are interested to see how we do it, ask us for a test case here:?

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