Making Remote Work

Remote work was a fringe benefit offered at very few companies before the pandemic, and then during the pandemic companies had really no choice. Post pandemic, the return to the office movement has met with a harsh reality - people LIKE working from home! Here's a reality check learned by every product manager that's ever launched a product or service. Convenience sells. Once people have a taste of it, there's no going back. So this week we'll look at what it takes to make remote jobs work particularly as it relates to game development.

Positive Impacts

Sure, employees like the convenience of zero-commute and having lunch in their own kitchen, but let's start by discussing the positive impacts of remote work from an employer standpoint.

Wider Talent Pool This is probably the biggest positive impact. When you don't have to relocate someone to your city, you open up the talent pool to the whole country. It's made recruiting top talent so much easier. While this does present a challenge for payroll given that tax-withholding has to be set up for each state, it can be overcome. The freedom to live where you want is also a huge perk!

Solid Revenue Very few video game companies can unequivocally state that their revenue sank during the pandemic. In fact, retail data shows a huge surge of video game sales. Jobs reports show huge growth in tech and video game sector jobs. Game companies did very well while their employees were remote. Now this may be more due to the fact that their customers also stayed home and on their devices, but clearly remote work wasn't hurting the bottom line.

Higher Retention Employees are happier when working from home. They also no longer have to leave their job if they have to move. Remote work means less turnover which can save companies and teams the burden of having to backfill.

Lower Costs The overhead of rent, phones, supplies, furniture, security and utility bills go down when there are no offices. During the pandemic, travel expenses also fell to near zero as conferences and sales meetings were canceled or went online. Post-pandemic they haven't exactly bounced back as companies have rightly re-evaluated the justification for travel. Relocation and recruiting costs also go down when you don't have to fly people in nor move them.

Higher Productivity Anecdotal evidence suggests many employees were MORE productive while working from home. This will clearly vary by the job and the individual, but you can't argue with the fact that zero-commute means less pressure on an individual to leave work for lunch or early to avoid traffic. So more time in their day can be committed to work.

Negative Impacts

So why the push to return to the office? This is largely driven by emotions and gut instinct.

Perception of Progress From an employer there is this assumption that people do not work hard if they are not being watched. This treats employees like milk cows who don't produce milk when they are out on the range but only in their stalls. Of course the cows produce milk all the time, but it's just not collected until the farmer pens them in. It's this sort of completion ritual that employers miss. If they don't see you turn your work in every day, they're unhappy.

This perception problem is what game companies have always struggled with. You could put in 10 to 12 hour days after rolling in sometime before 11AM, but unless someone notices your repo check-ins after midnight, your boss who works 8AM to 6PM might not know how much or late you actually work (true story!). This false perception of effort only grows worse with remote work.

Lack of Human Connection This is probably the biggest negative impact from an employee standpoint. People miss the camaraderie and often the social perks of office life like the team lunches, holiday events, swag-filled launch parties, the foosball tables and pickle-ball courts. Remote work will also eliminate the office romance where most people meet their future spouse.

Slowed Communication It's a fair statement that when people get blocked and need input from a fellow employee to clear it, they can lose focus and just simply leave it to the next opportunity to speak with them. In an office they might normally step down the hall or call out over a cube wall and get their questions answered and problem solved, but now they have to text or e-mail someone and that person might not respond for hours or days.

Wasted Efforts This lack of proximity also impacts the opportunities for peer, mentor and manager review of work in progress and course corrections on mistakes. The old practices of a walk-around manager with an open-door policy are completely curtailed in a remote work setting.

Lack of Structure While this is mostly perception, there is something to be said about the spatial awareness of departments and delineated offices that helps people understand their roles in the organization and who and physically where to go to when something needs doing that's out of the ordinary. If all you see is your boss, your reports, and immediate peers on team calls, it is harder to understand and build relationships with the rest of the organization.

Work at All Hours When going to work means sitting down at your computer or picking up your tablet, it's really easy to fall into a rhythm where you work around the clock. This may be considered a positive by employers, but it can also burn people out and remove the boundaries between work and home life.

Misconceptions about People

Sometimes people don't work out. Mostly they do. Working remotely has little to do with their success or failure but unfortunately employers haven't figured these key points out.

Laziness is Ubiquitous Being at the desk and arriving at work on time doesn't make a lazy person productive. There's that first morning coffee conversation, then the messenger and e-mails to digest followed by a little browsing to check the social feed, and then maybe a little work done before the topic of lunch comes up. How different will that be from them working at home? Whatever the location, they will not get their work done and eventually that will show.

Not All Hours are Productive The 8 hour work day is a myth. Studies have shown that American office workers are good for about 6 hours of work a day, leaving those 2 hours for meetings, mental breaks, long lunches and distractions. Crunch them a little, and you may get a burst of 8 to 12 hours a day, but after a week or so of that, people will find a way to reclaim their time. Their 10 hours will eventually produce about the same 6 hours of work per day they used to do before crunching, except maybe with more bugs and frustration. Butts in seats doesn't make people work harder. They may get praised for being there at all hours, but for all you know they could be running a D&D campaign from their desk. (True story!)

Making Remote Work

To make remote work, the negative impacts have to be addressed with some simple rules and steps.

Home Offices To address work life balance and reduce distraction, encourage your team members to set aside a room or area in their home which is where they do work, only work, the so-called home office. It may not mean much, but just stepping through a door or past a room divider creates a mental shift that keeps work and home responsibilities separated.

Core Hours Game developers always varied their schedules. Some are night owls, and others are early birds. Now with people working in different time zones its become more important than ever to establish core hours. This is the 4 to 6 hours where everyone's schedule must overlap for meetings and communication.

Team Chat Whether you use Teams, Slack, Discord, or HipChat, everyone needs to install it on their workstations and phones. They can snooze notifications on their time, but establish a rule that during their work hours and especially core hours, they need to be responsive. If it's on their phone, then there's reasonable expectation that even if they stepped out for lunch or to pick up their kid from school, they should be able to respond to a message in less than an hour. If a channel is too distracting with chatter, they can mute its notifications, but mentions and direct messages should absolutely ping them.

Sick or Away On top of whatever normal procedures you may have for getting time off or calling in sick, your team members or their boss should post a message in a PTO channel if they will be sick or away. If it's a planned vacation, have a group calendar for posting time off.

Lean into Task Tracking If you are at all worried about laziness and getting the most out of a day's work, funnel that useless stress into a manageable, unimposing task tracker. That JIRA story that may take a week or more could be broken down into two or three smaller tasks to help both the employee and manager assess their progress.

Post Your Updates Encourage team members to post their updates. Mark those tasks done as they get done, not at the end of the week or right before Sprint Planning. These could also be check-ins to a source repo or posts on a chat channel or Trello board. This can go a long way to creating visibility on all that your team is doing.

Team Org Chart Reduce the anonymity with a team org chart. There's plenty of software solutions that include real profile pictures, titles and chat links. Expand on that with a little bio or quotes to make it more folksy.

Demo Day An end-of-week show-and-tell to the directors and fellow team members helps address any misperception of progress. Encourage people to show work in progress, even raw and incomplete. They may resist, so caveat the demo with assurances that it is all work in progress and that it's not the proper forum for feedback. Remember, this replaces what otherwise may be seen by people wandering around an office.

Make Remote Fun The office team culture now all happens over video chat and chat channels, so if there's something you would do at the office, figure out a way to make that happen remotely. For example:

? Create a channel for people to post and vote on their Halloween costumes and Ugly Christmas Sweaters.

? Encourage team members to include their kids and pets on video calls for the bring-your-kid or bring-your-pet-to-work day.

? Got a favorite game you all play? Set up a channel for matchmaking or maybe another for high-score screen shots.

? Miss those coffee chats? Send out some Starbuck's gift cards and take your next team meeting out to the coffee shop.

Conclusion

With remote work done right, the work-life-balance formula puts both the company and the employee ahead. Next week we'll look at scope checking, one of the most important tasks for a producer, but if it's not done right can really mess up that work-life-balance!