Mastering Remote Work: Four Cornerstones for Success

In this article I would like to summarize some of the ideas I gave in previous articles about managing remote work. I strongly believe that remote work is a great option for startups and small businesses to start the business with no or minimum investments. But usually a strong weapon is a dangerous weapon: you should know how to use it. There are many big and small things you should care about when you organize remote work in your company: the methodology to organize the work in your company, the organizational culture and psychology, the approach to measure productivity of your company, and the skills to run online meetings efficiently. All those things are important and without them you can’t create a great product working remotely. My experience is in software and a little bit in hardware product development, but you can adapt it to your professional area.

Let’s look at every important cornerstone:

Agile methodology of development. When your work is organized remotely you need to have check points in time to recognize what part of the work has been done. Agile methodologies like SCRUM, Kanban, and others have meetings every day where you can understand what progress you have in the work. Agile methodologies stand out based on their inherent strengths, but when coordinating tasks in a remote setting, they emerge as the optimal approach for organizing work. I like to consult for friends and acquaintances who are starting their businesses. I provide this service without charge, and some people take advantage of it. Several times I came through the situation when a non-tech entrepreneur hired a team to develop a product. He paid money, but the development was never finished. This kind of situation is so common with non-tech entrepreneurs that I would say it is classic. I think we don’t even have any statistics for this case because these pre-seed startups were not yet founded officially at this stage. Of course, agile methodologies have much more than the ability to control the progress of product development, but that is beyond this article’s scope. So, the first cornerstone in remote work is an ability to organize product development by agile methodology. I have posted several articles devoted to agile methods like Kanban and SCRUM.

Remote work organizational culture. I already have written an article about organizational culture when a company works remotely. Managers should have a clear understanding of how the psychology of remote working is different from working in the office. The main point is socializing. When people work together in an office, they have a chance to talk with each other or get acquainted with new people. Speaking again about agile, daily meetings are a good way to socialize. Daily meetings are good but not enough. Informal communication is also important. In a remote environment you need to over-socialize. Organize meetings like ‘happy hour’ or other informal meetings. Continuous education and professional development should be a necessary part of the organizational culture. One of the great ways to do it is meetings where your employees share their experience and expertise. Usually, companies stop being interested in their employees’ knowledge after they have been hired. The ability to share their experience and expertise is a great chance for an employee to show it and for other employees to learn something new. You will be surprised how much expertise your employees have. Having real vision and mission in the company when your people work remotely helps to move in one direction and have common understanding of the company’s goals. Creating an effective company culture is a difficult task but it may be much more difficult working remotely.

Productivity measures. When you have just a production line you don’t care about the individual productivity of your employees. Productivity is defined by the speed of the product line. But when the work is more creative and unique you have difficulty measuring the productivity of your employees. It is so complicated that in some cases it better not to measure productivity at all than measure it in a wrong way. Using wrong key performance indicators (KPIs) may break your development process. Let’s imagine as a non-realistic example that some company decided to measure software developers by number of code lines they wrote. The number of code lines has no correlation with productivity or quality of code (it has meaning only if a developer didn’t write a line of code for a long time).

A real example: Once a manager of a QA team in a company decided that testers (QA) will be measured by the number of bugs they discovered. One of the QA persons was testing an application that had a rich UI. She reported a couple of hundred bugs about many small things in UI (like moving some elements for a few pixels). At the same time another QA person was testing a background process where every test required a huge amount of work to prepare data for the test. So during the same amount of time, she reported only a couple of bugs. As you can see the ratio between the two was more than 200:1. As you can see the number of bugs reported was not a good KPI to measure productivity even for the QA team. With development the situation is even more difficult. But if you don’t measure the productivity of your developers you will finish with your developers doing nothing.

Tips and tricks on how to organize online meetings efficiently. You should learn many small tricks on how to organize your online meetings efficiently. There are maybe more than a hundred tips and tricks for online meetings. I can’t give all of them here. You can’t implement all of them, but you should be aware of them and apply the most important for you. The devil is in the details. If you have a good intention of organizing comfortable communication but don’t have skills of online meetings, you can spoil your team communication. Your responsibility begins with ensuring that every employee has a conducive and distraction-free workspace with high-speed internet. Ensure that all participants have tested their audio, video, and internet connections before the meeting to avoid technical issues. For example, in some meetings you want all participants to be with a camera on even if they don’t like it to be. At other meetings this is less important. And there are many other tips, I can’t share all of them here. You should learn about it.

In conclusion, this article has sought to consolidate and expand upon the key concepts previously explored in my discussions on remote work. I maintain the viewpoint that remote work is a fantastic option, especially for startups and small businesses aiming to initiate operations with minimal or no upfront investments. However, like any powerful tool, it requires competent handling.

Each of these cornerstones contributes to the holistic success of remote work. While individual focus on any one aspect is valuable, the true potential is unlocked when all four cornerstones are robustly implemented. Whether in software, hardware, or any professional domain, these principles can be adapted to ensure a seamless and productive remote work environment.