Working From Home is not as hard as you might think

As a team we’ve been working from home for well over 10 years now, we’ve built two successful companies and now over 3 years into our latest venture, Velo Payments. We started a few companies ago with 1 week in the office, 2 weeks at home, some times 2 and 4 respectively. The main reason was that we were working with clients across the pond. We needed to maintain staff on site but staying in hotels or an apartment indefinitely was impractical, most staff had families. In the early years we maintained an office for management and admin but having spent weeks away no one wanted to turn up on their “home weeks” so after a few years we closed it.

Today we have over 70 staff split roughly 40/30 UK/US with a few in other countries. We work almost entirely from home and have done so since starting the company in 2017. Our only office is for finance and management in Sausalito (near San Francisco) and we’re closing that now too. We have never had an office in the UK where we have over 40 staff.

Covid-19 is going to be a massive disruption to everyone in every country but from a company point of view we have had zero changes, it’s business as usual for us.

Given that many people will have little choice to move to WFH (Working From Home) it might seem pointless to go through the pros and cons but let me sell it, we need some good news after all. On the upside, we have no commuting, certainly, for those around London and Bristol as you can see our distribution above, that cuts out a good 2-3 hours of wasted time every day. Our staff tend to use this extra time to take the kids to or from school, go jogging, cycling or the go to the gym, we have our own Strava club. Many of them start work early and take off 2-3 hours for some exercise and lunch, some stop early, pick up the kids and finish off another few hours at the end of the day. Each team manages their own stand-ups and meetings (I’ll come back to these), some late morning, some early afternoon but generally, everyone is present between about 3pm and 5pm (UK time) which overlaps nicely with the US. I’ve spent decades managing hundreds of staff in large investment banks, we get far more productivity and loyalty from our staff than I’ve ever seen in a bank, better still we find it easy to encourage the top performers over to work with us. Working from home is a family first move, for us that’s key for our staff.

Communication

As for tools, here’s what we do. Everyone has a company laptop (we use Macs), we use full-disk encryption and multi-factor authentication for logins, if a laptop was to get stolen then there’s no risk to our data (client data never gets on to staff laptops). We use open-source VPNs (OpenVPN, Tunnelblick & Wireguard) but I think the key to working from home is communication. This is my advice; don’t think that one solution alone will solve all your issues, we use several. Just as in the office people like different ways of communication, meetings, whiteboards, stand-ups, over lunch, at the pub, we use different tools. Email obviously, Slack, personally I hate it but it’s probably the most used tool for the engineering staff. To avoid the #general channel getting used for covid-19 message we’ve added a #corona channel which has been a huge success. We have encouraged staff to post jokes, messages, concerns and left it totally open, you need a forum where staff can discuss things openly, we treat our staff like a family. Skype, WhatsApp, SMS, iMessage and Signal all get used between different groups and people, many of these work equally well for text, documents, photos (screenshots), screen-share and video conferencing. If you try to lock down technologies they will get used anyway so just open up and embrace them.

Video conferencing

Video conferencing is incredibly easy, we’ve been doing it for years. We’ve tried all of them as many of our customers (banks and SMEs) often make the choice for us. Internally we use Zoom, it’s been the most reliable and easy. Skype and WhatsApp also get used for time-to-time, typically for one to ones. Zoom, however, has been the conferencing app of choice taking seconds to set up and share.

Collaboration

Staff sometimes spend an hour or two conferencing, working together, not just meetings. They can just leave a live chat open and continue as if the other person(s) is on the other side of the desk, not always video of course. We know most of our colleagues family, the children wander in, we can hear the dogs bark and even the cats purring. We have several stand-ups per day but other than managers it’s usually just one 10 minute call with 30-40 staff on the big call at 5 pm UK every day.

Some of the staff have whiteboards in their office/room so we use a video call pointing the camera at the board, we also use online tools like Miro and Draw.io. Other great tools are Trello boards and teamgantt. Of course, Google Docs and Sheets are incredibly useful but we have to limit their use for security reasons. For sensitive documents, we use an excellent security layer called Tresorit which adds end-to-end security on top of shared files services.

Cost

We spend very little on tooling, certainly less than ￡100 ($130) per person per year in total, some license are more expensive but we don’t need one for each participant and not all staff need access to all services. I don’t want to identify them individually for obvious reasons but many of the tools above work perfectly using their free versions.