xBerry R&D House: How to effectively organize remote work? # tips # tools.

#remotework#effective_remote_work#agile#tools#softwarehouse#xberry#ITindustry

Recently we can see that remote work is one of the hot topics. Many employers try to analyze the pros and cons of working from home and its impact on the company's profits or losses. We decided  to save you this information and will cut to the chase . Read our  5 tips about  how to make your remote work more effective and enjoyable!

1.Wake up ! We need to set the alarm and wake up earlier to take a shower, eat breakfast or do what we always do before leaving for work.We shouldn't start working in our bed, in pajamas, immediately after waking up. It badly affects our frame of mind and the rest of the day. The rule is simple - do everything you do before going to the office.

2.Prepare “to do list”. It is very important to list our tasks to be accomplished and the goals we want to achieve during the day. If we are off track, we can  look at our tasks list and then we will get our brain back on track. 

What can make it easier for us? Of course, choosing the right tools. We tested a few of them and chose the top 7! Don’t hesitate and implement it in your work, then your remote work becomes more effective.We promise!

• SLACK (Slack features include direct-messaging capabilities, notifications and alerts, document sharing, group chat and search) 
• TRELLO(this tool has everything you need to organize projects of any size.Open a card and you can add comments, upload file attachments, create checklists, add labels and due dates, and more.)
• ASANA (With Asana, remote teams can organize projects, manage shifting priorities, and get work done.Create visual project plans to see how every step maps out over time.)
• TODOIST (Regain clarity and calmness by getting all those tasks out of your head and onto your to-do list (no matter where you are or what device you use).)
• CANVA (Create beautiful designs with your team. Use Canva's features and layouts to design, share and print business cards, logos and  presentations)
• VSCode Live Share (enables real-time collaboration between developers. It gives users the ability to share a session with someone else, allowing them to edit code as well as share a server and debugging session.) 
• CODESHARE (Share code in real-time with developers in your browser. An online code editor for interviews, troubleshooting, teaching.)

3. Clean up your room ! Nothing has a negative impact on concentration as a mess in the room where we work. In addition, thanks to maintaining order, it is possible to reduce the level of stress and to provide appropriate conditions to ensure that in our head appeared interesting ideas and creative solutions.Remember to provide yourself with a comfortable swivel chair and the right positioning of the desk. The desk should be placed so that you can sit facing the door and back to the wall. It is also important to position the desk in relation to the window.We need to make  sure that we sit with our backs to the wall and not the window, because placing a desk with its back to the window may create a feeling of instability. On the other hand, if you work in a house full of people and you can't concentrate, we recommend investing in noise-reducing ear muffs (their prices start from PLN 60).

4.Remember about microbreaks. Every once in a while we should take a mini break, literally a few minutes, to leave the computer, drink tea or look out the window. Such a micro break will allow us to re- energy and thanks to it our brain will rest. If we have problems with controlling time and taking breaks, we recommend Workrave, it is a free program for Windows and Linux. It was created to prevent injuries due to chronic overload of the body by people who work at the computer. In addition, during breaks, it shows us what exercises we can do to be able to rest effectively and counteract the side effects of long work at the computer.

5. Clock out on time + keep moving ! We should remember to work only at the appointed time and not extend our work. Often, employees with high seniority tend to work more than they should. Unfortunately, it can be disastrous for our health, so we work as much as we should, but effectively. No more is always better. However, after work, we will plan some activity, preferably in the open air.

This is just a handful of tips on how to work more efficiently. Have you ever wondered how other companies are doing with the organization of remote work? We asked specialists in this field about it. So let's get started!

Tomasz Srokowski, CEO of Clever Grapes, told us how and why Clever Grapes decided to be a software house where people work 100% remotely. Generally, Clever Grapes is an agile software-house that thanks to his experience gained over the years of work in the software development market, is able to successfully build and deliver highly scalable web applications based on Microsoft Azure Cloud solutions.

Why the idea for 100% remote work?

When we decided to work 100% remotely in CG, we took into account two aspects. The first is to increase the creativity and satisfaction with life of colleagues, everyone creates the working conditions that suit them best, chooses the time of the day when they are most productive. Some people like to get up early in the morning to deal with the most important matters, while others like the evening hours the most. Co-workers are held accountable for the effects of their work, not for the time spent in the office.

We believe that people get more satisfaction from their lives when they don't have to spend time  commuting to and from the office, they can take care of private matters when it is convenient for them without feeling guilty about doing it during working hours, and they are free to choose place of residence without giving up the job that gives them satisfaction. Thanks to this, they can devote more time to their relatives and to make their dreams come true as well as develop their hobbies.

The second aspect is the company's competitiveness and development, we have access to an unlimited pool of specialists not focusing only on the local market, with low costs of running the company's operations, we are able to offer our specialists a higher salary than the market one, and our clients lower rates while maintaining high quality.

In addition, we have introduced several functionalities to improve remote work.

1.Recruitment process adapted to remote work.

Already at the recruitment stage, we put emphasis on looking for people who will do well in a remote work environment, communicate freely at a distance, and are able to organize the work environment themselves and the necessary tools. People who have no problems with the equipment or the Internet.

Learn more about our current recruitment process: https://clevergrapes.com/#we-are-hiring

2.Onboarding

The newly hired person first month works from the office to introduce and integrate with the company. During this period, the new employee is watched as he is coping with communication with colleagues and the client. If he is from outside Wroc?aw, we invite him to Wroc?aw for a few days. This stage ends with 360 degree feedback which, after a positive result, allows our specialists to work remotely.  

3.Communication

The company's recommendation is to use communicators instead of email. We use communication channels that all interested persons have access to. There is a one-to-one meeting with each employee once a week. We monitor customer satisfaction and how a colleague communicates with him, we react quickly to symptoms of communication that isn’t in line with the company's values, lack of kindness and openness, complaint and dissatisfaction with the project.

4.Transparency one of the company's values

Open and honest communication between management, client and colleagues. Informing about the most important events in the company, taking care of the atmosphere and a sense of belonging to the company.

Generally, when we organize remote work for our specialists, keep in mind that there may be problems that should be addressed as soon as possible.

At Clever Grapes, there was a problem with communication between our client and one of the employees. From the very beginning, this person was characterized by a low level of communication with the client. The situation worsened when he lost her motivation to work on the project and thus didn’t care about good relations with the client. We caught it quite quickly, but we focused for too long on motivating the employee at the expense of customer satisfaction. As a result, we lost the employee and the client's trust for remote work. 

In order to avoid another such situation, we have introduced a recruitment process adapted to remote work. We also monitor how employees communicate with the client and whether they are satisfied with the project.

And how does remote work at SoftwareMill look like? Jan Zborowski, co-founder and Business Developer at SoftwareMill, told us how the idea of remote work in his company was born and how the remote setup looks like in SoftwareMill.

When we founded SoftwareMill, all of the Founders were experienced remote workers, so starting a remote-only company was a no brainer. It also presented the opportunity to go global-first and to focus on hiring amazing people with great skills. Remote work has given us access to a broad group of experts and professionals, because it enables us to pick from a wider pool of talent, not limited to local communities.

Here, in the SoftwareMill's Handbook, you can discover more about how we built a 100% remote company and how we became a company we are today.

We quickly found out that the most important ingredient that makes remote work is a focus on communication. Good communication is the main challenge in distributed teams. Hence, we put great emphasis on choosing the best toolset for this purpose. Through experimentation and agile improvements, we have developed the following setup:

• Slack - mainly for written communication, also asynchronous
• TeamSpeak - for fast and often informal voice communication
• Zoom or Google Meet - for video conferencing
• Confluence and Google Docs - company’s knowledge base

These tools were carefully chosen and tested. The assumption was that it’s worth investing in great tools that should enable both synchronous and asynchronous communication. Here, you can learn more on how we communicate as a fully remote team — our approach, tools and best practices.

Another key element necessary to thrive in a remote work environment is building a resilient company culture. We put a high emphasis on creating a company culture which is beneficial for both employees and customers alike. To keep everyone engaged and help nurture relationships in a team we strongly value the time spent together in real life. We host an entire company meeting once a month and two weekends away annually, one is a family retreat. We make the most out of the time spent together. The current situation has made these meetings difficult to continue, hence we started a series of online meetings. Below you can find examples :

• How we threw a completely remote online party
• How to integrate remote teams: the online quiz 

A lot of people are asking us about tips on remote work. If you also feel you need a helping hand and advice on transitioning a business to a remote model, make sure to check:

• Remote Software Development Ebook - proven remote plays to organize and accelerate your team’s work, based on our 10 years of experience.
• Watch a video from an AMA (Ask Me Anything) with our CEO Tomasz Szymański and get our lessons learned when building a 100% remote team.

In our interview couldn't also miss the opinion of our partner RST Software Masters. Karolina Zych HR Manager at RST  told us how they organize remote work.

 Remote work was rare in RST, hence the situation was a huge challenge for us! In a very short time, we had to develop rules that would support both the organization and our employees.

Before we started introducing specific tools, we prepared a plan for the transition to remote work - we organized the necessary equipment, accesses, and wrote down rules for the organization of work.

In the first weeks of remote work, our Scrum Masters collected proposals of tools that teams used to keep their work effective. Our recommendations include: Slack for everyday communication, Google Meet for meetings, as well as: Mural, Stormboard, Miro, Parabol.

The estimates were realized with the use of tools such as Scrum Poker, Pointing Poker, Agile Poker Clock.

With such a wide range of solutions to choose from, as well as the support of our Leaders and Scrum Masters, we managed to ensure that the effectiveness of work still remained at a satisfactory level, despite the fact that we completely changed the way we work.

The situation in the world was very difficult, many people were worried  about employment and their future, so RST decided to publish the most important organizational information in a weekly communication from the management board to ensure an efficient flow of information.

Our employees were regularly informed about the company's financial condition and  the situation of our clients. We focused on transparency of actions - we presented possible scenarios  and the steps that we plan to take in a concrete situation.

The biggest challenge in the period of remote work was, on the one hand, maintaining efficiency, and on the other hand, taking care of relationships and regular contact.

There was some kind of isolation - the teams stopped seeing each other overnight during the morning coffee. Integration or face to face conversation was impossible.

In addition to transferring the above-mentioned activities into the online sphere, we have taken other actions in parallel. We recorded the next episodes of the Drive with IT series, about how to deal with remote work, we organized a webinar with our coach, where we talked about how to take care of yourself and how to organize your work. Articles with simple tips that are easy to apply and implement appeared on our blog. 

We should remember that the time of a pandemic is a special challenge, not only for organizations, but also for people who had to deal with the problem of arranging space for work. The private and professional world began to pass into very much. Some employees didn’t have a place where they could safely carry out their daily tasks. Persons who remained in a difficult situation could still use our office space while observing the recommended precautions.

As you can see, organizing remote work for your employees is a real challenge. However, there are many companies that are doing great. Many thanks to our experts from Clever Grapes, SoftwareMill and RST Software Masters for sharing their knowledge and valuable insights!

And how is your company dealing with remote work?