Tips and Tricks in remote work

A few months back I was challenged to talk to some colleagues about remote teams and have some sort of a short presentation. A few weeks back, I got myself into a discussion about remote work, remote teams, leading remote teams, and keeping people engaged. It seems this subject is starting to get interesting not even for managers and leads, but for normal devs. Even if the internet is full of articles and ideas on these subjects, I want to share with you my opinion also, maybe someone will be interested in trying something that I’ll write in here or that I/we tried.

The idea is that I had some experience working remote, even before the pandemic. It wasn’t a very long period, but in that time we (me and the teams I was in) tried a lot of different things or shared a lot of ideas. We didn’t try everything (as you can imagine) and to get an idea about what “we” meant, the members of the team(s) were spread in 3 cities (from which 2 were in Romania and one was in Sweden, so we had some cultural differences as well). In the pandemic, I changed my job and now I am working in a team with members from Romania and Netherlands, so we got more or less the same challenges.

My advice targets the leads, but not only and if you’ll read the article until the end you’ll get it why. Now…let’s get started:

The first key thing to having a good atmosphere and build a solid team in this remote world is to build trust not micromanage things. Every lead should think about the next questions:

• Do I trust my team members?
• Do my team members trust me and trust that I have their best interest and the best interest of the project? Do they feel that I care for them individually and I don’t see them only as a resource?
• Can they speak openly to me and they feel that we “are on the same boat”, or they are almost always in “defensive mode”
• Are they asking & caring about my feedback?
• Do they feel comfortable challenging my ideas? Do I feel ok if they do so?

Now let’s dig deeper into each question. If the lead doesn’t trust that his members want and can do their best to finish the project, then there are a few ways that this can go:

1. He can start trying to be in control of everything and he will be the only one that takes decisions. In the end, if the project is big he will eventually get exhausted, or bored because he won’t get time to do anything else besides making all the decisions, or when he will leave on vacation everything will stop because no one will take decisions in his place. (And it will get to this if there are still people in the team, because, let’s be honest, after a while working on that project, people will want to take small decisions at least by themselves; it’s not in our human nature to accept to do what we are told all the time)
2. He can start mentoring/coaching the people and help them to gain the knowledge they need to be a self-organizing team (big words), that can take decisions for themselves if he is not around. This way he learns that he can trust them.

People need to feel that who is in charge of the team, is seeing the big picture and he always goes for the end result of the project. If he gets lost, the team feel that no one can actually lead them in the right direction and they lose their interest in working there. Before the pandemic, people stayed in companies even for their colleagues that became their friends after some time, but now they were taught that they can see their friends even if they aren’t in the same company. To be in the same company or not, right now, it’s the same, from this “talking to friends” perspective.

People want to be mentored. They want to learn something new each day. If there is nothing new to learn or the lead/architect/anyone does not teach them something new at least one time per week, after a few weeks (in my opinion 6–8 weeks tops), those people start thinking about quitting. They get more time to think about what benefits they could have in other companies and they lose their motivation. Only money is not enough anymore and fruits and massages in the office do not work anymore, since, they are home.

Every lead should challenge his team and show he is not afraid to be wrong. I saw that sometimes it’s a good idea even to throw with bad ideas, just to show your team that you can be wrong and you’re not afraid to admit it. This way you teach them to speak openly and challenge you. Let’s be honest, there isn’t someone that knows everything. It’s easier to fix a problem as a lead when you know the cause of it and you don’t have a defensive person in front of you that creates shields in front of the root of the issue.

People need to be taught to give and receive real feedback (give the constructive one not only the positive one). The leads need to learn this and convince them to say whatever they have in their minds because only like this, things can change and evolve. They need to be helped to understand the importance of the feedback. For example, if they get bad bad bad feedback with which they do not agree, they need to ask questions to understand why the other person feel that way and wanted to give that feedback.

Now, to get a small step back, the entire idea of building trust is to manage less and to mentor more. Everyone needs to know why they should do a certain thing, because right now, to have an interview, means, just to click on a button. It’s more simple and easier now to change your job and remote work is available in a lot more companies, so if someone feels frustrated or not motivated he will leave for sure (and much faster).

On this subject from the coding perspective, the tech lead and the architect (from my story) didn’t have more than 1–2 dedicated stories / PBIs per sprint. They were just the “main members” of our “fire squad department”. They just paired with different team members and tried to help them out or challenge their ideas (motivated them and showed them they still have things to learn). For example, Visual Studio Live Share is a very nice tool to use. 2 users can write code in parallel, together and both can see what the other can do. It’s like writing your code and sitting on the next desk.

Another interesting thing about this pairing thing is that everyone knows what the others know. If someone will leave, there will be at least one person that will have the same business logic at least, and the knowledge share it’s much smoother. To continue this idea, I can share with you another thing that I saw working: every team member needs to pair program at least on 2 stories, with 2 different team members on each sprint. This way everyone will know everyone and will talk to everyone.

In the last sentence, I used a “keyword” — talk. In working remotely communication is the key. We have daily meetings and besides this, a good practice is to split the day into 3: Before the daily, after the daily until lunch, after lunch before the end of the day. At the beginning of each interval, members ask if they can help someone, unblock someone or pair with someone. The same thing is done, when a member finishes his work. It was proven that when someone finishes something, if the next thing is to help someone else rather than start a new item from the board, 2 items will be done faster and more people will be happier.

Let’s stick a little more on this topic, communication and meetings. It’s a good idea at least one time in 2–3 months to see each other in person and grab something to eat (even if the members are in different countries, let’s be honest, if you want a good team that can build anything, you can handle 4–6 airline tickets per year per team member), at least one time per month eat together in from of the camera and have a chat (so that everyone will get the feeling of a team lunch) and at least one meeting per day should be with the camera on.

The job of a lead it’s a little bit harder since now the one to one meeting are a lot more important and it should be happening monthly (and ask and receive feedback). Besides the 121s, team leads should grab one member per day randomly in a short break, just to have a virtual coffee together and ask that member job not related things.

TLs should simulate the breaks that happened in the office and the socializing from the cafeteria.

By the way, I wrote a few times about asking for feedback. I didn't mention something very very important. If you as a leader got constructive feedback 3 times and nothing changed, that person won’t give you any real feedback, because he will feel, that nothing will change anyway (and frustration will appear in his voice, since he won’t get it why 121s are done anyway). In his mind, if nothing is changed even if he tells how he feels, you or the company don’t care about him. Basically, you’re keeping this meeting without a reason and you’re just making him lose his time; eventually, this will destroy the relationship between you two, or even with more members, if he will start rumours that his feedback wasn’t taken into consideration. If you understand his feedback but you can’t do a thing, at least you need to let him know that. If he is wrong you must make him understand why his ideas were wrong and bring him real arguments, but if you agree, but you aren’t in the position of making the change you should underline that too. It is very important to be seen as a lead in the eyes of the team members as being in the “same boat” as them. In the end, they must understand and see you as another member of the team but only with more responsibilities. And the last thing about how you are seen as a lead…you must be seen as a shield of the team in front of the management, that wants only things to be done (without caring about quality, innovation, creativity or other things like that), and different reports and numbers.

Another meeting that got a lot more important (even if it was important even before), is the retrospective of the sprint. People must not be afraid to say what they have in mind and “the finger must be put on the wound. Even if it hurts, the bleeding will stop”. Everyone should bring the conflicts out in the open and the lead must push everyone to find a solution. If before, a leader could have ignored a conflict if he couldn’t face it, in our current conditions they aren’t an option anymore. Everyone should be aware of the problems and should agree on the solutions.

Remote social interaction between people is another very important thing. Regarding this I got involved in another 3 types of meetings:

1. A “learning group” which was set 1–2 times per month and in which anyone could present something. We had a board on which anyone could add an item/subject, about which they are interested and wanted to make a presentation and share his opinions on that subject. We had presentations from conflict management (soft skills presentations) to progressive web apps; from how to make a good code review to chapters of different books that were teaching us what’s the correct attitude that we should have when talking to business people (and how we should explain to them our technical problems in business words). For example, when we had a presentation regarding a chapter of a book, the moderator took notes on the interesting paragraphs and after that, in the meeting, he read them and the entire group talked about them and stated their personal opinion; basically, each member personal opinion got very important. It wasn’t just the idea to understand what the author wanted to say, it was more important the experience of each individual. The order of presentations was done by the members by voting what they wanted to hear/attend. Of course, after each presentation a lot of debates usually start and this way people start to know each other better and learn from each other experiences.
2. “Fika”. It seems this is a word that is pretty hard to be translated into English. I’ve first heard about this when I was working with some Swedish colleagues. The more or less translation of this “event”, is a coffee and a cookie. You can’t have a “fika” by yourself, so basically, one time per week we had a meeting of 30 min in which we were talking about anything and everything; meeting in which we grabbed some pastries and a coffee. Of course, this meeting was with our cameras turned on.
3. Beer meetings. These meetings were done one time per month, and we stayed for one hour every last Friday of every month and drank a glass of wine/a beer with our cameras on. In this meeting again, we were talking about anything and everything, but the key point here is that there were invited all the people that were involved in the project. If you were one time in that project you received an invitation (even if you left the company). This way, everyone was still connected and even the people that left the team could see that thing are going in the right direction (or could see the changes and might consider to coming back).

Now since we finished with the meetings subject, let me share with you a few more pieces of advice: Be very very careful when you think about assigning tasks! People don’t like to be told what to do. For example, I think in the past year I assigned 10 tasks tops. Everyone from the team must understand the work that needs to be done, as they should have the freedom of choosing what they need to do from the remaining work from the board. If you force someone to do something it will take longer if he doesn’t like what he is working on, than if he would have got that item by himself.

Keep your team motivated and encourage them to have a very good work-life balance. Let’s get this scenario: The sprint is going well and someone finished his work faster. It’s Friday and it’s 3PM. You as a leader should encourage him to leave. He shouldn’t start a new item even if he still has 2–3 hours left. Let’s be honest, it’s Friday, his productivity is less than 50%. He thinks about what he will do in the weekend, not about the new task he just got on his name. If he leaves, then on Monday he will understand he left 2–3 hours earlier so he will stay 2–3 hours more, and focus on what he needs to do. Everyone has their “batteries” full at the start of the week…

The company should keep it’s structure as flat as possible. Everyone should feel free to talk to anyone. A dev shouldn’t think that he can’t talk and bring his idea to the upper management, just because there are 2–3 more managers in between. Every idea is important and it shouldn’t get lost or changed.

The company should send small gifts to the employees just to show they care. I remember that a company had sent me a sixpack of beers just because I went to an interview and talked to them. That was before the GDPR, but anyway…it’s something that people do not forget.

About gifts, I can share with you that another nice thing is something that everyone does. When it’s the birthday of a team member, someone gets in charge of getting a present. To make a difference and that member to remember the team, you must really get a present. A voucher or just some money isn’t something to remember. Some members must find out his hobbies, what he wants to do, what he likes to do, what he needs, others are in charge of buying the actual present…this should really be teamwork (outside the office)! For example, as small gifts besides the actual presents, we created some fridge magnets with an elephant and some bananas. The story behind it is that we wanted to estimate in story points, but we had different opinions about what 1SP means. The scrum master came with the idea of estimating in elephants and bananas. This small gift will for sure be a reminder for anyone from the team about the company and the project.

The internet is full of advice on how you should behave in a remote team, but I hope this article will help you to gain some ideas about what you should do. Of course, this won’t apply to all teams, but at least should give you a start on how to handle this challenge.