Our remote environment
Tallwave as an organization is primarily on-site, but we have a handful of remote employees, as well as a strong culture of working from home when you need to go heads-down on a problem. Currently, ~20% of the full-time dev team and the majority of our contractors are remote. Therefore, async communication is very important, for which we rely on Basecamp. Email is used mainly for company announcements and project-client communication, and video calls are for anything from client meetings to 1-on-1s to pair programming.
As an organization, we are working to make remote more integrated.
Things we currently do are:
- Ensure company meetings have good audio for online attendees.
- Regular 1-on-1 communication with same-department coworkers for pairing on non-client coding projects.
- Fly remote employees to the Phoenix office roughly once/quarter for 3-5 days, covering the flight, hotel, and meals (and try to schedule those trips at the same time for the remotees!).
- Send gift cards to remote employees when they miss out on a project team’s celebration.
Things we want to do are:
- Make Virtual Coffees part of the culture, so an on-site employee can grab a remote coworker, or vice-versa, from any department for a chat every so often.
- Integrate better screensharing and pair-programming tools.
- Make the inclusion of video conferencing the default when creating meetings.
Nice-to-haves as we grow:
- For all-hands meetings or company standups, have a shared microphone that can be passed around, or have a culture where questions that are asked from the room are repeated into the central mic for the benefit of remote attendees.
General Communication
In addition to the basic communication principles we all use, here are a few more that should specifically be used with regard to you or a teammate working remotely.
Use “Focus Mode” on Basecamp when you need to focus, and alert your team that you’re doing so
The biggest risk here is that you forget to turn Focus Mode off, so consider setting a reminder in your calendar 😉
Be proactive
If you’re a remote employee, reach out to your coworkers for more than just work chat! Schedule virtual coffees; throw funny gifs in the #Random Basecamp channel; try to best Mohammed’s puns.
Use 😄🙋🏼🤜🏼🤛🏼!
Tone is important, and emojis are a great way to set tone in text-based communication.
Block off your non-working hours at the beginning/end of your day in your calendar
This helps people not schedule meetings with you when you’d rather be eating dinner, or haven’t yet eaten breakfast. This can work, for example, like setting a 6-9pmEST meeting labeled “EOD” (end-of-day) on every weekday. When someone schedules a meeting for you in your EOD time block, you are allowed to decline and request a new meeting time.
Project communication
Say hi 👋🏻 when you start work, and bye 🌊 when you leave
When you are in office, this usually happens naturally, and you also can visibly see if someone is currently at work. When one or more people are remote, it’s important to make sure your coworkers know when you’re up and at ‘em, and also when you are done for the day. This ensures everyone on a team knows when they can expect answers to questions or someone is available to collaborate on a problem.