Do These 9 Things To Get Better at Working Remotely

With more and more people working remotely at least some of the time, more employees are experiencing that things change when there’s no office. Dynamics, habits, and workflows change in a remote organization. Some changes are obvious, but others are subtle.

As an employee in a fully remote company for the last few years, I’ve learned a few things that have helped me make the most of remote work. Here are some of my biggest lessons.

OVERCOMMUNICATE BY DEFAULT

How do you know if your teammate is blocked? How does the team leader know the current status of a project?

These important questions are often answered over coffee or by walking to someone’s desk if you work in an office. When you work remotely, some of this communication can get lost unless you actively work to change that.

At Buffer, we focus on overcommunicating by default all that we do and how we are feeling with our current workload/team/schedule. Yes, this has an impact on our time, but it’s too important to the health of the organization to shortchange.

How to do this? Any format is good as long as it is easy to use and open to your team. Some teams do a daily asynchronous stand-up, while others talk and keep track of everything in tools such as Jira or Trello.

We’ve found that having a few key spots to focus on helps keep communication flowing while not overloading the team. Some tips:

Have you made progress in a task? Leave an update in the card.
Are you blocked or feeling that your current task is too hard/taking too long? Reach out as soon as possible and ask for help.
Have you found something unexpected that might delay the project? Prepare a quick document with the context and share it with the team.
Have you had an idea on how to improve something? You know the drill.
The alternative to this “overcommunication” is an isolated team and confused team members and stakeholders, not knowing where things are and an overall feeling that the team is not driving toward a goal but just doing their own thing.

Try to think who might be interested in knowing something, how much they know, and how to share information as clearly as possible. Sometimes you might need to communicate the same thing more than once. For example, if I’ve just completed a task I might share:

The full context of the technical details with my teammates if it’s interesting, because maybe I refactored something.
The current status with the product manager and the designer.
The change that this will bring and potential issues customers might find with the customer support team.
In each case, the context I’ll provide and the information will be focused on what those people know already. The refactoring part probably doesn’t matter to the customer support team, for example.

USE YOUR FLEXIBLE SCHEDULE WISELY

At Buffer, we don’t ask people to work any specific schedule or hours. Your time is truly your own, and I try to use it to my advantage.

On occasion, I’ve started working at 4:30 a.m. because I was feeling great, and then finished early. I was more productive and had more quiet time before the rest of my team woke up.

On days when I know I have a couple of calls in the evening I will sometimes spend the first few hours of the day working out or doing something else.

The key is finding that balance because for the most part, you won’t have anyone telling you you need to work from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. In a remote company, your output is way more important than the hours you put in.

This experimentation also applies to where you work. Feel free to try different things and see what works better for you. It might be a coworking space, working from home, or an occasional walk to your favorite coffee shop. It’s up to you to try different things and see how it feels.

YOU’RE NOT ALONE

In my experience, it’s much easier to isolate yourself working on your own, or not collaborate with others if it’s not strictly required.

But loneliness is one of the biggest challenges that remote workers face, and it’s important to acknowledge that isolation can affect our work and health.

When you’re mainly focused on output, it’s easy to forget that you have the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with your teammates. Some actions could be:

Send a message in your team channel or email group if you need help or to brainstorm something new.
Reach out to one of your teammates at your level of experience to chat about vision, strategies to improve, or something you’ve read that’s influencing the way you work.

At Buffer, we have a number of “virtual watercooler” activities teammates can participate in to help combat feelings of loneliness and isolation. The main thing to remember is that you’re not alone—you can always reach out.