Going remote – some things we’ve learned

A key concern about remote work is the impact on the ability to foster and maintain interconnectedness with work colleagues. And yes, we've found that building deeper personal connections has been more of a challenge for us since we became a fully remote team. At very least it requires more work, but also the relationships are just a bit different.

However, it is also important to relfect on this challenge within a wider context of the work-life balance that can be offered by remote work.

Since we went remote a few of our team have moved — for family reasons, or to buy a home, or both. Where you live has a huge impact on your life so being fully remote unlocks some benefits that hybrid work does not.

There are benefits and downsides to all different work arrangements, and these are felt differently by different people. It is always important to invest in building connections, but also I think we accept that relationships can be different in a remote vs. non-remote environment.

One study found that companies are having three times more meetings than before Covid. Incredibly, this feels about right to me. Having good online meetings was a key theme of early "how to work remote" chat, but it continues to be super important, and something we continue to focus on.

We try to make really good online meeting etiquette part of the culture. It's easy to slip into bad habits, but with so many meetings going on this can have a big impact on how effective we are as a team. Be on time. Have good video and audio. Don't huddle around a laptop with someone else. Have an agenda and be prepared with whatever your role in the meeting is. Small talk and "get to know you" chat is still important, but when the real meeting starts, be focussed and efficient.

Honestly, having good online meetings is a real flex for a modern organisation, and something we're always trying to get better at.

Some things are better in-person (of course). Here’s my “in-person vs. online meeting schema”. Short version: I reckon really serious and really not-serious meetings benefit from being in person, and most other stuff can be online.

An interesting little wrinkle of the world we live in right now is that many business owners and managers of remote teams got to where we are in a time when remote work wasn’t really a thing. The skills and attributes that got us here might not be that useful moving forward, and this is both a challenge and an opportunity.

Organisation and preparedness; the ability to invent and apply good systems for collaborative work; and a deliberate approach to team building and culture are just some examples of skills that are more valuable among remote leaders.

On the othe hand, my champagne-quality banter and timely (i.e. regular) use of “finger guns” had a lot more impact in-person than it does in a remote environment.

Becoming a remote team has been hard at times, but the opportunity to learn a whole new way of working might only come along once or twice in a career, if at all.

Controversial take: I think that at least some of the calls to "come back to the office" are from leaders who simply function better in that environment and aren't willing to or don't want to adapt.

On a lighter note, Lego is awesome. When we need to mark an occasion or just spend some actual time together online, Lego is near the top of the pile. It’s just enough distraction to have something to do while we engage in idle water-cooler chit chat — something that is otherwise quite hard to do online.

Side note — there is a wide discrepency in Lego skills in our team and I'm basically the worst at it.

While lots of people are being called back to the office, remote work is here to stay in one form or another. The abiding feeling I have about it is that it’s a big change, and we’re really just starting to understand what it means.

The world keeps changing and what works for Haunt might change too, but in the meantime we're going to keep learning.

Read about why we went fully remote