In our line of work, this is an up-to-date topic not only during the pandemic. However, this will not be a text about applications supporting remote work or facilitating team management – everyone has already mastered these. It will be a text about something which is much more difficult in remote work, i.e. about the human factor – emotions, communication, and relations in a team.
For the last year, my team – much like the rest of the world – has been primarily working remotely, but like many developers implementing projects for foreign clients, we had to learn this art much earlier. Over the years, some of us have been working in our Wroclaw office, and others in various places around the world. Hence, we’ve developed our own methods for not only effective work but also for reducing frustration and conflicts.
Overcommunication is the key
In asynchronous communication, we always use the overcommunication rule. This means that if I give someone a task that they will start to carry out when, for example, I am already in bed, I do not just send them the task with the information “it’s your turn”. Instead, I describe everything that may be of use to them and even more. It’s always better to write those two more sentences, even if they seem unnecessary than to find ourselves in a situation when someone has to wait 6 hours until I get up to ask me for some detail.
The benefit of the doubt
When someone takes over a task from another team member or when we do a code review, the following situation quite often occurs: The task was complicated, so the developer spent several hours working on it and produced a few lines of code. And the person who is only supposed to check if everything is OK looks at the code and says that it makes no sense, it should have been done differently. There’s not enough faith in the fellow team member and no assumption that they actually know what they’re doing.
Short messages and perspective
In written communication where emotions are invisible, proper perspective and initial assumptions are important. We often write something quickly and laconically in order to give someone a reply and push their work forward. The basic assumption should always be that the person on the other side has neither bad emotions nor bad intentions.
Clear message and agreement
Sometimes it is easier and faster to clarify matters by calling someone than by sending messages. When making calls, it makes sense to use the camera – it’s easier to communicate when you can see somebody’s emotions.
Remote work gets drastically more difficult when developers working in different time zones have less than four hours of shared working time.
Good and bad types of meetings
Unnecessary meetings that take half a day are the curse of our time. Hence, if the matter isn’t important, we do not organize meetings, if the problem isn’t urgent, we do not call.
But there are also types of meetings which I believe have become important and necessary. These are those conversations that previously happened casually while making coffee. It facilitates communication, builds trust and the conviction that other people know what they are doing.
The second type of meetings worth organizing regularly are strategic meetings. This builds a sense of community and shared responsibility. It shifts the burden a little from “I” to “we”.