Let’s face it: with all of the perks remote working brings, it isn’t always easy. This is especially true if you’ve been thrown into it during a global pandemic. You likely miss your normal routine, the hustle and bustle of the office and the feeling of closeness between you and your colleagues. While working from home is an excellent way to stay safe during these unprecedented times, it takes concentrated effort to keep your motivation and productivity high.
Kin has been 100% remote for almost three years now. We began nearly seven years ago, when our front-end developer put in her resignation not because she wanted to leave the company, but because she wanted to leave Chicago where we were headquartered.
Our CEO thought, “If your only dissatisfaction with work is where you’re doing it, why not work where you’re happiest?”
And so, our remote culture began.
Over the years, more and more people at Kin began to take advantage of working remotely. We started to recruit from across the United States, not just from our own backyard. Finally, we let go of our office in Chicago in September 2017 and became fully remote.
While we’ve had our ups and downs while working remotely, one thing is for sure: it was the best decision for our team. Our perspectives and solutions are more diverse with contributors all throughout the United States from different backgrounds and upbringings.
Here are a few things we’ve learned to keep our culture intact and our team connected while working remotely.
Focus on balance
One thing that’s easy to do when working remotely is losing the balance of work and home.
Normally, you’ve had the physical separation of your office and your house, but that is taken away during this time. It’s easy to feel like work is all-consuming when you have nowhere to retreat from it. Laying firm boundaries in the beginning is extremely important when it comes to a good work/life balance.
By building time for yourself into your daily routine, and understanding when work should start and end, you can begin to build health habits when both work and your personal life happen in the same place.
For example, make sure that your early mornings aren’t consumed by work. Doist, the company behind Todoist, has a blog all about remote working. They nail it when they talk about a morning routine and what goes wrong when you don’t prioritize yourself first.
When you wake up and check your phone for emails first, you run the risk of deprioritizing everything you want to accomplish for the day to help others with their priorities. Instead of checking email first thing, take that time in the morning to get up, drink your coffee without distraction, make your own priority list. Then check in.
This will help you avoid making non-urgent issues the focus of your morning which then have the ability to derail what you set out to accomplish that day.
Over-communicate
At Kin, we have an ongoing conversation about communication…and over-communication. We often talk about the need to over-communicate our thoughts and emotions. This is because we can’t physically see each other, therefore we can’t tell if someone is stressed or uncomfortable about a situation.
Each day, we have a designated time that we meet “face-to-face” via Zoom and go through our days. This daily standup provides a time not only for us to update each other, but also to check-in with the team and have a bit of connection throughout our day.
We also are quick to have a Slack call whenever we need to, and are constantly communicating throughout the day via direct messages and channels on the platform.
Body language accounts for so much of our communication as human beings, but it’s easy to be missed when working remotely. Instead, we’re stuck with emails, texts and direct messages that can be misinterpreted. It’s so important that we find time to communicate and see our teammates so we can maintain and grow those bonds that help us do our best work.
“Peripheral communication happens accidentally in an office. We usually know what our coworkers are doing because we overhear snippets of conversation, we celebrate triumphs, or we see them struggling. Entire books have been written trying to increase office productivity by blocking out peripheral communication in meetings, email, and offices,” Jeff Robbins, from Yonder.io, wrote in his blog post about tips for working remotely for the first time, “By contrast, peripheral communication needs to be intentional in a remote working environment.”
Make team time a priority
Following the idea that peripheral communication needs to be intentional, one way to do this is to make the time for it on your calendar. The best part about work for many people is the team they get to work with. You build strong relationships with colleagues that allow you to face a host of challenges.
When you go from working in an office to abruptly working from home, it can feel like you’ve been ripped away from the best part of your job – teamwork with people you enjoy being around.
Take the time to make seeing your colleagues outside of work meetings a priority. A few ways to do this are to schedule lunch meetings where you “go out to lunch” together. Grab your meal, and hop on a video call to share it with one another. Just like you would if you had left the office to pick up something to eat with a coworker, don’t make it a work meeting. It’s okay to talk about life or what you’re doing on the weekend during your virtual lunch date.
Same thing with happy hours. Perhaps every Friday afternoon, you could instate a weekly happy hour at the end of the day to celebrate another week down. Just sitting back and laughing with your colleagues on camera to end the week is sure to send everyone into the weekend feeling good.