December 2, 2019
This remote working playbook takes learnings from a variety of EE consultants who have spent time working remotely with a view to help our network collaborate more effectively and provide ways to improve the distributed work experience.
At Equal Experts, we are passionate that teams are empowered to succeed and deliver value no matter where they are located. Over the years our teams have covered the full spectrum from fully co-located, teams with work-from-home-Fridays, teams with multiple locations spread across geographies and different timezones to fully distributed teams.
As the friction created by remote working rapidly dissipates and as the generation of workers who have grown-up playing on-line enter the workforce, remote working will become an increasingly important part of our working life. With the right tools, practices and mindset, the once significant advantages provided by co-located working can be reduced to a point where remote teams should be a strong consideration when forming your next team.
Effective distributed working requires more than huddling around a big screen once a day or communicating via Jira ticket. We want this playbook to be practical and help teams establish useful tools, process and working patterns for remote working. We have included a healthy dose of practical tips and learnings as well as some recommendations for technical tools.
Technology is changing very fast, and while we have focused on giving practical advice, we have also shared some of the underlying principles that allow remote teams to be successful.
Feel free to skip through some of the more theoretical sections as it is more musing about why, rather than practical advice on how. The Team Charter section provides a tool to help team alignment and set expectations. In this section, we give hints on working day etiquette, working across timezones, some important considerations when running video calls and thoughts that extend Slack beyond /giphy for communicating in a remote-working setting. Some of these suggestions may appear obvious, but applying them consistently makes a big difference when working in a remote setting.
We hope you find this and our other playbooks useful. If you’ve used it to help your remote team work more effectively or have feedback of any flavour, we’d love to hear from you. We offer a range of services, and of course, we’re pretty good at delivering software.
Share thoughts, find updates, templates and other information at ee.yelkdev.site, or get in touch if you are interested in working with us.
Finally, if you want to learn some of the techniques we use to build high-performing remote-first teams watch this recent webinar.
All business models have their pros and cons. But, when you consider the type of problems we help our clients to solve at Equal Experts, it’s worth thinking about the level of experience and the best consultancy approach to solve them.
If you’d like to find out more about working with us – get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.