It’s a time when many of us have become accustomed to working from home. What happens when you need to return to the office and how do you convince your manager to let you remain working remotely? Alex Warren is an Engineering Manager at AlphaSights in London. Before that, he spent 3.5 years working remotely as a full-stack web developer at Stack Overflow. He shared his experience transitioning between remote and office work at Codemotion Milan 2019, and offers a number of helpful perspectives when talking to a manager who is reluctant to entertain remove work.
Working at Stack Overflow he explains, “I got very used to a particular working style. And I sort of assumed that, oh, yeah, this is the way that development is done now. And yeah, people understand how remote work works, and they can still see the benefits and people generally do it really well.”
A job in an office followed where Alex notes: “I found returning to an office environment kind of surprised me. Actually, I was quite surprised by some of the primitive technologies that I saw people were still using in 2018. Things like actual physical whiteboards, which I hadn’t seen for a number of years. The place was absolutely covered in these sticky yellow and colourful post-it notes and most archaic and disturbing of all this thing called Skype for Business. What is this it really felt like it had come from the future.”
So many meetings!
Alex recounts, “There seemed to be lots of meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings all the time, sometimes a whole day just filled out with meetings. And yet things didn’t really seem to get written down. So it was kind of hard to keep track of what was going on. There was a lot of information that only existed in people’s heads, things like how the software works, and what the current status of the various projects that were going on was. And the office was noisy, it was very hard to concentrate at times because people are chattering, chattering, chattering away.
You would have thought with all of this communication going on that people would have a good idea of what was happening at any one moment. But what I actually found was that coordination between teams was vague and disorganised.”
Alex was left thinking:
- Why are things set up in this way?
- Why was this built like that?
- Who made that decision?
The benefits of remote work
Depending on your situation, working from home can be peaceful and conducive to deep work. Alex notes, “One of the big surprises going back into an office is just how loud it is. There are lots of people in offices talking away all the time, and people have some really annoying habits as well kind of picking their teeth and just kind of making weird grunting noises every few minutes. There’s always somebody who’s got a mechanical keyboard just rattling away like a machine gun.”
Remote work means there’s a greater ability to set your own schedule. You can nap, enjoy the lack of commute and improved health from not facing public transport.
Less stress: this leads to a virtuous cycle because less stress means that you’re even more productive. And less stress also means that you get less sick.
Being able to be anywhere in the world to do work means that you can keep staff around longer. As Alex notes “You can hire from anywhere in the world, why restrict your hiring pool just to people who live within a certain radius of your office? – This also, makes your company more attracted to work for.”
Why office work?
Alex asks, “Who is the work office environment actually optimised for? It’s people in developer teams who have the energy to face the commute every day. It’s people who like being surrounded by people, and it’s people who live nearby. Is it any wonder that so often out when you have a like a team shot showing our developers on our website, it’s just full of young extroverted males. And I think we can do a lot better than that.
Optimal work practices for remote work
- Remote first work: set up your processes so that they work well for people who are always at home.
- Favour asynchronous communication. “Asynchronous work is where people participate at different times. And they’re not necessarily actively waiting for incoming messages and replies, they may go off and do something else in the meantime, and get back to you an hour later, a day later.”
- Avoid meetings, wherever possible. Instead of value writing documents, sending emails and using slack.
- Use collaborative documents – if somebody has an idea for a new feature or a new system, write it up describing the problem and what is being proposed. Send it out, see what people think of it.
- Post mortems of outages can be done in collaborative documents also
- Monthly planning: “Who’s going to do what this month what features we’re going to pump next month, that can all be done. Google Docs, Google spreadsheets, weekly status updates, rather than having a meeting saying, oh, what did you do yesterday or last week?”
- “Even better, when you need to refer back to it, it’s already there, you will understand exactly the context in which you made certain decisions. And so you won’t be left wondering, Well, why did we build that way? What was going on at the time? “
- By default, all information should be accessible internally unless there’s a good reason for it not to be available to everybody. This means you stop the practice of people only finding out things by overhearing someone else talking.
- Procrastination can present as a problem. Alex concedes “And I don’t really have a very good solution for that other than just discipline. You just need to know how to, to do work when you’re there to do work. And if you have problems with that, then maybe the office is better for you. Because you’ve got other people to keep you on the straight and narrow. And if you’re energised by being around other people, then ultimately maybe we’re remote work is not for you.”
