Deliberate implementation of remote work: how to double your results without hiring anyone

Today I will talk about how we implemented remote work in CarPrice, what results it led us to, and why it is needed at all.

The purpose of the article: to make more companies supporting remote work, because this approach really improves the results of the company, and, most importantly, people become more free, more creative and try harder.

Background

At least 600 companies in the world are already working remotely. Their employees sit at home or travel, while working and doing cool results. There are already more than 150 completely home-based successful companies, for example, Invision, GitLab, Balsamiq, Zapier. Distributed teams - this is not tomorrow, it is today.

We at CarPrice were inspired by the Skyeng example - there are many developers working from home - it looked interesting and attractive to us, and we decided to give it a try.

The initiator of the implementation of remote work in CarPrice was Yura Builov, our CTO. Previously, everything was very strict with discipline: even when an employee was lying at home with a temperature, he thought about how to be, after all, he had to warn HR, to understand whether he would at least read the mail or it would be better to take sick leave right away. And in the end, we switched to full remote work, and now I will tell you how we did it.



We had an IT team of 50 people physically distributed over two offices: in Moscow and Kirov, that is, in fact, two teams. And we broke down the tasks: some completely donated to Kirov, some completely did in Moscow, while the interaction was at a very low level.

Of the interesting things, I would like to note the recruiting pressure of corporations. A novice developer came to us, and only we had time to pump it up a bit and teach some things, as soon as he raised his hand and left for a larger company. And such a story happened constantly: people worked for 6-7 months and left - it was very annoying.

What did we want to get after implementation? Become fully distributed, as was the case with distributed companies. They tried to do more with less resources, and at the same time, so that people would not run away from us every six months.



What did we do? We began to introduce remote work according to the principle of feature toggling, when you do something in stages, increasing the test sample. In the first quarter, as an experiment, we decided to give employees the opportunity one day a week, from Tuesday to Thursday, to choose from, work from home, if desired. You can work everything in the office, and if you want, you can work from home on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday - as you like. And we saw that the employees at home work well. Why Tuesday to Thursday? We did not want people to tie a remote day to the weekend and go somewhere to the country.

What did we see? That people began to develop habits for remote work. Previously, a person was sick, and he was guaranteed to be discriminated against, for example, a rally was being held, but everyone forgot about him and did not even include him, believing that he was sitting at home and reading mail, and we would talk without him. When all the people started working from home, they realized that they could also forget to connect them themselves, and, as a result, everyone began to connect everyone.

Other habits have also been developed, for example, to keep working out, to provide everyone else with the most transparent information - this is all at the level of understanding people and some useful actions that they do every day. A complete list of habits is shown in the picture above.



In the second quarter, we decided to make two such days, also without the possibility of joining the weekend. All this time we controlled the process, monitored the effectiveness and, if it turned out that someone was not online or did not set Slack status, that he was having lunch, then we returned him to the office.

Since work from home was already carried out two days a week, we realized that we needed to tighten some additional tools. The manager brought Miro to the team, drew us service schemes, and rummaged through everything. Now even those guys who were initially against this program sat in Slack. Everyone understood the usefulness of the tools, why they are needed, and that general transparency and accessibility are also needed, and as before, working on the knee will fail - it will be ineffective.



From the third quarter we allowed these two remote days to be attached to the weekend. And we began to develop some kind of remote processes. This was not forcibly implanted from above, but came from the team itself. Wives told the developers: it’s good that you sit at home (not for everyone, though for the majority). Someone just realized that it’s great not to spend two hours a day on the road, but it’s much better to sit in your comfortable chair at home, and equip yourself with jobs. These remote processes have become important and in demand. That is, when you cannot go up to someone, harass him and say something, then you understand the value of the processes. All these processes are presented in the picture above, but perhaps the most important process that supported us is OKR.



Since the 4th quarter, we have already made 3 such days a week, with the possibility of joining, and then culture began to be developed. People began to understand what it takes to work remotely efficiently. For example, they started calling up 15 minutes before Meath to chat about this. If someone is going to come to the office, he warns the others and says: guys, let's agree, and we will all come to the office on some day, i.e. people are more focused on remote specifics than work from the office.

And the most important thing is the trust of management. Perhaps you now think that you will never succeed, because the HR director looks after everyone and does not want the people to wander around. The trust of management is very important, and it is necessary for management to understand that this is not some kind of whim that is being done so that everyone can lie comfortably in hammocks instead of work, and that this helps to achieve better results, and this is evident on the results.

We developed some artifacts that were invented by both the team and the management. For example, if you came to work, and the person you need works from home, then at his workplace there is a card with a QR code - to make it easier to contact him. The code of the removed employee is an amazing thing: we made a set of rules, and all employees signed for them, for example, that they undertake to work out 40 hours a week.



Of course, there are risks, we also felt them. The first risk concerns fast-growing teams: if you grow twice as much per year as a team, then it will be difficult for you to switch to a remote site.

Weak onboarding is when new employees come, it’s more difficult to introduce them to work than when they come to an offline team.

For beginners, I believe that the remote is not suitable at all, because they cannot self-organize. Beginners, of course, sometimes have a good self-organization, but usually it happens that a young and inexperienced person cannot motivate himself and is distracted, and for him a remote person is too much.

It is also more difficult to train and grow a remote team, but these processes can also be built.

Life hacks

Summarizing what I said:

1. Implement the approach step by step, do not rush.
2. Teach people, tell them, take practices from other companies on how to work effectively remotely.
3. Be the evangelist of this approach yourself.
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Since we have OKR, for the past 3 years, at the beginning of each quarter, we have painted all our OKRs and evaluated them using poker planning for the complexity of tasks from 1 to 5. And for all of our OKR that we take to work, we We know how much they will cost us in these estimates of complexity.

At the end of the quarter, we look at how many tasks fit in all the teams, that is, how many total OKR we did in terms of complexity. Based on this, we understand how much we can take for the next quarter.

Over the course of the year, as we began to introduce the remote, our performance more than doubled. And another nice bonus is the zero turnover.

Why does it work, as I explain it to myself?

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2. The remote woman gives people additional value, they feel it and are ready to work extra for it, invest more.
3. And most importantly: you start to think more, and more ideas come to you when you work remotely.