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How to (not) break firewood on a remote site

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I joined the InfoWatch team recently. Almost immediately I noticed that the developers took the opportunity to work remotely, and for products this was somehow considered inappropriate. When we, the products, approached the “self-isolation” activities, we did not have the experience of remote collaboration. And it didn’t bother me too much, but looking at the statistics and what is happening in neighboring countries, we realized that we couldn’t avoid separation, and decided to conduct “exercises”. For one day, all employees were asked to work from home.

And this is what turned out:


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  • You should definitely read what the IT team writes, because there was no recording of conversations when they were needed (and this was not an IT error).

In one day, we caught only obvious technical and organizational problems. But when they plunged into the “self-isolation” mode completely, something else appeared that was not obvious:

  • It’s inconvenient to use conference services without direct integration with Outlook (when Outlook automatically creates a meeting in the service and inserts a link to it directly into the invitation): double work to book a meeting first in the calendar, then in the service itself, then updating the meeting with a link to the conference room from service.
  • Video conferencing services introduce almost elusive delays that seriously affect the quality of communication. In addition, the usual methods of managing communication work worse: facial expressions and gestures, looking at which, colleagues better understand at what point is it appropriate for anyone to enter into a conversation. Turning on the video here helps poorly. And we still have not developed for ourselves any rules / ethics that would allow us to communicate through video as naturally as it happens in a personal meeting.

Technical problems can be solved somewhere (as with better Internet), somewhere - no (delays), but you can adapt to them. Organizational problems turned out to be much more unpleasant:

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  • Due to the fact that you have to sit at home, it became unclear what the team was doing? If at the office the head usually half-listens to the conversations of his wards (and thus keeps his finger on the pulse), then there simply is nothing to listen to, and to read the JIRA activity tape is, well, a lot of fun for everyone.
  • Colleagues plunged into their inner cosmos: the feeling of “one wave” was gone, each in solving their problems went his own way.
  • Have you tried brainstorming on a remote site? With those same delays, without the ability to actively interact with gestures and facial expressions?

Organizational problems began to be fought with organizational measures.

What we did and what tools we used on the remote


  • It turned out that you can maintain the general direction of movement using a process that describes the steps and their results (but not the content of the steps).
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We did not want to create complex processes (we believe that complex ones do not work), so we took the basic of three steps ("backlog", "in work", "completed") and after a while added it with the "done" column.

It turned out conveniently: at the beginning of the week you type yourself tasks and shift them to “in work”. At the end of the week, you check and talk about how many tasks are in the “completed” status on general synchronization. After the meeting, we transfer unnecessary cards to the “done” column. According to the results of work, for some time, we analyze the structure of our load in the “done” column (we use tags to mark the meaning). But my team did not like this service (it is inconvenient to work with your cards if there is a common board), and it is inconvenient to view the department loading if the boards are separate. Therefore, we decided to return to JIRA, reorganizing the processes for remote work modeled on Trello.

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In general, I still had the feeling that “communications were sagging slightly” (there is not enough personal communication and pereshichivanie with colleagues), but the work did not stop and the quality does not drop. And if I ask what I recommend to the leaders of remote teams, I’ll say this by dividing the recommendations into technical and organizational:

Technical recommendations


  • Provide the team with good call center headsets with directional microphones.
  • Do not forbid the team to use "shadow IT", it is better to try to understand what is wrong with the officially authorized tools and bring them to mind, or legalize the "shadow".
  • Build a transparent (available to other departments too) work planning tool inside the iteration (we have it JIRA).

Important organizational issues


  • Set the boundaries of working hours within the day. It’s even better to set aside a separate workplace and work only there.
  • Diversify the day (plan physical activity, chat with loved ones, play).
  • And last, and most important: in your conditions, something else may work. Love your team and just give them the opportunity to do their job the way it is IM (first of all to them, and then to you) is convenient. But let the result be as you need it.

I sincerely wish you success!

Please share your knowledge about the rules / ethics of communication through web-conferences so that their participants can better navigate when and to whom it is necessary to start / end a speech and what should be replaced by such necessary gestures and facial expressions?

Author: Stepan Deshevykhstephandeshevikh

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