👨‍🔧 ✏️ 🧑🏿‍🤝‍🧑🏽 Remote Tools: how the misuse of applications almost cost us $ 50,000 ✌🏽 👨🏿‍⚖️ 🛀🏾

We have been working remotely since 2013 and we know in what places newcomer-remote workers bang their heads. Article 5 of the stupid mistakes that we made while looking for the perfect set of applications for the online office.

Bonus at the end: a link to a directory of applications for remote work.

Our company is called Ratio, we are engaged in custom web development. Until 2018, we worked in the format “office in Moscow + remote employees in the regions”. Now there is no office at all, but there is a fully distributed team of 20+ employees.

Here we will talk about our mistakes in organizing a remote office. Rest assured, in the coming months many leaders will stumble over the same places that we seven years ago.

By the way, we recently launched an online catalog of applications for remote. There is a link at the end of the article: you can evaluate the project yourself and share your impressions in the comments.

Error 1: documents instead of knowledge base

Google Drive is about disposable tablets and official pieces of paper. If you plan to store forms and regulations there, to which you will return again and again - it is better to look right away towards the knowledge base: Notion , Coda , Confluence , Yandex.Wiki .

In the life of every business, there comes a time when it is time to capture experience and processes - otherwise newcomers will go crazy getting into your team. But when the regulations become 30-40, they need to be structured somehow, otherwise you will not be able to quickly find the right one.

Once our manager spent half an hour to find a file in Google Drive. Then we decided to transfer all the project documentation to Notion. This seemingly simple affair cost the company 20 man hours. 20 paid hours just to organize documents in a new way.

Realizing the mistake, we have collected on the basis of Notion the entire management infrastructure - projects, HR management, a CRM system and a corporate social network. In Google Docs, we certainly wouldn’t do that.

Mistake 2: managers are controlled as performers

The first months after a complete transition to a remote site, we tried to accurately calculate the costs of managerial tasks. Ha!

The square-nested YouTrack with clear TK, deadlines and estimates is great for developers. Using the same tool for managers, we quickly ran into problems - tasks were estimated from the bulldozer, deadlines were constantly being broken and people were suffering. Perfectionist Hell: no sense of completion, nothing works as it should.

It is clear that such control was useless. The tasks done were accumulated, and then marked all at once - the managers did not use YouTrack to organize the working day. The exact loss in productivity is difficult to measure, but it is clear that they were huge.

In such a situation, it makes sense to move managers to a separate site, where there are fewer fields to fill in and more freedom. Usually this site is more like an advanced to-do list than a tracker.

At first we poked at Asana , but then decided to abandon duplicate applications and switched to Notion . There are no clear templates at all: each manager fixes tasks in a way that suits him comfortably. Also, we immediately integrated Notion with Slack - this saved us from unnecessary communication, reports on completed tasks now come automatically.

Mistake 3: sharing instead of corporate storage

At first, we shared the files as necessary: in telegrams we dumped each other or uploaded to personal disc drives. Designers have not yet used Figma, all the work went into Photoshop - files were transferred often, but were lost even more often.

Three or four times we lost operating time on projects, we had to draw the interfaces again. Do not repeat our mistakes and immediately use the corporate Google Drive , Box , Dropbox or Yandex.Disk .

Error 4: passwords in task descriptions

At first, cybersecurity issues did not bother us. Passwords were stored where they are usually needed - in tasks and project cards. That approach almost cost us $ 50,000.

It was like this: we almost got on the NDA, because YouTrack bogged and allowed search engines to index their insides. We had everything there: logins, passwords, all sensitive data. The customer noticed a leak and gave us a hat.

YouTrack developers corrected the error, we managed to agree with the customer, but after this story we do not trust passwords for services that do not specialize in cybersecurity. Now the company has a closed information circuit and confused rules: all usernames / passwords are in 1password , we don’t exchange access in chats, we don’t store them in production applications.

Error 5: free open-source

For several years we paid Slack for the whole team. Group calls are convenient there, screen sharing is functional - it was cool when they added a feature with drawing over the screen of the interlocutor. But in 2017, our anchor client (a third of revenue) reduced the volume of orders due to business problems. We had to cut bones, including the office.

Here we discovered the world of free full-featured software. We stopped at a bunch of Rocket.Chat + Jitsi Meet as a dialer - both products are installed on their own servers, which completely suits us. The interface is crooked, but we are harsh encoders - functions are most important. So it seemed to us, at least.

We spent on deployment, testing and implementation of new applications 20 hours of management and 20 hours of development, and then we started to spit naturally. Rocket.Chat was buggy, notifications did not arrive on time, and overall there was an unpleasant feeling: in order to work, we had to literally wade through an inconvenient interface.

As a result, we switched to the free version of Slack without a complete chat history and Google Meet for calling. Still, the starting version of a paid product turned out to be better than a completely free solution. The truncated message history even became an occasion to improve discipline in the team - all important project information should be stored in Notion, not in chat rooms.

Choose tools wisely

The most important thing in a distributed team is not in applications, but in rituals and people - not everyone is suitable for a remote site, and the remaining ones need to be periodically glued to each other. Applications are secondary, but without them you won’t organize a good workflow.

We recently launched Remote, a free directory of applications for remote work. Drop by to find the right services for your office. Choose wisely and do not repeat the mistakes behind us.

remote.ratio.digital

We also made a sticker pack for communication in a remote team:
https://t.me/addstickers/Cat_Remote