Remote Work Is Not Allowed Working From An Office. The Comma Challenge

We used to place the comma in the sentence above by ourselves, and these days it is not much of a choice left.

I ought to think that for many business managers it was a bit scary how their businesses will perform under given circumstances. At least that was my feelings by that time.

It’s been almost 3 weeks since we have moved the whole company to remote work. A stressful step for me personally. I’m more used to face to face conversations and workgroup meetings rather than chat or email exchange. And the company policy was that everyone is working from the same location.

Since the quarantine started I found out that indeed people are working in remote teams.

Discipline

We kept all scrum activities but transferred them into remote calls. Teams that usually didn’t have daily scrum & standups are having it now. And that is working well as it keeps the discipline at a good level and people are responsible for their words.

Burndown

I noticed people are actually doing more work now, they are stretching the working hours over the day but the output is more than we used to see as if that would be 9-18 or 8-17 schedule.

Apparently, the fact that you have not many things to do also is helping here, but the fact is that the work is done.

Hiring

Even being quarantined we managed to get new people aboard. By nature, we had to adapt our hiring and onboarding processes. So the situation with expanding teams is not frozen still.

Burnouts

People are getting tired the same way as if they are working from offices. As the quarantine hits Europe, flights are stopped so everyone is shifting the vacations till the better days. But having postponing your holiday doesn’t really help to work more effectively and doesn’t save you from burnout. We are advising our guys still to use the holiday and hang out with Netflix or meditate, whatever. Just to switch the mindset.

Free time

Kids are superhappy to see daddy hanging around, and it’s a few extra hours I’m spending with them as there is no time consumed by trips to the office and back.

Conclusion

A lot of businesses are indeed affected, but having remote work discipline at the company DNA did minimize the impact for us, as well as for many other IT companies.

What is your experience in transforming your business to remote? What are the insights? Please let me know in the comments.

Be safe!