A Guide to Remote Working

For many people the content of this article may seem obvious, rudimentary and basic... BUT I think what some of us forget is that for many businesses, big and small, the concept of successful remote working is very new and we shouldn't take that for granted.

@SOTech we have successfully been running an optional 'work from home' policy for over 3 years and in this time feel we have managed to perfect the balance of communication and productivity. Currently our team stretches from South London to Milton Keynes to Scotland to Kiev to Bali all the way to Australia and every member of our team still feels like they are part of the 'office'.

There are a few key things that can help in running your business remotely, both from a technology standpoint and business processes which I will outline below.

Daily Collaboration and 'water-cooler' chat.

Part of being in an office is the day to day communication, whether it's talking about what you did at the weekend, what you watched on TV the previous night, talking about family, OR occasionally talking about work ;-). In a remote working scenario there is a risk of losing this and people feeling isolated, which in turns leads to a drop in productivity. There are a number of tools out there on the market that can assist in this, below I have highlighted just a handful:

• Slack
• Microsoft Teams
• Skype
• Workplace By Facebook
• Basecamp
• Google Hangouts

AND LOADS MORE... (a good list can be found here https://www.workzone.com/blog/slack-alternatives/)

We have been using Slack for a number of years and would very much recommend it. How we use it at SOtech is by having specific groups or channels dedicated to specific things, this way your team members can be part of appropriate channels based on their role.

A channel can be a particular project, a working group or simply a channel for general chat. Some of our channels are:

• #wins (where we share wins or successes)
• #tech-stuff (for our developers to interact on technology challenges latest releases or just general tech fail amusements)
• #Social (where our pool league lives and where we talk about going out for drinks / lunches)
• #WorkoutWednesdays (for those that like to go for a run or cycle)

and then we have a channel for every client, every project and our management team. Your team can also direct message and make voice and video calls easily.

Ensuring work priorities - 'The Stand Up'

One of the other issues with not being in the same office is that you can easily loose sight of what your team are working on, or if something urgent comes in that you want your team to re-focus on.

We introduced the daily 'stand-up' many years ago and have been doing it every day at 09:30 since. This can take place via video conference (using slack or video conferencing software, listed later) easily and gets everyone dialled in. As MD I will lead this call and we very quickly go round the team and each team member notes what they worked on yesterday, what they are working on today and if they need any support from anyone else. It is also a chance for managers or team leaders to re-prioritise any projects if needed and provides visibility of what your team are working on.

For me, this is a key part of remote working and actually gives some team members the only opportunity they get each day to ask for help (not everyone is very good at asking for help remember!) and sometimes provides the most productive 30mins of a day.

Planning of work

While the stand up process is a great help for immediate tasks being worked on 'right now', in order to ensure your team don't run out of work, or are unclear of what they should be working on next it is wise to plan ahead.

There are some great tools for planning work and the idea would be to create projects and tasks and assign them to individuals or teams, so everyone in a team has visibility of when certain tasks have been completed and what they will be working on next.

We use Jira to both plan work internally and to collaborate with outside organisations. It not only allows us to plan work for specific projects but also allows managers or project managers to plan another team members day / week / month by assigning tasks.

Good tools to look into:

• Jira
• Asana
• Monday
• Trello

Conferencing

Obviously this has been around for a long time and remains an important part of most businesses. In times when your entire workforce is forced into remote working though, the main issue can be around licences. Normally most businesses will pay for a handful of licences as under normal circumstances that's all you need. However if all of a sudden your workforce is forced to work from home the usage of these tools will double down - at least.

So, as well as the financial aspect of increasing your licences it is also important to set aside some rules to ensure you maximise the productivity and don't just throw away money on licences you don't need. i.e.

• Only use conferencing if you need to have a call with more than 2 people (that are outside your organisation)
• Only use conferencing if you need to deliver a presentation or screenshare
• Ensure you have a public diary of all calls being scheduled so people can avoid clashes (if limited licences)
• Ensure your calls remain within the allotted time and give 10mins flex between calls.

Good off-the-shelf conferencing softwares we have used are:

• Zoom
• GoToMeeting
• BlueJeans
• CiscoWebX

more can be found here: https://www.softwareadvice.com/uk/video-conferencing/

Office Access (Servers etc)

If for any reason the services you normally have access to are locked down to your office IP address (business servers, files, folders, systems, etc) then setting up a VPN in your office would be the way to go, a VPN allows remote workers to access the office 'as if they are using the office internet'. Depending on the size of your office this can be low cost and simple to setup and there are lots of good guides out there.

The alternative to having a physical server onsite that requires VPN access would be to look at cloud based storage, especially if the only things you have on your office servers are files, images, data) You can easily look at your existing office suite provider to see what options you have for moving this data to the cloud, again a couple of popular examples are:

• GSuite (Google Drive)
• Office365 (Sharepoint / OneDrive)
• Dropbox

These tools are a great way of sharing documents and storing them in one place for multiple team members to access, again the success of these tools is around how you use them and what rules are in place. i.e. folders or files that multiple people use, a simple rule of download and make your own copy prevents lose of data :-)

Personal Advise to Team Members

This is your opportunity to show your value, step up, be productive and support the wider team around you where you can. You will naturally have to be more self sufficient in your work but if you take the proactive approach of sharing completed work, communicating via telephone, instant messaging or video conference to discuss work (as opposed to emails) you will lead by example and be noticed.

Personal Advise for Management

As the manager of a business the ultimate success of your team remote working will be how you interact with them, you will need a high level of trust because you won't be able to 'see' them at their desk. You also can't keep asking for updates as that will impact their morale.

So trust them, ensure they know what their priorities are, ensure they have access to ask questions of other team members and most of all be clear yourself of what your business outputs need to be.

Mark Purdy

MD, SOtechnology