Naiman Labs Newsletter #38. Remote vs Office. Improve your own experience.

Hi friends! Welcome to another Naiman Labs Newsletter edition. Get ready for a long read 😄

I can see a lot of heated discussion about remote work and returning to the offices. There is certain trend for companies to encourage their employees to come back to the offices. This topic has always been controversial. I believe we all can agree that our work lifestyle has changed during COVID, and it’s quite hard to come back to this. Basically, the entire world of work is getting divided into 2 main camps again.

The first one - companies encouraging their employees to come back to the offices. Second one - companies that have already adopted their work-from-anywhere or hybrid work policies and remote work thought leaders.

Reasons for Encouraging Office Return:

Based on my observations on companies encourage their employees to come back to the offices, I can see several reasons:

1️⃣ Many companies have invested in their huge office facilities and supported people moving across big countries by opening regional hubs (so opening new offices). If I invested that amount of money in office facilities, I'd definitely want my team members to use them.

2️⃣ Second, there are many observations that remote work has made it much harder for managers to control their employees as they claim.

Here we can go into a big discussion of what is the prime job of a manager, and I believe that it’s not about control at all. Also, I am sure you have all seen various posts on the internet about companies introducing “controlling” software to track their employees and how employees come up with various devices imitating mouse movement to be seen active by this spying software. In this case, I believe that it’s much more about toxic culture and weak managers rather than remote work itself. If these practices exist in the companies, I think it is really not about remote or office or hybrid setup.

Advantages of Flexible Work:

Indeed, managerial practices require much more effort and more creativity, different approaches when you are in the remote work setup. You need to be more creative to keep a high level of employee engagement, be more creative with compensation management, and remote work actually requires more skills from the managers.

At the same time, a remote work setup, or I would even go farther and rather say flexible setup today provides a strong advantage for the companies that can manage it right. In this clash of remote vs. office setup, flexible setup will add some extra points to the company's employee value proposition (EVP).

I have recently met several candidates who wanted to leave their companies because they wanted to continue utilizing the remote work setup instead of being pushed to visit the office. I personally think that remote work itself is not that strong advantage for EVP. However, flexibility at work in general provides much more value for your team members. By flexibility I mean flexible location, flexible setting, flexible working hours. But we can leave it for the next newsletter 🙂

I am lucky and I have been working in a flexible, hybrid setup for the recent years. And recently, I have been thinking about the steps and measures that any team member, any employee, any one of us can take to improve our remote work or hybrid work experience.

Let’s divide them into 3 buckets: Mind, Process, and Tools.

🧠 Mind:

I think we all struggled there when we first tried remote work. Working hours get blurred. You find it hard to concentrate. If your family members are with you, they subconsciously think that if you are at home you’re not working, etc.

What really helped me personally is setting a home office routine:

• Setting a dedicated workspace at home.

• Creating a routine to get into work: breakfast, coffee, news reading, writing down the tasks for the day

• Changing clothes for work. Yes. I thought: “You’re going to your home office, right? You wouldn’t go to the office in your sleeping pants.” And it changed my concentration dramatically.

When you work remotely, you genuinely have more autonomy and personal responsibility for completing your work. Your manager wouldn’t pass by your desk and casually ask how things are going.

It’s often harder even for good skilled managers to keep the team spirit and motivation in the remote environment. So your internal motivation, your personal persistence is very important for your own performance at work.

I also often observe that it is harder for employees to stay connected with their team mates. I felt it myself obviously. So I think it’s crucial to take part in team meetings. You can also make to spend some time outside of work-related topics to get to know each other better. Try making some knowledge sharing sessions or random-coffee sessions, or book-clubs, movie-clubs. Try meeting some of your colleagues especially those who you don’t communicate often with. It is always worth it to know people from the other teams better. It will increase your exposure to the company as well as help you to understand all the business processes better.

And another important point that I always highlight to the team members I work with. Show your work. It is even more important in the remote environment. Show your growth, your achievements, your performance. For example:

• Discuss your goals, plans and targets with your manager. Make sure you have regular catch-ups with your manager. And don’t be very humble. If you achieve something, tell them about it. If you have made some progress with a complex task, don’t wait until you complete it 100%, try sharing updates on the progress.

• Team up with your colleagues. Solve problems together. When you do this, recognise your team members help and you will also be recognised for your help. Nothing is more bonding then solving problems together. Building relationships with your team can only benefit you in the long run.

• Don’t hesitate to share your knowledge. This is one of my favorite practice. I love knowledge-sharing sessions. Your colleagues are experts in their own fields and can offer some amazing insights. Why not to discuss it with them? And of course you know a lot, and you often learn something new - why not to share it?

⚙️ Process:

Another thing that’s harder when you work remotely is to stay connected with your teammates. Communication with your remote colleagues requires more efforts, more thinking and more creativity. When we work remotely, we all need to pay a bit more attention to our communication skills, both written and verbal.

Here are some ideas that I try myself and recommend others to try:

📱 Keep your profiles up to date - make it easier for your colleagues to find you, and to reach out to you. For example add your Slack job description, your profile picture, help your team members identify you.

💬 Work messengers are basically the replacement and the imitation for our verbal chats, it’s worth it to apply some nice techniques.

• Don’t type just “Hey, how are you?”. We try to be polite by just typing “hi” and waiting for a person to reply to make sure that they’re ready to talk. But instead, it’s better to enforce asynchronous communication and type the entire message at once and let your team member respond when they have time. So follow up your “Hi” message with your actual message.

• Another good habit to implement in your communication is to mention if your message is urgent or not. When we work in different time zones, sometimes we can text each other at inappropriate times, outside of working hours, or even late at midnight. So just mention that it’s not urgent and you’re not requiring a response soon.

• Kind reminder: one longer message is always better than six one-word messages.

⏰ Set your working schedule. You might do it just for yourself, or even align with your manager and your team on this.

For example I set Tuesday and Thursday as my focus work days, I reduce the meetings during these days and I work longer in order to progress on my projects. At the same time Wednesday and Friday are my focused communication days and I try setting most of my meetings in that time slots. So I can have 5-6 meetings in one day and I am prepared for it.

🔰 Protect your time. We all have do not disturb modes, pause notifications features and silent modes. Don’t forget to use them. Protect your non-working time and focus time. Some of my colleagues are extremely good in this and I am happy that we as a company encourage time management and protecting the time. Today I can see more and more successful businesses promote this as a good self-management and team management practice.

📆 Your calendar is you biggest friend. Use it effectively. These are the practices I use in my calendar:

• Keeping the calendar up to date. All the meetings and focus time blocks go there.

• If I have some time-bound tasks and to-dos, I add them into the calendar.

• RSVP. Meetings invites should get responses. It helps to keep the calendar clean and it gives an understanding if I participate or not.

• Color coding. I love using different colors for different calendar activities to make it visible how I spend time at work.

• Adding different timezones in google calendar settings is very helpful for working with team members in different geographies.

📱 Tools:

🎙️ Good audio. One of the constant irritating problems is poor audio quality when we are in these zoom calls. Invest a little bit in your audio set up. Adjust the audio settings, try noise cancellation software, don’t use the poor quality microphone.

📸 Using software for asynchronous work can be very helpful. Don’t every conversation and not every presentation should be a meeting. For example you can try “Loom” app to record the presentation, manual, or walkthrough for your colleagues.

💻 Try improving your virtual meeting experience:

• Don’t join meeting off-camera. When you turn your camera on - you are present, others can see your emotions and you basically improve the quality of the meeting

• Enhance your audio quality

• Don’t overuse “mute” button - I think we’re all pretty tire of hearing “sorry, you’re on mute”.

• When you join the meeting, make sure you don’t have a strong background noise, or you’re join muted. You don’t want to shock others by sudden noise.

• Set clear agenda for the meeting and make sure every meeting participant knows why they are there

• Come to the meetings on-time.

• Don’t exceed the meeting time, if it’s needed to exceed, you might want to set another conversation, or continue discussion off-line.

• When you are at the meeting, be Present. Follow the conversation, give your inputs, don’t do a hundred other things at the background. You don’t want to be that person who misses the entire conversation and asks: “could you repeat please, I guess I missed something”.

• Take meeting notes to keep everyone updated and to have our thoughts clearly stated. Everybody will benefit from it - you’ll know what you have agreed on as well as everybody will know what do they need to do. You can use one of the multiple note-taking apps, or even AI software that will transform your meeting discussion into a text note.

Working from home or in a flexible work setup has its challenges. All these office vs remote vs hybrid setup will go on and on. While companies are trying to figure out what is the better approach, we can do something to improve our own experience and stay as productive or even more productive when we work from home.