Banno is a highly distributed team, with over half of our engineering staff working remotely. Over time we’ve grown some best practices for working with remote employees that can help this hybrid team structure work smoothly.
Attempt to keep discussion in text
Teams have a natural tendency to chat face to face, meaning important conversations often happen around the water cooler or at team members’ desks. While this is important to building office culture, it’s vital to ensure that remote employees are not left out of important decisions. When possible, keeping important conversations in Slack or email gives us a good traceable history and allows remote workers to engage. It’s also important to funnel the results of face-to-face conversations into chat to allow those that were not there in person to understand decisions as they are made. In either situation, be sure to include complete context so that later readers can gather the full breadth of the conversation without missing pieces that occured face-to-face or in one-to-one chats.
When in doubt, fire up a video call
While the traceability of text is valuable, it also lacks nuance and tone. If a conversation begins to spin its wheels, a video call is a great way to take a conversation face-to-face while still allowing remote employees to engage. On Slack you can do this directly by entering /zoom meeting, /teams-call meeting, or /hangout in chat.
If one person’s remote, everyone’s remote
When a remote employee joins in a call with several employees in a shared office, it’s easy for the remote employee to be come just a face on the TV. Discussion often happens within the room without a chance for the remote employee to join in, or it happens at a volume the mic cannot pick up. Whenever possible, try to engage with remote workers on equal footing. This means everyone joins a hangout from their own machine, bringing a more face-to-face engagement to each member of the conversation.
Sometimes this isn’t possible, as meeting space in an office is limited and noise pollution can get high. If possible, team members within a single room can still join the meeting from their own computers with all but the room mic muted to allow for the face-to-face experience while still utilizing the space the office provides. While not every meeting allows for this kind of setup, thinking of a remote worker’s experience during meetings goes a long way. If a meeting requires a team to be available only within a meeting room, always make sure remote employees can hear you and make sure you’re on camera when speaking, even if it’s just a quick move in to ensure everybody knows who is talking.
Regardless, if you’re on a video call, be sure to keep your camera on as often as possible. This is the best way to get tone and to see when someone needs to interject. It also helps get a feel for who you’re talking to, since so many of us are in different offices.
Document everything
The easiest way for new hires and remote workers to keep up to date with changes in process and workflow is having complete documentation. Be sure to update docs in both repositories and the wiki consistently whenever changes take place.