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Startups and Business

Retro-fitting remote working

I wrote my last post about remote working on my way to Gran Canara almost 4 years ago. It was the first time I had attempted to work remotely from the team based in London, and the reality was – remote working was really hard!

We aren’t a “remote-first” company, and I knew working with the team when they weren’t used to having to deal with a remote team member was going to be challenging.

Even a slightly flaky internet connection became massively frustrating during calls. Reverse engineering context from discussions that were happening ‘offline’ was a constant challenge. And trying to engage the team in the work I was doing from Gran Canara.

On the plus side, there were no time-zone differences, I met some awesome people, we redesigned the FundApps branding, and I was living one minute from the beach!

However, the challenges of growing a team in person in London were enough that I hadn’t really attempted it since.

How does it look now?

Roll forward several years, and FundApps has grown from 8 to approaching 50, has offices in London and New York, with remote workers in Toronto, Darlington and Auckland.

Now, whether we like it or not, we have to get good at this! It’s still hard, but we’re inching closer to this being a better experience:

  • A decent video conferencing set up. Sounds obvious, but it took us much experimentation to find something that worked for us. We’re now using Zoom and a proper speakerphone that works over USB too. If someone has a dodgy connection, they can join the call by phone instead.
  • If there’s one remote person in a meeting, then everyone joins a call from their desks. We don’t do this for everything yet, but it does level the playing field significantly.
  • Face to face time is invaluable, particularly for new starters. Our remote workers had the advantage of having worked in our office for some time – they knew the team, and the culture. Our recent recruits in New York didn’t have that luxury though, and so making the time for them to visit London, and their colleagues visiting New York to build those relationships have been super valuable.
  • Increase signal to noise. We’re trying to separate discussion from actual decisions so it’s easier to keep track of what’s going on – we’ve had some success using dedicated project channels in Slack (for chat), while ensuring core decisions are recorded more explicitly in GitHub or Google Docs.
  • Preferring async communication, if you have team members working on different time zones – try finding a time that works for folks in Canada, London and New Zealand for a call!

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