3 Simple Tips to Greatly Enhance Remote Work at Your Company

These are the top 3 most important tips that have enabled us as a company to successfully work remotely since 2014. We have been remote first since the founding of the company, it's part of our DNA.

1: Embrace Asynchronous Communication

If you don't know what is asynchronous you have a lot of catching up to do. Since you are not in the same office as the other person, you will need to adapt your communication strategy. There are times where you receive a message on MS Teams or Slack, then you need to wait for a response, the other person waits again and so on. Sometimes you end up with long conversations and still didn't exactly figure out what the other person wants. You could jump on a phone call with the person. But then you are communicating synchronously with the person again. The person you are calling loses focus and will need time again to get back into the context. Instead record the other person a quick video and screencast, showing your problem. This way the other person can watch the video at her/his convenience and sees the emotions of the coworker. There are countless extensions for your browser, or native applications such as "Loom". This simple hack is going to make a big difference!

2: Avoid Isolation: Team events

The biggest downside of working remotely is isolation. Some of our employees have moved to the Canary islands, others have moved to low-price housing areas in Germany to afford a nice property. If you sleep at the same place where you work you can end up hours in front of the computer. Furthermore you don't go out as often, you will feel more isolated and unhappy. We counter this by offering everyone in the team 25$ per month for remote team events. Those team events are sometimes beer tasting, sometimes buying a game, or joining an escape room together. This helps to improve team motivation. I initially learned about this when working at trivago where we would have on-site team events. Since being remote only it's not as easy, but still a lot of fun. Just an example, we had a virtual escape room together where we would control a real life person to solve riddles for us. It was a lot of fun.

3: Weekly all hands coffee break

Now this sounds like a stupid idea, but I think it's totally underrated. Once per week have everyone from the same company join a short 15 minute coffee break. This is optional of course. But those who are interested will love it. For 15 minutes you can talk about your week, what you have done on the weekend and what you have planned. Sometimes you can discuss updates on a project. It's great to see what your coworkers are working on. These are all details that you might normally miss.

What is your favorite tip? What works best for you when working remotely? Please share your tips as well. Thanks!