Working remotely is great, sometimes

It’s just another day in the office. At the desk next to you is the comforting presence of the lady from HR with the great hair, and people are laughing in a meeting room. You wish you were there to hear the joke, but it’s OK. It can’t have been as funny as that thing you said in a meeting that other time. All is well with the world…and then everyone goes away.

Cue tumbleweed and Western music. Photo credit: Elgad.

In September last year, team Jobbatical was scattered across the globe—beyond the norm even for us startups. Now as far as I’m concerned, remote work is great for a week here and there if you’ve got nice weather and it’s newt season. But a totally distributed team? A month of trying to keep track of who’s in San Francisco and who’s in Sydney?

Yikes.

I thought, “People do it all the time. It can’t be that bad.”

“What’s the worst that could happen?” – Someone, seconds before this happened. Photo credit: Muratart.

Well, it looks like I (and the rest of the gang) successfully made it through Remote September. The world didn’t explode (at least not literally). Work got done, lessons were learned, and discoveries were made.

I sent out a survey because I was curious to find out how the rest of the team felt about it. The results reflected an almost unanimous thought: Remote work is great in moderation, and it can throw a bit of a spanner in the works if you’re not careful. Here’s some wisdom from our team—now seasoned remote working veterans—distilled from the survey results.

You need a system

If your team is new to large-scale remote working, things will almost certainly be weird. Know what to do if X happens while you sleep.

To oversimplify, you should be aiming for the “We have a Google Doc for that” approach and beyond.

Your communication is bad and you should feel bad*

There are a million creative ways in which humans can screw up their communication; we’re famous for it. We literally can’t stop misunderstanding each other and making all sorts of assumptions that make sense at the time.

Those expectations aren’t going to manage themselves

It’s all about dropping the F-bomb