So you're a Remote Worker Now

Welcome to the remote worker’s club. No commute, the comfort of your home, cooking your own meals; what’s not to like? Well, for some, a lot. I’ve had a fantastic experience but it’s a peculiar equilibrium and you might have already discovered that it’s not really working out for you.

Is the secret to productivity a boss that keeps you on track? A good pair of headphones? Maybe putting on your “work clothing” in the morning and changing after you clock out? I think not, so let me try to put things in perspective and talk about what you really need.

1. Good communication with yourself

When you’re working remotely, you’re spending most of your time alone. You might have your family with you, but they are most probably not directly involved with what you do. From the moment you sit in front of the computer, you’re alone with yourself. It’s hard to keep pretending that you like something when you don’t and there is no social pressure to make you act like you do. Some people have spent all their life forcing themselves to like their job and so they never exercised this muscle. The result is that the change makes them feel confused and think that at home they just get distracted too easily.

As a recommendation, start by regularly asking yourself “What do I want to do next?”.

2. Good communication with your colleagues

When you work remotely you can’t see your colleagues sitting next to you. There is no natural coffee break where you both get up and exchange some thoughts while you walk to the coffee machine. This is just one example of the many types of non-verbal communication that we leverage in an in-person environment to support our verbal communication.

When you’re part of a remote team you have to be much more deliberate with your communication. As software engineers we should already be familiar with this concept from networked communication: hosts can’t “see” each other and so you need heartbeats and other strategies to know the current state of the network. Software engineers working under agile methodologies have been partially addressing this problem with the daily standup.

My recommendation for “horizontal” communication is to set up weekly 1:1 meetings with your colleagues where the only item on the agenda is to chitchat for a while and tell each other how things are going. It might seem awkward at first, maybe even a waste of time, but that’s what allows you to know the state of the network.

3. Good communication with your bosses

As I’ve already said, working from home is a wildly different thing than working in an office. You really need a good fit with your role to do well in the long term, and you do need to be more effective when communicating.

Remote work forces a new equilibrium.

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