I have been working remotely for a while now. Summarising my learnings below, on how to make it work effectively & efficiently 💪🏻
Communicating Effectively 💬
- Verbal communication can easily get lost. Log important meeting notes in a google doc for referencing purposes.
- Prefer communication via a Video Call rather than a Voice Call. Human expressions create more openness and mutual trust. 🤝
- Document / Write clearly to communicate clearly with your co-workers. Time & Space are big barriers in remote work.
- Prefer to post work related communication in open / team channels rather than 1-1 chats. This keeps everyone on the same page and avoids confusion.
Sharing Publicly 👐
- Publicly share as much as possible about your tasks.
- Share a task's status before starting it and after completing it.
- Openly share blockers so that they can be timely cleared by fellow workers.
- Sharing your learnings can easily clear someone else's blocker. Group learning is exponential in nature.
Working Style 💻
- Analyze 📈 a task before spending time on it.
- Write your analysis in a structured manner to helps communicate your thoughts clearly and lucidly.
- Use a tool like Hackmd to scratch your thoughts and share it with fellow developers.
- It also acts as a knowledge base for any similar future tasks.
- Designing a quick prototype, say in Figma to make sure that other stakeholders ( developer, scrum master, clients ) are on the same page will avoid rework.
- Cross referencing resources on gitlab / github / bitbucket issue provides more context into the problem. Link issues, designs, analysis docs or even screenshots to the issue.
- Add a before / after screenshot of the changes (➕/➖) made in a Merge Request / Pull Request.
Tweet or DM me @Gautam__Jain to let me know your working style.