At Haven, one of the unwritten values we had was “work as if remote”. In this post I’ll explain what this means and why it is important.

What does it mean?

“Work as if remote” means we always pretend that there are people working remotely, and behave accordingly. Even if everyone on the team is in the same room, or at the same meeting, we operate like there are people that are across the country. We do this by documenting:

• the plans that we have
• the decisions we make
• the things we do
• the things we learn
• meetings or conversations we have

The tools

We implemented this at Haven by using Slack for most communication, and Trello for capturing story-specific details in line with the cards that they were related to.

Also, MeetingHero (now the inferiorly named WorkLife) allowed us to record meetings in a collaborative way, although a shared Google Drive document could achieve the same goal.

Benefits

There are usually people working remotely, even if you don’t think they are. First, there may actually be remote people that you have just forgotten about. :) We had a designer working in San Francisco, and while he didn’t chime in often, writing as much as we could likely gave him more context for designs.

You might think that everyone who cares about a given subject is in the current room, but often there are other people that would benefit from having conversations written down.

Working as if remote allows us to bring new people up to speed more quickly, because we document what we are doing and how we do it. Asking a question in a shared channel enables anyone to answer it without interrupting everyone. Everyone can search back through history for the discussion and resolution of problems.

Writing out what we are doing forces our thinking to be sharper and our decisions more explicit. We get a chance to look back at the decisions we make along the way and introspect when things go well or go poorly. We make it clearer what we are planning on doing and can hold ourselves accountable. Coworkers understand what we do on a daily basis and where they might be able to help.

In today’s software development environment, being able to work remotely some of the time is more and more common. I doubt that I will consider future work that isn’t partially remote, and there are or will likely be more people like me. Most people expect to be able to run errands or take care of their kids or have a more flexible schedule, but our communication patterns need to change if we are to be successful and have this be a possibility. To this end, I would argue that working as if remote is one of the foundations of a healthy culture around taking vacations and traveling. In my opinion, it should not matter if I am across the street or across the country if we are getting work done effectively as a team.

Tradeoffs

Communicating in this way may seem like a lot of extra work. In reality, it doesn’t take much more time than having the conversations that we are already having. Also, it can actually save us time. When I try to remember something I did yesterday and I wrote something about it, it saves time and effort.

Four people getting together in a room for two hours is an expensive thing. We have an obligation to make sure that meeting time is well spent and that we are clear on what comes out of the meeting. By typing up good notes, we give people who weren’t in the meeting the benefit of being in the meeting without needing to devote the entire time to be there.

Good practices

Be asynchronous

From code review to meetings to doing standups, there are many activities that can be made asynchronous or location-independent. You may start a process that works synchronously (perhaps a recurring meeting), but once the team understands the parameters, consider how can it be distributed over time and location.

Overcommunicate

This is probably a good principle in general, but write more and about more topics than seems necessary. If you feel like someone might say, “TMI (too much information)!”, then you are probably headed in the right direction.

Record synchronous communication

If you have a useful conversation with someone, post a summary so that others can learn from it. Also, this helps document what you talked about to ensure that you actually heard it right.

Embrace the firehose

Posting everything that happens can be a little overwhelming. Personally, I’d rather have more information than less, so I think this is worth it. But when everything is a priority, nothing is. It is useful to mark things as “FYI” or “important” so that others understand the priority and can effectively filter the firehose of information. You also need to set up your channels and policies to be responsive but also not get overwhelmed.

Don’t be afraid to sync up

Even when remote, be willing to have a Skype / Hangout to sync up. Synchronous communication allows you to hash things out much more quickly. Then, of course, write down what you talked about and the main decisions or clarifications made. :)

Conclusion

I wanted to share this because I think it was a really useful philosophy that we had. I will definitely be trying to do things along these lines going forward.