Should we practice remote work?

[jessepollak]

Hi @clef/employees! As we've heard more from people on the subject of office hours and remote work (see #59 for some awesome commentary by @sarahmei, @zspencer), I've had the sense that (a) we should change our policies around remote work; (2) if we change our policies, we'll need to figure out some ways to experiment and grow to match them.

I want to propose that we put in some structure to simulate more remote work, so we can get a better sense for how it feels as a team and how we can create systems that support it. The primary goal with these structures is to learn: this may mean that they cause issues in the short term, even as we're learning how we can improve in the long term.

The general gist of how we do this is that we all spend more time outside of the office working on a regular basis. This will test our ability to communicate & use tools like Slack, Trello, and Google Drive to operate efficiently even when we're not in the office.

I've thought of two ways to do this:

1. We pick one day a week and all work remotely (from home or from another location) for that day. This would be pretty easy to coordinate: we all just have to pick a day (say Tuesday) and then not show up.

2. We all commit to spending one day a week out of the office, but it's not predetermined to be the same day as everyone else or the same day every week. This would be a little harder to coordinate. To make this work, we could block out on a company calendar when we'll be out of the office and let everyone know with good lead time what day it will be. I also think it may be useful to block out days where explicitly everyone is in the office (maybe Monday and Friday), so we can have important all-hands meetings (like our product sync and all-hands).

I'm leaning towards (2) because I think it better simulates what remote work actually is, but I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on the matter (and any suggestions outside of 1, 2).

Thoughts?

[sarahmei]

DevMynd has been doing (1), because we inadvertently did (2) for a while and found it didn't work for us. When I joined, everyone was in Chicago except for me in San Francisco, and I felt very out of touch due to missing out on the in-person conversations. That said, if we had been aware we were doing (2) perhaps we could have done better. :)

We switched to all working at home (or otherwise outside the office) on Wednesday, and it's been great for me because it moves so many more conversations into slack. Now that I've got more people in SF, keeping in touch with Chicago is less of an issue than it used to be...but they're still the home office.

[nrrrdcore]

Love that remote work is being discussed here! It's really exciting.

The only problem I see with the team choosing one day a week to WFH is that usually when I want to work from home it's for one of following reasons:

1. I have one or several doctor's appointment(s) or some other scheduled obligation that makes working or being productive from home more convenient and/or feasible than going into the office.
2. I'm struggling with my physical and/or mental health and going into the office is triggering moderate anxiety and stress, but I'd still really like to get some work done from home.
3. I was/am triggered by something where I feel most safe and secure working from home.

Having the team choose a day to WFH means that my personal agency is stripped or rather discounted in the decision making process around working from home, and therefore the perk becomes much, much less desirable for me personally.

When it comes to living and working with mental illness it is important to remember that agency, in this specific situation; having the ability to say "I feel more safe and healthy working from home today" and feeling okay or even good about that decision, can be really empowering.

[isicalynn]

In the past, I had worked on a team wherein everybody on the team got to choose one day of the week to work remotely. The idea being that two people from the same team wouldn't be out at the same time. (I understand right now there is only one or a couple people on each team, but soon teams may consist of a few or more people each.) Im appreciating Julie's point though, that this eliminates her agency to dynamically decide to work remotely.
I'd like to add however, that I have no problem allowing everybody to create the remote work style/schedule as it fits to their lives. In other words, maybe scheduling a day for me would work, but allowing Julie the flexibility to decide dynamically is the best way.

[iamb55]

This is interesting and is probably something we should learn from :)

https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/10/15/best-practices-for-distributed-teams/

[metavida]

This recent article by Martin Fowler also has some great insights into co-located vs remote-first teams and the spectrum of work environments in between:

http://martinfowler.com/articles/remote-or-co-located.html

@jessepollak, you said:

I've had the sense that we should change our policies around remote work ... I'm leaning towards [experimenting with a smaller number of individuals working remotely each day] because I think it better simulates what remote work actually is.

I think more clearly spelling out Clever's remote work goals will help you pick remote work simulations that'll be most helpful for your team. It sound like Clever's goal is to continue hiring co-located employees, but offering (even encouraging) your co-located employees to work remotely for limited stretches of time (e.g. going home early to answer emails, working from home on days when personal appointments make that more convenient, working from home for a stretch of time accommodate physical and/or mental health needs). Conversely, I think it's worth clarifying that your short-term goal is not to begin hiring satellite workers nor is your goal to shift to a remote-first work environment.

P.S. I'm suggesting clarification because as a fully remote employee at a company that works remote-first, simulation (1) is exactly "what remote work actually is" for me 😄