Banner photo: Ryan Plauche working at the Stoke couches in early 2020.
How we work and where we work has changed significantly, and there’s no going back. We’re moving forward into a new normal.
For people who were already working from home, having to stay at home wasn’t a huge shift. For those who began to work remotely AND at home, they faced different challenges. As the Stoke team went remote, we adopted new ways of having team meetings and learned the ins and outs of Zoom, stopping just a bit short of expert level. Many companies faced similar adjustments, having to learn what worked best for each individual and the company as a whole.
In this blog, we’re exploring ways to develop and engage in a supportive, healthy company culture for the future of work and to strengthen teams in distributed workforces. We sat down (virtually) for a talk with Ryan Plauche, Software Engineer with satellite software startup Kubos, who worked remotely from Stoke but had to transition to working from home during Texas’ stay at home order.
“I think a lot of people when they think of “work from home” they think “oh yeah, I’m going home to work” but the idea of building remote culture is far different from just working at your home instead of at your office.”
Along with the usual tips (like taking a break when your eyes are tired and getting fresh air), we talked about what company culture should look like for effective remote working and operating as a distributed team, revolving around the question, “What are the things you have to consider when you’re a remote worker at the personal level, the team level, and the bigger company level?”
Remote working can be a fundamental shift in the culture of the company if done correctly.
Intentionally and Frequently Engage Each Team Member
Engaging your team when you’re all in different places is crucial to success and smooth operations. The Kubos team has casual, virtual meetings through Zoom a couple times a week, deemed “water cooler” video calls that are 25-30 minutes. Ryan called these quick calls the equivalent of chatting in the kitchen at Stoke, and the understanding is that you’re not supposed to be multitasking and working.
They also use an app called Donut through messaging system, Slack. Donut pairs team members up with someone else in their Slack workspace, and they then organize a time to chat and get to know each other. Donut’s useful for team building that isn’t necessarily structured around a business goal. The purpose is to get to know someone you might not usually interact with, which could be useful to build relationships across teams in a larger company.
Communicate Clearly, Frequently, And Using The Right Medium
We’ve all experienced the loss of nuance when receiving news or direction via text rather than in-person. Sometimes you’re just not sure what tone to take on as you’re reading. Clearly communicating with the team when transitioning to remote work will take practice.
“If your culture is going to survive, you need to have every level of facetime or communication with your employees. It needs to exist on every level. People suggest a whole company retreat at least once a year if not twice a year, and some sort of team retreat once a quarter even.”
Ryan emphasized that there are types of conversations that absolutely need to happen over the phone or through a video call. If you think there’s anything that could be ambiguous through text, then use your voice and expressions to prevent misinterpretation.
On a similar note, Amy Edmondsson of Harvard Business School writes:
“Distributed work is making us realize we have to be more deliberately—more proactively—open. We have to be explicit in sharing our ideas, questions, and concerns, because we can't just overhear what's happening in the next cubicle,” she says. “We now have to work a little harder to share what we're thinking, to ask questions. And then I wonder whether we might be able to import this new sense of deliberateness back into our workplaces when we do go back to them.”
Intent and deliberation is key to successful, effective communication, written or verbal.
Document The Work Process And Make It Available
The Kubos team has worked remotely for some time now, and we talked about some of the most important factors that affected the company culture positively.
“The biggest thing that we had to wrangle as part of that process was really formalizing “what does work look like at Kubos? How do we get things done? What is the process that we go through as a company, as a team, and as individuals?”
When you’re working remotely you’re not looking across the hallway at a person to see how they’re working..there’s not this collective in-person conversation and culture and these conversations that are really easy to have happen. So it’s important to be able to communicate very clearly how you expect things to happen and what is the process that you expect things to happen.
Any conversations that happen about that stuff, if they happen over Zoom, then that conversation was only between us and no one was able to hear that conversation or learn from it. But if you can document that stuff or talk it out over Slack, then the whole company can benefit from it and learn from it.
If you’re in an open office situation, and I ask a question about how we do things, then everyone around us can hear that and chime in. [You have to realize] that level of communication just doesn’t exist anymore and there’s a lot of communication that could happen in a vacuum. And that’s not good for perpetuating or building culture so you have to be a lot more intentional with how those things are communicated and passed on to employees.“
Ryan also mentioned the importance of documentation and how the team uses a living document to explain in detail how work happens at Kubos, which includes everything from the interplay of sales and engineering to how individual engineers get their work done and the process that they go through. The living document also answers higher level questions about how Kubos operates. Everyone in the company can access and add to this doc.
Additionally, the team has a lot of documentation in Trello, a project management tool where they’re able to see who’s doing what and what they’ve been doing.
Deliberately Develop Your Company Culture
Though you and your team might use different systems (like preferring Asana over Trello), we can take away a few actions to consider:
Connect people on your team and make time to really get to know one another, outside of work projects and tasks.
Choose the right communication method for the message: messaging, email, phone calls, video conference calls are each appropriate for different situations.
Keep everyone in the loop on the team’s work process and expectations and make it accessible.
