Photo by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash
Recent weeks have introduced many thousands of people to fully remote work for the first time as employers look for ways to keep their people safe from COVID-19. Best Practical has been a fully remote company for several years and we use a variety of tools, including RT, to work and communicate, allowing us to function as if we were all in the same office. As people adjust to remote work we wanted to share how we do it.
What is Everyone Working On?
One of the first things that hits employees and their managers is how to coordinate what everyone is working on and get status updates. In an in-person office, this is often done via status update meetings or informal visits from team members to get a verbal status update. You probably already use some form of ticket tracking or project management tool, but it may not get updated with all of the information exchanged in person. Moving to remote will typically involve moving much of this verbal information transfer to something typed out.
It should be no surprise that we use RT for all of our task management and communication. There is a ticket for each task and all of the ticket metadata has the details like Owner, Due Date, Status, etc. We update ticket status when tasks are completed and include comments to provide some context or details.
For bigger tasks, we have a policy to update tickets twice per day, more or less mid-day and end of day. So status might not change, but there is still feedback on what progress has been made. If someone hits a blocker, we encourage an update for that as well so we can help clear it.
Once you have tickets created, you can create reports to show active tickets by user, by queue, or some other grouping, and sort by priority or due date or other important values. Each user can then create a search to show them the highest priority tickets they own and managers can have similar reports for their team.
For time tracking, we use the TimeTracking extension which provides a page with everything you have worked on for the current week, making it easy to record time. The extension also allows you to log time to previous days, so on Wednesday you can add hours to Monday and Tuesday if you forgot or didn't have time. You can read more about the RT’s time tracking options in an earlier blog post.
Communicating in Real Time
RT is great for task updates since one person can change ticket status when they are done, comment on the ticket, and maybe change the owner to someone else and move on. The ticket will then show up on the next person's list and they will work on it when appropriate based on their backlog.
But what about questions that need more conversation? For discussion and questions during the day, we use Slack. We have the general channel for everyone, and specialized channels for different teams and some with bots for status. We are aware of how Slack can be distracting at times, but we have found a good balance between the occasional team water cooler discussion while staying mostly focused on work topics. We're also working on a Slack integration for RT and hope to be able to release something soon.
We also have several live Zoom calls scheduled every week with video on so people get some face time and can see and speak with co-workers even though we are spread all over the world. We have worked on finding a good balance for how many live Zoom meetings to have. Too few prevents remote people from feeling like they know each other, too many isn't always the best use of time. Teams who have just become remote likely won't have this issue since they know one another from being in the office.
At first, some people felt Zoom had to be a scheduled meeting. We clarified for everyone that we can have a Zoom meeting whenever it is needed, even ad hoc like "can we do a quick Zoom?" This is similar to walking to someone's office to discuss something in person, with similar guidelines like check my calendar first.
Good luck to everyone out there working fully remote for the first time. It certainly takes some adjustment, but feels very natural once you sort out how your teams will communicate. I'm sure we do many other small things that we don't think about, so if you have questions about RT or how we make remote work for us, feel free to send us an email.