Context

All information is meaningless until you provide context. We build up context based on our past experiences, where we have worked, who we socialise with and the situations we have found ourselves in. We know that working for the same organisation allows for some specific shared context. You might share a work environment and culture, and you can draw on this knowledge when interpreting what’s being said. However, we hold specific mental models that, though seemingly closely aligned, often have varied meanings from person to person. A term like DevOps has a wide range of definitions and just because you say the same word it doesn’t automatically imply you share the same meaning. Remember, “my” context is different than yours.

Impact on remote working: Explain yourself clearly. We have all sent an email that has been taken out of context, resulting in someone overreacting. Sometimes a pithy one-liner via Twitter isn’t the best method of communicating what you have in your head. When you are face-to-face, you can wave your hand, draw on whiteboards and see when someone doesn’t understand what you are saying. Draw your ideas using shared interactive boards like Miro or the tool in Zoom. Take the extra time to explain your context, don’t use woolly terms ( /ˈwʊli/ vague or confused in expression or character, ‘woolly thinking’) and don’t assume you are talking about the same thing!

At Equal Experts, we are passionate that all team members are empowered to succeed and deliver value no matter where they are located. Over the years our teams have covered the full spectrum from fully co-located, teams with work-from-home-Fridays, teams with multiple locations spread across geographies and different timezones to fully distributed, remote-only, teams.

Effective distributed working requires more than huddling around a big screen once a day or communicating via Jira ticket. We’ve found it most successful where we have taken the time to define a team charter to ensure everyone in the team is committed to making it work.

Whether you want to find out how to make the most of video calls, how to adapt your working etiquette or how to facilitate remote workshops this play book will help you get the most out of remote working.

If you want to learn some of the techniques we use, and talk to our experts, we have set up a series of webinars to share our insights on how to build high-performing remote-first delivery teams.

Hanlon’s Razor - Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by misunderstanding or neglect.

Trust is a multiplier! Teams need to collaborate to deliver a goal, and if basic levels of trust are not present, it leads to fewer interactions and, therefore, even less trust. If you want to build trust in a team, communication is key. With communication, you learn about the personality of your teammates. You can assess their values (and how they fit with yours) and evaluate their capability and expertise.

Impact on Remote Working: Open, prompt and continued interactions allow you to gather evidence about other members’ credibility and trustworthiness. Take the extra effort and time to talk via video and keep constant communication via Slack. If you’ve gone through the whole day and have only spoken to your cat, then maybe you need to communicate with your team a bit more.

Interactions: proximity, privacy, and legitimacy

Encounters lead to interactions, which allow communications. How do we increase the frequency of encounters? What factors turn encounters into interactions? How do we convert interactions into communications?

Proximity

Increasing the physical distance separating people at work is likely to decrease the amount of spontaneous, informal contact among them. There need only be a small amount of distance between people before they stop interacting.

Impact on Remote Working: You need to reduce the friction required to connect to your team. Each slow response to a question is like moving your desk an extra few meters away from your team until eventually, you are in the basement office with the door closed. Using always-on Zoom channels or fast response to Slack messages can increase your teams’ proximity with minimal effort.

NB: Although we use Slack and Zoom as the default messaging and video conference tools, other tools exist that might be as good. We just haven’t found them.

Privacy

People must have confidence that private conversations are only heard by those intended and not overheard by anyone else. Interactions in the absence of such privacy — talking in a corridor, for example — risk being silenced or broken up by the appearance of others and raise concerns about what the interrupter might have heard.

Impact on Remote Working: If the only time you speak to another team member is on the daily Zoom call with 15 other people, then you will never create the necessary environment for people to have those frank and honest conversations that are required. Consider taking a video call directly, or take conversations to temporary Slack messaging so you can thrash out the details. Just remember, once you have finished, consider sharing the outcome with the rest of the team in a shared channel, so everyone has the context.

Legitimacy

The social definition of the space: What is supposed, obliged and allowed to occur there. People have got to feel comfortable that it is okay for them to be in a certain place, that is, not feel embarrassed or discredited. For an encounter to become an informal interaction, the people involved must not only feel comfortable about what others will see and hear — the issue of privacy — but also what others will think.

Impact on Remote Working: In a remote environment, having different channels for people to talk about topics ranging from specific technical subjects to a place just for some watercooler chat helps promote legitimacy between co-workers. Remember that shy people in a remote setting will be doubly shy, so ensure that the team environment invites active communications across all team members.

Colocation (of people/teams) is not about physical colocation. It’s about colocation of minds. Physical proximity is a good way to achieve it, but not the only way. There are other ways. The argument of face-to-face communication should not be used against remote working. - Christian Hujer

At Equal Experts, we often work as co-located teams; however, this isn’t always the case. We have seen a variety of arrangements from a single hub location with work-from-home Fridays to multiple hub locations spread across geographies and different time zones to fully distributed teams.

The ideas set out below aim to create conditions that allow for teams to be highly collaborative in a remote setting. They explain how to increase the connection strength between each node to achieve a point where there is clear common ground across the team that isn’t dependent on physical (or temporal) proximity.

From this (remote-friendly)

To this … (remote-first)

Remote-friendly vs. Remote-first

There is a real difference between operating as remote-friendly vs. remote-first. Make it clear as a team what you want to be as it impacts the actions you need to take. This playbook focus on the actions required to be remote-first.

Remote-friendly: Your company may allow you to work remotely. But, most of your company’s processes, tools, and meetings will revolve around the office. As a result, remote teammates often feel excluded from important meetings and company decisions, even if that’s not the intention.

Remote-first: Remote-first empowers team members to work remotely, make and decisions online. Individual’s always have their video on, even if the majority of people are in the same room. Tools, ways of working and processes, level the communication playing field providing equal opportunities to contribute ideas and access information.

Source amended from: https://doist.com/blog/remote-career-advice/

Common Ground & Grounding

When you start interacting with someone, you can assume some common ground, and this develops over time as interactions deepen. The more interactions you have with someone, the better the joint context and the more common ground you have. You can assume some common ground before an interaction, but it increases over time with further interactions and deepens the more interactions you have.

Impact on Remote Working: Is it harder for remote teams to achieve common ground when compared to fully colocated teams? Maybe, but if the full team embraces a different mindset, approach, tools and processes, it becomes a close-run comparison.

Colocation is always better … stating the bleeding obvious?

Colocation is always better than remote working; it states it in the agile bible somewhere so it must be true.

There is an assumption that colocation is better. After all, in Kent Becks - Extreme Programming Explained the very first Primary Practice he lists is Sit Together.

Develop in an open space big enough for the whole team.

There is surprisingly little scientific evidence on the effectiveness of co-location, which seems to be more assumptions than hard scientific facts. There are a few quality articles. The majority of the literature is based on case studies and anecdotes and shows little in the way of quality evidence. The rise of the new wave of tools, such as Slack and Zoom and more focused working practices aimed at working remote, are not featured in these studies.

But don’t worry, it isn't anti-agile

As Beck continues in his book he states:

Does the practice of sitting together mean that multisite teams can't do XP? The simple answer is no; teams can be distributed and do XP. Practices are theories, predictions. "Sit Together" predicts that the more face time you have, the more humane and productive the project. If you have a multisite project and everything is going well, keep doing what you're doing. If you have problems, think about ways to sit together more, even if it means travelling."

So the "agile law" isn't so strict. Beck calls out a key reason why sitting together is important;

the more face time you have, the more humane and productive the project

So we should look at the underlying components that go into effective collaborative working and see how technology and working practices can help.

Advantages of Remote working

If you use the right tools, practices and mindset, there are many advantages in remote working. Some of the benefits that our people have seen are as follows:

• Remote working is more productive as the focus is more intense. This can also hold true for pairing.

• When you have your own space, you can speak more freely (when both parties are in a situation to do so). This can promote more honest interactions. Contrast this with working in an open plan office where people may avoid having intense discussion.

• Remote working can increase quality of life due to less travelling time, better marriages, more time for work and more time for yourself.

• Often, home connectivity, upload speeds, download speeds and latency is better than in the office.

• The removal of location barriers allows for the selection of talent from a much larger pool.

Disadvantages of Remote working

• Often, home connectivity, upload speeds, download speeds and latency are worse than in the office.

• It is easy for people to feel isolated both from the team and, more often, from the wider organisation to which they belong.

• When working remotely, you lose the work-life separation when the physical distinction between home and work is removed. Some people find it hard to unplug and stop thinking about work when they are away from their jobs.

• A lack of relationships between teammates can develop, as they fail to both interact regularly and gain trust and common ground.

• Where there is a fast-changing environment and people on-site, it can be difficult to keep remote workers up to speed with all the goings-on.

Video Calls

We strongly favour Zoom for video calls. We’ve tried several alternatives, and this seems to be best for handling short dropouts and accommodating people with poor bandwidth.

Remote call etiquette

Crappy sound and video is a killer

• Turn your video on when meeting - it does make a difference when interacting with people. On tools like Zoom, you can enable this by default in the settings. Don’t forget that seeing someone on the video provides a more intimate connection, develops empathy quicker and forces people to get out of their pyjamas at a reasonable time of the day.

• If one person is remote everyone’s remote. Open your laptop and share your video feed even if most people are in the room. This provides a more inclusive environment for those who are remote and levels the playing field for all participants.

• Find a quiet place, with good acoustics. Shared office spaces with coffee cups clinking in the background are very distracting, similar to rooms with lousy acoustics.

• Avoid sitting in front of a window or strong light source, as the backlight will tend to make you appear as a silhouette.

• Be present in the meeting: close BBC News, YouTube, etc. in your browser.

• Low bandwidth / high latency internet connections suck for everyone. If you are experiencing this in a meeting, ask all participants to turn off the video or try to use a video conferencing tool that has regional dial-in options as a back-up.

• Buy a decent microphone; this is so important, really

• Be on mute by default. Use a tool like Shush, which enables your microphone via a hotkey.

• Is everyone there? Check that everyone can see, hear and be heard at the start of the call. A simple “hi” is all it takes.

• Communicate clearly. If you speak at 300 words per minute or are soft-spoken, be aware, and take extra steps to compensate.

• Appreciate the Differences. Cultural differences affect the way people act and interpret the actions of others. Even if you are speaking a common language, there will be words that you use that don’t have the universal meaning you think they do. Holidays will have different levels of significance, so maybe don’t plan for people to be available for Thanksgiving or Diwali, even if you are working. Step back, reflect and appreciate the diversity.

• Human Interactions. Leave some space for some social interaction at the start of meetings. Dial into meetings 5 minutes early and see what essential information surfaces just through normal human chit-chat.

• Record the meeting. Record the Zoom for those not able to attend due to time zones. If you are using a whiteboard, go electronic, so everyone watching the video has the full context.

Pro-tip

Team Charter

We use lightweight team charters to remind ourselves of the standards and principles we agree to work towards, to use as a baseline for reviewing and optimising our performance and to share knowledge when onboarding people. These become particularly important in the remote-working environment, as a failure to set expectations upfront makes it easy to slip into miscommunication and misalignment. Ease the communication within your team by helping your team members set their expectations and understand their responsibilities.

Areas that we suggest you consider for your team charter include:

• Team-specific principles

• What are our regular ceremonies?

• How we will make decisions as a team?

• How we will collaborate as a team?

• How we will plan and prioritise our work?

The information below will help shape the extra, remote working items that should be considered for your charter.

Ease the communication between your team by helping your team understand where you are.

• Out of the office? Keep a shared team calendar and ensure you update it, so your team knows when you are not working and for how long. It’s easy to maintain and provides a level of transparency about availability.

• In the zone - Sometimes, you need to get your head down and code, or sometimes, you need to disappear for a bit. Make sure you let people know you are unavailable by setting your Slack status (or similar) with the reason and expiry time. Usually, people are happy to wait if they have some context.

• @name around? - Have a simple way to check if a teammate is around but in a way that it doesn’t matter if they can’t answer.

• Be Responsive - **If you are not in the zone (but inside your working hours), then be responsive to other team members’ questions. If people need help and you have the skills, then jump right in.

• Be Available - This is a step more than being responsive. Create a Zoom room where you always share your desktop. Then, if someone wants to reach you, he/she can jump in!

• Clock-in, clock-out - Make your teammates aware when you have started work, and finished for the day. A simple “Hi, I’m around” and “Signing off for the day”in Slack is all you need.

• Seek & Give feedback - Seek and give feedback. You have to take a more active role in seeking and giving feedback. Do not wait for the next retro to address concerns.

Remember - It can be hard for people to develop the same level of empathy when the relationship isn’t face to face. When the conversation is via a video screen avoid making assumptions about your co-workers intentions.

Remote Teams and Instant Messaging Slack

Teams that work remotely love using a real-time collaboration tool like Slack. 💛 Slack is so useful that it can be used to help a remote team manage many aspects of their process and work in real time:

• Managing Environments Incidents & Events (production and non-production)

• Publishing calendar events such as on-call rota’s and holidays

• Publishing Environment Build activity

• Exchanging important context and information about a project, user stories and lines of code.

• Sharing meeting notes, actions and decisions.

The Water Cooler

Perhaps one of Slack’s most useful functions is its ability to be an online version of the watercooler — where random work discussions happen mixed in with a bit of banter and a healthy dose of /giphy to express how you really feel.

The best part of Slack as a watercooler is that everyone, regardless of location, can join in or catch up with conversations that have happened as if the conversation were at the actual watercooler so others don’t miss the critical context. Slack has an excellent search tool that makes it easy to find relevant information posted in the past.

Like any written content avoid ambiguity at all costs. What someone else reads and what you mean can all too often be misaligned. Take extra steps to make your communications crystal clear, working hard to avoid ambiguity. If it feels like you are writing an explanation that a young child would understand, then you are on the right track.

Slack Principles

• Give everyone the bigger picture by making information and conversations public

  • Ensure people can widen their context

  • Make channels public by default - it provides the greatest opportunity for others to learn from any discussion, and documents tribal knowledge.

• Increase the signal to noise ratio of the information and conversations

  • Narrow people’s focus

  • Ensure people are reading information that is relevant and useful to them

  • Use people’s time efficiently

• Respect the amount of information anyone can tolerate reading

  • Do not overwhelm people with a high volume of messages that they are expected to read

  • Avoid communication burnout

• Optimise for the whole of the organisation rather than local optimisations for parts of the organisation

  • Avoid creating a disjointed experience for people by focusing on overall simplicity rather than local simplicity

Slack Etiquette

• Be friendly and patient.

• Be welcoming - Create a community that welcomes and supports people

• Respect other people’s opinions, especially if you don’t agree with them - Not all of us will agree all the time, but disagreement is no excuse for poor behaviour and poor manners.

• Know when to step away from the keyboard and have direct and honest conversations instead. If that’s not feasible, remember that Slack is not the best way to resolve an argument.

• Mention by @name - If you mention someone by their slack handle (e.g. percy or @percy), it highlights them in slack, notifies them. Naming is generally acceptable convention to avoid misspellings and add additional potentially interested people to the conversation.

• Use of Private Messages - before using a private message, consider why it couldn't be public to the network as that has the benefits of allowing others to pick up (help, improve) on what is happening or learn from the conversation.

• Conversations Transitioning off Slack - Sometimes a conversation will start on slack, but move off-channel to a face-to-face conversation. It is polite to either post "This conversation has gone face-to-face" so that others aren't confused by a slack conversation that just ends mid-way through, or post a summary of the conversation back into slack for posterity.

• Profiles - provide enough information in your profile so that others can more easily find you outside of Slack

• Search - Before asking a question in a channel, check to see if the question has already been answered. Type a word or phrase in the search box to start looking. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, try search modifiers to narrow your search even further.

• Gif’s and Emoji’s - these can be fun and a great way to lighten the mood, however, given images can sometimes be inappropriate or distracting, especially on a client site, learn the ways to minimise them.

• @channel @here - people are less likely to mute or leave the channel due to being spammed with notifications. Use these wisely and sparingly!

In the same way, your business takes Health and Safety seriously when you are working in an office the same needs to hold true if you are serious about long term remote working.

Internet

For stable internet what we mean here is rock-solid, consistent, doesn’t drop any packets which gives your video calls that uninterrupted, I’ve forgotten you are sitting in a different city, type of feeling. Not all Wifi connections are created equal so if you are having issues explore other options like changing the WiFi channels you connect to, wiring directly into your router or connect to a Mifi device. The important thing is to establish a connection that stops those annoying dropouts. So if your colleagues are always telling you that you have frozen … again, then look to see if you can fix your Wifi or find an alternative.

Dual Screens

One screen for seeing your workmates, one for doing your work. If you want to keep your social connections and work at the same time it’s essential to have two screens. A video call with the other people sitting behind your active window is as good as voice only (except they might see you picking your nose). Dual screens is especially useful when facilitating workshops as it allows you to read the “room” and the overall mood of the participants.

Headset & Mic

Good sound quality is important as it takes less effort on a call if you don’t have to constantly ask the speaker to repeat themselves and just because they are expensive audiophile headphones they may not be suitable for video conferencing. What’s most important is the microphone, as this isn’t for you it is for your teammates. A headset with a microphone that dangles a foot from your head on a wire, brushing against your clothing, makes it difficult for others to hear you. If you are using one of these in-line microphones, be sure to hold on to it (yes, I know this no longer makes it hands-free) to prevent the excess noise. For the best experience, consider getting a headset with a boom mike, preferably a model that includes noise-cancelling microphones or even a good quality desk mic if you are in a quiet space. Recent MacBooks (and presumably other laptops) have pretty decent microphones, while these might be okay for conference calls, they don’t work well when you are trying to type and talk at the same time (pairing, taking notes, etcetera), as the noise from your fingers hammering the keys will be distracting to others. The worst option would be a headset with a microphone built into the earpieces. Sadly, this includes some expensive, very comfortable headphones that seem to have terrible microphones built into them. These headsets (with microphones built into the earpieces) can create a poor experience for others on the call. But whatever you use, ask for feedback to make sure you can be heard clearly.

Dedicated Space

Make sure you have plenty of desk space so you can fit your dual monitors and a space that is dedicated to work. A separate room is preferable, but if that’s not available, a space that is designated for work helps keep your work-life separate. Some of our colleagues use a room divider (like a dressing screen), which is quite a cheap but effective way of separating your 'office' from the rest of the room if you are sharing space. You feel like you're 'going to work' when in that area. And it has the added benefit of making your video background a bit more professional.

Pro-desk and Chair

For the same reason you need good quality office furniture when you are in the office. You don’t want to end up with a bad back because you picked up a cheap bar stool. A cost-effective chair option is a gaming chair, they tend to be pretty comfy, have lots of adjustment features but a fraction of the price of ‘pro’ or ‘exec’ type chairs.

Drawing tools

Many teams working in a co-located office come to live around a whiteboard to sketch out how the software or processes will work. There is no reason to give that up when working remotely. Using a real graphics tablet and stylus with associated drawing software such as MS Whiteboard makes for a good way to collaboratively create and share ideas. . Don’t bother using a mouse as it makes it quite hard to draw. Consider the Wacom Intuos (small with Bluetooth) as a great entry-level tablet or an iPad with the pencil. These kinds of sessions lean on the fact that the sketches are freeform and an aid to the conversation rather than a prescriptive box and line tool. However, if you want everyone to collaborate they all need the equipment to ensure equal access.

Be respectful of different time zones and try to schedule calls that are inside of everyone’s working hours when possible. Use tools like https://everytimezone.com/ to find a convenient time for everyone, and enable Secondary Time Zone in Google Calendar settings to see other regions’ times from within your calendar.

‌Publicise what the team's collectively overlapping core hours are. Don't forget about daylight saving different public holidays and working weeks.

Use this time wisely. Things that you need to do as a group do in the overlapping time, things you can do without the group do when it isn't. Oh, and try and avoid booking meetings with teammates that are outside their core hours.

Maintain core hours for your timezone, so at least people will know when they can expect you to be available. Unfortunately, due to time zones, not everyone can be present in core hours, so if you have an important discussion with a stakeholder or client, then record the conversation on zoom. That way, all team members can gain context when they get into work.

On the whole, the team ceremonies don’t need to change that much, below are some suggested tweaks to help things to run smoothly.

Remote Retro's

Duration: 40 minutes

Frequency: Bi-Weekly

Location: Zoom

An important prerequisite for any retrospective is that everyone can be seen and heard effectively. For this reason, it is best that everyone is on a level playing field and joins the retrospective remotely using a separate laptop and headphones.

We use the same structure for the retro regardless of whether it is collocated or virtual (or a bit of both). Work on a task together -> Ask everyone to answer a question -> Affinity Group answers -> Prioritise actions / next steps. This allows everyone to have a voice and an influence on the outcome of the retrospective.

Sometimes the overlap of time zones means there isn’t a part of the working day where you are all in core business hours. To make effective use of the time use a Trello board to capture topics in advance, maybe even do the dot voting in advance so that you can start the retro getting into the issues that are important allowing the time to be used more wisely.

Showcase / Show & Tell

Duration: 15 minutes

Frequency: Bi-weekly

Location: Zoom

A regular session involving the team, customer and users to share and review recent progress towards a goal involving a live demo of new features or changes to an existing or new product or service. Remote teams are sometimes more distant from the customer or users of the product or service they are building, so a regular showcase is an excellent opportunity to receive feedback and also share challenges and learnings.

Engagement Sync

Duration: 15 minutes

Frequency: Weekly

Location: Zoom

This ceremony is designed to give an update on key events across the team. It is an update from the management and includes information from steering groups, changes in product direction, new joiners and leavers and so forth. It is also an opportunity for Q&As across the teams. It's basically where important contextual information is provided to the wider team.

Cross Team Ways of Working - (Retro)

Duration: 1 hour

Frequency: Monthly

Location: Zoom

Because working with remote teams is difficult, it is important to reflect on and improve how cross-site people and teams are operating. This is run as a retro or a review of the team charter.

Signally availability of your team members is important in a remote-first world. You can’t just look over at someone's desk and see if they are there or if they are in deep work with a “DO NOT DISTURB” face. Using the status on Slack can solve part of the problem, but that only really saying when you are not available, “In a meeting” or “Out sick”, but it doesn’t work as well for "I want to pair" or even "fancy a coffee".

TLDR: create a dedicated slack channel, put in some "enduring" zoom links, when you are on the zoom call then add your emoji so others can see and join.

Set it up:

• Setup a new slack team-based slack channel which is dedicated to the task e.g. #clientx-meeting-rooms. Do not use this channel for anything other than adding the room details

• Create team slack Emoji’s, one for each team member preferably with a real photo and name.

• With a pro zoom licence, create a small number of ‘Enduring Meetings Links’. Schedule a meeting in zoom and create a recurring meeting (Recurrence = No Fixed Time).

• Add these links to the channel and label their purpose. E.g. meeting room, watercooler

Running it:

• If you join a meeting link then add your emoji

• If you leave a meeting link then remove your emoji

• Rooms are available on a first-come-first-serve basis

• Try “Hey are you free, I’m in clientx meeting room#1 with Sarah to chat about this, can you join now”?

This has been tried and tested with the CondéNast project with significant success, where it has helped to bring back some of the feeling of being co-located but in a remote way.

In general, remote pairing is no different from collocated pairing except for the obvious video link. These days, there is no need to use anything other than a high-quality video, sound and screen-sharing, and a remote screen control tool such as Zoom.

Pro tips:

• When sharing have two screens, one for sharing and one for personal use for slack, mail etc. Make sure you remember which is which ;)

• Be careful with notifications when you are actively pairing with someone. It is often worth muting notifications.

• Maintain an active dialogue about the code you are working on, particularly when you are not driving.

• Try to minimise the amount of environmental noise around you. Where possible, work in a quiet room.

• Don’t forget there are whiteboard facilities on Zoom. This can be useful in explaining ideas.

• When using remote screen control, latency is important!

• Use a keystroke visualiser! Especially when you're demonstrating complicated keyboard shortcuts. Just be careful not to expose any sensitive data such as user password from login form, etc. All major operating systems are shipping with built-in keyboard viewer solutions out of the box. However, in our experience, specialised tools like, for example, KeyCastr work better in a remote pairing environment as they provide a more focused view by displaying only one single keystroke at a time.

  • KeyCastr for macOS

  • Carnac for Windows

  • Built-in Keyboard Viewer for macOS

  • Screenkey for Linux

Remember, you have to actively fight against the people isolating themselves, especially when people first start to work remotely. Make yourself present; be overactive in communications like Slack and Zoom. If you are overactive, people are more likely to pair with you!

The major benefit of having an office is the instant feedback you can receive when you are working face to face with someone. I can walk over to someone’s desk and start a conversation which gives me instant feedback. It's easy to understand not only the words but also the intent and this is the standard that we need to achieve for effective remote working. These short and frequent feedback loops need to persist beyond the office boundaries to ensure the effectiveness of a team in a remote-first setting.

The categories we have assessed tools on are ease of collaboration and overall user experience which includes

• The required actions for the tool can be performed by multiple users, simultaneously

• Easy Adoption for individuals or teams. If I send a request to my (tech-savvy) 6 year old they can join me in less than 5 minutes (sorry Skype for Business)

• Easy access across platforms and devices: e.g. macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android

• How fun or painful is it to use

We have also excluded tools that are not currently been actively developed

All tools in the list should be designed for the remote working world rather than office tools that you keep using when working from home. You can still use Microsoft word but when you compare it to Google Docs you see that one is designed for high collaboration with multiple users being able to update, edit, review simultaneously while the other is Microsoft word. This tool assessment is built for ease of collaboration and user experience and doesn’t assume corporate constraints such as “we only use Microsoft”. Tool selection and ranking is highly opinionated and is based on input and opinion from within the wider Equal Experts Network.

Remember, it’s not all about tools, the remote working culture is as, if not more important as the tools by themselves. You need both to make remote working amazing.

Instant Messaging

For any remote working or office-based team, the instant messaging tool is the centre of your communications universe. When done correctly, internal emails can completely disappear from your inbox, but if you have the wrong tool or your administrator locks it down you will stay in the age of email.

Slack

Teams

Videotelephony

If you spend enough time in face to face meetings you can quickly become exhausted. Now add a little extra lag, poor synchronisation between vision and sound and missing body language to the mix and the 3-hour workshop feels like 3 days. When working remotely, you spend a lot of time on a video call so find the one that addresses these problems rather than settling for the cheap or bundled option.

Zoom

Google Meet

Jitsi Meet

Jitsi Meet offers the standard capabilities that you would expect – including screen sharing and text chat, and a couple of extras that you wouldn’t expect in a free offering. Notably, this includes Google Calendar integration, video recording (although this requires a DropBox account to work), and international dial-in options. There are some fun features too, such as speaker stats which shows you how long each participant has spoken for during the meeting, YouTube video sharing, and background blur (still in beta).

We found video quality and performance to be acceptable, but noticeably not as good as Zoom. The quality of the meetings seems to be heavily dependent on which browser you use, with Chrome and Chrome-based browsers (e.g. Brave) performing better than Safari and Firefox. In fact, we had significant technical difficulties with Firefox on Mac that we would recommend using alternative tools if Firefox is your browser of choice.

We should point out that in our tests Jitsi Meet seems to work your PC/laptop hard, with all participants in our tests noticing temperature increases and increased fan and disk noise. We also experienced occasional problems when switching between screen share and video, but these were quickly fixed with a page refresh.

Overall, Zoom remains our preferred choice for video conferencing but Jitsi Meet is a credible alternative with a great feature set for the price (free!). It seems the numbers back this up too, with over 10 million average monthly users at the time of writing.

Slack Calls

Slack might be best in class as a team messaging tool, but it also has a built-in video conferencing feature. This can be convenient for a quick call with a teammate but it can only be used to make calls to other members of your workspace, and to members from external organisations that you're sharing channels with. This causes a problem when it comes to collaborating outside your immediate Slack universe (yes there is a world beyond Slack). It is easy to use and the quality is on par with most of the other non-zoom competitors but has limited features e.g. when you are having a video call you loose the video of the person who is sharing the screen and because of the lack of wider team collaboration, you will need another option to speak to the rest of the world.

Teams Video Calls: It is similar in quality to many of the other non-zoom video options but allows for wider collaboration that Slack Video calls as people outside the organisation can join as guests. It can be slow for people's pictures to come through, especially on startup and somehow it seems to amplify participants' background noise to a point where it can be very distracting. The integration into the Teams chat channels works well and provides a better ‘chat’ facility than most, however, permission settings can get in the way of this working for participants, which can make things confusing. The good news is they are releasing fast, with a recent feature release increasing the number of faces you can see of a video call which is a big step forward. All round, it's OK if you want a quick chat, but any long or big group meeting can quickly become fatiguing.

Virtual Whiteboards

Virtual Whiteboards divide into several subcategories based on their origin stories. We have tools that took the Visio concept and adapted it into the collaboration space such as Lucidchart. They are really diagramming tools rather than a virtual whiteboard and they are great for more formal system design. Then we have those boards that follow the physical whiteboard lineage. These tools copy the basic principles of physical whiteboards, put it online with a sprinkle of virtual collaboration. You can draw basic boxes, scribble lines and write (type) some notes and add virtual post-it notes but it's just a whiteboard that’s online. Then we have the new breed that has thrown away the original constraints and reimaged the whiteboard in a remote-first world.

Storm Board

Storm Board is a copy of an office whiteboard which comes with many of the limitations that other products have addressed. It has a limited canvas and working in it feels a bit claustrophobic as you spend your time fighting the user experience. Its UX feels dated and most (but not all) things are more than one click to edit. It does provide a good selection of templates but even these don’t offer the flexibility of the market leaders. The 2-way integration with Jira and Azure is good, but you need to be on the expensive Enterprise plan to access this feature. Storm Board does have version history on sticky notes so you can keep a record or changes and the real-time collaboration feels responsive which is critical in a virtual whiteboard.

Miro

Miro is a virtual whiteboard that allows multiple users to simultaneously view, update and edit in real-time. It’s great for sketching out and collaborating on ideas and using as the basis for running workshops. You never run out of space on the canvas and there is a growing selection of templates that can help set up and inspire your next remote meeting. It’s easy to draw out your ideas with pre-canned boxes and lines or you can take advantage of the smart draw to make your trackpad drawing look less ‘pre-school’. Even on a large board with a lot of simultaneous users, it performs well. It's extensible with ‘apps’ that allows you to add tools like countdown timers, voting and surveys and it's easy to embed links and media.

Miro does have a free plan but overall the pricing and team structure are confusing and you have to be careful on how you set up teams if you don’t want to accidentally share a board with the wrong people.

You’ve spotted that the text is similar to Mural’s? That’s because they both perform the same role well and pricing is similar so it is down to personal preference.

Mural

Mural is a virtual whiteboard that allows multiple users to simultaneously view, update and edit in real-time. It’s great for sketching out and collaborating on ideas and using as the basis for running workshops. It has a large canvas so running out of space is not an issue and there is a growing selection of templates that can help set up and inspire your next remote meeting. It’s easy to draw out your ideas with pre-canned boxes but it lacks a ‘smart draw’ feature so any freehand drawing looks pre-school. It typically performs will with a lot of simultaneous users, although we have noticed from time to time a lag in updating when the board gets big. It has features like a countdown timer that is built-in and in big team meetings you can use Mural’s ‘Summon’ feature to bring everyone together (recently released into Miro as well).

You’ve spotted that the text is similar to Miro’s? That’s because they both perform the same role well and pricing is similar so it is down to personal preference.

Google Drawings: It is never going to win a beauty competition but does the job of a basic virtual whiteboard. The canvas size is small and really it’s just a drawing tool with great collaboration capability which allows multiple users to simultaneously view, update and edit in real-time. If you want a fancy count-down timer, embedded links and media or even just nice-looking ‘virtual sticky notes’ then keep looking. But if you don’t care about style and simple shapes and lines with a sprinkle of text is all you need to convey your idea then look no further. As you would expect, Google Drawings integrates well into the other Google products like Google Slides and Google Doc and the change history feature is excellent for tracking the evolution of your diagram.

Bonus

Not everything falls into neat categories so here are our bonus tools that are worth considering when working remotely.

FunRetro

A tool that does one thing well, and that’s run (fun) retrospectives. If you are happy with a standard Retro format, then FunRetro provides an easy way for a team to collaborate. You can choose from a number of retro templates which are all just variations on the same thing. Team members can add cards, upvote, comment, merge and reorder cards. It's a high quality, easy to use tool that helps make retro’s fun.

Icebreakers

Otter.ai

A transcription service that plugs directly into zoom to automagically takes your speaker notes. You can share the transcript, edit it and playback so you can hear the voice and see the text. This has three clear use cases.

1. Accessibility, for those who are hard of hearing then having realtime transcription is useful.

2. Keeping the flow of meetings, if you miss some gold that someone has just said you can copy and paste their words verbatim without disrupting the flow of conversation.

3. Meeting recap, if you need to provide a summary of the meeting just highlight key text in real-time and at the end, use these highlights as the basis for the meeting notes!

The transcription isn’t perfect which can lead to some comical mistakes, but you can playback and correct the transcript and it is still more accurate than most humans and doesn’t get bored halfway through taking the notes.

Loom

A simple, reliable screen recording tool. Great for taking and sharing videos of show-and-tells, quick how-to-guides and just sharing knowledge in a more engaging non-text format.

Task Management

Physical boards to track workflows through the team gave a big boost to teams transparency and productivity.

Atlassian Jira

From a commercial perspective, when your teams start to grow beyond a few users, the pricing model seems to reward customers who use on-premise instances rather than Atlassian Cloud, which is surprising given it is 2020. Additional add-ons can also push your subscription costs up significantly. Overall, Jira is a steady choice of tool to manage your backlog and with a shallow learning curve for most developers due to such widespread familiarity with the tool.

Trello

Documentation, Wiki’s and Repo’s

It’s not just developers who pair on code these days, having an easy way to simultaneously work on documents with co-workers then make these documents accessible is vital for any remote team.

Google Docs

When Google Wave, which showed the world how to collaborate online, was retired the best bits were incorporated into Google Docs. All these years on it still feels a little like magic when multiple team members are collaborating on a document simultaneously which is helped by the lack lag between fellow editors updating and that update appearing on your screen. If you ever need any level of collaboration on a document, be that jointly authoring or just asking someone to review and edit then Google Docs goes out of its way to make it easy. If you compare it to the desktop version of MS Word then it’s fair to say that it misses some features but these days the missing features are of limited value such as ‘word art’. Like all the Google suit, sharing is easy and there are plenty of integrations into the wider remote working ecosystems.

Office 365 Word (desktop/ web)

Using the on-line version of MS Word allows users to collaborate, view, update and edit in real-time in a similar way to Google Docs. It allows collaboration in both the browser and in the full-blown desktop version of Word which is easy to launch, (if you have a licence) when you hit one of the many limitations you will find when using Word in the browser. When using the Word in the browser it is pretty basic with no native diagramming options, although if your company settings allow, you can use some third-party tools which can then be imported. Because of the degraded features in the browser when users collaborate with a mixture of browser and desktop the browser users can end up with a different view of the document and may end up with missing information. This problem goes away when all users are using the desktop version only. Either way, the update time between users is laggy, especially when importing images or drawing boxes and there is a noticeable lag even on entering basic text. As with all Microsoft Office products the login flow is clunky, especially when you need to switch between accounts

Atlassian Confluence

Atlassian’s wiki and blogging product is a popular choice among enterprises due to its clean UI and good integrations with the rest of the Atlassian tools like Jira. It allows users to organise pages in ‘spaces’ which are often mapped to projects, teams, products, or any other logical grouping that you want to organise your information by. Creating new pages is straight forward, with a wide selection of templates that should cater for a variety of different roles: AWS Architecture Diagrams, creative briefs, business plans, DevOps Runbooks, and impact assessments are just a few of the options available. Editing pages is also easy for less technical users with an integrated WYSIWYG editor, providing basic formatting capabilities. Each page also has version control/version history. As with Jira, there are extensive options for integrating Confluence with other 3rd party tools via the Atlassian marketplace. Our main bugbear with wiki software is that they tend to quite quickly become information silos that are poorly maintained. Atlassian has tried to address this with features like activity feeds and Slack integration, but in our experience, this has had limited success. For living documentation, a model such as GitBook would fit better into a team’s workflow to encourage regular maintenance of documentation.

Gitbook

OneDrive

An also-ran in the Cloud storage space, OneDrive is Microsoft’s offering that is bundled with their software and tightly integrated with the Office suite. If you have an Office365 subscription, OneDrive comes with an impressive 1TB of storage space. It’s not that OneDrive doesn’t hold its own against the competition, and if you live in a Microsoft World (i.e. Windows, SharePoint, Office365, Teams) then OneDrive will provide a convenient experience. Beyond Microsoft’s walled garden, we feel there are better options available. Dropbox: One of the pioneers of cloud storage that has outlasted its peers (remember box.com?). Dropbox offers a file repository that’s good for both collaboration and integrating with other tools. As it’s a standalone product, it is not biased towards any specific operating system or product suite at the detriment of others. However, this also means that collaboration is not as straightforward because it lacks native web editing features (think G Drive and Google Docs). It does provide a preview capability for most common formats (e.g. Microsoft Word), and their web front end makes it easy to open documents in their native editors. It has native sync capabilities for all the major operating systems (Windows, MacOS, and Linux) which allows you to access and edit your files like any other file or folder on your computer. Its version history feature is also very useful, and its sharing controls are simple to use. Dropbox also offers native apps for iOS and Android to give you access to your documents on the move.

In this section, we’ll be sharing the challenges we find, and approaches we take when running remote interviews.

One remote - all remote

We follow the paradigm that if one person is remote, everyone is remote. This means that even if two out of the three people are in the same physical location, behave as if you are remote. Open your own laptop, and turn on your video. This creates the best overall experience. This provides a more inclusive environment for those who are remote and levels the playing field for all participants, especially in interviews.

In fact, candidates have given us feedback that suggests that they prefer the “all remote” scenario as it makes for better interactions and more natural communication (compared to a ‘half-way house’).

Remember, as we will be working remotely more frequently, be this with colleagues or with clients, a remote interview can be a good indication of a candidate’s ability to work in this manner.

Process

Our overall interviewing process remains the same as when we run bricks and mortar interviews, while we can see the benefits of face-to-face interaction, we believe that not only is remote not bad, but there are also interesting things to be learned from a remote interview.

How we interview

For non-coding roles, the interviews consist of open conversations and case studies. For the case study, the candidate and their interviewers play through the scenario collaboratively, and most candidates will want to draw or otherwise visualise their ideas.

This means that we not only want to hear and see each other, but share drawings and visualisations remotely and allow collaboratively exploring and changing these.

Tools we use

Communication and screen sharing - Zoom

Use a high-quality and easily accessible communication tool, and we’ve found Zoom currently has the best quality. Ensure you have high-quality headphones with a good boom microphone.

General visual idea sharing and collaboration - G Suite or Miro

Use an easy-to-use real-time collaboration tool (or any other reasonable tool the candidate may suggest). Candidates in the past have successfully scribbled on paper or a wall and pointed the camera. It is not ideal, but it works.

Make it easy for the candidate

• Share the conference details well in advance.

• Manage candidate expectations: Make the candidate aware of the need for good connectivity and conducive set-up and surroundings. Explain how the interview will unfold and what the various remote tools will be used for.

• Test the technology: Provide guidelines for the candidate to test their set-up beforehand and familiarise themselves with the collaboration tool. We have seen interviews get cancelled because one party couldn’t get their audio to work.

• Provide exercise materials: Share case study-based exercises either a day before for the candidate to have a quick read or at the start of the interview, and then allow the candidate some prep time as part of the interview.

• Put your candidate at ease: Interviewing is hard; remote interviewing is harder. Be mindful of the stress a candidate is under. Put them at ease and cut them some slack. Form a connection, similarly to as you normally would.

Be prepared

• Pre-meet to align with your co-interviewer: As we always co-interview, briefly meet your interview partner prior to an interview to align procedures and tools.

• Kick off earlier: Connect with your co-interviewer at least 15 minutes prior to the actual interview to ensure you are set up. The remote call should be “live” when the candidate joins.

• Get your set-up right: Find a quiet and low-echo space. Make sure that everyone can see and hear each other and that any scribbles (digital or otherwise) can be seen and read by everyone.

• Have a headset: Make sure your headphone and microphone work well. We prefer this over conference call speakers or talking at your computer.

Run it well

• Introduce yourselves: With remote interviews, it is easy to “jump into it”. Don’t forget to introduce yourselves, explain what’s going to happen, and make a bit of chit-chat to lighten the mood. This is even more important should only one person be remote.

• Preparation time: Stay online during the time we give to the candidate to prep, so the candidate has a feedback line in case they need support. You may wish to turn off your video and mute your microphone.

• Keep time: Set clear expectations with all parties in regards to timekeeping, especially if you go mute or offline during preparation time.

Troubleshooting

• Bad connectivity: Do introductions via video, then turn the video off.

• No Audio: Have a fallback solution if the candidate cannot get their audio to work (it has happened before).

What is it?

Wash-ups can be considered a type of “post-mortem”, as they occur after the project is finished.

Timing

We suggest doing two sessions of 1h30m on different days in the same week, making the wash-up a 3h exercise.

Why two sessions?

As you are remote, you end up having several video calls a day.

When you're on a video conference, you know everybody's looking at you; you are on stage, so there comes the social pressure and feeling like you need to perform. Being performative is nerve-wracking and more stressful.

Having two sessions help reduce that fatigue and having a second part helps do some preparation work and extra thinking time between sessions.

Setup

The wash-up session requires some preparation steps :

• Send the invite for the sessions (suggestion: 1 week in advance) with the agenda and explain why we are doing them;

• Send the survey for the first session 4 to 5 days in advance (don’t forget to reinforce the deadline to have them filled);

• Send the how to use the virtual board in order for everyone to feel comfortable using it;

  • Examples for Miro:

    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pULLAEmhSho

    • https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmiHe0R4hbzRbpqJVs2HllnjhrTeiDVsE

• Add the survey results before the session starts in order for them to be analysed by the team as a starting point;

• Fill the project timeline several days before the session and let the rest of the team fill in the details;

• Fill the relationship diagram you will get out of the last 2 questions from the survey.

Roles

There are two roles in this exercise:

• Facilitator

  • To facilitate effectively, you must be objective. You step back from the detailed content and from your own personal views, and focus purely on the group process;

  • We suggest using someone outside of the team, with experience facilitating these kind of activities;

  • What you should do as a facilitator?

    • Design and plan the group process, and select the tools that best help the group;

    • Guide and control the group process to ensure that there is effective participation, participants achieve a mutual understanding and their contributions are considered and included

    • Ensure that outcomes, actions and questions are properly recorded and actioned.

  • What do you need to ensure?

    • Send surveys - send them a couple of days before the exercise and give a deadline for people to respond, so you have time to add that information into the template;

    • Timekeeping - make sure that the timings don’t derail during the session. It is helpful if you use a tool that has a timer incorporated, if you don’t you can use a time timer (kitchen clock) or any other online tool;

    • Adjust template - the templates are setup and have the necessary information for the sessions and from the surveys;

    • Write-up - to end the session, This is the document you will share with your organization.

  • Feedback - don’t forget to ask for feedback at the end of each session on the format and facilitation. Make it easy to record that information, like a mini retrospective at the end of each session.

• Team

  • Make sure you follow the “remote call etiquette”;

  • Participants take shared responsibility for the outcome;

  • Everyone is equal and has the right to his/her opinion, as job titles should be left at the “virtual” door.

Tools

The important thing is not the tools you use but how you use them. And it’s fundamental that you know the tools very well, especially their limitations. Have a backup for the tools in case some problems arise.

Basically you need two tools, one for the video call and another as a virtual whiteboard. Here are our main go to and some suggestions, you can use others if you want to as there are always new tools coming into the market.

See Tools for further details.

Steps

AGENDA - Session Day 1 (1h30m)

• Miro intro (5m)

• Review survey results (15m)

• Icebreaker (10m)

• Timeline (20m)

• Happiness Line (10m)

• Relationship Diagram (25m)

• Next steps (5m)

Miro intro (5m) prep work

• Send the how to use the virtual board in order for everyone to feel comfortable using it;

  • Examples for Miro:

    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pULLAEmhSho

    • https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmiHe0R4hbzRbpqJVs2HllnjhrTeiDVsE

Review survey results (15m)

• Add the images/results of the survey on the board;

• Discuss them with the team.

Icebreaker (10m)

Icebreakers play a significant role in events in which communication and participant comfort level are important factors. They help you ensure that all attendees are equal participants and they fully engage participants when you want them to own the outcomes of the meeting or session.

Some suggestions here:

• “This or that”

  • Each person as a set of cards per colour (write the first letter of your first name and last name inside the circle);

  • Choose what do you like the best (e.g. salad or pizza);

  • Have a fun conversation about the choices the team has done.

• “Thank you”

  • Write one post-it on what are you thankful on the engagement (e.g. something you learned, someone or a group of people you are thankful for something);

  • Give two minutes for people to write and then let people share (add the name in the post-it).

• “Accomplishments”

  • Write one post-it on what you believe was the biggest accomplishment of the engagement (e.g. individual or as a team);

  • Give two minutes for people to write and then let people share (add the name in the post-it);

  • If there is affinity between the accomplishments, get them together.

• More ideas:

  • Equal Experts Icebreaker Cards - https://icebreakers.equalexperts.com/

  • Miro has templates for Icebreakers in the paid version

  • https://www.collaborationsuperpowers.com/44-icebreakers-for-virtual-teams/;

  • https://blog.sli.do/virtual-icebreakers/;

  • https://miro.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Chapter_4.pdf;

  • https://www.virtualicebreakers.com/ (paid).

Timeline (20m) prep work

The timeline will help guide the story of the project and it’s different phases.

The timeline should have the following information:

• Dates - decide how you want to split your timeline (months, quarters, etc.);

• Phases - consider grouping several dates into phases (only if applicable);

• People - for each date write the joiners/movers/leavers with their name and role:

• Goals - Write the engagement/project goals (What did we wanted to achieve?) for this month/quarter;

• Achievements - Write the achievements (What were we able to achieve?) for this month/quarter;

• Challenges - Write the challenges (What obstacles did we face to reach our goals?) the team faced this month/quarter;

• Engagement - Write the engagement changes or achievements (e.g. renew the contract, canceled the contract, added more people, ...).

Pro-tip

Happiness Line (10m)

The Happiness Line will help understand the mood of the different team members in the different phases of the project and will create a bridge for a Relationship Diagram.

How to:

• For each date (month/quarter) move a "happy" face (if you were engaged) or a "sad" face (if you didn't feel engaged);

• One face per person per date (month/quarter);

• The "happy" or "sad" are more intense the further away from the horizontal line they are;

• After you added all your faces connect them with a line.

Pro-tips

Relationship Diagram (25m) prep work

Relationship diagram is the exercise where you try to understand the relationship between the client, the EE engagement team and the EE management team. The information should come from the last two questions from the first survey and added to the template before the session by the facilitator. (EE Branded Template here)

How to:

• Each circle should be filled with the results of the last two questions of the survey (If possible, create affinity clusters);

• During the session, give an overview of the items in the circles;

  • If needed, clarify any misinterpretation from the facilitator.

• Everyone has one vote for all items (card or cluster);

• The top 3 topics (most votes) will be explored in the second session and survey;

• At the end of the session, send the second survey and ask people to reply until the end of that afternoon.

Pro-tips

Next steps (5m)

End up the session by summarizing what you have done today and what is expected for the group to achieve.

AGENDA - Session Day 2 (1h30m)

• Recap Session Day 1 (5m)

• Discuss Key Topics (60m)

• Key takeaways (20min)

• Wrap-up (5m)

Recap Session Day 1 (5m)

Start the session by summarizing what the team did in the first session and what is expected for them to achieve today.

Discuss Key Topics (60m) prep work

The discussion around key topics is the peak of the wash-up! The information for the topics comes from a second survey, which you should send just after the first session. (EE branded survey here).

How to:

• Write one answer per card;

• Create affinity between the cards, but let people move them if they don't agree with your clustering;

• For each topic, give three minutes for everyone to read the cards and ask clarifications if needed;

• Give 1 vote per person to choose which card they want to discuss in detail;

• Start the discussion (use Lean Coffee);

• The group might want to pick more than 3 topics in case you finish the discussions, otherwise you can finish the session earlier!

Time Management:

• To manage time you can use the miro timer or any other timer (as long as someone is time keeping), there are several online;

Key Takeaways (20min)

The key takeaways should come from the discussion of the Key Topics. As a facilitator during the “Key Topics” conversation you should start taking notes, or ask help from the team.

Take the time to review them, give them a title and a short description on why this is a takeaway to avoid losing context. The team agrees or challenges these key takeaways (they will be used in the write-up shared afterwards by the facilitator).

Pro-tips

Wrap-up (5min)

Finish the meeting by giving kudos to the team for their effort and reviewing what you were able to accomplish during the two sessions.

Write-up

This is the document you will share with your organization.

How to:

• If applicable, don’t use names of clients or team members (no one likes finger pointing). As an alternative use a fake name (for team members) or mention the industry (for clients);

• Setup context of the client and the timeline;

• Share the results of the survey;

• Do a deeper dive of the Key Aspects of the engagement/project;

• Optional - Add some personal reflection, as the facilitator, on the project.

Logistics

Where running multiple hubs in different locations for the same project or product, to make the delivery more effective, consider setting up the organisation like so:

Multiple Hubs

• Build cross-functional teams - Each hub has cross-functional teams located at each hub. There may be some limitations e.g. where a role only requires a single individual, the location of the product owner or there isn’t a critical mass of people, however creating fully formed teams into each hub covering role such as Delivery Leadership, QA, BA, Dev, DevOps will provide better delivery outcomes.

• Regular Rotation - Ensure regular rotation between each hub so people can form real relationships. Ideally rotate the location and bring more than just the Delivery Lead / Tech Lead to get full rotation around the different locations.

• Share purpose - Roles such as Product Owner and Sponsor should travel to different location, ideally quarterly and share 'purpose' with everyone on the team.

Getting some (real) face-time

While video conferencing has improved substantially, it still doesn’t build team bonds like meeting face to face. When teams are distributed, arrange to meet up from time to time.

• Kick-off new work together - For new work coming into the team, run inceptions that are co-located, cross-functional and made up of members from across different locations. Use this opportunity to retrospect as a team together.

• Plan the location - make use of the location by trying to meet where your customer is (or where their customers are) so that you can get a first-hand opportunity to meet and receive feedback.

• Team Bonding - Take the opportunity to perform team-based activities to improve trust and increase your types of interactions. Team Bonding will only help you further to gain that common ground.

Multiple & Extreme Timezones

When scaling your delivery teams around the world, think carefully about where team members are located so you can optimise your delivery. Consider how time zones can work in your favour to deliver end to end features within minimal disruption and impact on your customer.

• Reduce the impact on the Customer - Have a Delivery Lead, an Analyst and Tech Lead as close to the customer as possible. You want to reduce the impact on your customer of the distributed team as much as possible.

• Cross-functional teams per Timezone - You need cross-functional capability that can deliver its features/components to production independently of other Timezones.

• Localise decision making - Most implementation decisions need to happen quickly so empower the team in the Timezone to make component level decisions to prevent work from being blocked. Try and locate people working on the same components to be in the same Timezone (App, F.E., Services).

• Ensure the right access - Ensure everyone, irrespective of their location has access to the same code base so that they can make updates if blocked.

• Take advantage of time zones - Organise the hubs to take advantage of time zones and location of the customer. Make your customer the centre and put the things the customer will "see" as close to them as possible (Location / Timezone). E.g. If your customer is in Sydney, have your Front End team as close as possible (Australia would be best, but a similar Timezone) and the service teams could be further afield (Pune, San Francisco) to enable at least a half day overlap with the FE team and the customer.

• Follow the sun with your communication - If you have teams in three time zones, then use the sun to direct the travel of your communications.

• Avoid Extremes - Try and avoid extreme timezones (more than seven hours) as full team communications becomes to difficult. If this isn't possible, then have a team in the middle to bridge the gap and provide continuity.

We have been running increasingly more workshops remotely – from pre-mortems and retrospectives to inceptions and design sprints.

We have found (so far!) that all workshop activities can be effectively run with a remote, distributed team. All we need to do is adjust how we design and run a remote-first approach.

This is critical because collocated teams think with their environment (this is called distributed cognition), and working remotely disrupts a team’s environment. In a remote setup, teams are no longer able to read subtle social cues as easily, can miss nuances in discussions and can struggle to leverage their colleagues’ energy levels to stay motivated and focused.

As a consequence of these factors, we need to adjust activities and amplify how and what we communicate in remote workshops.

The facilitator

When running a remote workshop, the facilitator’s role changes. There is more emphasis on the pre-workshop preparation when compared to physically co-located workshops. On the flip side, there is less to write up at the end as the team creates the digital boards, diagrams and maps throughout the workshop.

We recommend having one facilitator (rather than multiple), as we have found that with two people tag-teaming, it is harder to pick up on some of the visual clues to stop, start and hand over the conversation. You can still have other people lead sessions, but overall we recommend one facilitator.

Preparation

Set up the space

One of the biggest enablers for a remote workshop is to have an effective virtual space that replaces the usual walls/whiteboards we use in person.

We tend to use www.miro.com as it offers a large canvas to work on, and it is built for collaboration. It also has very low friction for inviting participants to collaborate.

• On a single canvas, create a different section on the board for each activity you are planning to run. For example, if you were running an inception, you might include a section for Vision and Goals and a separate section for the Business Model Canvas.

• Label each section clearly and provide a description of the objectives of the activity and detailed instructions on how to complete the activity. If the section has a template, add this in as well, e.g., Business Model Canvas. Add these in order of the agenda so that there is a clear flow across the canvas, e.g., left to right.

• Add sections for capturing questions and ideas like a Parking Lot or somewhere to capture risks and issues as they are raised.

• Add the running sheet (agenda) down the left-hand side with a clear narrative on why these activities have been included.

Setting this up will make it easier for participants to understand the context as they go and has the added benefit of being set up beforehand, allowing people to work ahead of time and think about how they’ll contribute to the board. People will often start filling things in before the session starts (which is useful for certain activities).

Setup & Test Video Conferencing

The most important virtual space you will use is that found in the Video conference. Before the session ensure:

• all participants test their audio prior to joining the session

• all participants join the remote working tool with their full name

• all participants have an actual thumbnail image against their profiles (not some random emoji or picture from high school)

Test out Zoom's breakout room feature (enabled by the host account), this allows the host to create ‘side’ rooms during the workshop which may be useful if you want to hold some breakout sessions.

Split the sessions

It is often much harder to stay focused and process what’s happening in remote workshops than in person.

Therefore, instead of running a single long workshop, look to break it up into smaller chunks. For example, if the workshop takes four hours when co-located, split this down into two one-hour sessions on the same day (morning then afternoon) followed by one two-hour session the next day.

With a split session, leave five minutes at the end to wrap up and prepare as a team for the next session. The facilitator needs to be explicit about when the next session starts and what is on the agenda as it’s harder to maintain momentum with split sessions.

Another activity which is harder to do remotely is to have breakout sessions; however, some tools (like Zoom) have a great breakout feature. Make sure you assign people to groups before the workshop as it’s pretty chaotic trying to get teams to form over a video conference.

Before the workshop

• Prepare the board and create the visual narrative of the overall workshop. Then provide access to the participants!

• Get everyone to test their access to the virtual tools before the meeting starts, e.g., the virtual board (above), video conference tool and task management tool (if you are using one). We often get teams to join the call five minutes early to make sure we can start on time.

• Send clear join-in details before the meeting outlining the above.

During the workshop

• As a participant, to avoid distractions, take yourself away from your day job. Turn off notifications on your devices and consider removing yourself physically from your usual environment (e.g., find a private room or work from home).

• Make sure people attend on time as it’s hard to get people up to speed.

• Although it feels counter-intuitive, using the 1-remote-all-remote rule equalises the power imbalances we often see in remote-friendly teams. An alternative approach is to have one facilitator in each room of attendees however this approach has different challenges e.g., requiring the facilitators to have an ongoing private conversation throughout the workshop.

• Enforce basic remote-first working etiquette: mute by default, turn the video on etc . . .

• Focus on being efficient with the digital board: rather than raising duplicate post-its, either enhance or upvote an existing post-it.

After the workshop

• Get individual team members to playback directly to their stakeholder groups using digital boards, maps, and documents that were created during the workshop. No need to wait for a playback deck!

Challenges of running a remote workshop

• The biggest challenges are often around working with people who are not used to working together remotely. If needed, take regular timeouts to remind the team about remote working etiquette and agree to some practices as a team. Explaining the rationale behind practices and activities, and allowing time for the team to familiarise themselves with the online tools has generally resulted in greater buy-in, in our experience.

• It can be harder to know whether the attendees have understood and internalised discussions, therefore regularly stress-testing the team’s collective buyin and understanding is very helpful. We achieve this by updating the digital board and asking open questions to confirm we are aligned.

• Some find it hard because they like to talk (read: ramble), and there is less tolerance for this in remote sessions. Acknowledge this and allow for break-out sessions or “discussion time” between workshop sessions.

• Secondary objectives, such as building trust and bonding as a team, are more difficult to achieve during these sessions. Acknowledge this upfront and optionally plan the time for remote-friendly ice-breakers and trust-building exercises.

• Given it is harder to have casual “side conversations”, setup an open and/or anonymous chat channel so attendees can raise thoughts and concerns as they are going through workshop sessions.

Make Movement a Habit

The human body loves movement, and having frequent movement snacks throughout your day is an effective way to stay alert, clear away brain fog and maintain mental focus.

Making movement a habit is key for your physical and mental wellbeing. The evidence for any specific frequency is not definitive, but what is certain is that the more you move, the better you feel. Just a two-minute movement snack is all it takes.

As a cognitive worker, you have to be deliberate and intentional about weaving movement snacks in your working day. You need to keep working at it until it becomes a habit, so you end up doing them without disrupting your cognitive flow.

To form a habit loop, you can establish cues, you can develop routines that work for you, and you can feel the boost it gives you immediately.

Example of a habit loop from the book “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhiggg

Rewards – Knowing about the benefits of movement gets you motivated but may not sustain you. So, it’s important to find the movement routines and healthy postures that make you feel good straight away and then build on these. Experiment with different movements to find the ones that you most enjoy and sensitise yourself to how good they make you feel. Movement snacks are intrinsically rewarding, and being aware of this will help you develop the instinctive urge to do them.

Routines – Read the section on movement snacks for a comprehensive set of movements that have been designed to be done at a workstation (seated and standing) and that help undo the damage done by many deskbound hours.

Cues – you can use any number of cues to help you get moving:

• Set timers on your computer, smartphone or clock to remind you to go for a short walk, have a movement snack or just change your posture.

• If you regularly sip water or tea or coffee, use a smaller cup so you have to refill more frequently and use these situations as refill breaks – a cue for a movement snack.

• If you have micro-rituals that you are aware of, attach some movement to them. For example, do some wrist rolls before pressing the send button on an e-mail, reward yourself with overhead reaches when you close a document you’ve just finished or give yourself a confidence boost by opening up your shoulders just before joining a remote meeting.

• If you are finding it difficult to get “in the zone” for a particular task, treat this as a cue to take a movement break. It will help clear your thoughts and allow you to start your activity with a fresh mind.

• Introduce movement snacks into your remote team meetings and turn them into a team activity. They are a great way to energise the group; they are fun and help with the team’s dynamics or social synchrony.

• Design your home office and your workstation to trigger opportunities for movement and changes in posture, such as switching between sitting and standing.

Dynamic Workstation

Our bodies are built for all-day movement. We are designed for upright walking while carrying stuff or reaching out for things all around us. You can recreate some of these by designing your workstation to be dynamic, so you naturally flow between several different positions while you work.

Aim for a mix of several different standing and sitting postures. This will also help you organise your time, separate out your activities and focus on tasks. For example, you might prefer standing when dealing with e-mails and short tasks, sitting upright when doing more focused work or relaxing on a sofa for more social conversations or creative thinking. Consider using a physical whiteboard or flipchart to jot down ideas and to-do lists, which encourage you to stand up and move around the room. Why not use an old-fashioned phone call to try out a “walk while you talk” one-to-one conversation?

If you have the space, you can improvise and set up a variety of different workstations to make this easier, and you don’t have to buy expensive equipment or extra furniture. If space is tight, then investing in an adjustable height standing desk may be right for you.

Here are some tips on good desk-work posture by Phil from Wellforce.life that you should consider before making any purchase decisions. Humans are no more designed to stand for long periods with feet flat on the floor than they are designed to sit down for 8 hours.

Movement Snacks

The most important thing is all-day movement. Regular workouts are great for building your strength or cardio fitness, but they are not a substitute for continuous low-level movement. Frequent short walks are fantastic, as are movement snacks that use your full range of motion. The snacks described here are designed to be done seamlessly at your desk and many of them while seated.

A movement snack is a short (two- to five-minute) sequence of movements that:

• nourishes the maximum number of joints

• activates tissue that becomes long and weak when hunched over a computer

• stretches tissue that becomes short and tight

We have created a Trello board that contains a complete menu of movement snacks that have kindly been prepared by Wellforce.life.

Movement snacks improve cognitive function, so you feel awakened, engaged and energised. The associated joint movement and blood flow invigorate your nervous system, making for higher levels of productivity, creativity and engagement.

Regular and frequent movement snacks can reverse the ill effects of desk work, reduce injury susceptibility and enhance your mobility. Each snack is designed to target the most common ailments associated with excessive screen time.

This playbook was created by , , , , , and the amazing folks at whom have generously shared their experience for the benefit of others.

We hope you found this playbook useful. If you want to chat about its contents, we’d love to hear from you.

Guides like this are never complete. There will always be improvements we can make as more teams use these practices in a wider variety of contexts — some of which we may not have envisioned. To help ensure this playbook remains relevant and useful, we welcome contributions.

Links to some great Playbooks, Tools & Articles

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