Remote Working: What, Why And How?

22 September 2016

Learn what remote working is, why employers and individuals should do it and how to do it effectively.

Presented at LITE in 2016.

Show transcript

0:00 Hi everyone. Sorry, I've got a few bits of paraphernalia. I'm used to having a lectern in
0:13 front of me that I can use to hide everything on. Two beepers, so hopefully I beep these
0:19 relatively in sync. Right, so I'm going to talk to you a little bit today about remote working,
0:23 and broadly three sections: what remote working is, why you should do it, and why you should care
0:32 about it, and how to do it effectively. So to start with, how many of you in the room just now work
0:39 remotely? You work from home either somewhere or any other time? Cool. How many of you who either you
0:46 do work remotely or you work for a company that allows you to do so, but you choose not to do so?
0:52 And how many of you are capable of putting your hand in the air? Almost everyone. That's good to
1:00 know. Right, so I'll actually start with who I am. So my name is Mike McQuaid, and I've been working
1:08 remotely for about seven years now from my home in Edinburgh and formerly Dundee as well. This is me
1:16 with my co-worker at home. Oh, I realized that I didn't click through any of these. There we go. Sorry,
1:24 I'll try and do these in sync now. This is me with my co-worker who was brutally cut off the website. If
1:30 you look at the website, my picture has just that because apparently I need to get some sort of more
1:34 professional looking profile shot done at some point. So my experience with working remotely has
1:42 been a little bit different to some people because I've worked across a few different companies and I've
1:48 never actually worked remotely for a company that I could have ever attended the office. So my three
1:55 employers, while I've been working remotely, have been a company called KDAB, a company called Oldtrails,
1:59 and a company called GitHub. All of them have been software companies because I work as a software
2:03 engineer. And all of them have been headquartered in the country other than the one I live in currently. So, this is
2:10 where they were kind of based. So, Hagfors is out in rural Sweden somewhere, in case you're not as hot on flags. And
2:17 San Francisco is in California, kind of Silicon Valley, with those being software companies. So, that will come on to
2:25 some stuff later on with that. But the interesting thing with that is, obviously, none of them are in the same time
2:29 zone. None of them have the same necessarily culture, and none of them are easily transportable without a plane. So,
2:40 what is remote working? So, you may have heard any of these terms used before. I'm going to broadly say that
2:49 they're all kind of encompassed with the stuff I'm talking about in the talk. Digital nomad is something
2:54 that's floating around a little bit more recently. Stick your hand up if you've heard that expression ever get used.
2:58 Okay. So, a few people. So, that's broadly, I think the same principles apply, but that's generally when, instead of
3:05 working from a home office or something, you work from wherever you happen to be in the world, and you can travel
3:10 around, and your employer doesn't care whereabouts you are at all. And I'm not considering working from home being, you know,
3:17 last thing at night or at first thing in the morning answering your work emails on your iPhone, because, A,
3:24 like, it's not -- it doesn't really have the same problems that remote working does, and, B, it's just like a bad idea. So, please, stop doing that.
3:31 I am going to define it as your main place of work. So, not the place you are, like, one or two days a week,
3:38 but the place you are three, four, five days a week is in a building that's not provided by your employer. So, for me,
3:46 this looks a bit like this. If the beeper works. There we go. So, I have there all the stuff I need to do to do my job. I've got a
3:57 nice monitor. I've got my keyboard, my mouse, my computer, etc. And I also have some things I don't need to do my work,
4:03 like my guitar and some nice speakers and things like that. And already, we can start to see, like, this segues kind
4:10 of nicely into why remote working is good. Well, other than anything else, my office looks different to anyone
4:16 else's office. I have things in there which not everyone else will have. I have made choices in there which not
4:22 everyone else will make. And I can tailor my environment such that it's the most productive for me. But let's try
4:29 and be a bit more specific about why this is a good idea. So, the first one, to start nice and small, is that we
4:37 can kind of save the planet through more people remote working. So, in 1996, the U.S. passed -- which is kind of crazy to me
4:44 when I was kind of doing a bit of research for this, because it seems like such a long time ago -- the U.S. passed the
4:51 Clean Air Act. And what that said is any company with more than 100 employees needs to encourage its employees
4:57 to share car journeys, carpooling, as the U.S. would say, make better use of public transport, shorten their work weeks,
5:04 at least optionally. And the big one, relevant to us, is remote working. They need to try and provide facilities for
5:11 and encourage their employees to do more remote working. So, in the U.K., there's been a study relatively
5:17 recently as well, which estimated that remote working could increase -- sorry, it could save costs to the U.K. employees
5:27 and employers of three billion pounds a year. And that's mostly going to come through people not having to
5:33 commute to work, offices not having to spend as much on having a massive building, and just generally that -- now
5:39 that we're doing more work from laptops, more work from phones and stuff like that, not having that duplication
5:44 of resources where you have to have something which you can work on on the road, and you also have to have
5:49 identically the same thing at a desk, which you're kind of used to working on as well. It's also got a big benefit in
5:56 terms of the world for your health as well. So, Emma Lloyd from the Royal Society of Public Health wrote a
6:03 fairly long report about this, but a quote that jumped out is, "There is a noticeable decline in health and
6:08 well-being if you have a longer commute." There's been various other studies that have shown this, that your
6:13 commute length is at least correlated, if not causing, a decline in people's overall health. It's -- if you have to spend an
6:23 hour in a car or even a bus or a train to work and back every day, that's not great. And I think the
6:29 nice thing about remote working expanding a bit is that we can see more people able to -- even if they're not
6:35 able to do this all the time, if they're not able to do this every day, if you can do this one, two, three days a
6:39 week, then it reduces the amount of time you have to spend traveling to and from work, and then that
6:44 frees up more time for you. And that segues on nicely to happier people. So, studies also show that remote
6:52 workers are found to have higher satisfaction in their jobs than the same people who are working in an office.
6:58 It's also been found that providing more flexibility to people who -- around their working environment,
7:04 such as, for example, remote working, but also in terms of their hours, also increases worker satisfaction
7:10 and reduces, like, stress and conflict with their family. I mean, this should be relatively obvious. A few
7:16 anecdotes with that, like, I found every company I've been at, when there's been people at the company who have kids, quite often the person who has, you know, the nine to five remote working job will -- if the company is a bit more
7:26 flexible, they'll be the one who goes and does the school run. They'll pick up their kids, they'll maybe come home, stop work at, you know, earlier in the afternoon, and then maybe do a couple of hours work in the evening.
7:37 And that flexibility in allowing them to do that does make a big difference to their family life and their happiness. And also, perhaps related to that, turnover seems to be in studies lower for remote workers as well. So that's another benefit.
7:51 So, the other thing which I've always been a big advocate of myself, and I've seen in myself, is that it results in more productive people.
8:00 There's the obvious things that people save a bit of time every day through commuting, and that's time that could be spent additionally working, although I'm not necessarily advocating for that.
8:09 But it certainly saves time every day doing things that you would have to do to otherwise to get to an office. But also, people can be more in control of their environment.
8:18 You saw the little picture of my office before, and that's tuned to my environment. It means that when I'm working on stuff that I kind of want to be able to, you know, just block out the world and just, you know, churn out code, documentation, whatever, then I can put on some music that allows me to do that.
8:33 If I'm having something that I need absolute silence to really think, I can just press a button and cut off all the background noise in my house.
8:40 If you work in an open plan office environment, that's not really possible. You can't just immediately cut off all the noise around you.
8:48 And the other thing you can't do, which, again, I'll touch on more later, is you certainly can't stop anyone in your office from coming up and just quickly asking you a little two minute question, which by the end of that, you've forgotten what your train of thought was, and you need to start what you're doing again.
9:03 So a little quote on that. This guy called Jason Fried, who works for a company called Basecamp. They've been big proponents of remote working for a pretty long time. And he says, offices have become interruption factories. A busy office is like a food processor. It chops your day into tiny little bits.
9:22 So I would argue personally that the modern office is not designed for individual productivity unless you have everyone segmented off into individual offices with doors that close, but instead it's being optimized mostly for efficient use of space and for kind of, you know, people like to be in a big room together and they like to kind of have a bit of a chat and interaction and stuff like that.
9:44 And there's nothing wrong with that. That's positive and that's healthy. But if you're focusing purely on productivity and particularly on individual productivity, accomplishing tasks, which particularly in software are collaborative, but require large amounts of work that I do individually by myself, then I think you can see real benefits from remote work.
10:05 So obviously, like every cloud has, I was going to say a silver lining, but that's the other way around. Every silver lining has a cloud, I guess. That doesn't really work. Right.
10:17 So it wouldn't be fair to not mention any of the negatives as well. And some of these are, you know, cold hard facts and some of them are just stereotypes that come up, but they are common critiques that you hear about remote working.
10:31 So one major one is you hear people who are like, how do you not just spend all day and all night working? Is it not really hard to kind of get that work life balance boundary?
10:42 And I think for some people that can be a bit of a struggle and it's something you definitely learn more while you're doing more remote working.
10:50 But I think what it comes down to is with both working a lot and as we'll talk about in a minute, working a little, you're still doing the same job. You still have the same kind of goals and deadlines and things like that.
11:03 So at the end of the day, if you feel most productive, and as I believe I am on a roughly 40 hour a week, it's a software engineering book called PeopleWare that kind of talks about that, that people are most productive when they work 40 hours a week.
11:16 If you work a small amount of overtime, you can get a bit more productive. But if you do that consistently, then you will become less productive. And I think that applies to most kind of knowledge working jobs as well.
11:26 But if you subscribe to that viewpoint, it's easier to kind of stop yourself from working all the time. It's also helpful. People find often to have a separate office. Some people like to go and work from cafes or some private office in a co-working space or somewhere like that, which means that they have that kind of separation between work and home.
11:47 But for me, I find that's relatively straightforward. The next one is time zones, particularly for if you work at a company where their headquarters are a long distance away, this can be a problem.
12:01 So when I worked for the company based in Sweden, the biggest office was in Berlin, the head office was in Sweden. So it was never more than an hour time difference away from me.
12:12 Whereas working for a company based in San Francisco, I have an eight-hour time offset. And because I get up and finish relatively early and some of my coworkers get up late and finish relatively late, that means we have no overlap between the two of us.
12:27 And this means that if we want to have, say, a video call in which we can kind of chat about something, like one of us has to kind of make a sacrifice. Either I need to stay late or someone else needs to get up early.
12:37 So another common critique is that, well, how do you know people are not just being lazy? How do you know people are actually doing their work and they're not sitting watching Jeremy Kyle all day or whatever?
12:50 And this goes both ways, I guess. I'll talk about the manager side in a minute. But from an individual point of view, how do you keep that motivation to keep working? And actually, I think this is a lot easier than people think, because most of us work in offices.
13:04 Most of us have a computer in front of us in the office, which has the internet on most computers, and the internet has a wide variety of things you can do which will happily occupy instead of work. And as long as you have that, then it's pretty easy to procrastinate if you want to procrastinate. It's pretty easy to not do your work. And I think the thing is when you work from home, you have the same thing, but you also have the same requirements. You have the same boss who's expecting you to get stuff done by the same dates and things like that.
13:33 So you could go and sit and watch Jeremy Kyle, but then you know that at the end of the day, you're going to have to get this work done.
13:41 But what I would say is that the flip side of this is that I think it's much easier to look like you're working when you're actually doing nothing in an office than it is to do so at home.
13:50 If I do, you know, sit on Facebook all day, I could have just, you know, sat, gone to the cinema or sat in my garden or played with my dog and it will have the same, if I'm being judged based on the outcome of my work and not just based on sitting in a chair, then the effects are the same.
14:07 So one of the nice things about that is that it actually goes the other way where if you're not being productive right now, then it means that you're able to say, well, I don't need to sit and pretend for the next 15 minutes while I wait on a coworker to get back to me that I'm somehow doing work.
14:21 I can go and do whatever. And then I'm being charged on my work output and not just on where I sit.
14:27 So the other one that's related is how do you manage people and how do you ensure that people are going to work in the way that they do?
14:37 And is it not impossible to manage someone when you can't kind of keep an eye on their day to day?
14:42 And well, of course, it's not. You need to judge people based on, as I said before, the output of their work and not based on the time they spend doing it.
14:50 Particularly when you have mixed time zones thrown in and you allow people more flexibility with their working hours.
14:56 It does become a lot more, I guess, opaque as to when people are working and not working.
15:04 And I think most people here are probably in some sort of salary job and most salary jobs, you're not being paid for the hours you work, right?
15:12 You're being paid. Most contracts I've seen at least will say that you're being paid to accomplish your job.
15:18 Maybe it has some statement of recommended hours that you might work in there, but it doesn't state a fixed hour period.
15:25 And as a result, I think when you're managing, you need to just change your expectations that someone is going to be working a fixed number of hours to being this is what you expect from this person.
15:35 And you mutually agree on outcomes and deadlines and these type of things.
15:38 And then you're judging that person by their ability to meet those things or not.
15:44 But let's see, what are some of the tools that we need to make sure that we use to work effectively remotely?
15:50 I've kind of talked a little bit about why it's a good thing, about some of the problems that you can have.
15:56 I talked a little bit about how you can address some of those problems, but let's be more specific and more proactive.
16:01 If you were a company who said, okay, well, I'm on board with this. I want to allow more people to work remotely.
16:06 How do you do that? And how do you set yourself up for success?
16:09 Well, the first one is ensuring that you have some sort of community.
16:14 And that's something that happens more naturally in an office anyway.
16:19 When you come in first thing in the morning, you sit down at your desk and you wait for your computer to boot or whatever.
16:23 You know, you're going to chat with the person that sat at the next desk about maybe how their day was or their weekend or, you know, if they see whatever was on TV last night.
16:32 Whereas when you're working remotely, it's a lot easier to kind of fall out of those habits and being talking to your coworkers exclusively about work and nothing else.
16:40 So I think it's important to improve people's interaction, their trust, and their motivation through encouraging a sense of community.
16:48 A big thing that every company I've been at has tried to do is trying to get everyone in a team together at least kind of twice a year, physically in the same place.
16:57 Partly for kind of work-related conversations in which the kind of bandwidth is higher, being able to have those face-to-face chats.
17:03 But also partly just to have fun, to go out and get to know each other a bit better and to understand people.
17:09 So when someone, you know, blows up in a conversation, you can be like, okay, well, I have a bit more of an understanding of that person.
17:15 I can understand where they're coming from.
17:17 I can understand why that happened than if they're purely text on the other side of a screen and a video call once a week.
17:24 The other thing is I believe that teams that work better together are those that trust each other, those that kind of care about the other people in that team.
17:33 And as a result, you need to work a bit harder to get that for teams, particularly teams where you have some people who are remote and some people who aren't.
17:40 Because it's very easy for a little clique to maybe form with the people who are in the office and the person who's remote to be excluded from that.
17:47 So having these regular interactions, encouraging people to kind of talk about their day and things like that on the same mediums you're using to talk about work is helpful.
17:57 So the next big thing is trust.
18:06 I've mentioned that word a few times already, but I think it's essential to make a remote worker work effectively.
18:12 On my first week of my first remote job, my manager said to me that remote working is all about trust.
18:19 And I assumed what he meant is, you know, it's all about you trusting me or something like that.
18:24 But what he said is that it's about a kind of a carefully entwined mutual trust, because I need to trust that my manager trusts in me.
18:33 Because, and what he meant by that is if I have a day, which I'm sure we all do, where I spend eight hours churning away on something, I realize towards the end of the day, oh, well, I went down a dead end and I have nothing to show for the day.
18:45 That's when you need to have that trust.
18:48 And that's where the trust stops the overworking, because the temptation might be, well, I need to just keep working until I have something to show for my day, because otherwise, they'll think I'm not doing anything.
18:56 Whereas if you are in an office environment, then you may well be sitting down and be like, well, you know, they all saw me come in, they saw me kind of, you know, angsting over the problem.
19:06 So they kind of know that I've, I've done my job today.
19:09 So I need to trust that my manager has that trust in me, that we both believe that neither person is trying to kind of, you know, rip off the other.
19:18 And a big part, I think, particularly when you have those different time zones, is trying to do as much stuff asynchronously as possible.
19:28 As I mentioned before, it's very easy in an office, if I have a question, to go over and tap someone on the shoulder.
19:34 It's not easy for me to do that with my remote coworker, who maybe is not paying attention to their email client or their chat window or whatever right now.
19:41 And it's now impossible for me to do that with my remote coworker who's in Australia, who has zero working overlap with me.
19:48 So as a result, you need to think a bit more about the stuff you're doing, about the messages you're sending.
19:52 And if there's anything you take away from this talk, even if you don't want to do remote working, you don't want to encourage this, that's fine.
19:59 This would be the biggest thing I think can boost productivity in almost every company, is thinking about your communication style.
20:05 When you ask someone a question, does that need to be answered in the next minute, the next hour, the next day, the next week, month?
20:11 And using a suitable communication tool to do that, and trying to set expectations.
20:17 Because what kills productivity more than anything else in my experience across all sorts of companies, is people asking questions that don't need to be answered for maybe a week, and asking them in a way that needs to be replied to within a minute.
20:30 Because that means that it's very hard to focus on the longer term picture, because everyone is constantly interrupting each other, and no one is able to kind of get that time to focus.
20:38 And a big part of that, I think, particularly with me being in technology, is having the right technology to help you with that.
20:46 So, a few things which are fairly obvious and fairly essential tools that I think you need to have to effectively work remotely, is some sort of tool for video and audio calls amongst your team.
20:59 Ideally, something which is easy to set up and doesn't require, you know, pre-configuration or whatever.
21:05 Google Hangouts or FaceTime, they're both free and they're good solutions for doing that.
21:10 Some sort of group instant messenger, this is not as widely deployed, but I'd really recommend something like Slack, that's kind of becoming more popular.
21:18 A way that people can kind of talk in groups, they can have things segmented off into kind of work and, you know, hobby-based kind of rooms where they can chat about these things.
21:27 And also where people can have one-to-one conversations about things in private that they might not feel comfortable sharing in a group setting.
21:33 And finally, and I'm a little bit biased about this because I work for a company that produces one of these tools, having a product management tool, a project management tool, sorry, something like GitHub or Basecamp or a similar tool that allows people to collaborate, work together, plan projects, and discuss how they're going somewhere that's not just a massive email chain, that's not a daily meeting, that's somewhere online where that information can be tracked, stored, and accessed at different times.
21:59 Because that allows people, again, to work more independently and more flexibly, and as a result, I think more productively.
22:06 But you may also find it useful to recommend a couple of other little tools.
22:10 One thing is Screen Hero, that's a nice little tool for doing screen sharing.
22:15 You can have two people looking at the same screen, either person can click and control the mouse or the keyboard, you have two separate mouse curses, and you can also talk while you're kind of viewing that as well.
22:24 That's useful if you want to collaborate on a document or something like that.
22:28 And finally, a little thing which, again, you can see if you go to my website, there's a more specific example of that.
22:34 It's just everyone could do with getting better at managing their email, using email filters to try and figure out, like, if an email was sent to your entire company, you probably don't need to read that right now.
22:43 If an email was sent just to you with the subject title, urgent, urgent, whatever, you probably want to read that right now, and that could be prioritized and put into the right bucket, whatever.
22:53 Right, so that's more or less the kind of outline of the talk.
22:58 So we talked a little bit about what remote working is.
23:00 I was saying anywhere where you're kind of working primarily from a place where it's an office not provided by your employer.
23:07 Maybe it's your own home, maybe a co-working space, wherever.
23:10 Why is remote working good?
23:12 Well, saving the planet, helping you be healthier, more productive, and helping your employer to save a bit of money as well.
23:18 And you can work effectively when you're working remotely through communicating well, through trusting each other, and through using the appropriate tools to enable you to have asynchronous communication whenever possible.
23:31 Right.
23:32 So that's me.
23:33 And if anyone has any questions, you stick up your hand.
23:36 Thank you.
23:37 Yep.
23:38 Question, please.
23:44 Are you on an annual leave today?
23:46 Am I on what, sorry?
23:47 Annual leave?
23:48 Annual leave today.
23:49 Yeah.
23:50 That's still to be decided.
23:53 Yeah.
23:54 Because I did a bit of work this morning, so maybe, maybe not.
23:57 I work for a company, technically we have no vacation allowance anyway, so it doesn't make a difference.
24:01 I have a minimum amount I need to take rather than a maximum, but.
24:04 Okay, so you have leaves, like you can take leaves, annual leaves and everything.
24:08 Yeah, yeah.
24:09 So, yeah, we take time off and just like anyone else.
24:12 Okay, thank you.
24:13 I'm getting the steps in today.
24:14 Hi there.
24:15 I have a role that's client-based, so I have a lot of clients, and clients contact me via phone, email, meetings, et cetera, et cetera.
24:30 That, to me, is very hard for me to work remotely.
24:34 So have you ever had a thinking about, so software engineer, you can sit at a computer and you can have a piece of work.
24:40 It's very different for me in having to be reactive, et cetera, et cetera, so.
24:44 Yeah.
24:45 Yeah, I can see that.
24:46 We have a big sales team at GitHub, and they work, I guess, probably more in the way that you do as well.
24:53 But a lot of them, when I say work remotely, I don't necessarily mean, you know, instead of going to a customer's office, they will sit in their house and refuse to leave.
25:02 I more mean when they're not doing that work, where is their place that, you know, you're typing up notes after a customer meeting.
25:09 And for that, for them, most of the time, that's often their home rather than, like, an office where they have to be.
25:15 But yeah, as you said, that's a very good point.
25:17 There are certain jobs and certain roles where you're going to be required to have more face-to-face communication like that.
25:23 But again, even with that, I guess, like, obviously, in a sales environment, you're wanting to kind of pander to your customer more than demand they do things your way.
25:32 But even in those environments, I wonder whether we can all do a little bit more kind of video call, a little bit more maybe by email and stuff,
25:40 and a little bit less requiring face-to-face meetings.
25:43 But that's just my two cents. But thanks. Great question.
25:48 Anybody else?
25:51 Just one there.
25:55 So you mentioned that to keep the kind of social angle working that you meet up as a company twice a year.
26:02 Have you got any other tips for keeping that sort of social side live while you're remote working?
26:07 Because obviously there's a lot of benefits from face-to-face connections.
26:11 Yeah, as I say, I think the big thing is trying to just force yourselves to have those, like, more almost real human interactions and trying to think about the people you work remotely and closely with as being like your coworkers that you sit in the same room with.
26:29 And I personally try and, for example, this sounds a little bit weird, but almost slightly overshare on personal information because, like, if I'm having a hard time or something like that, like, telling the people in my team, I could quite easily hide that in a way that I maybe couldn't in an office.
26:45 But trying to force myself to be like this. But trying to force myself to be like, well, it's only fair to them to know when they're working so closely with me if something is affecting me right now.
26:52 So I should probably be explicit about telling them that.
26:55 So I think that's something that helps. And again, as I say, just when you have those meetups and those interactions, when we have our whole company get together once a year, I've seen across the companies that changing over time and being initially quite a lot of meetings and work planning.
27:09 And now it being more or less a kind of an entirely social event because that's what we've realized is what is missing. People can do, you know, you can plan roadmaps and stuff like that when you're not sitting in a room face to face.
27:22 That's possible, but it's not possible to kind of recreate the sitting in a pub like or a cafe, like chatting about life and the bigger questions or whatever, like those sort of weird, spontaneous interactions that you have when you're together.
27:38 Like it's harder to do them online. Thanks for the question.
27:45 Do you ever have situations where maybe something's been shared in the office in an informal way, which is not important at the time, so it's not communicated, but then later down the line it becomes more important and maybe people don't think to share it with you.
28:05 Do you have any advice for things like that?
28:07 Yeah, I mean, stuff like that definitely. That's something on a very personal basis. That's a reason why I would only consider working for another company in the future that had at least some remote presence already.
28:19 Like I wouldn't want to be the sole person because then you do end up missing a lot of that information.
28:24 But yeah, I mean, the way we, in GitHub at least, previously we had a little saying which is if it doesn't have like a URL, if it's not on some web page or written down somewhere, it doesn't happen.
28:38 So basically the reasoning for that would be if someone would cite a decision that like, oh, well, we, me and so-and-so discussed over coffee and we agreed this two weeks ago, unless you can point to some sort of write-up for that, you almost don't get to use that.
28:52 Like someone is entitled to turn around and say, well, I don't see any evidence for that. And it maybe sounds a little bit aggressive, but that I think those type of approaches and just enabling people who work remotely to be able to call stuff like that out is the only way you can kind of build a culture like that.
29:09 And I guess as well on the flip side, having the leadership being aware of that and trying very hard to try and encourage people to kind of communicate in a way that is accessible to everyone and not just accessible to the people who happen to be sat at the table at the same time.
29:23 Any final questions?
29:29 Hope we've got time.
29:37 - Specifically in the software development context, is there certain structures, certain processes a development team might be using that would prohibit their ability to work remotely?
29:49 For example, pair programming, where two developers are working on the same machine, or something like scrum, where you have a daily stand up and you've got your time zones, that sort of issue?
30:00 - Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, there's definitely been teams in GitHub where that has been the case, and they've been quite open about that.
30:07 where people have said, "Oh, why don't we do, you know, pair programming all the time, or we do scrum?"
30:11 And if you have a person in, for example, the UK and Australia, in Sydney, like East Coast Australia, you have no working overlap.
30:19 So either someone has to work very antisocial hours, or someone, you know, it basically, it becomes a bit of a mess.
30:28 So then you need to decide to yourself, like, what are these processes doing for us?
30:32 Is there any way, either we can replicate them in an async way, I've seen the stand up thing done as being, I worked at the Swedish company I was at, we had effectively a daily stand up, and the meeting was run by like, a bot.
30:46 And what you would do is, you would just tell the bot in advance, if you couldn't make the meeting, what to say as you, and then it would go through and we'd almost have the stand up.
30:54 And, you know, obviously, it requires a slight deviation in process, but you can still end up with effectively the same result as doing a stand up.
31:01 But you're just not all necessarily there right at the same time.
31:05 And in terms of pair programming and stuff, yeah, I mean, that's, in my team I'm at, at the moment, we do see some more of that, because there's been people I've kind of wanted to pair with who are not in a friendly time zone.
31:15 And if I really, if one of us really, really wants to do that, then yeah, we'll take the sacrifice and maybe work a little bit later.
31:20 But yeah, it does prohibit certain ways of working like that.
31:23 And I think what you can maybe do with that is try and, if that's really, really important to your workflow, structuring your team such that people are more,
31:30 time zone friendly, for example, and so teams maybe clump together based on time zones.
31:37 I guess that I would see that as a potential solution.
31:39 But yeah, thanks for the question.
31:41 I think that's us for questions.
31:43 But yeah, thanks very much, everyone, for coming.
31:45 And thanks for the great questions.

Mike McQuaid

Remote Working: What, Why And How?