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That’s why at Fuckup Inc, we decided to create a guide to remote work. We’d like to thank Trello and Zoom for inspiring us and helping us improve our processes; we hope this guide helps you as well.
Stay on top of your routines
One of the most common tips is to stick to a daily routine. One of the advantages of working from home is that it helps you understand yourself and identify when you are most productive. The advice is to start your day as if you were going to the office:
Wake up, exercise, take a shower, have breakfast, and then start working. It’s important to have a routine and organize your day.
Set your work hours and make sure to set aside time for meals and breaks.
Set up a home office. It’s helpful to have a dedicated workspace and keep it separate from your personal living areas (like your bedroom); this will help you truly disconnect from work.
To stay focused, try not to work for more than 45 minutes at a time. The Pomodoro Technique is a tool that helps you set time intervals for work and rest.
Just like any other workday, you need to wrap up your day. This is essential for maintaining your mental health and happiness. Once you’ve finished your work, disconnect and enjoy your personal time. Turn off all chat and email notifications.
4 Tips for Maintaining Effective Communication
When working remotely, especially if it’s your first time, you need to communicate frequently. If you’re wondering whether or not you should ask a question or clarify something, go ahead and do it! The most important thing here is assertive communication, which is why you need to make sure that ideas, tasks, and objectives are clear to everyone.
Fuckup Tip #1: At Fuckup , we organize our work using OKRs, which provide clarity on our direction and how each person’s work contributes to the organization’s overall mission.
When working remotely, it’s important that we make up for the fact that we don’t run into each other in the hallway or at lunch to share ideas and have conversations. That’s why we need a messaging tool.
Fuckup Tip #2: We use Slack; it’s our primary communication tool and helps us make up for the lack of face-to-face interactions.
It is essential to have a clear communication process and to use specific channels based on the priority and urgency of each message. This means choosing the right time and channel for your message (chat, video call, or email) to avoid overwhelming others and disrupting workflow.
Fuckup Tip #3: At Fuckup, we’ve organized our channels as follows:
Slack is the go-to platform for communication.
In person (when possible) for team meetings and collaborative work.
Video calls for brainstorming, team meetings, and to share ideas and new processes that the entire team needs to be aware of.
Email is used for important documents, official announcements, and weekly reports.
Fuckup Tip #4: At Fuckup, we hold weekly team meetings, one-on-ones, monthly meetings to share updates on how each team is progressing toward its goals, and quarterly meetings to present final results and discuss next steps.
Team dynamics
One of the most common myths about remote work is that employees won’t get any work done and that they’re lazy—which is why so many companies are wary of it. This concern is the elephant in the room, and it’s something we’ve all struggled with at some point. We understand that the key here is the trust you place in your team.
How can you build trust and accountability within your team? Ensure clarity regarding the company’s purpose and values. If everyone understands why they are part of the company, how their work affects others, and how it helps achieve goals, they can work from home or from a coffee shop in Thailand without losing focus.
At Fuckup Nights have a flexible work arrangement, which means that:
We set our working hours based on our headquarters in Mexico City and ask the team to be available for as many of those hours as possible. Doing so helps convey a sense of trust to the team.
It is important to take into account team members who work in other countries. We have a team in Mallorca, Spain, and a team member in Argentina. They adjust their work schedules to accommodate team meetings. Flexible work hours are essential.
We have a clear mission, and we’ve set our objectives based on it. These objectives and our mission help us establish our OKRs for each area. We hold quarterly meetings to review our OKRs, share our achievements, and determine next steps.
Each person submits a weekly report every Friday, in which we share our results, challenges, and opportunities from the week.
On Slack, we have different channels; one of them is called “Random.” We use this channel to share all sorts of things, from memes to family photos, and it also helps make up for the time we’re not spending together.
It’s important to remember that working remotely will always present new challenges for your company, such as how to foster team dynamics that promote creativity and growth. That’s why we recommend establishing processes and systems that help foster accountability, leadership, and ownership—this way, you won’t need to micromanage.
Tools for team dynamics
As soon as the current crisis forced us to switch to remote work, we created a Slack channel to communicate our daily priorities. This is useful for letting the team know how we’re doing our jobs; we send a message before lunch and when we finish our day.
Here are some tools we’ve found useful:
Google Docs for creating and collaborating on documents, presentations, and more. Google offers a business platform called G Suite.
Asana and Basecamp are project management tools. These tools are great if you decide to go fully remote for good.
Video calls and meetings
When we need to ask for opinions or clarify something, a video call is always the best way to do so, because we can see each other, which helps us understand one another better. Video is also a great tool for sharing knowledge; you can create a tutorial or demonstrate how to use a tool or program.
Consider planning your meetings and time with the team, setting priorities, and determining whether a video call will help streamline your processes. Remember, no one wants to say, “That meeting could have been an email.”
Remember to set up a space for video calls at home; choose a quiet, well-lit area and try to use headphones so you don’t miss anything. Here’s an article with some tips for improving your video calls with Hangouts Meet.
Fuckup Tip: Don’t forget to keep it real and human. We can’t control everything that happens in our homes—sometimes the kids cry, the dog barks, someone comes to the door, etc. Sharing your life helps with team building (and it’s funny).
Personal and professional life
One of the benefits of remote work is a better work-life balance, thanks to flexible working hours. Here are some best practices we use internally to help you better organize your day when you have family around:
Yannick Kwick, our Global Sales Lead, is a dad. On the days his daughter is with him, he tries to schedule fewer calls so he can spend more time with her during the day. He works longer into the evening and lets the team know about this.
We know it’s not always easy to plan your day around calls when you’re working as a team. Another tip is to look for educational programs or content for your kids while you’re on a call; these will keep them entertained in a healthy way. Not all screen time is bad.
During our webinar on “Resilience in Times of Crisis,” one of our partners shared that he sets aside specific times to spend with his children and blocks off those slots in his calendar. This way, he can actually spend quality time with his children and focus on work.
Remember, stay true to yourself. We’re all human, and sometimes life gets complicated. Here’s an interesting Forbes article that takes a closer look at the topic of work-life balance.
Get to know your team
It is important to understand the personalities of the people on your team; this makes it easier to plan meetings and choose the best times and methods for connecting with them.
To keep it simple, we can consider three personality types: introverts, extroverts, and ambiverts (a combination of the two mentioned above)
Fuckup tip: Each team at Fuckup Nights its meetings differently, based on its specific needs. For example, the Movement team likes to have a 15-minute meeting every day to catch up and organize their priorities.
The reason to consider team dynamics is that if you have a lot of extroverts, you’ll probably need to schedule additional video calls and perhaps hold more meetings to help them feel connected.
I hope this guide is helpful to you. We recommend that you create your own guide to ensure clarity within your team, including what works best for you.
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