How we make remote working work
Thankfully, Kyero has had the past eleven years to figure out how to work remotely. Today, we have a super strong culture because of remote working, not despite it.
As your business gets to grips with physical isolation to control the spread of Coronavirus, we’d like to share our experience, ideas and tools about remote working. Perhaps you can turn this challenge into an opportunity to experiment with a new way of working in the future?
We didn’t start as a remote company – fifteen years ago we had an office full of people. But the 2008/9 recession prompted us to downsize and work remotely. We’ve learnt as we’ve gone along and made many mistakes. Today, however, remote is ‘business as usual’ for Kyero – and it can be for you too.
How to get started with remote working?
We suggest you start slowly: come up with a small trial project – pick people on your team who are keen to try remote working, define the scope and have clear deliverables & metrics for success.
Remote isn’t a cure-all, it’s not a magic trick and it doesn’t work for everyone in every situation.
Your people need to be self-motivated and happy to be accountable for delivering an outcome.
As a manager, you have to dispense with the usual proxies of productivity – early starts and long hours.
Micro-managing doesn’t work with a remote team. Instead, your role is to support them and remove obstacles standing in the way of them achieving the goal.
And when you’re ready to try remote working…
Here are some of the Tools & Apps we use:
Communication
Slack – online chat tool
Vonage – Voip for phone calls
Video
Zoom – video 1:1s, all hands meetings
Project Management
Trello – organisation, track progress on projects
Document management
Tettra – online wiki of processes, employee handbook
Google Docs – shared cloud documents
Security
1password – security, share passwords
Systems
Process Street – systematise processes
Final thoughts
Have you ever worked remotely? How have you adapted to the current situation? Are there any other apps, tips or tools that you can share? And looking ahead to when this is all over and things begin to return to normal, do you think remote working is something you’d consider continuing with?
