Remote Work

We divided our work into two parts: working within the team and working with companies/brands. This article will focus on working within the team.

 

Communication

For our primary communication, we use a tool called Basecamp (previously, we used Slack, Teamwork, and others).

The main reasons we use this communication tool are:

• The ability to chat.

• The ability to separate teams and projects (we have four main teams: coordination, marketing, design, and development, and several projects with various clients).

• The ability to record information discussed in a message board format.

• The ability to set various timers for meetings or deadlines.

* All of these features are integrated into one place.

The communication and management of various tasks are divided into daily and weekly updates, including leave management.

 

Daily Task Management

The main purpose is to communicate what we are working on each day, whether it's completed or if there are any issues. We use a format in Basecamp to communicate at the start and end of the workday. 

At the start of the day

Work from home dd/mm/yyyy

Project Name

- Task 

For example:

Work from home 16/09/21

SUFFIX

- Design Landing Page

 

We use the same dataset to report the status at the end of the day by adding: 

[Status] Task 

For example:

Work from home 16/09/21

SUFFIX

[Struck] Design Landing Page

 

The task statuses are divided into:

[Done] Finished

[In-Progress] Not finished

[Struck] Obstructed

If a task is obstructed ([Struck]), we can ask for help from other team members through discussion or mentions. Having three standardized statuses like this is easily understood by everyone. 

* Using percentages to show progress can lead to confusion due to inconsistent measurements.

 

Weekly Team Project and Process Update

Every week, we update the progress of each project the team is responsible for. This ensures mutual awareness within the team and presents new problem-solving approaches that can be adopted. Any issues and their solutions are recorded in the company's WIKI so they can be referenced in the future if similar problems arise.

For meetings, we use Google Meet and turn on cameras for discussions. Our current (2021) team meeting schedule is:

• Mondays for the coordination team.

• Tuesdays for the design team.

• Wednesdays for the development team.

• Thursdays for the marketing team.

We prefer team meetings over project-based meetings because we focus on information exchange. For example, the design team can learn about problems from other projects and devise solutions to prevent similar issues in the future.

 

Leave Requests

We use a web application called Happywork. Even while working from home, one can take leave, such as for getting vaccinated.

 

In summary, after nearly 2 years of working remotely at SUFFIX, we believe that we will primarily use online tools for communication and meetings going forward, reducing the need for traditional office attendance.

 

The main points of work are: what is being worked on, who is responsible once it's completed, and various communications, which can almost entirely be replaced by web or app-based tools.