How to successfully work from home: strategies for remote work

Remote work is top of mind right now for many employees, teams, families, and companies suddenly faced with a very new work situation. For many people, this is the first experience they’ve had working from home for an extended period while also trying to figure out how to establish a new normal.

On top of the standard challenges involved with switching to a fully-remote setup, many people are also dealing with a host of unexpected changes – kids who need to continue learning while schools are closed, pets jumping in to join meetings, partners and roommates talking from the next room. We’re also worrying about the safety and health of our friends and families. It’s a lot to deal with.

CircleCI has a fairly distributed workforce – about 40 percent of our company works remotely and several of our teams are completely remote – but we still work collaboratively every day, regardless of location. Over the years, many of our remote folks have come up with a host of useful tips on how to stay productive and happy as a fully remote employee.

These tips aren’t meant to solve all of the new and challenging issues associated with working from home, but we do think that the strategies that our more experienced colleagues have developed can inform us as we quickly adjust to this completely new reality.

Here are the best reads by our employees about working from home:

• How to communicate on a remote team: tools and templates for engineers - Communication is hard, communication on a remote team is harder. Fortunately, it can be as effective on a distributed team as it is on a colocated one, if not more so. This post delves into ways our team has learned to counter the two biggest challenges of remote communication: understanding tone and upholding a collaboration framework.

• Maslow’s hierarchy of remote worker needs - Remote work is an art and a science - it’s iterative, and not necessarily something that can be perfected overnight. That being said, there are certain areas of focus that can help you figure out what works best for you more easily, which is exactly what Customer Engineering Operations Analyst, Liene Verzemnieks breaks down in this post.

• How my distributed team communicates so no context is left behind - A number of our engineering teams at CircleCI are mostly or fully distributed. One such team, led by Engineering Team Lead, Marek Nowak, has consolidated their four main tips for keeping their team productive and successful: overcommunication, pairing/collaborating, Slack usage, and meetings. This post describes how they’ve learned to use these tips to thrive as a fully distributed team.

• Tools for effective remote pairing - The Plans and Pricing team at CircleCI is 100% remote and pairs almost 100% of the time. While this might seem like a challenge, the team has developed a number of strategies that make them consistently successful at pair programming. In this post, we break down some of our best tips for remote pairing that other engineering teams trying this for the first time might find particularly useful.

• What it means to be remote-first vs. remote-friendly - There are tools and strategies that teams can use to keep everyone feeling supported, connected, and empowered - even at a distance. In this post, Product Manager, Rose Jen, details how CircleCI works to create a culture that puts remote employees first.

• What to expect as a remote CircleCI employee - We often get asked in interviews what it’s like to work for a distributed team. In this post, we asked engineers from across the organization to describe their experience, and share some tips for working as a fully remote employee.