Remote Development Teams: Adapting To Working From Home

2020 has proven to be a trying time for developer teams, including ours, due to the pandemic. Quickly, our team became one of WFH Engineering
Teams worldwide caused by the lockdowns. We are now a fully remote dev team without plans of an immediate return to an office, face-to-face environment.

My entire TinyMCE editor team went through a major change. But so did other dev teams with no other alternative but to shift being WFH dev teams.

Here, I pieced together valuable information on how we dealt with it, the hurdles we encountered, and what didn’t and did work.

Evaluation of Lockdown

Among our priorities was to evaluate the status quo. We considered our present approaches and thought of ways on how to fit them into a WFH environment.

Our entire dev team needed an option where we can still conduct
and manage our routine discussions.  The most obvious way was adapting Slack calls. In contrast, onboarding new team members seemed not viable. This was another issue we had to address, nonetheless, considering we had plans of increasing our team right before the pandemic.

Our work at Tiny is niche-concentrated. It means no learning resources exist external to the company. We help onboard new staff through one-on-one discussions and pair programming about our stack and products. So, we considered a number of alternatives as well.

Conceptualization of Team Docs

We conceptualized team docs to deal with our processes to onboarding
new hires. We basically built it from scratch since we relied on hands-on
training before.

Our team acted fast on setting these up using Miro. We brainstormed, taking notes on post-its, and grouped and mapped them. Items under the priority matrix/category are split under various categories, according to immediate needs and how often these need referencing.

Important learnings along the way:

• Fewer topics get you more detail since we merged and dropped some topics
• Going evergreen works essentially when overhead maintenance is minimal
• Stick with top priorities. Explain the rest as needed
• When we write, we think, and this works even with WFH
• Building on your priorities leads to improvement

New people joined our team, and we realized our docs have gaps. So, I constantly work on these, update them as they come. It’s easier this way than multiple updates at once. It’s a long way to go, but our intimal efforts
on writing our docs showed a decent amount of development already.

Adjusting Processes

According to a recent survey, people use video meetings more now, and we can totally relate. WFH dev teams and businesses adjusted to relying
on live feeds and video chats. We use Slack calls for standups for about 15 minutes so the team can still chat or do quick discussions. If it requires a lengthy discussion, then we simply set it up to involve the whole team.

Adapting New Culture

One challenge in remote work settings is to build culture while strengthening the bond and trust of the team. All these, without in-person
interactions. So, we exercise virtual coworking around 4 pm for discussion and throw feedback, but somehow end up talking about fun topics as well.

I believe a team that works on building culture, maintaining closeness, getting along, and knowing one another is essential when WFH. In the
long run, the team becomes more productive when they are more understanding and emphatic of each other. It means a healthier environment where one cooperates and coordinates, where arguments and mix-ups are fewer.

I love our arranged afternoon calls. I think it closes the gap caused by the working remote. Now, with WFH, people rarely interrupt others. We have an outlet to socialize and converse casually while at work but not working.

We sometimes end up doing our favorite thing to do – WFH or office environment – playing Mario Kart on Friday afternoons. Playing this video
game during team building is superb.

Since October 2020, there has been no known transition in the Brisbane community. Tiny provides team lunches regularly as they take delight in seeing each other and having face-to-face time again.

Taking a Long, Hard Look into the Future

It’s been eight months and, I can say, we accomplished a lot. However, our work from home practices needs more improvement in certain areas.

Prior to COVID-19, we do sessions using whiteboards when brainstorming features and figuring out user interface and settings, including listing down of advantages and disadvantages, and so on. We apparently have no use for a whiteboard now, so we still have to figure out our remote approach. I’m looking into integrating Miro and Zoom/Slack calls and an online whiteboard app as a great approach.

Despite it all, WFH led to new opportunities for international onboarding. This isn’t a new thing for Tiny since we are headquartered across three continents at the moment, from Australia to Europe and the USA. Still,
we are eyeing talents located in regions we haven’t considered before.

Eventually, nothing compares to socializing and working with the team in person in the near future. Mostly in my team are fine with WFH, although these video calling or Slack calls cannot fully take the place of in-person interaction and brainstorming. The entire team and organization hope
to find the perfect balance of meetings in person and WFH in the future.

All in all? We found ways and made them work.

To summarize, we eased into the challenge of shifting to WFH and make things work to our advantage at Tiny. The statistics tell you this is
good, with 75% of individuals saying the same level of productivity or better were achieved before WFH. 77% said they are happier with WFH settings. It’s a clear message that remote work might stay awhile.

I think what significantly helped us through during the transition was we set ourselves to succeed by investing effort and time with our team docs as well as adapting new and old processes consciously.

While we consider onboarding new staff and maintaining the team culture are our principal hurdles, we found temporary substitutes to how things were done before. We haven’t figured out everything yet, but we will definitely work at getting better along the way at WFH.

Do you have a WFH team as well? We would be glad to know how your remote dev team adapted!