Remote work could be perfect for individual contributors, but it's still full of challenges for people who work on teams.
There's been a lot of buzz lately about remote work. I have been working remotely since 2012; the challenges of remote work are not new to me. I work with 30+ people, and our clients are in different timezones. Our team includes full-stack developers, designers, product leads, and other support staff.
First Challenge: Schedule of work hours or team availability.
Back in 2012, each member of our team started working from our respective homes. We started with seven team members; it's a small team. Initially, people are productive while we work as individual contributors. However, efficiency and productivity dropped very low when we started to work on the same project because everyone has the flexibility to choose when they want to work as long as they complete the required hours per week. We partially solved this by setting standard work hours that everyone in the team will follow.
Second Challenge: Quality of work is affected by many factors.
Working alone remotely is initially fun, but eventually, employees feel lonely. Keeping focus at work is also hard due to distractions, like games, social media, house-related errands, etc. Monitoring employees' honesty on work hours and work done is also a challenge.
Since our team mostly live in the same town, we decided to work in the same place. We converted my whole dorm into an office, removed the walls, joint the rooms, and made it look like a real office. Centralizing our distributed team to work in the same place doubled or tripled our team's efficiency and productivity. You can imagine how it made it easier to do daily standups, do design planning, pair programming, code reviews, etc. Employees became happier, and the bond between got stronger; we also eat meals together, we go on retreats, we play games together, our employee retention rate is 90% since we started. Over the years of working remotely, we have also built a tool that we use internally to manage and monitor employees and projects.
Now with the Corona Virus, our team is back temporarily in working from home, and most of us can't wait to start working together in the office again.