Organize a team of people with experience working remotely to communicate remote work best practices and answer questions for others. This team should have the authority to establish and document company best practices and identify directly responsible individuals (DRIs) to find solutions.
The company handbook serves as a single source of truth for the entire company. One of the major challenges when going remote is keeping everyone informed in an efficient manor. Use this handbook to systematically document process changes in a central place to minimize confusion.
Transparency is key when transition to remote collaboration. Team members expect frequent updates as leaders iterate on their communication plan.
Use the fewest tools possible and eliminate tools with redundant features. Using fewer tools means brings a unified approach to communication and eliminates confusion around tool choice.
The transition to remote is a process and takes time. Leaders need to embrace iteration, establish communication around what is and isn't working, and communicate messaging to all employees. Our success comes down to trust, communication, and company-wide support of shared goals.
Conference rooms are a limited resource. Only reserve a conference room when it's required and immediately release reserved conference rooms if they're no longer needed. Reserving a conference room and not using it may prevent collaboration when it's needed most.
Leverage Zoom's whiteboard. Zoom's whiteboard is just as good as a conference room whiteboard and allows you to make collaborative annotations with remote colleagues. You can save a copy of your annotated whiteboard by exporting it to a PDF or image. These annotations can be added to shared notes (such as a shared Google Doc) for everyone to quickly reference.
Always include remote colleagues in team meetings. Add a conference video link (i.e. Zoom) as a default to your meetings so all team members can participate, regardless of location. This has the added benefit of helping on-site colleagues who might be working from home.
When conducting a meeting with on-site and remote employees, encourage all on-site colleagues to join the video conference from their laptops with their camera on and microphone muted. This may seem strange at first, but having all participants on video helps remote employees see all meeting participants and feel like equal participants. This also helps remote colleagues keep track of who's speaking during the meeting.
Meeting organizers should include an agenda with the meeting invite. The agenda is often a shared Google Doc that all participants can edit during the discussion. Including the link in the meeting invite makes it easy to find when you need it.
The shared Google Doc should be used to document the discussion, decisions, and actions made during the meeting. This doc should be editable by all participants so participants can collaborate on notes and refer to a single source of truth. Zoom's whiteboard can be exported and added to the document along with any other relevant assets or resources.
This may feel like extra work at first, but this documentation minimizes miscommunication and establishes a source of truth for future reference. This also helps people who miss the meeting keep up to date on the discussion and outcomes.
Your team might consider sharing all meeting notes to a shared Google Drive folder for improved organization and reference.
Video conference calls should be recorded by default. This doesn't mean every meeting needs to be recorded (such as confidential or private discussions), but automatically recording conference calls helps promote a culture of documentation and transparency. These recordings can be shared with participants for their future reference. Links to meeting recordings should be included in the group's shared meeting notes.
You can configure Zoom to automatically record meetings so you don't have to remember to do it each time. Zoom can record meetings in the cloud and will send you a link to the recording after the meeting. This screenshot shows you how to configure your Zoom settings for automatic cloud recording.
A team meeting space is dedicated, repeating meeting for your team to hold casual discussions and impromptu meetings. This can take the form of a dedicated Zoom meeting that's always available for your team to jump in and out of at any time. This allows your team to quickly meet without going through the hassle of creating a meeting and inviting attendees.
How to create a dedicated meeting space in Zoom
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open your AbSci Google Calendar
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Add a new meeting and set it to repeat daily for an arbitrary date range
Note: Don't add a video conference option yet. We have to first close and save the event to get around Zoom's limit on recurring meetings.
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Check to make sure the event successfully saved to your calendar.
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Edit the meeting you created and click "Add video conferencing" and select "Zoom Meeting"
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You now have a meeting that you can share with your team. The Zoom URL will remain the same so team members can bookmark the URL for quick access
Use a headset with a microphone when talking in a noisy environment. It's a good idea to confirm your audio input source before before joining a conference call. See this Zoom guide on configuring your audio input.
Many of these ideas come from GitLab's Remote Playbook. Download the eBook or see a copy here to learn more about GitLab's approach to remote work.
GitLab also provides a guide to all-remote which highlights their approach to remote work.
GitLab's Handbook is a great reference for how their organization operates.