When Priyanka Sharma first started at Gitlab, she felt apprehensive about adjusting to life at fully-remote company. While it's becoming increasingly common for startups to build distributed, remote workforces, she worried that she would miss the social aspect of her past San Francisco Bay Area tech offices.
But after nearly a year, she found herself "forever changed" to preferring remote work.
Today, companies around the world are ordering their employees to work from home to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. Before the outbreak, Business Insider asked Sharma and two other employees who work remotely every day to share their best tips and tricks.
Their advice is more widely applicable now than ever:
Work-life balance
The line between work and life can get blurry once you no longer need to leave the house.
It can be really easy to default to working in your pajamas all the time, Sharma said. But getting dressed before signing on — even if she isn't planning on leaving the house — helps get her into a work mindset.
"Just that one thing has made my day so productive," she said.
Working remotely requires setting boundaries and respecting the ones that others set, too.
Sharma realized that it would be easy for her to work all the time, since she no longer needed to schedule her day around arriving at and leaving an office.
"You have to be conscious," Sharma said. "Especially if you like working, you could keep going forever."
She's deliberate about starting her workday around 8 or 8:30 and ending around 5:30 or 6. She holds herself to that schedule by going to the gym or making plans to hang out with friends.
While those options don't translate well to a time of social distancing, the idea still applies. Stick to self-imposed limits and respect your coworkers' preferences too.
For example, one of Sharma's coworkers regularly puts "Time for my daughter" on her calendar.
"It's blocked and I would never disrespect it," Sharma said.
Communication and transparency
When it comes to remote work, the more communication, the better, employees say.
"Transparency is really key," Wade Foster, CEO and cofounder of all-remote startup Zapier, told Business Insider. Since knowledge transfer can't happen over a chat in the company kitchen, Zapier keeps detailed repositories of data that anyone can access anytime.
"You want to be able to solve problems with the best information available," he said. "When you're asleep at night and someone needs to make a decision, they need to have access to that information."
Job van der Voort, who left GitLab in January 2019 to start Remote.com, echoed that idea: Everything should be written down so that workflows are as transparent as possible.
"It has to be searchable and easily accessible," van der Voort told Business Insider. "I like to call it asynchronous work."
That structure means that remote workers need to be comfortable letting their colleagues make independent decisions, he added.
"If you run this kind of company, you have to trust the people who work with you," van der Voort said. "If you work in an environment where you're not looking for consensus, you're able to work much faster."
With that said, when people are online at the same time, they should make an effort to respond quickly, Sharma says.
Since coworkers don't see each other in real life, they also have to find other ways to get to know each other on a personal level. Zapier managers hold one-on-one meetings with employees, which helps create personal connections, and the company encourages employees to get to know each other through fun, employee-wide surveys.
At GitLab, there's a Slack bot that pairs random employees up for "coffee chats," Sharma says.
"We have this culture of sharing ourselves: We're somehow able to do that even though we're remote," Sharma said. "I've had coffee chats where we talk about work or growing vegetables at high altitudes in Colorado. I get to hear about interests and activities that are really different."
Don't blame remote
The final tip is to have an open mind around distributed workforces.
Whether a company is remote or not, challenges are inevitable, said Foster. He cautions executives against assuming that being remote is at the root of any problems that occur.
"Founders often say, 'We missed a deadline — it must be because we're remote,'" Foster said. "When I talk to CEOs in offices, they comment, 'We missed a deadline' all the time, too. Missing deadlines is something everyone struggles with, whether you're in an office or not."
If something goes wrong in an office, people don't blame the office.
"If something goes wrong in a remote office, consider what's the real root of the issue instead of blaming 'remote' on why it didn't work out," Foster said. "If you go into it with an open mind, you're able to experiment and adjust."
