I’d like to share some of my ideas and practices about telecommuting in response to the late rework notifications in recent days.

A working day

Get up, take a bus to the company, with ali email unread mail processing, open the finches, finished the day’s work plan and lesson, and then disposed of in accordance with the priority of the work plan, through Aone management task schedule, complete code of CR and deployment, not process nailing messages regularly, through arirang attends the offline meeting, online meeting or to the conference room It’s a day of my workday.

As we need to communicate and communicate with students in multiple parks and cities, in fact, except for the students in our team, we always work remotely. But will telecommuting really create new problems?

The answer is yes. From the perspective of team and collaboration, how to manage the team in this state, how to track the progress of the project and how to ensure the timeliness and accuracy of communication are all topics that cannot be avoided. From the perspective of individuals, it is also worth discussing how to improve the efficiency of self-control, how to manage their own time, and how to efficiently use tools to complete collaboration. Have a chat from these respects respectively below.

communication

First of all, be clear that the purpose of communication is to ensure the alignment of messages, so as to avoid the situation where everyone is running at the same pace but at different ends. According to different communication scope, there are two types of communication: intra-team communication and cross-team/cross-region communication.

Communication within the team

Communication within the team, most of the time at the station before and after a voice can be solved, it is really difficult to take more than two steps will soon be clear. There is usually some synchronization of team affairs, which may include what is being done, how far the project is progressing, a problem is being met, a technical design is being completed and everyone is expected to review it, etc. The synchronization of this part of the information is usually relatively simple and fast, and remote working does not affect too much.

Communicate across teams/geographies

For a team like ours that is split horizontally and not organized as a project team, it is often necessary to communicate with other horizontal roles (operations, PD, designer, back end, testing, etc.). Due to different work contexts, different areas of responsibility and professional levels, and different degrees of familiarity with cooperation, there will be different degrees of communication problems, and it is usually necessary to organize special meetings to confirm the final conclusion and reach agreement. However, as a matter often involves a lot of people, the part and degree of participation of each person are different, resulting in a low effective participation time of each person in the meeting. As telecommuting amplifies, meeting efficiency becomes even more important.

Here are a few suggestions from my past experience for meeting organizers that apply to most meeting scenarios:

  • Minimize the number of participants and minimize large meetings and long meetings
  • Send invitations to all participants in advance of the meeting, including time, place, agenda and agenda
  • Get back to the main points in the meeting to avoid getting bogged down in detail and losing sight of the main issues
  • After the meeting, summarize the meeting minutes in time, send to all participants, keep written records

For participants, it is important to check the invitation regularly and know the agenda in advance so as to avoid being late or unprepared for the meeting and affecting the efficiency of the whole meeting. Of course, these suggestions are not easy to implement in practice, and it may be difficult to ask others to follow them when you are not the organizer, but at least when we organize our own meetings, we try to stick to them, and try to make the people around us change, isn’t it also good

Team management

Team management is inseparable from target management. Whether OKR or KPI is used, team members can identify with the company’s, team’s and individual’s goals. Only in this way can we unite and have stronger motivation to achieve the goals. Goals need to be aligned multiple times to ensure they are understood in the same way, whether you work remotely or not. In the work, I will cooperate with the students of ecological development, because the work station is far away, which is actually equivalent to telecommuting on weekdays. Have a more intuitive feeling, telecommuting requirements of delivery time and quality are more fear of heart, need more clear break up and track the target, need target responsibility clear and dismantling the task of planning the task completion time, and continue to track, eliminate the possible risks in the process of, make the process more transparent, finally realizes the demand delivery on time as requests.

The project management

Team management tends to people management, project management tends to things management. For a project, there are many people involved, so it is necessary to ensure the smooth flow of information, timely synchronize the progress of all parties and risks in the process, so as to make the progress of the project smoother. This requires good mechanisms to reduce the time wasted in bickering. For example, the requirement change process specification needs to be evaluated to clarify the reasons and benefits of the requirement change, as well as whether the design, development and testing of the downstream links are affected. After the final confirmation of all parties, they can join the demand pool.

For relatively large projects, the project leader can establish the knowledge base of the project, output the “big picture” of the project, mark the stakeholders clearly, precipitate requirements documents, design drafts, technical sub-documents and so on. Update the results of each meeting or discussion in the project to the corresponding document so that changes can be tracked. In last year’s Double 11 collaboration, this knowledge base saved a lot of time spent in the alignment of various details and made the process more transparent.

Time management

One of the things that can happen when you suddenly switch to telecommuting is burnout, because home is usually a place where you can rest and not be as focused as you are at your desk. I can draw lessons from OKR’s ideas, make weekly and daily plans, clearly describe the things to be done and the deadline, and strictly follow the plan. With clear milestones, I can effectively reduce the sense of tiredness. It’s also a good idea to get up in the morning and shower and dress as usual.

Another benefit of working from home is that the environment is significantly less noisy and easier to concentrate on. The more focused you are, the more productive you will be. It’s hard to stay focused for long periods of time. Try to find the best hours for your energy and make the most of them. Try the Pomodoro technique, which can be counterproductive for jobs that require long periods of focused thinking because each tomato clock is short. My practice is to continue to break a task down into small enough granularity that it is more effective to focus on one thing per tomato hour than to keep one big thing in mind. Of course, the core goal is to increase productivity through focus, and it doesn’t matter what method of work you use if you can stay focused on a task at all times.

Collaboration tools

As a development team, we need all kinds of tools to improve the efficiency of collaboration. If we can let machines do it for us, we should not let people in. In fact, because of the frequent need to communicate and collaborate across geographies, Alibaba has all the tools needed for telecommuting. If you do not have such conditions, you can try excellent open tools at home and abroad, refer to the last few articles shared by the leaders, choose the best for your team, is the best.

Here are the ones I use most often:

  • Arirang: Integrates Intranet access, telephone/video conferencing, and multi-screen communication. It is the basis of telecommuting
  • Nailing: Used as a workbench for daily work.
    • Have real-time communication capability, support telephone/video conference
    • Important channels for messages to reach, including company announcements, tasks assigned to you, workflow to be approved, schedules, and emails
  • Language: integrated document, table, design slice, text drawing and other capabilities, as a team and individual knowledge base
  • Aone: one-stop R&D collaboration platform, providing r&d lifecycle management services, covering project management, code CR, code deployment and release, code testing and performance measurement and other links

summary

Ultimately, I think the most important thing about telecommuting is transparency. Enhance the awareness of transparency in all aspects of work, provide a transparent environment and working atmosphere as far as possible, enhance the sense of participation, identity and trust of each student in the team or project team, and cultivate their self-drive.

Hope to give you see the officer to bring some inspiration, more deficiencies, welcome everyone to leave a message exchange.

The focus at the moment is on the Novel Coronavirus, and there are many ways to look at the prevention and control of the virus and the relevant data. In dealing with the epidemic, the test is not only our medical capacity, but also the coordination capacity of our society as a whole. Only by containing the momentum of infection can we truly defeat the virus. The opening year of the air seems not so good, but I always believe that our country and our compatriots, bless Wuhan, Thanksgiving to all the frontline medical staff, everything will be better, will run towards spring.

Good article recommendation:

  • PingCAP 5 years practice of telecommuting: zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/104184804
  • Icodesign.me /posts/remot…
  • After consider telecommuting – mactalk:mp.weixin.qq.com/s/WBlVHS6ip…