How to motivate a remote team

Remote work is now the norm. This is one thing that the COVID has pushed us to and has proven that it works. Companies that never did remote work (including us at Kaz) are now fully functional and thriving with remote work. And remote work is here to stay as a work model - it’s very likely that every company in the world (including us) would keep some form of remote work in their process. Everything has a downside - and for remote work it’s the lack of the rest the team near you that starts having an effect. Over longer period of time motivation for work becomes a big stumbling block. And for manager and team leads it’s not an easy problem to solve. But we’ve found that it’s not an impossible problem either.

“77% of remote employees say they’re more productive when working from home”

— Survey by CoSo Cloud

You don't have to be next to someone's desk in order to feel the energy of a team that can work together and accomplish goals. As a manager, you can motivate and inspire your remote team just as well as you would if they were all sitting in your office.

Here are our top tips for motivating your team remotely.

1. Set clear expectations for your team

We are used to taking visual ques from all our interactions, these ques form much of our understanding in any conversation. A remote team misses a lot of these visual ques in an interaction over a zoom call or worse over an audio only call. So it's vitally important that common understanding of expectations is reached. We tell all our customers to set aside a slot at the end of every meeting to just go over the main points of the meeting and check that the both sides agree on what the expectations are.

2. Be transparent about what is happening

When your remote team feels out of the loop, they are less likely to want to engage. People are motivated by being informed about what is going on around them, so tell them! If they miss something, feel free to say "let me go over that thing" or "you should hear about a new development that is happening". This is especially true for software teams, as software development is typically a very collaborative effort and if the remote team feels that they are left out of decisions, changes in requirements etc. it will create a loss of motivation and just make the overall process of software development difficult.

3. Communicate regularly

The remote work experience will be a lot better if there are regular communication channels between the remote team and the office. Some ways to keep them in the loop is by having weekly meetings that are open to all members of the remote team, sending out emails with important updates on new features or scheduled changes, etc. Asking them regularly how they are doing, where they are on particular tasks or deliveries.

There are many other ways you can motivate your remote team. Some of them are time off or bonuses, but at the end it is about working with people who enjoy what they do - And if they are happy to work for you, you will get an effort that goes beyond the job requirements.

For small companies this might seem like a lot of overhead, but it is vitally important for the longer term.

“2020 has seen a 9% increase in Google search interest related to “team-building””

— www.thinkwithgoogle.com

A full year of WFH

Last Friday marked a full year of WFH for Kaz Software. On March 19, 2020 we turned from a zero work from home company to a 100% one.

The WFH move

We were one of the first few companies to move to WFH because of the pandemic. There were a lot of unknowns, both about operations and about the business. There were very valid concerns of performance, our ability to work from home without any experience in managing software projects from home. We mitigated the risks by careful planning, our blog post from that day outlines some of the strategies we took: Adapting to COVID reality and posts from the time we started thinking about the challenges and how to manage the risks are also very interesting to read: 10 Tips for effective work from home, Remote work - what can go wrong? The title itself shows what was going on in our head :)

First two months of WFH

To our great relief we found that the transition from 0% WFH to 100% WFH was almost completely frictionless. Our risk mitigation strategies proved to be very effective. We had almost no hiccups and was hit the ground running from the first day. That is not say that we didn’t have any problem at all, over the first few weeks we started coming across some wrinkles that we ironed out with our planning. We wrote about our experience in the two month mark: WFH - our experience so far We soon learnt that the work environment setup at home needed to be right for better WFH and we resolved that constantly providing tech and facilities support from the office to individual developers at their home. This included supplying them with the chairs, monitors, etc. resolving technical issues on their home computers, if needed supplying them with their work computers and monitors, etc. We also realized that the office cannot be fully closed as access was required on emergency situations - so we had staff (properly isolated) living at or near the office building so that any resource can come over to the office when needed.

One year down

Now we are on our full year of WFH. And we can say with certainty that the WFH model has worked very well for us. We have absolutely no delays or work lapses that was directly because of WFH. We believe we have improved our overall performance by saving time on travel. We do however feel that for a collaborative work of software development a purely WFH model is not right, there is huge value in face to face interactions in software. Our current state is a mixed mode of WFH and work at office. We have made it optional for resources to work at the office if they are vaccinated or if they have taken enough precaution and ensure that they follow the health guidelines. This mixed model of WFH and work at office is proving to be quite successful. As the situation improves with wider vaccination we will see how much of this model we can retain permanently - so I’ll be back with another post about what we are doing!

Bye for now, stay safe!

Software beyond the pandemic: What happens to 5G?

Would you believe that there was/is even a conspiracy theory that 5G caused coronavirus! The theory goes that the radiation from 5G towers triggered the virus. Very imaginative! But my post today is not about a crazy theory, it’s about how the global pandemic affects the pace of 5G technology adoption.

5G was definitely the flavor of the month before the virus took center stage. Every tech conversation around connectivity led to 5G and how life as we know it will change when 5G becomes widspread. 5G, or fifth-generation connectivity, will provide amazing fast internet, 100 times faster than 4G with better network reliability. Enhanced connectivity will bring new way of doing things, new technology, like self driving cars, drone delivery, AR/VR/XR experience like movies and sports events or games.

5G roll-out delays

5G network roll-out across the U.S. will definitely be delayed significantly because of the global pandemic. Network operators that buy 5G gear will changing their business plans based on demand and the supply chain of telecom equipment, mainly from China will be affected. Vendors such as Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia will see much lower sales than were projected just months ago.

For 5G connectivity to take off the whole equipment and network ecosystem needs to working in synch. And 5G hardware — phones, chips, etc. — has to start in full pre-pandemic levels. With the supply chain severely disrupted, hardware production has been affected and with most of the world preoccupied with the immediate worry of the virus the consumer interest has fallen too. All of these aggregate to the an overall delay in the technology adoption.

The use of 5G in factories, storage, distribution and ports is one of the big driving force for it’s adoption in the business space. This delay is a big blow for businesses that were planning for improvements via upgrades to a company’s wireless network.

Only a temporary setback

Ultimately, there will be pent up demand for 5G among companies that want an edge. Businesses will be looking to be more productive and gain ground by modernizing their IT systems, collecting more data than ever and automating as much as possible. That includes lights-out manufacturing, in which factories keep humming with no human presence, thanks to 5G-connected hardware and software.

Also the virus has forced us to lockdown and work from home. Which is showing to everyone that this new way of working and living is possible. Remote work could very well become the norm with office spaces being exceptional. With this way of life the need high-speed connectivity will become essential infrastructure need for business and communities to operate. The pandemic has shown that the current network infrastructure is not enough. Large scale remote work has strained household networks and points to the fact that the network technology needs to upgrade to fit with this new way of doing things. Which leads to 5G. So it is only a temporary setback for sure.

So we wait for this fabled technology and dream about those real time VR games that we will play one day!

Can a software company be 100% WFH?

The global pandemic has pushed us all to working from home (WFH). And overall across all industries WFH is proving to be a viable way of working. For the software world WFH was very common anyway, but now will complete WFH for months is showing to many that WFH works and this could be the new way of working with or without a global pandemic.

This has led many to ask:

Do we need to work at an office space at all?

We see a reflection of this thinking in big software companies already. Facebook and Shopify has already put out clear strategies for this change mindset about office space. A recent tweet from Tobi Lutke CEO of Shopify puts this succinctly:

As of today, Shopify is a digital by default company. We will keep our offices closed until 2021 so that we can rework them for this new reality. And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over.

— Tobi Lutke 🌳🌲🛒🕹 (@tobi) May 21, 2020

Mark Zuckerberg did a longer version of the same thinking in Facebook post (of course)…

Our experience - WFH is great

At Kaz Software our experience has been extremely good with the 100% WFH mode. We posted recently about what we’ve learnt after two months of full WFH. Going by where we are we know that 100% WFH at all times is something that we can sustain very well. The time savings merely on the journey times on Dhaka’s infamous traffic itself justifies the WFH move.

But…

However, we also feel strongly about the need to be together as a team, working side by side. There is something in nature of work, nature of us being human that makes face to face interactions inherently better for some type of tasks. Here are some tasks we know we’ll have to revert to working together at the office.

Brainstorming software features

Brainstorming just doesn’t work the way it should in a virtual environment. There is something in the energy and enthusiasm in face to face discussion, something in the hand gestures of an excited colleague or heated argument about what is a good software and what is not, that is completely missing in the video calls. You just cannot do great brainstorming session without bring the team together.

Software UX/UI design phase

When you are designing UX as a team the constant to and fro between the designer and product manager or the developer is what drives the design forward. You take that out, move that into regulated video calls you will lose the creative spurts that happen in those face to face interactions. We would never want to take that out from our work, and this would be another phase of work we would always keep as a time to get together at the office.

Technical planning and architecture

Technical architecture and planning is something that can be done fairly well on the WFH mode. In fact some part of, it where a single architect is designing the overall blueprint, are best done alone and WFH works just fine for that. But when it comes to discussing the pros and cons of an architecture, debate out technology choices video conference calls fail miserably.

QA cycle

On intense QA and testing cycles of a project the constant need of the SQA team members to talk with developers, show them in action what is wrong, articulate their emotions of frustrations when a bug reappears or happiness when a bug has been fixed is something that can’t be done remotely. An intense QA cycle is very much like sports, where the developers are competing to create a bug free product or fix the bugs fast and the SQA team is working to find the bugs. The pace, the excitement, the mechanics of such a phase of the software development cycle just falls flat on remote teamwork.

So WFH is great. It’s here to stay. At Kaz we are prepared and committed to work from home as long as it takes. But we are also thinking of changing how we would work beyond the pandemic. WFH will be part our practice for sure, but we would also ensure that we work from office too. If you are in business of creating great software, as we are, there is no way but to meet and work side by side sometimes.

Stay safe!

Work from home: Our experience so far

We’re hitting the two months’ mark for working from home (WFH). It’s been, overall, an excellent experience for us. We’ve turned, overnight, from a fully working from office to a working from home company. And thanks to careful planning and great execution by our systems and facilities teams we did not miss a beat in that transition. We wrote about the steps we took to move to home in this blog, today’s post is a summary of what our experience and learning has been over the two months that we’ve been doing it.

WFH is great

Working from home worked very well for us. We have not lost a bit of our usual efficiency, in fact sometimes we feel we have gained more with more focused work and collaboration. The time we save everyday by not travelling to work through Dhaka’s horrendous traffic is by itself a great win. Add to that the convenience of working in familiar environment and ability spend more time with family - WFH is a winner. So much of a winner that we think WFH will stay beyond this pandemic (yes there will be a time when will have no coronavirus!), we are planning to make WFH part of our regular working procedure when things get back to normal one day and we get to go back to the office again.

Work environment is important (even at home)

This was expected. As we went through the motions of WFH we realized over and over that having the right work environment is important even when you working from home. So having a table dedicated to work (rather than using the dining table), in a space where you are not disturbed is very important. Over the first week this realization meant many of us adjusted our work computer setup at home. Some even moved their furniture around, moved to a different room or opened up an unused space at home to setup a relatively noise free working environment.

The chair needs to be just right

The other big realization is that the chair that we sit on needs to be just right. Many our us had chairs that was OK to sit and play game for a few hours at home but when you are spending longer hours of work that chair becomes extremely important. We arranged to send emergency support missions to provide the work chair from the office to the home of some.

System support is essential

Our technical support team has been playing a very important role during this WFH period. As we went through the weeks of WFH new issues came up on home PC, work environment, access to resources at office etc. that needed direct support from our technical support team. Our systems guys have been busy providing Kaz developers spread throughout the city with technical help over phone and online, even risking a trip to the house to support on site with cables, monitors, internet troubleshooting, VPN setups, hard disc installations, etc. They also worked with our facilities team to switch on developer machines, coordinate access to resources available at the office.

Office needs to be accessible

However well you plan things in a company like ours where there are multiple projects with multiple teams working on separate deadlines and priorities the need for access to the office is essential. We expected this and had on site support at the office made possible by the fact that some office staff stayed next to the office space. Hence it was possible to provide access to any resource at the office on a very short notice. This is one of the key factors for successful full on remote operation.

So our fight against cornovirus continues by staying at home, maintaining social distancing and by working remote only. We plan to do this until all signs of the virus is gone - we pray and hope that it will soon.

Software beyond the pandemic: The Rise of the Drones

With the global pandemic wreaking havoc worldwide, business leaders are scrambling to deal with a wide variety of problems, from slumping sales and stalling supply chains to keeping employees healthy. One of the biggest issues that all business are facing is the changing reality of physical deliveries. This used to be a well established model with your own delivery outfit or outsourced to a delivery platform. The trend was (it’s crazy that I’m using past tense on such a recent thing) crowd-sourced delivery models with concepts like Uber eats coming center stage. The virus has completely disrupted this trending disrupt. And as every business is scrambling to find out new ways of doing deliveries the drones are coming out from amazon marketing stints, concept papers and university lab projects to real viable options.

Word’s first drone delivery service

They are billing it as the “world’s first”, a drone delivery service to carry medicine and food to people forced to self-isolate because of the COVID 19. An Irish startup Manna Aero has begun a drone delivery service in Moneygall, Ireland. They have received permission, obviously rushed because of the virus from Irish Aviation Authority to run drone runs. Their drones are delivering medicine to vulnerable people locked in their homes.

“Using custom-developed aerospace grade drones, we deliver directly from restaurants and centralised kitchens to consumer’s homes. We fly at an altitude of 80 metres and a speed of over 80kph - delivering within a 2km radius in less than 3 minutes.​ ”

— Manna Aero

Drones in Africa

A US medical drone company has been delivering blood and medicine to rural hospitals in Africa for the past few years. But now with the virus and the related lock down this technology and experience is coming in very handy. There are already accelerated plans of adopting this technology in California.

Keller Rinaudo wants everyone on earth to have access to basic health care, no matter how hard it is to reach them. With his start-up Zipline, he has created...

The drones can deliver up to 85 km away, and arrive within 30 minutes. Zipline changed the cargo attachment on it’s drones and has been delivering PPE, COVID 19 test samples in Ghana, here’s a story CNN Business about what they are doing.

The funny thing is Zipline starte in California but has no commercial operation in the United States. Coronavirus is changing this dynamics and Zipline is planning to join two other companies - Matternet and Flytex - for an initiative to deploy drones to deliver PPE or medical supplies in three North Carolina cities.

UPS and Matternet are beginning regular drone service at WakeMed hospital in Raleigh, NC. The daily flights will deliver medical samples to the hospital's ma...

Matternet was miles ahead on drone technology and had partnered with UPS for a viable drone delivery platform. The pandemic has only accelerated their go live. Only a few days ago it achieve a milestone in getting a full OK from Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) in US. Which would the gold standard in ushering in the drones to our world. And there is no question coronavirus is playing a part in fast forwarding process. An autonomous drone company needs two types of authorizations:

1. Permission to fly over people

2. Permission to fly beyond the visual line of sight of an operator.

Matternet has both these permissions in Switzerland but only #1 in US. To deliver further, the company needs the second one, which is what they are striving to achieve with FAA. Given the national emergency, FAA could grant the authorizations in the name of public interest - moving the needle forward for all other drone companies in US. And that would be the beginning of the age of drones.

The post pandemic world will have drones as the major delivery vehicles. Your next burger could be coming to you from the air! Here’s a Dilbert strip to kill time before it arrives.

Add video conference to your app now

Coronavirus has changed us and changing us. One of the biggest changes to our lives is the move towards reliance on video calls. We are now heavily dependent on video conferencing abilities to get our work done, communicate with friends and family and even strangers. The impact on business software is very significant, with any software platform having the video call capability getting a huge business advantage. This business need and the actual work related need is pushing pretty much every software platform to consider adding or improving video call support on their application.

A recent survey done by Trustradius on more than two thousand businesses have shown that even in the economic uncertainties of the pandemic most businesses are considering additional spend on video conferencing solutions.

Source: https://www.trustradius.com/vendor-blog/covid-19-tech-spending-data

Another very interesting trend that is coming out of studies like that is the interest in making remote work permanent even beyond the pandemic. The spend on security software (41%) nearly tripled in the last three weeks of April 2020 this is by itself an indicator of a longer term strategy that companies are taking for remote work. Remote work is being embraced as the norm in the post pandemic world.

Nearly 90% of increased spenders expect to still be using, and paying for, these tools two years from now. 

At Kaz we’ve been working on video conferencing integrations and the WebRTC stack for years. We’ve built one largest platforms for video call based interpretation for hospitals and lawyers in the US. We have worked with the Jitsi stack, customizing it and improving it as the WebRTC itself has been changing. We have also been working extensively on 3rd party APIs such as Twilio to provide video conferencing solutions to our clients.

Here are some of our quick and easy strategies for integrating video conferencing to your application:

Cloud APIs for full integration

There are several very robust cloud solutions that takes away all the pains of setting up video conferencing servers and management by hosting them and giving developers APIs to work with. The beauty of such APIs are that they can be deeply integrated with your application with hooks to features that already exist in your platform. And the development investment of such integration is still very minimal - we are usually talking of days and weeks rather than months and years that a custom video conferencing solution would involve.

Twilio is pretty much the leader in this space, with video as one of their many offerings. Their full coverage on everything to do with online communications from PSTN lines, telephony, VoIP, text, etc. means that you can bring in any feature you can think of for remote conferencing/call/webinar type features. An interesting application we built using Twilio involves letting users call using their cell, punching in a pin code to get access to an online service which is managed by an existing web platform. Essentially opening up the existing service to a very large user base.

Other players in this space include Eyeson, Vonage, Sinch etc. who are all promising to make video call integration super fast. In most cases they are essentially very simple and you could be up and running in a matter of days with full feature video on your app.

Code snippet for Video call app hooks

The less integrated but still a super easy way of bringing in the option of having video calls in your apps is to embed a little script in your platform or your website to have users connect to existing popular video apps such as Skype, Zoom, etc. This is where you are talking about minutes to do the integration rather than days! And in most cases you don’t even need a software developers. Just follow some instructions of where to put the script in and wham you have video calls. Here are some of the popular ones:

Skype

Skype has huge adoption and it’s a good option to add. The way you do it is add a Skype share button. You can get the code and instructions from here: Get Skype Share Button. If you are running a Wordpress site then they have neat plugin to do it: WP plugin for Skype Share.

Zoom

Coronavirus has certainly made Zoom a star in the video call world. Zoom has an API for full integration, but there are 3rd party zoom integration options such as this wordpress plugin

Webex

Webex has a widget that involves just setting up the account and then plugging in the appropriate script to your site to enable webex calls.

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Software beyond the pandemic: VR Workers

COVID 19 is changing us. And I’m sure it is changing us permanently. I believe that we will never be able to think and act like pre-pandemic again. There will be a permanent change in our mindset which will hugely impact how we consume technology among every other thing. The taste of doing things remotely weather it is to do your groceries or just plain old video conferences will stay, people will get used to the convenience and continue to use them. I wrote recently about the online explorers about how other forms of consumption such as concerts, events, even travel is and will move towards online deliveries. Today I’m going to rant as to why VR and AR magic we’ve be hearing about so much isn’t where it is supposed to be. These technologies will see a major push because of the virus and we should see major innovation at last beyond the obvious first person shooters in VR and yet another demo AR app that displays information in context.

Virtual Meeting Places and the Virtual You

The obvious niche to fill up first is virtual meeting that are immersive. We could be meeting everyone who is missing (afraid to get out of the house because a crazy virus is ravaging the planet? Apocalypse can happen you know :) ) through AR where the person magically appears before us in the empty seat like Star trek. We could be visiting locations in the virtual space and meeting others with VR glasses (or even without them!). Making strides already in this space are apps like AltspaceVR that almost died in 2017 but thanks to M$ we still have them going strong. And with the coronavirus scare they’ve been seeing a surge in interest.

AltSpace is compatible with many VR platform including Vive, Oculus and Gear VR and it also works in 2D mode in Windows and with the Windows Mixed Reality headsets. The Android app has been discontinued and iOS was never supported, so M$ has to come out of it’s partisanship and make it deliver wider.

There is similar renewed interest in other meeting technologies. Among them MeetingVR is creating a lot of buzz because of the enterprise focus. It can be the new standard for meetings and collaboration for work for the post Pandemic world.

Engage is another corporate focused VR space platform that is moving fast from this push for effective online meetings. It currently supports most PC based VR devices and a selection of mobile standalone devices. PCs without VR equipment are also covered with the loss of immersion of course.

And the fact that life like avatars are just a few more iterations away means that VR meetings with almost real feel are just round the corner. Leading in this space is who else but the company who has all our pictures and data tagged and flagged - Facebook, making VR avatars look and move exactly like you

Interesting developments also moving fast because of the virus are bridging and integration technologies that would allow developers and user mix and match services to create better experiences and applications. A recent one making headlines is Spaces that bridges VR with Skype, zoom and Hangouts.

This is just the beginning. And it’s about time too. VR and AR has to pay up. And the virtual you is here to stay.

Software beyond the pandemic: The Rise of the Online Explorers

This infernal COVID 19 pandemic isn’t going away so easy - we just have accept this fact and move forward. Moving forward means - adapting. We are all adapting. Most companies in the world has adapted to the concept of work from home. It felt like a very difficult task, specially for the industries that were not IT driven, but as with any new concept - once the wrinkles has been ironed out it’s working out fine. In every industry, in every country in the world people are coming up with innovative solutions of adapting their work and life around the facts of social distancing and lock down. Software world is probably the most prepared for that adaptation, we after all are the facilitators for most of the adaptation with technologies like online conferencing, project management, file sharing, come to think of it, online (and offline) everything! But beyond the facilitation and the continuation of the old paradigms we also have to start thinking of how the world will change, how the new world beyond the pandemic (yes there will end to this someday, there has always been one, even black death) will change it’s behavior for consumption, software usage and living it’s life.

We don’t know. We can only predict. But what we know for sure is that there will be many permanent change to how we lead our lives. And as the leaders of change, us software people have to come up with new ways of doing things.

Online concerts and events

Here’s one change that has already started: online experiences for what used to be face to face events. With the lock down in place events like stand up comedy, football games or concerts can’t take place anymore. The alternative is to have them online of course. And we see that happening in many platforms. A great starter event for this new way of doing things came when the greats like Lady Gaga, Stevie Wonder, Shahrukh Khan, and many others came together to support the WHO with an online streamed show recently that raised almost $128 million for the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund, as well as local charities that are fighting the coronavirus.  

This overall movement towards online events is a natural progression from where we where before the pandemic. The virus only pushed us more and accelerated us in this direction. What is more interesting is:

“Will this become the new normal beyond the pandemic?”

I would argue yes. The pandemic will change our mindset about online entertainment, it is giving us a taste of the ease of online live streamed events and we like what we taste. On top of this our habit in consuming such events over prolonged time of the social distancing along with residual fear that will likely to remain for a while after the dust has settled will cement the success of these online experiences.

In line with that thinking online venues (the alternate of concert houses and stadiums) are coming up everywhere. Facebook pages like the billboard are picking up huge views. Pickathon launched the series "A Concert A Day" on April 8, which raises money for the MusiCares COVID-19 Relief Fund. Every day through June 7, at 1 pm PST and 4 pm EST, a new performance will be premiered or livestreamed via the Recording Academy's Facebook page, Amazon Music's Twitch channel, and Pickathon's YouTube channel. Featured artists include Margo Price, Mac DeMarco, Tyler Childers, and Foxygen. This is just the beginning.

Beyond online concerts

The interesting trend is that the online experience is going far beyond the old concerts and event streaming that we were used to in the good old days of pre-pandemic world (aka ancient times of 2019). Airbnb for example has focused on hosting “online experiences” as an alternative to their hosting your house for strangers mode. In their words:

These online experiences are as varied as their hosts are imaginative. You can cook with a family from Morocco or go out with someone and check out how the dogs are doing in the post nuclear accident Chernobyl.

This is the face of the new online exploration. This is just the beginning. There is so much more that can happen in this space that is unexplored. Take trips to interesting places for example. The obvious space for that is arm chair based world travelers who asks local experts to visit places they want to see, look at things they want to look. This already existed with 3D videos (and VR apps) like visiting Angkor Wat virtually or Vineyards but the post pandemic world will likely see an explosion of interest for such online explorations.

VR and AR technologies will need to catch up with human expectation for such online experiences. So that is the new horizon for hardware improvements for sure. Again it was going that way anyway, but the pandemic just pushed it harder and the demand for this will be much more stronger than the lukewarm early adopter space it was hovering around in.

Looking forward to that brave new world of online explorations. Life will be interesting. One little pesky virus will not put the spirit of human exploration down for sure. We are working on it but stay safe for now though :)

10 Tips for effective work from home

We started work from home from last Thursday (19th March 2020). An adaptation with the new reality of the COVID 19 pandemic that wreaking havoc. This is a new mode for us, we’ve never had work from home option since we strongly believe that software projects need a lot of collaboration that is always best when the team sits together. So the transition was difficult to imagine, we made all kinds of plans to ensure that we had an easy transition And the result is really amazing. We moved to being a fully on site, face to face interaction organization to a fully remote working from home and through digital interfaces organization overnight without a single issue. We had our facilities and IT teams on standby for any emergencies, and the only big emergency they had to handle was shipping a beloved chair that developer wanted at home! So this is wonderful news for this #stayathome world.

After spending a few days in this work from home mode, I’ve been collecting suggestions and advice from everyone. There are some great articles online too about staying productive while working from home. I’ve summarized here the top 10 tips from our experience. Hope this helps someone out there…

1. Setup the IT stuff first

Whatever profession you are in you are probably using your computer to access your work and collaborate with your co-workers. And if you are like us a bunch of software developers then that computer is probably the most important thing in your work life. So getting the computer and related IT things sorted is the first priority to be an effective remote worker.

Not having any computer or internet connection is enough here. You absolutely MUST have the correct one. Make sure your computer has the right hardware to compile your code fast enough or generate those cool 3D models, etc. The next thing on the list is the fast internet connection and checking that that work with our office access points.

2. Set a fixed space at your home for work

Productivity to a large extent is also a mindset thing. When you go to work at an office building your mind sets a switch that changes your mind to a work mode. This does not happen so easily when you are working from home. So setting up a specific space at home as your work place helps to tell your mind that you are now at work. Sounds weird, I know, but it works like magic.

This doesn’t mean you need to create an exact office like space in your house with bland furniture but just to have a space at the house dedicated for work goes a long way. It’s important, obviously, to keep that space in quiet part of the house and ideally it should have a door that locks.

3. Have a fixed work time

When you are at home it’s hard to stay focused on the work when there are distractions that take you away from the work at hand. This leads to you working beyond your usual working hours to finish off the tasks. If this happens often soon it becomes a habit and you find that your work time and your personal time are blended together and you can’t really be focused on anything. This is a real problem that you need to be aware of and address fast. Set yourself a fixed work time, make sure you work within those hours without getting distracted. Stop working when that time is over and leave your designated work space. By leaving your work space you signal your mind to switch off from the work mode. Remember working from home just means your work space is at home - work type, time and process should remain the same as working at the office.

4. Plan your work day

Working from requires good work plan for the day and the discipline to stick to that plan. Structure your day by working out which tasks are the priority and the number of hours you are going to spend on each task. Also routine in your days about breaks, lunch helps structure your day at work at home. It’s important to set some rules that you would follow to stick to your planning since it’s very easy to stray from you scheme when you get distracted.

5. Communicate more than ever

The biggest negative for working from home when you are part of a team is that you don’t get to easily reach out to people, see their expression or hear a conversation that can help you. You address this negative by using technology to fill in the gaps. Use chat/voice tool like Skype, whatsapp, even Facebook messenger to stay in touch with the rest of the team. Reach out to them as you would if you were in the office. Setup some rules about what to do when there is an emergency information that you needs to happen as opposed to a something that can wait. Face-to-face and voice interactions are very important, you should do video calls as much as possible. This helps set the mindset of working and also seeing facial expressions has a huge impact on conversations that we don’t always think of.

6. Be transparent about work

There is no need to hide from your team members or your lead if you are lagging behind on something. This could’ve happened just the same if you were at your office desk. Just because you are working at home doesn’t mean you have to be perfect all of a sudden and no one assumes you slacking off at work. Communicate any problems or issue immediately with your team mates or your lead or Clients just as you would have if you were at the office.

7. Monitor your work

When you are working from home it might sometimes be hard to know if you are being effective at all as you don’t get as much feedback from other members of your team. This is where tracking your work becomes important, tracking leads to monitoring and it tells you how much progress you are making. There are many apps for tracking your work which helps monitor your progress. These keep you accountable and more productive. Once you have some data you can actually review your work and see if you are prioritizing at the right places, working according to the schedule you set, etc.

8. Avoid Distractions

With no colleagues or managers around to check in on you, it’s easy to become distracted. You are usually your biggest enemy here, a doorbell ring might get you out of your developer’s flow when someone else could have easily opened the door. You can easily resolve this by setting some standards, ask family members not to ping you during working hours unless is absolutely important. Make sure you stay away from sources of distraction like the TV or the land phone. You family members will happily help you if you tell them you plan and ask them for their help. You just have to make the move.

9. Dress appropriately

Working from home may give you the feeling that you can be relaxed about what you are wearing or how you groom yourself. But dressing as if you are going to work at the office when you start work at home makes a huge difference to the mindset. You signal to yourself that you are shifting to work mode now. This helps immensely in getting you in the right frame of mind. And a side benefit is that when the video turns on you don’t have to hide!

10. Take breaks

Just as you need breaks when you are the office you need them when you are working at home. Slaving away at your code just because there is no colleagues to means you’ll get tired and the quality of your work will suffer. Breaks are needed for a refresh, for a reset and has nothing to do with your work settings.

OK here are some stolen gems on work from home from Dilbert!

Adapting to COVID 19 reality

The COVID 19 pandemic is creating havoc all around the world. We have be relatively lucky in the Bangladesh, there hasn’t yet been a major spike in cases. But as with all other places it is very likely to increase, we are all worried.

It’s proven over and over that “social distancing” the right approach for stopping the spread of the virus. An excellent read with very visual proof of this is a recent article in the Washington Post: how to flatten the curve.

At Kaz we started working from home from today. This is the first time the whole office went into working from home mode so it is a new experience for us. We’ve been working hard to make the transition absolutely smooth. Here’s how we are doing it.

Support in setting up home work environment

Our tech support and facilities team has been busy last few days helping developers setup work quality environment at home. This includes making sure the PC at home is fast enough (if not we are supplying them with their PC at work to home), the internet connection is good, VPN setup works, etc. Being a software company most of our people have a great computer at home, that helps, but it is not always setup for professional development work. So that means we have to ensure that it’s virus free, has the right IDEs and other tools setup, etc.

Work environment is also the physical environment at home. The place you work should be in quiet part with as little distraction as possible. The chair and the table should be appropriate for the working hours. Our facilities department has been helping our staff with setting up such an environment at home.

On call tech support

We’ve assumed that right at the beginning we’ll have a whole bunch of tech support issues. So our tech support team will actually be at the office for a whole week supporting people. The support procedure we are following is we try to solve the issues online or over phone first. If that fails we would send one member of the tech support to the staff’s house to help out on site. We plan to continue this for the whole of next week and then the tech support team will also work from home.

Guardian for IT infrastructure

We have one tech support person who lives next to the office (this is by design, we’ve always ensured that a tech support person can at the office within minutes 24/7) so that means our servers and other IT infrastructure has a guardian while we are away.

Keeping the office space accessible

The office space itself will be accessible at all times during this work from home mode. This is possible as we have administrative staff living next to the office. We will have one member of the management and facilities working at the office next week to support any unforeseen issues during this transition. Beyond this the office space will still be accessible by our staff by calling our administrative hotline and arranging for an administrative personnel onsite to open the doors. This is essential, as there are likely to be situations where a developer might have to access her desk for something.

Recurring status check

We are introducing a regular status check on a team level. The goal of the status check is to make sure on a daily basis that everyone in the team has access to the resources they need. The check also works a health check on the working environment and the communications of the team.

Skype groups for teams, leads and all

We are using Skype as our main form of communications. This is because Skype was the common communications tools across the teams and it’s great for quick conversations and screen share. Every team has setup its its own group but the company also has setup groups to coordinate with the team leads, administrative staff etc.

That’s about it, I’ll update as we continue this mode and come across issues and solutions we use for those issues. Let us hope and pray that this great calamity that we are going through all over the world will be over soon and we will be back to normal. What a party we’ll be throwing to celebrate that!!

By en:Siouxsie Wiles, en:Toby Morris (cartoonist) - https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/14-03-2020/after-flatten-the-curve-we-must-now-stop-the-spread-heres-what-that-means/, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88017093

Remote work - what could go wrong?

Amidst the global pandemic of Covid-19, software, and technology companies are thinking about their employees’ safety. Companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, all have allowed their workers to work from home to fight with the novel coronavirus.

Not going into the specifics of the virus but more discussing the steps that software companies can take to protect their employees and still function as a business entity. One of the biggest advantages, specific to this situation, is to be able to promote “Social Distancing”.

But what that mean for the Software Companies. Companies where teams have to work with each other, interact, communicate and process together. Some of the biggest challenges that Project managers and team leads have to face could be:

Distractions

When you are working with people in an environment where it is more professional, there are fewer distractions. When you talk about working from home, you may not be able to avoid the distractions that arise. Interruptions from children, work, neighbors, friends, and family members may be very disruptive and special efforts must be made to make it known that you are working and unavailable for interruption within work hours despite your physical presence at home.

Distinguishing between home and work

The temptation to engage in household matters since you are at home is often very strong. Suddenly you may start to feel obliged to clean the home, do a little shopping, take a little more time with your child, do a little bit here and there around the house, and socialize. Not to mention the riskiest factor, “being a little lazy”. You must be able to draw the line between home and work to avoid both areas suffering.

Communication

Communication is the most to be affected, as concerned by the project managers. Teams will have to follow scrum and communicate between timelines to discuss their progress and determine the task loads. When you are working as a team and physically present in the same location, communication is easy and straight forward. Now think that you have to work where you have to communicate with all your 10+ team members on Skype. That seems more time consuming and loses productivity.

Maintaining a work schedule

Since no-one is looking over your shoulders or enforcing your hour strictly, you may feel tempted to work endlessly, or worse, try to skip a few minutes surfing Netflix. This pressure to work endlessly or without supervision may be compounded by the fact that you feel there are greater expectations made of you as a home-worker or by self-imposed pressures to prove yourself and your abilities in this arrangement. Moreover, the lack of physical separation between home and work may add to this pressure to work endlessly or supervision.

I’ll finish with WC’s tradition of using a Dilbert cartoon :) Stay safe in these uncertain times and let us all hope and pray that this will be over soon.