At the time I wrote this blog post, China is suffering from novel coronavirus outbreak. The virus brings lots of messes to the countries, companies, teams and individuals. From 3rd Feb, all employees of Daimler China have to stay at home and work remotely.

This is definitely a “black swan” event. And as the author Taleb keeps telling people, black swan leads to disorder, and people should consider the “things that gain from disorder”. According to the fact that we must work online, so I believe the benefit we should gain is the capability to do remote co-work smoothly.

Luckily, we do not start from scratch - remote co-work is getting more and more popular in many companies and there are lots of tools, ideas to support this new working model. There is even a book, “Remote: Office Not Required”, is dedicated to this topic.

Until now (9th Feb), inspired by the existing experiences, we had worked remotely for one week and we tried out some new tools and practices. I summary what we are doing as below. It includes two aspects - “Technology and Tool”, “Value and Mindset”.

Technology and Tools

It must be emphasized that new technology is key enabler of remote co-work - on the other hand, if you stick to tools which suppose to support work in office, you will suffer from the mismatch. We chose tools to support 3 kinds of routine jobs: meeting, task management and content sharing.

Meeting - Zoom and WeChat

We use “zoom” for the online meeting. It is a high performance and easy-to-use tool. It offers advanced screen sharing and meeting recording functionalities. We also have a rule that you must show your face during the meeting so that make all attendees feel like talking to human instead of “electric bot”.
WeChat is still used for a short and ad-hoc meeting among 2 to 3 people.

Task Management - Jira and Github Project

We use “Jira” and “Github Project” as online task management tools. There is no surprise for the choices. Since the team was based on physical Kanban board and online Kanban like Jira/Github Project were just a backup. To support remote co-work, we assign the accessibilities of online Kanban to everyone on the first working day.

As usual, we use Confluence for formal documents. Similar to Jira, we adjusted the Confluence structure and accessibilities to make sure everyone can read/write the necessary content.
We use Slack for daily communication. Slack is a powerful and mature platform to support employees to work within slack. For example, we integrated Jira with Slack so that people can manipulate user stories in Slack.
WeChat is still used for ad-hoc communication.

Value and Mindset

No need to mention more the importance of changes of mindset to enable the remote co-work. During the current special time, I believe it is easy for people to accept and build a new mindset as below. (Some ideas are from “Remote” and other articles in the Internet)

Autonomy and ownership

The first thing the team did is separate the whole team into 4 sub-teams. The effectiveness of collaboration inside sub-team is must higher than a big team. And the sub-team members must make more decisions on their own.

Online

Keep online and response others quickly. Without seeing each other, it is more critical that the “online” status is on (Specifically, I refer to online in Slack).

Seeing is believing

All online meetings are “Video meeting” instead of “Vocal meeting”. You can see someone, then you feel the sense of reality to he/she. However, new technology is fundamental to doing this.

Keep everything open

Remote communication is more expensive than face-to-face ones. So we’d like to reduce the valueless communication like “Can you share me the PPT/Excel/Data/Information” or “Can you tell me what you did/who did it” etc. Therefore, we remove the restrictions on source code, confluence, Jira and Github Project. People can get as much as information without asking others.

Focus on result

To define the result for every task and focus on the result. It makes no sense to pay attention to “when you get into office and start work” or “how many time you went to the bathroom”. Without seeing the working process when there is more time to validate the quality of work.

Further thoughts

If the virus keeps us to work remotely, it is a good opportunity to train the team to gain the capability of remote co-work.
Although we currently have the policy for “home office”, “Remote co-work” is not “a set of ‘home office’”. Because the current home office lacks “co-“ due to the technical limitation and the mindset gap.
“Remote co-work” could be an alternative of work in office even when the virus has gone. If we can prove remote co-work can benefit us, we still need to mitigate the gap in technology and mindset.