💻 What you'll need

• We ask that you have a consistent work space for your office, ideally with a door that closes. You can literally work from anywhere, but it’s important to have a space that’s distraction-free where you can get your work done.
• A functioning computer, reliable internet connection, and headphones! You should be able to easily participate in video calls wherever you’re working.
• In order for the team to work effectively with you, it’s important that you set working and available hours and communicate them to the rest of the team.

🎳 Operating Principles

Have daily stand ups

• Each team has their daily stand up every morning using Hangouts video conference. Minutes are taken during the meeting and posted on the team internal channel right after. The idea is to truly communicate to your team what you're working on that day, so that your team can help you understand if some priority has shifted or there is additional context you may need.
• Teams should use Monday's standup to set their weekly goals and document them to be shared with the rest of the company.

Share goals and updates every Monday

• Every Monday, Varun shares a company wide update covering the top Headout priorities, existing projects and new projects. Link
• In addition, each pro sends out a weekly update email to the company covering their team’s priorities and progress.

Communication & Collaboration Guidelines

• Slack: Since we’re not all physically in the same place, we will consider Slack our office. We have our conversations, both formal and informal there.
  • Use public channels for all your work related communication. Make sure all communication for each project and within each team happens in public channels as much as possible. This keeps everyone informed about the status of work and encourages the exchange of ideas. More on how to use Slack effectively here.
  • One of the big disadvantages of going remote is that we lose in-the-moment questions. Set up 15 - 20 minutes slots a day where you are available to be contacted by your peers who want to sync up/ask questions for a project. Use these slots to response to emails and Slack pings from your peers.
  • Use custom statuses (and associated emojis) to let people know at a glance if you’re out on vacation, in transit, or in meetings. Your peers can no longer see when you're away from your desks, so you should set a custom status to let everyone know that you've stepped away / that you're offline / on calls and may be slow to respond. You can learn how to set your slack status and availability here. Bonus: You can also sync your Google calendar to Slack to automatically update your Slack status when you’re in a meeting.
• Google Hangouts: Communicating in writing can be difficult at times, particularly in more delicate or nuanced situations. Sometimes you just need to see each other’s faces and talk, out loud, with your mouths. For a quick call, you can use Slack’s built-in voice and video calling feature. For larger meetings, use Google Hangouts. Set up Google Hangouts within Slack.
• Loom: Sending a Loom video is often more efficient than typing long emails or spending your day in meetings having conversations that don’t need to happen in real-time. Therefore, all team and company updates should be supplemented with Loom videos as much as possible. Loom Use cases.