Over the last few weeks, COVID-19 has suddenly changed the communication model for many teams from in-person to completely virtual. With this sudden change, multiple teams are realizing that being productive remotely is much harder than they thought it would be.

This mirrors our experience in building a remote-first team of 10 over the last year. Remote work is hard, and you need to explicitly build communication practices to get close to the impromptu in-office communication that happens naturally.

There are many articles on how to be an effective remote team, but they focus more on teams that are permanently remote. You need quick techniques that will make this temporary situation work, and work fast. Here are some quick tips based on our experience, split into 2 sections:

• Basics: techniques that are easy, provide high impact and you should implement immediately
• Advanced: techniques you should consider if WFH needs to last for more than 3-4 weeks, and stretches into months.

Basics

These will take 30 mins to implement, but will bring a lot of sanity to a Work From Home situation.

Create a daily morning sync up for everybody

Yes, not just your product teams, everybody! Office timings create a natural rhythm, and working from home removes that rhythm. People quickly drift into working late, waking up later which reduces productivity and team participation very quickly.

💡Institute a daily sync up near 9am for everybody

Setup daily sync up in teams of 5 to 10. It doesn't have to be fancy, a simple what's your focus for the day is good enough. A daily sync up, even if it is just for 10 mins, brings back rhythm into everybody's lives and creates accountability to the team.

Train everybody to use Zoom for ad-hoc conversations

Many in-person teams that use Zoom only use it for calendar meetings, and don't know how to quickly conduct ad-hoc conversations using it.

✋Yes, you know how to use Zoom. But no, you don't know how to use it for ad-hoc conversations.