A year into the COVID pandemic, many of us are hitting a wall with remote work. We're tired of endless video calls. We're lonely, missing the camaraderie of the in-person world.

There are many best practices to make working remote more bearable—even delightful. After all, there are benefits to having a remote workforce: more diversity on the team, no time wasted on commutes, and a lower carbon footprint.

Read on to learn the most useful remote best practices from years of experience leading remote friendly teams.

👑 Ownership

The best remote friendly companies designate a team or individual to be responsible for the remote experience. You'll need someone to roll out all the best practices below, and without ownership, building a great remote culture can fall through the cracks. It tends not to fall neatly into any team's responsibilities, and as you'll see, remote culture requires intentionality to be successful.

• At Gitlab, the Head of Remote ensures all work is inclusive of time zones and spearheads the mission that "all work is achievable regardless of an employee's physical location." This involves leading an unlearning process to replace old habits (e.g. defaulting to a meeting, forgoing documentation, etc.) with remote-friendly ones.
• As they expanded remote hiring, Stripe designated specific leads to measure and iterate on the remote experience. These leads began with goals (e.g. "improve the remote experience") and used the scientific approach of a) hypothesis, b) data, c) action to drive improvements.

🤝 Team collaboration

How to work with me docs

Have each person in the company create a "how to work with me" document. Stripe's COO Claire Hughes Johnson shared an example of hers. These documents are useful both to help individuals reflect upon their working styles, question their habits as well as to help peers collaborate more easily by laying a shared foundation of understanding.

Though many good managers already know to cover a lot of this content with their direct reports in an early 1:1, it's useful to have clear expectations in writing so one can refer back in performance reviews and to reach resolution when an expectation isn't met. It's often overlooked how valuable it is to share working styles with teammates and coworkers on other teams, especially in a remote context where there's less opportunity for organically sharing this type of information in friendly chitchat.

How can you make sure there's engagement with these documents beyond the initial day they're created? Try a Slack app like nametag, which sends a weekly update to users about new people they've messaged and surfaces their "how to work with me" page. Ensuring these documents are read when they become relevant means you can improve collaboration and prevent potential misunderstandings between colleagues.

Team learnings

At McKinsey, every time we started a new project, we did a "team learning." In that meeting, everyone was equal, from the most senior partner to the new grad business analyst. Everyone had a place, an obligation, to speak up about their work preferences. This information was respected in the many hours and weeks of work to follow because we all want each person on the team comfortable and performing at their best. McKinsey team learnings included sharing one's MBTI profile. Knowing whether someone is extroverted or introverted is useful in situations when you keep inviting a coworker to lunch and he/she keeps turning you down because as an introvert, he/she needs time to decompress.

🖋 Written communication

Documentation becomes the primary mode of effective collaboration and knowledge transfer in remote teams. For this reason, it's critical to have shared best practices for written communication across the organization. Strategies to keep docs tidy and useful include tools, templates, and stakeholders.

• Tools—use a single documentation system, especially for cross-functional projects. While functions may opt to use a specific documentation tool that suits their domain, this practice should be limited to intra-function work.
• Templates—create a standard format for common document types to make it easier to onboard for new people to a work stream and cross-pollinate across teams. In meeting notes, for example, have sections for agenda, notes, decisions, and action items. A shared structure makes it easy to refer back and simplifies post-project retrospectives.