Remote work has rapidly become commonplace for companies around the world. We asked optile MD and CTO, Jonas Maurus about the benefits and challenges of this new style of work in addition to his goals for optile’s team communication.
My last company was fully distributed, so I love this way of working. Of course, working in the office has a lot of advantages and disadvantages which vary between different departments. Remote work is positive for individual workers such as developers who just need lots of focus time. If they can work from anywhere, focus and inspiration may be easier to find from places such as the coffee shop or a quiet living room.
Originally, our goal at optile was to start making our working arrangement more distributed starting in 2019. One of the main drivers for this was the difficultly in hiring in Munich. Moving people here takes a lot of resources. Thus, distributed work makes it easier for us to find qualified people from anywhere in the world.
We had a 6-month plan for building out the appropriate infrastructure and policies for remote work but instead, COVID-19 forced us to cram this all into 3 weeks. Now, strengthening our culture is one main focus area for me over the next six months. Most of our new hires will not have access to the shared past experiences that we used to have like playing kicker or hanging out on the roof terrace.
To be honest, we are still experimenting and finding out what works. I used to be able to bring people to Munich for social interaction and building team cohesion but that’s not an option at the moment. We are figuring out how we can operate fully remotely for a year or so. It comes back to having offices as a nexus of activity.
To me the benefits outweigh the negatives here. There’s no way that we will be going fully back to the way it was before. Our goal is to have a revolving door. If you want to come to the office, you can, but you are also free to work somewhere else. I imagine this will become the company rule – obviously, individual teams have to discuss what works for them.
Specifically, if you want to come to the office five days a week, you can have an assigned desk. If you want to come in two days a week, we can designate a temporary seat for you, and if you don’t want to come to the office, we can provide the tooling and equipment to make working from home possible.
Due to the fast ramp up, we’re still missing a lot of artefacts that usually go with the tools and culture that come with effective remote working. There is a lot to build, and our VP of Engineering, Kristian Glass will have a focus area of doing this to make remote and distributed work along with the culture surrounding it fixtures here at optile.
It’s all about providing the tools for a good work environment no matter where people are situated. We’ve already done things like ship office chairs to people living in and around Munich but there are other questions like how do we deal with coworkers in India? A funny example is that we tried sending our employees’ laptops, but they got stuck in customs and we may never see them again. This example just scratches the surface of what we need to tackle to take care of our optilers irrespective of location. This covers international frameworks for company benefits to inter-cultural training and communication culture, and much more.
This is one of my favorite topics. The focus isn’t on being able to breathe down somebody’s neck. It doesn’t work at the office, let alone remotely. In development, we measure between output and commitment because that’s realistically the thing we really care about. We ask ourselves if the result is good enough for what we think should be delivered or what we’re paying.
Of course, this must be tempered with regard to a person’s circumstances, especially during COVID-19. If you are stuck in quarantine in a two-bedroom apartment with two kids, your situation matters in what you can deliver. Just as for a coder working in a cross-functional team, I don’t care if you arrived at a brilliant result working 24 hours between Thursday and Friday or if you got it by working 8 hours a day. That’s not to say that we don’t want you to have an 8-hour workday, we just treat this as a flexible responsibility of the team member. Most of all, I don’t need to observe them in front of their PC.
Now we get to see the result of a management approach that I personally like very much which is hire smart people and get out of their way. If we get the hiring right, we will have self-motivated, brilliant people who do their work because they like their work and see purpose in what they’re doing. They will let you know when they hit a roadblock or if something doesn’t work out. And ideally that doesn’t require us to really go in and measure anything but our success.
First of all, It’s perfectly OKAY to be demotivated sometimes. Especially in the middle of a global pandemic there are lots of additional stressors. From a management perspective, Covid breaks down a lot of the systems that are in place that support empathetic communication. Communication can become purely functional and that in turn can reduce a coworker from a human being to a role you interact with and that in turn leads to the tribalization of teams within a company.
First, facilitating motivation requires the manager to be very much in touch with their team members. It requires them to be a voice for empathy and understanding across teams. Second, we also need to counter imbalances between employees’ workload and motivation. Employees should be empowered to give themselves permission to manage their own well-being. In my opinion, especially in a distributed work environment where nobody from the company can observe you or check on you, you need to be self-monitoring.
Sometimes it’s as simple as you having to get out of the chair, go outside, get some sun, take a walk in the park, get coffee and stop working for a bit before coming back, and sometimes you should feel empowered to talk to your manager or PeopleOps to get a break, take an intermediate vacation day, or reorganize with your team to make your schedule fit better with family life disrupted by school closures and other external influences. Providing a framework for this, is most important.
Keeping the empathetic connection needed for motivated teams and individuals requires us to hire managers who prioritize this aspect. optile’s continued momentum, comradery and workplace culture is wholly dependent on this empathetic connection between team members.