Team collaboration tool Chanty dives into some of the problems (and solutions!) they overcame during their remote work transition.

1. September 4, 2020
Making the Remote Work Transition: Advice from
Chanty & Problems They Faced
process.st/remote-work-transition
Oliver Peterson
September 4, 2020
Productivity, Remote Teams
This is a guest post from Julia Samoilenko, a marketing specialist who writes about
digital marketing trends and strategies for the Chanty blog. This powerful and free Slack
alternative is aimed to increase team productivity and improve communication at work.
Feel free to connect with Julia on LinkedIn.
Many of us like the idea of working remotely (especially if we have never experienced it).
Out of bed and —Voila!— you are ready for work. No commuting, no noisy colleagues. Top
level of independence and flexibility.
But what is remote work really like in practice? One day here at Chanty we had to answer
this question and discovered what new benefits and challenges teams face when
transitioning to remote-only mode.
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2. Spoiler: there were many productivity pitfalls on the road to beneficial collaboration. It
turns out that being an efficient remote worker is quite challenging. And that it’s twice as
tough to manage a high-performing virtual team.
If you want to adapt to remote working best practices and maximize the benefits, then
you’ve come to the right place. We’re going to reveal the ugly truth and teach you
everything we’ve learned about a successful transition to remote work. After reading our
‘confession’, you’ll understand the challenges and methods on how to overcome them.
In this Process Street article, we’ll be covering:
Let’s dive right in!
How to successfully transition to remote work
Source
There is an ocean of large and small companies with remote employees. Because of the
COVID-19 pandemic, this figure rose incredibly over the last few months. During especially
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3. dark days of our adaptation to the remote mode, we looked at the companies that had a
successful transition to remote work to not give up.
For instance, Twitter went remote and covered everything from desks to printers that their
employees needed during the home office setup, including video conferencing services and
project management software. Facebook says that any employee who can do their work
from home may continue to do so until year-end.
Google employees will probably continue to work remotely through the rest of this year.
Zillow employees can work from home until the end of the year too.
Being in the same boat, we decided to keep up with our tech colleagues and developed our
own strategy of a seamless transition to productive remote work.
Here it is!
Ensure everyone has needed tools under their belt
Team communication, productivity, and collaboration mainly start from home ‘office’
space. Investments in effective working space could increase productivity by up to 64
percent. Considering that, we ensured that every one of us had a perfectly organized
workstation, from drawer organizers to desks and computers when transitioning to remote
work.
Think about security
If your team members use their own laptop to connect to your system remotely, make sure
that the devices they use are secure enough.
How? First, help your employees install endpoint protection software (basic antivirus
software and firewalls).
Next, enforce password management: ensure that your teammates are using strong
passwords for accessing your network and software platforms. If you want to share some
account and login credentials, use a password manager application so the entire team can
have access to specific websites.
What’s more, emails should be encrypted. Then, remote desktops should be accessed via a
Virtual Private Network (VPN). So, provide the appropriate IT support to help teammates
configure their devices and set up VPN services.
Employee training will help your remote workers learn how to protect themselves and your
network. Educate your team on how to prevent cybersecurity threats. Also, create a
response plan for the situations when the unexpected happens (a device with sensitive data
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4. is lost, unusual account activities are recognized, etc.) and clearly communicate it to your
team. After that, they’ll know exactly how to act in different situations that involve IT
security.
Overcome distractions while working from home
Are you complaining about office distractions? When your company transitions to remote
work, you’ll be rudely surprised. Anyone who spent a single day working remotely can
confirm that there are not fewer distractions at home than in an office. To tell the truth,
various distractions were one of the biggest productivity killers that turned remote working
for us into a nightmare.
If you live in a small apartment without a dedicated space to do your work, there will be a
sea of distractions, from babies to laundry needing to be done. When you work where you
live, be ready to separate these two worlds from each other.
How did we solve this issue? In a perfect world, a workspace should be a separate room
dedicated to work and nothing else, where you come to get stuff done. But we discovered
additional methods to make working from home more productive:
Work on summer terraces in cafes. These places come with their own
distractions, but they can be the better alternative to a home full of pets and relatives.
Make sure that your family knows your working hoursand ask them to
respect your schedule (it probably won’t work out, but you can still try).
Make an office out of a spare room: bedroom, storage room, balcony, garage,
etc. A space that is just for you to get tasks done.
Leverage your most unproductive hours. Think about how to utilize those
hours where you might otherwise not be doing much of anything productive (the
early morning hours, for instance). You’d be surprised what you could squeeze into a
few hours each morning.
Work at night. Sorry for this cruel advice, but it’s helped some of us.
Focus on productivity measurement and time management
Having transitioned to remote work, you don’t literally see how your employees use their
working time. As a result, chances are you will want to take everything under constant
control. It’s a productivity pitfall. Resist the urge to monitor your team strictly. Instead, feel
free to steal some management hacks which have helped us to stay productive after remote
work transition.
First, you can adopt a time tracker for personal use to understand how much time you
have spent on certain tasks and identify what destroys your productivity. These apps can
help you be more aware of where your time is going. Do you fall down a YouTube hole
twice a day? Do you spend too much time answering unnecessary emails? These insights
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5. will help you adjust your working day accordingly and increase your productivity.
Second, find what actually you want to measure, your weekly or monthly key performance
indicators (KPI). This north star helps you discover how well you’ve been doing over the
past period. With the help of KPIs, you can track both long-term performance and short-
term productivity. Also, roadmaps help remote teams stay on the right track.
Don’t forget to take care of your mental health
Source
Let’s face it, despite having more free time to take care of health while working remotely,
remote workers usually suffer from different mental and emotional issues. That’s the
hidden and dangerous element of remote work transition.
The first issue is burnout and exhaustion. People are just tired, lose energy and joy. To
avoid that, achieve work-life balance through unplugging after work. Switch off after the
day and get a genuine break. The best way to switch off after work is to set achievable goals
for each day and routinely hit those targets.
Second, pay attention to remote employee social isolation. Here at Chanty, we noticed that
we started feeling a bit lonely and unengaged when we couldn’t grab a cup of coffee with
colleagues before work or have a beer after.
Therefore, we took some proactive steps towards supporting our relationships after remote
work transition:
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6. We start our virtual meetings by telling everyone something personal: how we are,
what we are feeling, etc, what our news is, etc.
We use a Chanty conversation channel for sharing non-work-related content, jokes,
GIFs, and everything in between.
We do something as simple as saying ‘Hey!’ every morning in the team chat.
Obviously, team spirit and mental health habits won’t materialize overnight. Thus, don’t
strive for immediate results. Enjoy the process instead.
Adopt new tools for your remote work transition
Chanty relies on different tools to support the working process, especially when it comes to
remote cooperation. On the other hand, having transitioned to remote work, we’ve already
understood that more tools are not equal to more productivity and engagement. Every
team needs to find the right balance between the number of tools and the challenges they
face.
Where to start when choosing the go-to tool stack for your company transitioning to
remote work? First of all, team chats are irreplaceable due to their robust features that
optimize every nook and cranny of the workflow. Today team chats are much more than
just a messenger tool.
Chanty
Source
Yes, surprisingly enough, here at Chanty we use Chanty.
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7. Why is it worth a try? Chanty is very secure, intuitive, and easy-to-use: your team won’t
waste weeks to adopt this tool. Also, it provides unlimited message history, simple file
sharing via attachments and drag & drop interface, powerful search, task manager,
integrations, voice, and video calls – everything is for free.
To achieve a whole new level of productivity, we’ve integrated Chanty with Zapier. That
allows us to:
1. Get updated with recent events created on Google Calendar in any Public or Private
conversation.
2. Receive recent emails from Gmail directly in Chanty.
3. Celebrate acquiring new subscribers on MailChimp.
4. Catch the latest responses from Google Forms.
5. Keep track of new records to Google Sheets.
6. Keep up with new commits on your Git version-control system.
7. Stay updated about new tasks, issues, or cards in your task manager.
8. Never miss your new Salesforce or HubSpot leads.
9. Monitor your sales activity on Stripe.
Process Street
Before jumping into Process Street, check out this quick introduction video to get an idea
of what it’s all about:
One way to make sure you’re staying on track and minimizing distractions is by using
checklists. And no, I don’t mean jotting down a to-do list on a piece of paper only to be
misplaced and forgotten about.
Process Street is a BPM software that offers dynamic and practical superpowered
checklists. They utilize features like Stop Tasks, Dynamic Due Dates, and Approvals to
make sure you’re getting work done effectively and efficiently, never missing any deadlines.
For example, here’s Process Street’s Achieving Work-Life Balance Checklist below:
Brilliant, isn’t it?
If your company and projects are big enough, you will definitely need a solution to keep
projects, tasks, resources, and documents under one roof. With tools like Asana or Wrike,
your remote teammates can also access all needed information and files from anywhere,
anytime.
Establish remote communication and collaboration rules
These ground rules establish clarity in digital communication and help remote employees
stay connected and engaged after remote work transition.
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8. Here’s a list of rules for you to consider:
Create tags for important messages. For instance, #3HR can mark messages
that require a reply within three hours after being sent.
Sometimes it’s more productive to stop bombarding your colleagues with endless
messages and jump on a two-minute call. So, use built-in call features or third-
party video conferencing tools like Zoom.
Speaking of endless messages, always strive for being understood using the
bare minimum of words. At the same time, don’t confuse brief communication
with clear communication when trying to be efficient. The balance lies somewhere in
between.
Make sure that teammates know your status(when you are available or away).
Have regular video team meetings, but audio works, too.
Share and synchronize your schedule with teammates, especially when
collaborating across different time zones. That lets your team know when you are
available for collaboration and protects your private life.
Hold a meaningful meeting. Make sure that all participants know what is being
discussed and that there’s a strict time limit. Always invite as few team members as
possible and only the relevant ones. End a meeting with a straightforward result.
Pay attention to new employee onboarding
Since you can’t bring new remote workers to the office for their first days in the company if
your company works remotely. Considering that, spend a couple of days with each new hire
on various video chats to walk them through the daily processes and their role.
Also, provide new employees with all necessary hardware, furniture, tools, instructions, etc.
Then assign a person who will be a virtual mentor for a new worker. Having a helpful
buddy that guides a newbie through all the things they should learn, is really handy.
Our key takeaways for remote work transition
Organizing teams should not be a nightmare when transitioning to remote work. Remote
work can be just as productive as an in-house one. To win this battle and make remote
working work for you, use some tried-and-tested productivity tips that we’ve outlined:
1. Make sure that everyone has a perfectly organized workstation.
2. Think about security and utilize basic antivirus software, firewalls, VPN, and
password management tools.
3. Eliminate home distraction.
4. Measure your productivity and work time: adopt a time tracker if needed, find your
key performance indicators, create a roadmap.
5. Take care of your mental health to prevent burnout.
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9. 6. Adopt essential services that foster remote work: a team chat and project
management tool.
7. Establish remote communication rules.
8. Pay attention to new employee onboarding.
To sum up, remote working brings a lot of benefits. In this article, we’ve listed a few tips on
how to achieve a desired level of productivity and a work-life balance after remote work
transition. Now, good luck on your road to a truly productive remote work!
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