Remote Work Help Roundup
Google Trends "wfh" 365 and 30-day trends
Remote work stats
The amount of people who work remotely at least once per week has grown by 400% since 2010. (GetApp)
42% of employees with a remote work option plan to work remotely more often in the next five years. (Owl Labs)
Between 2017 and 2018, telecommuting increased by 22% (FlexJobs)
If they could, 99% of people would choose to work remotely, at least part-time, for the rest of their careers. (Buffer)
--40 Remote Work Stats to Know in 2020, Hubspot
Slack
Self-serve help resources quickly went up at http://slack.com/remote . Our Customer Success & Experience teams lit up: new training webinars & 1:1 consultations were made available to anyone — a massive bottoms-up effort to offer personalized assistance at unprecedented scale. -- Stewart Butterfield, CEO
GitLab
Establish a handbook. This will be rudimentary to start, and will serve as a single source of truth for more pressing questions. Communicate this company-wide, and update it continually with DRIs for common questions around tools and access. This can start as a single company webpage or repository in Notion or Ask Almanac, and will serve you well even after the current crisis subsides. One of the most sizable challenges when going remote is keeping everyone informed in an efficient way. Put concerted effort around systematically documenting important process changes in a central place to minimize confusion and dysfunction -- GitLab Remote Work Emergency Plan
Shopify
Using Guru with our remote Support teams helped us scale and maintain consistent, quality support to our customers while working remotely and distributed around the world. A reliable and up-to-date knowledge management repository has been critical to ensuring our remote teams are set up for success. -- Dana Tessier, Director of Knowledge Management
Intercom
Beyond equipping our team with the right tools, keeping up team morale has been top of mind for me in our planning. After all, a highly engaged and happy support team is at the root of great support experiences. So my team leaders and I have been discussing two questions in particular:
What habits would we maintain to help the team stay connected?
What new rituals would we adopt to build team cohesion – virtually?
--Kaitlin Pettersen, Global Director of Customer Support
Automattic (Wordpress)
Operate as if everyone works from different time zones, because one day they might. This means more communication, likely written, that is accessible to people even if they can’t attend a specific meeting or be in a specific place. If you can minimize the number of real-time meetings, do so. Embrace asynchronous communication. -- Matt Mullenweg, CEO
Document everything. Having things documented and available to reference means people can self-serve rather than having to ask/interact on every little detail. This goes for decisions, architectures, vision, mission, roadmaps, project plans, discussions, processes, etc. We’ll explore a few options for where to document things further down. -- Beau Lebens, Head of Product Engineering