To contribute to the plethora of home working content floating around right now, here’s a brief insight into home working from Hiring Hub product team.
Most product teams are pretty well set up for remote working, given that bursts of productivity and inspiration don’t always arise between 9am and 5pm. That said, adjusting to communicating over Slack exclusively as opposed to in person has really improved my typing speed. Slack calls have been stepped up and Zoom calls have been added.
When it came to preparing for remote working, the only thing we really needed to maintain was communication. Thankfully, we all love to talk so this comes very easily with tools such as Slack and Whatsapp. As a Product Manager, I need to know where everything is up to and how the team is progressing, so more regular team calls have worked really well. We’re also making full use of our Trello boards and being strict with ticket control. We all trust each other implicitly, so we know work will always be done.
Continuation of team meetings is important so we’ll be holding our first ever Slack ‘Show and Tell’ on Friday morning. A good opportunity for the company to get together and see what we’ve been working on. Online retrospective tools have come in handy, too – we tried FunRetro this week. It was great to hear that everyone was having the same feelings about adjusting to working from home, adjusting to different levels of productivity during the day, and enjoying any and all non-work related chat with team members.
To make us feel like human beings, not robots that have been relocated, we’ve started sharing any interesting thing we did or learned the day before at our stand up meetings. It gives us something different to talk about and maintains a sense of normality by continuing the general office chat we’re missing now. Thus far, we’ve learned about medical advances using tech, origins of words (more interesting than it sounds), snails and space clocks.
Small things have started to become big things when working from home. When we first went home, we all shared the photos of our workspaces. It gave us each an insight into our team that we don’t normally get. Here’s mine. This is the closest I’ve been to my books for longer than I care to admit.
Our stand up calls have regular visitors now – spouses, children, housemates and dogs. We’re all keeping ourselves in check. Fancy dress is now a requirement for all company calls, which really helps get everyone into the Friday spirit! Check out my first company meeting costume – can you guess the theme? Yes, you only have one image from which to guess. We have a lot of time to kill right now..
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