Remote Work

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While Spark::red has offices, we are primarily a distributed team, and as we continue to grow more and more of our team will be geographically separated from one another.  So the topic of remote working and distributed teams is an important one for us, and one I’m personally invested in.  I feel that there are significant advantages to both working in an office (collaboration, communication, culture, and more) and working remotely (freedom, focus, no commute, and more), so I do both.  I work from the Spark::red office outside of Boston 3-4 days a week (unless I’m traveling) and work from home 1-2 days a week.  As you may have read in several previous blog posts, I am also experimenting with one month or longer remote working situations.

Why Remote Work?

There are several reasons that Spark::red embraces the remote working approach.  It’s both something that we want to do, as well as something that we have to do.

For employees near a Spark::red office, being able to work from home as well can be a great perk. You can balance the pain your commute with the benefits of being in the office.  You can stay home if the plumber is coming by.  You can work from Boston if you have an appointment in town and don’t want to get stuck in rush hour.  You can visit your family in another state and still work as needed.  So it’s a benefit that many of our employees appreciate and take advantage of to differing degrees.

The type of person that we want to hire as we continue to grow is rare.  Our focus is ATG Oracle Commerce, which is a very small niche, so it’s difficult to find people with the right experience and skill set to join our team.  As a small company performing important work for large clients, it’s also imperative that any team members are amazing.  I know there’s a strong backlash against terms like “rockstar”, “ninja”, “A level”, etc… but there’s always going to be a wide spectrum of talent, experience, motivation, and effectiveness.  Spark::red can’t afford anyone who isn’t a GREAT team member, both from a effectiveness standpoint, but also from a cultural fit.  Find a person who fits is hard, and it’s impossible to find everyone we need from a single city.   We need to be able to hire the right people, regardless of their physical location.

Our clients’ sites are 24x7x365 operations.  They need to be supported, monitoring, maintenance, and improved at all hours.  Our clients are spread coast-to-coast in the United States, as well as multiple other continents.  Our global client base is growing, and is likely to be one of our largest growth areas in the coming years.  As such we need to be able to provide support, and not just emergency support, over a wider range of the day.  Deployments, support tickets, and alerts can happen from the early morning to the late night.  The more geographically diverse the Spark::red team is, the more of this can be accomplished by people working normal hours.  When you’re up until 4 AM helping a client with a deployment, you can’t be at your best the next day.  If that deployment can be done by someone 8 or more hours behind you on the globe, then it’s easier to provide better service.

The following three points drive home the fact that embracing and supporting a geographically diverse team is important for Spark::red’s growth and success, both from a team member happiness and from a client satisfaction standpoint.

The Struggles

Having a remote team comes with a unique set of potential difficulties, both hard and soft.  It’s worth doing, but you need to be mindful of the risks and have plans, tools, and processes in place to address them.

The “hard” issues are technical, procedural, or quantifiable and range from things like “how do you handle it when someone has a problem with their laptop and they live thousands of miles away from the nearest office?” to “how does the team communicate effectively?”  How are tasks managed, progress tracked, support and mentorship given, how do you make sure people know what’s going on in the company around them without overloading them with a river of distracting updates and information they don’t actually need?

The “soft” issues are more around corporate culture, interpersonal relationships and communication, maintaing and evolving the company ethos and soul.  They are hard to measure and harder to solve.  Also, everyone is different.  Everyone works differently, and is motivated by different things.  So don’t expect everyone to want to work remotely, or for it be effective for them, or for a given set of tools/ideas/processes to work equally well for everyone.

How Spark::red is Working

Spark::red has two main offices in Redmond, WA and Chelmsford, MA, employees who split their time between an office and working from home, as well as employees who live thousands of miles away from the nearest office.  Our tools and processes are certainly a work in progress and by no means are the end-all-be-all approach you should adopt, but there’s some good stuff going on here.

We use Campfire for group chat.  We have several standing rooms, for internal teams, for clients, for random chat, and also create rooms on demand for projects or topics as needed.  The chatroom provides a good way for large numbers of people to interact, but it can be as interrupt driven as you let it be.  You can check the rooms each time a new message is posted, or only look when the chime means your name was mentioned, or just glance over when you’re not in the middle of something.  Or you can just sign-out for a while, and when you get back into Campfire you can scroll back through and see what you missed.  We use Flint as a Campfire client instead of using the web app.  We can also use it on our phones and iPads so if we’re  not at our computer and need to ask something, or check in on something, it’s easy.

After an amazing presentation by the Streaming Eagles from GitHub at the FutureStack 13 conference last month, we’ve started using video chat for one-on-one discussions and some small group chats as well.  We’ve played with several different tools for video (google hangouts, FaceTime, Meetings.io) and currently are using Skype.  I hate the Skype application, but it’s video quality and reliability under sub-par network conditions have really made it work for us.  The video chat gives you a much more natural conversation style, and makes it clear that on the other end is a real person, with real feelings, and a real life, and I think it makes people less likely to be snarky or miscommunicate.  This is still an experiment in progress, but so far I think it’s good.

We use Jira for task tracking.  It makes it easy to hand off a task to another person or another team, providing the full history of the task and current status.  We use Confluence for a wiki.  We use DropBox for sharing files.  We’re starting to use Evernote as well for collaboration and notes.

While we don’t do development (agile or not) we are doing a daily scrum call with the entire company.  We quickly go through what we’ve done, what we’re working on today, any blocking issues, if we need help from anyone, etc…  It’s 15 minutes well spent and gives everyone a good idea of what’s going on, let’s people ask for help, and gets everyone “together” virtually.  As our team grows internationally it may become harder to involve the entire team at any given timeslot.

We do some inter-office travel and office visits.  Getting people to meet, talk, work, and hangout in person provides huge benefits in their long term working relationship and communication effectiveness.  We’ve done a company all-hands summit, and that’s something I’d like to make an annual event, although it’s tougher to do now that we have more clients and more daily support need.  This is something I’d like to figure out better.

We have a lot to learn still, and I don’t think we’re doing things as well as we could be, but we’re connately trying to improve how we work and how we work remotely.

Go Forth and Work!

I think most companies would benefit from allowing, encouraging, and empowering their employees and team to work remotely.  The big cons are pretty easily solvable and the pros are significant.  I would love to hear what you’ve found works or doesn’t work around working remotely.  I’m constantly looking to improve what we’re doing and try new things.

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