5 Reasons Why Great Teams Work Remotely

great teams

Advances in enterprise software from recent years triggered an explosion in remote work adoption rates. According to this report, the number of remote workers in the US has increased by 115% since 2005. And while small companies and startups are key factors in this increase, many large organizations from different industries also contribute significantly to this trend.

But why is that? By the end of this article, you’ll have five solid reasons why great teams work remotely. You’ll also find out why remote work is seen as a necessity by many young companies around the world – not just an employee perk. So without further ado, here are 5 reasons why great companies hire remotely:

1) Lower business costs

The most widely cited reason for going remote is the reduction in business costs. While remote work can bring other types of expenses, they are nowhere near what you would pay for a physical office and all associated expenses with it. Rent, utilities and office amenities can form substantial business costs, especially when you take into account the often long lease agreements. This leads to a lot of risk and potential headaches if the company enters a period of financial trouble. Not having an office can help mitigate such risks.  

2) Access to a bigger talent pool

Another important benefit of working remotely is the access to a huge talent pool. Doing business from a physical office requires you to look for employees in on or around your area which makes it harder to find suitable candidates. When you allow remote work, you can choose from a global talent pool of experts in practically any area. This is especially useful for companies based in competitive labor markets, such Silicon Valley for example. It makes a lot of sense to hire remotely instead of competing with the lucrative packages Google or Facebook can provide.  

3) Remote workers are equally or more productive than on-site employees

According to this report, there isn’t a negative effect on productivity when working remotely. In fact, some employees produce a higher output due to fewer time-wasting meetings. Other factors include a better sense of career satisfaction and the ability to work during the most productive times for the particular person. While some people are early risers, others are night owls who are more active and alert during the typical out-of-office times. Why waste all that potential?

4) Faster hiring process

Fully distributed companies take 33% less time to hire a new employee. As one of the prime concerns for any business, hiring frequently takes a lot of time and resources. However, new technology platforms and the access to a bigger talent pool can make things much more efficient. With on-demand freelancing services and the ability to quickly write job descriptions the hiring process is greatly improved.

5) Lower employee turnover

Companies that support remote work have 25% lower employee turnover than companies that don’t. Remote workers say that avoiding the daily commute and the flexibility to work when they’re most productive are key factors for deriving more job satisfaction. Therefore, it’s not surprising to find that on average people stay longer at distributed companies.

Conclusion

There are clear benefits to allowing remote work at your company. From reduced business costs to a greatly enhanced hiring potential, there is clear evidence that remote work is here to stay. And with more and more people preferring their home or a coworking space to the office, remote work can often turn into a business necessity rather than a choice.

 

If you’d like to learn about ways to collaborate online efficiently, download our free e-book “Online Collaboration: a practical guide for modern teams” and transform your organization today.

The Tools We Use At Sendtask

tools

Quools.io

At Sendtask, we are a fully distributed team, meaning there’s no office and no two people in the same place. To keep everyone in sync, we use a variety of tools. These are the five tools we use the most often:

#1: Sendtask

We use our own tool for sprint planning, roadmap, prioritization, call agendas, bug reports, feature requests, etc. We believe that dogfooding is crucial to building a good user experience and thus use Sendtask whenever and wherever we see fit. In general, everything that can be organized in a list goes into Sendtask.

#2: Google App Suite

We use all Google tools – from Gmail to Drive – to organize and share information and communication. With our email integration, we create tasks in Sendtask projects directly from Gmail. One Google Document is particularly helpful: While the team is still small, we use a Google Doc titled «Sendtask Bootcamp» as our wiki. We store all information needed for new team members to join the team in that one document.

#3: Slack

We’re all on Slack at least twice a day. We use a set of integrations to get real time updates about our system. And, of course, for 1-to-1 and group chat. We used to discuss bugs and features in Sendtask but then realized that sometimes these messages were forgotten because no one had put them on Sendtask as tasks. That’s why we built our Slack integration. With a very simple command (e.g. /sendtask @joe please prepare the report until Monday #sendtask) we are now able to create tasks directly from Slack.

#4: Appear.in

We hold one video call every week when the whole team gets together to update each other and discuss next steps. We use appear.in for these calls as it provides a very simple setup (no accounts, just like Sendtask) and great quality so far. Of course, there are plenty of alternatives when you talk to users and want to avoid hefty international call fees.

#5: Intercom

We use Intercom to talk to our users. Via the blue button in the bottom right corner, they have a very quick and easy way to talk to us and vice-versa – either while they use the app or via email when they’re not online.

Conclusions

I did not cover the tools we use for analytics and will cover those in another post. The five apps mentioned are in use almost every day, if not every hour and have been crucial in how we are able to build a distributed company.

What tools does your company use that might be helpful for us?

What You Should Do With A Task You Didn’t Get Done On Time

task

Articulate

Planning is an art. And more often than not, we tend to overestimate what we can get done in a day. It might be that some things take a bit longer than planned or that urgent matters come up last minute. But it’s only natural that some tasks will remain undone at the end of a work day.

What’s the right thing to do with these tasks?

#1: Update the due date

Every task on Sendtask comes with a due date field. The due date is crucial for multiple reasons:

Most of our users sort their ‘Tasks assigned to me’ view by due date. Meaning that a task that is due today shows up above one that is due in a few days. And thus those that are due sooner get more attention. A task without a due date may end up so far down the list that it is never seen.

If it’s a shared task, the due date communicates when you think you’ll get something done. If someone sends you a task, they might come back to it to check if you have already had time to get it done. An accurate due date helps them get that information at a glance – all without having to bother you to ask.

#2: Leave a comment

If you’re collaborating on this task with someone, leave a quick comment with a status update if you think that’s helpful for the others. You won’t disrupt their workflow with this – they get a summary email twice a day that covers all relevant comments. That’s a super convenient way to get them updated without interrupting their flow.

#3: Delegate

Some tasks stay on our list for way too long. Often it is because we need to ask someone for help or wait for someone to make the next step. In this case – just assign the task to them and ask them to re-assign it to you once they’ve done their part.

Bonus: Is the task really needed?

Sometimes it also helps to ask yourself if this task is really important. If not, go ahead and delete it.

How To Use Sendtask To Keep A List Of Writing Ideas

writing

About 30 days ago, I challenged myself to write every single day. Writing is
something I have always struggled with and I needed to find a way to make
writing easier for myself. I have since written an article, an interview or
other long form text every day.

Often, it is easy to come up with ideas but sometimes I don’t
know what I’ll write about immediately. For those moments, I keep a list of things I
want to write about on Sendtask. Sometimes, it’s a question that someone
has asked me. Other times, it’s an experience that I want to write about later.

In order to not forget about these, I’ve created a project named “#write”
on Sendtask. Because of our email integration, it’s really easy to add items
to the list while I’m on the go. All I have to do is send an email to ‘
task@sendtask.io’ and put my thoughts into the subject line, followed by
‘#write’. For example, for this article, I sent ‘How to use
sendtask to collect writing ideas #write’.

Similarly, I can add writing ideas to the list from Slack. Our team spends a lot of time in Slack. Being a distributed team, Slack is our equivalent of walking over to another desk and mentioning something. Naturally, a lot of my inspiration for writing comes up while I’m in Slack. We believe that one should be able to create tasks immediately from wherever one does a lot of their work. Thus we created our Slack integration. With a syntax that’s even simpler than the email syntax, one can create tasks right away via the /sendtask slash command. The above example would be: “/sendtask How to use sendtask to collect writing ideas #write’ – this will add the task to the #write project immediately.

Now, every day I don’t know what to write about I just pull up this list and
check what I’ve recently added.

Of course, you can use the same mechanic for another project – your grocery
list, a list of ideas for birthday presents and many more.

What kind of lists do you cultivate and what tool do you use for them?

This Is Why Your Agency Should Use Sendtask

agency

Hubspot

I started my first business when I was 14 years old. It was – and still is – an agency business. We started mediasign by building websites, designing logos and printing business cards for our clients.

I think everyone’s first business should be a service business. It allows you to make mistakes without ruining the whole company. Sure, you might lose an important client or two but a mistake won’t kill your business like it could kill a product business.

Working in a service business definitely has its perks – you get to know various companies, industries, and partners. We worked with more than 20 clients on average per year.

It’s in the nature of a service business that you get paid for your time. That’s why you want to work as efficiently as possible. Every hour you spend on a project but don’t get paid for is your loss and in fact lost revenue. Working on mediasign inspired us to build Sendtask. Because while there are many tools out there to work efficiently with your team, we couldn’t find a tool that allowed us to work efficiently with the three largest groups an agency is in contact with: your team, your clients, and your service providers.

Your team

Sendtask allows you to see who in your team is working on what and finishing when.
While there are many tools out there for team collaboration – Asana, Trello, Podio, Teamwork, to name a few – there are very few that allow you to work not only with your team but also the other two groups of partners you interact with.

Your clients

Sendtask does not require accounts. Your team can collaborate efficiently with your clients without having them register. This would have been huge for us – our consultants and project leads spent a good amount of their time chasing clients and reminding them of deliverables. With Sendtask, you can not only track who’s falling behind on a deadline but they will also get automatic reminders every day after the due date.

Your service providers

Especially when working with service providers, it’s crucial to be mindful not only of your own time but also theirs – because you’re paying them by the minute or hour. Sendtask allows you to set them up with an efficient workflow without having to spend time onboarding them first.

I wish we would have had a tool like Sendtask when we started mediasign. It would have saved us many tedious hours of reaching out to clients, reminding people on our team or coordination with service providers. That’s why we’ve decided to build it.

How To Get Your Team Onto Sendtask

team onto sendtask

Some of our users have asked us for tips on how to onboard the rest of their team. Here’s a best practice guide for how to onboard your team onto Sendtask:

#1. Motivation

Start with why you want your team to use Sendtask and move away from Email (or other non-task means of communication). 

Why will we use Sendtask for tasks instead of email going forward?
Some of the reasons that we frequently hear from our users are:

  • Tasks in emails can easily get lost within a conversation.
  • Tasks in emails aren’t trackable and there’s no way to see which tasks you’ve assigned to someone else.
  • It takes a lot of time and effort to update your collaborators if your schedule changes. You have to manually email them when the due date shifts. In Sendtask, this is taken care of as soon as you update the due date on a task.

Also, keep in mind that your teammates can still use email to create tasks on Sendtask through our email integration.

What are the alternatives to email?
Sendtask definitely isn’t the only alternative. But we think it’s the best mix of functionality, flexibility, and simplicity.

You could do with Post-Its but that becomes messy very fast and doesn’t allow you any kind of overview or automated communication.

You could also use very sophisticated project management tools like JIRA but there’s a very steep learning curve and everyone needs to have an account first.

We believe that Sendtask is the right mix of both worlds. It combines the simplicity of Post-Its with many of the features of more complex collaboration software.

#2. Functionality

Then, it’s best to give your teammates a tour of Sendtask’s features. If you’re ready to convince your team to use Sendtask, you probably know most of these. However, we’ve linked all of them to their page in our tour if you would like some additional reference.

The Layout

-The list view and task detail view
Filters and Sort options

Task Functionality

Sending and receiving tasks

The view for a received task for signed-in users and users without an account

Functionality and fields in the task detail view: Assignee, Due date, Comments, Attachments, Followers

Subtasks

Recurring due dates

Projects

Creating a project

Project Followers

Project Settings

We’ve seen that it is helpful to create a project together with your teammates during this session to give them a very clear idea of how projects work.

Miscellaneous

-Mobile App

Email integration

Slack integration

#3. Rules And Workflow

Now that your team knows why you are going to switch to Sendtask and how Sendtask works, there are two more important questions:

  1. What to use Sendtask for?
  2. How to use Sendtask?

What to use Sendtask for?

A lot of our users replace all email communication that calls for an action with Sendtask. They only allow communication via email that doesn’t expect a feedback. An example of this is “Please note that the elevator is being repainted today”. Everything else that expects an answer (“Can you please send that report?”, “Please let me know the dates you’ll be on holiday”, …) goes into Sendtask.

Our users tell us that it took them between two and three weeks to get everyone to switch to Sendtask but once they got used to it, everyone became more productive.

How to use Sendtask?

Sendtask is a tool and is flexible to adapt to your workflow. This framework is one example of how to use Sendtask. It’s in use successfully by many of our users:

  • Each task needs to have a due date and assignee set. If not, the task might get lost because it will not show up in anyone’s ‘Assigned To Me’ view.
  • At the end of the day, there should be no tasks left with overdue due dates. Everyone must change the due date of incomplete tasks to a realistic due date. This is important to give everyone an accurate idea of when they can expect feedback for their tasks.
  • If a task creator is likely to do something with the results of the task (e.g. they will further process a report they have asked for), then the task should not be completed by the assignee but it should be re-assigned to the task creator.

These three basic rules have helped many of our users to get very good visibility on their team’s progress.

#4. Q&A And Next Steps

We recommend that before you finish the meeting, you get everyone onboarded on Sendtask and exchange some tasks. Ask everyone to copy over their tasks from wherever they tracked them previously – could be from their inbox, a written note or other.

Clarify who the right contact to ask is for questions. Typically, questions about the workflow and how to use Sendtask will be answered by someone in your team. If questions about Sendtask in general arise or something doesn’t work the way it’s expected, use the blue Intercom button on our site or our Help pages to find answers.

We wish you good luck and a very productive meeting with your team! Let us know if you have amendments for this guide!

How To Use Sendtask With The SMART Framework

smart framework

The SMART framework is frequently mentioned in management literature. It’s a goal-setting framework used by organizations and individuals based on Peter Drucker’s concept of management by objectives. Often, the acronym stands for different things depending on the author. For our purposes, it stands for:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Action-oriented
  • Realistic
  • Time-bound

That’s how you should be able to define your goals and key objectives.

In this post, we’ll look at how you can utilize Sendtask to make the most out of the SMART framework (and vice-versa). If you’ve struggled with getting the right things done on time, this post will help you manage your time and goals better. We’ll look at five steps you can take today in order to reach your biggest objectives. Let’s dive in.

#1. Establish a specific goal or outcome

The first step you need to take when defining your goals or objectives is to determine your end destination. There are many ways to do this but one of the most efficient ones is visualization.

As the name suggests, visualization requires you to imagine where you or your organization stand some time in the future. A good way to make visualization easier is to write down the current state of affairs for a single or a number of different areas – either in your life or your business. This could be things like your Health or Profitability. Once you write down the current status for each area, ask yourself how you’d like this area to improve after a given amount of time. This could be a week, a month, a year or more, depending on the goal you’re after.

Once you have a clear vision of the outcome, make sure it’s something specific. For example, “Improve profitability” is a vague description of a goal. “Improve men’s bicycle margin by 10% before year-end” is a better example of a specific objective. It identifies a single area to focus on, provides a deadline and identifies a metric to keep an eye on.

Sendtask tip: Sections and Projects are a great way to set long-term goals for yourself or your organization. Short-term goals can normally be set using tasks. Learn more.

#2. Choose the one metric that matters

The one metric that matters (OMTM) is the “guiding star” of your objective. It’s a (usually) numeric expression of your concrete vision. From the example above, men’s bicycle margin is our OMTM.

Among other things, the OMTM helps you stay on focus and never lose sight of your goal. It also lets you track your progress against a benchmark which provides greater motivation. Having a series of little wins along the way to a bigger goal can be the difference between success and failure. The momentum gives you a great boost and makes hard times easier to handle.

So, how do you choose the OMTM? First, you need to take into account the context you operate in. This could be your industry if you run a business or it could be your life-stage if you want to change something personal. The OMTM can influence your end goal because you may find you were going after the wrong thing initially. This is why it’s important to remain flexible when setting goals and objectives. Think deeply about the OMTM before jumping into action as it may just save you a ton of time and resources.

Sendtask tip: When setting up high-level projects and sections, it’s a good idea to include the one metric that matters in the title. This way you will always have it in sight and stay on focus when creating tasks and subtasks. Learn more.

10% extra margin

#3. Make sure action steps are within your control

Even if you choose a specific and measurable goal, it’s easy to focus on an extrinsic goal. When you choose an extrinsic objective, often you don’t have enough control over the outcome. Going back to our bicycle example, if you’re the receptionist you will have little to no influence over sales margins.

Instead, you should only focus on goals you have control over. You need to be able to perform or control the action steps directly, without depending too much on external factors. For example, if your aim is to become a better programmer, an action oriented goal would be to spend 1 extra hours per day coding. That’s within your control and impacts your outcome directly.

Sendtask tip: If an end goal is dependent on many people, not just yourself, tasks and subtasks are a great way to delegate work. Even if the bigger objective is extrinsic, individual tasks or subtasks should be action-oriented. Learn more.

Subtasks-distributors

#4. Make sure the goal or outcome is realistic

Another mistake people often make is setting unrealistic goals. Sometimes, the timeframe is unattainable while other times the goal is beyond our current abilities. It’s important to make an objective evaluation of where you stand right now and where you want to go.

#5. Set a concrete deadline

Finally, if you want to get something done, make sure it’s on the calendar. A goal without a deadline is just a dream. A concrete date can push you so you don’t waste time and take consistent action.

When setting a goal deadline, allow yourself more time than you expect the goal to take. We tend to underestimate how much time or money projects will take so it’s always good to have a buffer. This will help prevent demoralization and it will give you something to look forward to.

Sendtask tip: It’s easy to set a due date in Sendtask. Some careful evaluation and a few clicks will let you make substantial progress with your goals. Learn more.

set deadline

Conclusion

It doesn’t matter if you’re a seasoned manager or someone who’s just getting into the productivity space – the SMART framework is always a good way to ensure you’re on track and achieving the right goals.

So the next time you step back to establish your new goals, spend that extra time and make your goal Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic, and Time-bound. The bigger the goal, the bigger your return on your time invested will be.

How We Came Up With The Idea For Sendtask

idea-sendtask

The idea for Sendtask developed over time. Here’s how it shifted into its current form.

The four (unconnected) dimensions of productivity apps

About two years ago I started thinking about my frustration with how unconnected my productivity apps are. I think most productivity tools can be attributed to one of four core categories: Communication, Scheduling, Tasks and Data storage. In each category, I use at least one tool. My productivity suite on my desktop looks like this:

Communication: Apple Mail, Whatsapp Web, Slack, Facebook Messenger
Scheduling: Google Calendar, Fantastical, Apple Calendar
Tasks: Asana, Trello, Text notes
Data Storage: Evernote, Google Drive, Dropbox

What frustrated me was how many manual interactions were needed between these apps. For example, when I received a task via email, I had to manually switch to Asana and create that task manually. Once that task was completed, I also had to manually go back and let people know that this was done. When I got an event invitation or agreed on a meeting time on Slack or Whatsapp, I had to manually go to my calendar, ask the other participants for their calendar emails to invite them and then send the invite. During the meeting, I had to manually create a Google Drive Document or Evernote and keep track of meeting notes. Then, I had to send out those minutes after the meeting.

Blacksteak

What frustrated me was that a) it seemed so simple to detect events and tasks in any of those channels; and b) that there’s no interface to create links and link objects. For example, if I could link the calendar event of a meeting with the corresponding meeting notes and the corresponding task list, I could avoid a lot of duplication. This way, if I were to go back to that meeting, it would be easy to find all connected parts. When I’m working on a task that came out of this meeting, I’d like to have a quick link to jump to the meeting notes. This way I don’t need to copy all the necessary info into the task. Once that task is completed, I’d like to have a quick way to inform the rest of the participants.

Out of this frustration grew an idea with project name «blacksteak». I’ve started to work on it myself and soon hired a developer to progress quicker. To show these links between all the apps, you have to integrate with all of them or re-create the UI. We opted for the 2nd route. 

Prototype and UI

project-blacksteakA screenshot of the Blacksteak UI

The prototype had a UI for an email client, its own calendar, online storage and a task list. The UI had a difference to all the clients that existed – it offered a ‘context sidebar’ on the right side. This sidebar served three purposes:

– It offered the user to create a new linked object. E.g. when you were looking at an email, it offered to create a related task. That task was automatically shared with all the people in the email with a link in both directions.
– It offered one-click creation of new items based on the content it recognized. If an email contained information about an event, the sidebar offered a way to create it with one click. Similarly, you could also invite the people who are in the email.
– It showed links to previously linked items. If you created the task and the event mentioned in the examples above, you had a one-click link to them.

The prototype was already useful to me but it lacked a lot of the functionality that a user expects. We could have added some of it but often it was not available via some the products’ API. Also, going the Interface route meant that we had to champion in at least four productivity interfaces where large corporations (think Apple, Google and Facebook) have impressive teams working on getting just one of them right.

Undoubtedly there was also a benefit of having all four dimensions in the same UI – the same shortcuts, the same button placement and other standardization meant that a user only had to learn one interface instead of four or more separate ones.

Testing with users

We started to show our prototype to test users and got very mixed feedback. Some of them saw the long term benefits and would have given the app a try once we added more functionality s.t. it could replace 80% of their existing app’s feature set. Others didn’t see big enough of a pain point with their current setup. Yes, they were doing all these manual steps, but they had always done it this way and got used to it. It didn’t seem like a big problem to them.

However, one thing was common for all their feedback: They all liked our task manager and the idea that they could share tasks instead of emails with anyone. We had built a very simplistic version because we realized that Trello, Asana, Podio, and the likes didn’t offer a way to share a task with anyone via email. Users always needed to create an account first before they were able to receive tasks. That didn’t work for us of course because we wanted people to be able to create and share tasks via a one-click action from the sidebar. If you first had to convince your collaborators to create an account with one of the aforementioned products and then to go through some training to know how to use these tools, we knew it wouldn’t work.

Sendtask was born

This is where the core idea for Sendtask came from. I have been an early user of Asana, Trello and others. Tool like these made our internal workflows at mediasign much more efficient. But I couldn’t use these tools with our clients or some 3rd party providers like lawyers, accountants, etc. – I would always revert to my ‘old habits’ (read: email) when working with people outside our own team.

We spent a good amount of time researching the market because we were sure that someone must have built a tool that does this. The solution seemed obvious to us: Build a tool with a more simple interface that doesn’t need any explanation. Also, allow users without an account to authenticate via a link that they receive in the email that notifies them about the task.

We couldn’t find a tool that did this in a clean and simple way and decided to go ahead and build it ourselves. Most of our test users liked the idea and we realized that this was a larger pain point for them. This is how we decided to focus on just one feature of project «blacksteak» and how Sendtask was born.

How We Keep Everyone Aligned With Just One 60 Minute Weekly Call

weekly-call-phone

At Sendtask, we are a completely virtual company. There are no two people in the same place or office. We only talk to one another once a week – for less than 60 minutes. We are very strict about that limit and often keep the weekly call to 45 minutes or less.

Every Wednesday we all get on a synchronous video call on appear.in to discuss the topics that need to be discussed synchronously with the group as a whole.

Why do we limit the time we talk to each other to as little as possible?

We are building a company that allows everyone to work when they are most productive. And take time off when they’re not. Also, we build a tool that allows people to work together without friction in a mostly asynchronous way. We have that vision embedded in our company culture and naturally get as much done in an asynchronous fashion through Sendtask as possible.

Also, we are going to grow quite a bit in team size over the next few months and in anticipation of that, we want processes that scale well. Finding a 45’ minute spot once a week is considerably easier than finding several or much longer ones – especially as people work from many different time zones.

What happens on the weekly call?

Even more important than what happens on the call is what happens before the call. Until the evening before the call, everyone leaves their update on Slack. The update consists of three parts: What have I accomplished last week? What am I working on the coming week? What would I like to talk about?

Before the call, everyone has read everyone else’s update and there’s no need for us to update each other on what we’ve worked on and what we’re going to work on. The third question is important though and an integral part of what we do on the call.

1. The one-word open

We start the call with the ‘one word open’, a technique we borrowed from EO (Entrepreneur’s Organization). Instead of just asking everyone how they’re doing (their answer would usually be ‘good’ and not tell much), we each state the predominant feeling at that point. It could be ‘calm’, ‘tired’, ‘excited’ or any other feeling. We’ve found this to be very powerful as it allows to immediately connect with each other in very little time. If someone is not doing well, we clarify if it has anything to do with the team and/or if the team can help. Especially in a remote setup, it is important to be aware of everyone’s state of mind.

2. Talking points

We then go through the topics that people listed under ‘What would I like to talk about?’. These are typically things that need group consensus and are not easy to discuss via Slack – because they require demos or an extra level of creativity for example. The topics range from ‘I need feedback on the screen designs’ to ‘What do you guys think I should focus on between a, b and c?’.

3. User feedback

The third part of our call is someone presenting their learnings from onboarding a new user. Every week someone onboards a new user to Sendtask and interviews them about their three most positive and three most negative impressions in the process. It is paramount for us to provide a great user experience where our users immediately and intuitively understand what they can do with Sendtask and how. This is why a) we want everyone in the company to be confronted with that process on a regular basis and b) want everyone in the team to hear about what we do well and what we do poorly.

4. The weekly riddle

The fourth part is fun – it’s our weekly riddle. Similar to the feedback on the onboarding experience, we also have another person each week preparing a riddle for the group. We all love riddles and logical challenges and this part of the call is more of a reward and group fun activity. It’s something we all look forward to and preparing the riddle is as fun as solving it. We try to find tough riddles to really make the team think. This is not easy nowadays as we’ve gotten quite used to a lot of different types of riddles. Next week will be my turn and the solution to my riddle will be the destination of our next retreat – which we’ll fly out to the day after.

5. The one-word close

We end the call with the ‘one-word close’ which is very similar to the ‘one-word open’. We go around and everyone shares how they feel.

Conclusions

When we started Sendtask we did not think that 45-60 minutes per week would be enough time to update each other and discuss the topics that need to be discussed in a synchronous fashion. However, we quickly learned that we can boil down the topics that we discuss during the call to the most important ones and with good preparation, we can discuss all those, have some fun with our weekly riddle and still sometimes be done in no more than 45 minutes.

How often does your team meet and how long do your company-wide meetings typically take? Are there any important agenda items we forgot?

Four Reasons Why We Work Remotely

work-remotely-sendtask

When we started Sendtask, we made a conscious decision not to have a traditional office. Our team is spread across 7 different countries. And we only speak to each other once a week – for no more than sixty minutes. These are the reasons why this setup resonated with us:

Focus on the important vs the urgent

Being in a distributed setup often allows us to work on the important things versus the urgent. In a traditional office setting, it’s easy for a colleague to come over, tap you on the shoulder and ask questions. In a distributed setup, it’s not as easy. Sometimes, this means that it will take you a bit longer to figure out something. But what we’ve seen is that over time, everyone becomes better at helping themselves, reading documentation and figuring stuff out on their own. And if a problem just seems too complicated, the colleague is never more than a phone call away.

Less distraction

It’s very easy to get distracted, especially in an open space office. You hear the sales people talk, there’s a meeting in the room next to you…the potential distractions are endless. This is the main reason why a lot of developers wear headphones in a traditional setup. They come to an office and virtually remove themselves from it by wearing headphones. This never made sense to me and our distributed setup has proven to be very low on noise. While we use Slack for all our communication, we don’t even require you to be online constantly. It’s ok to check Slack 2-3 times a day. If there’s something urgent, we’ll find a way to reach the team member (Whatsapp, Skype, Phone Call) but those emergencies are rare. Less noise has made us a lot more productive and allowed us to be in a flow state for extended periods.

Everyone can be productive on their own schedule

One thing that was challenging for me when I was a developer were office hours. One day I felt productive from 7 am early afternoon and the other day it was from 1 pm until late night. One thing was certain: It was very rarely 8am-5pm. Very often I was sitting in the office, trying to get work done but just couldn’t. And then I would go home and feel productive but was tired from already spending the day at the office.

In our distributed setup, we allow everyone to work on their own schedule. Not just the hours of the day, also the days of the week. If you don’t feel productive or have something more fun to do on a Tuesday – go do that. Feel productive and have a good idea for how to solve a certain problem on Saturday – why not solve it then and there?

We only have one synchronous meeting per week – every Wednesday at 2pm-3pm CET we update each other and check in on topics that should be discussed with the whole team.

When we do get together, it’s extra fun

All of that is not to say that working remotely doesn’t have its downsides. The biggest one being that you don’t get to spend a lot of face time with the people you work with. I’ve caught myself using the term ‘team crush’ lately and it adequately describes how I feel about this team. We assembled a pretty amazing team and I often wish I could just walk over and chat about life, alien movies and whiskey.

We deal with this by bringing everyone together four times a year for a week of fun and work. This is when we work on long time topics – our roadmap, vision, processes, and ideas. And we take a good part of the day off to have some fun together. On our last retreat, we went to Gran Canaria and went hiking, surfing and escape rooms. Next week we’re headed to our next retreat and we have another set of experiences planned. But that’s for another post.

Conclusion

We came up with the idea of setting up Sendtask as a remote company because we were frustrated with certain aspects of working together in a traditional office setup in past companies. Working in a distributed fashion helps us focus on the important vs. the urgent, reduce a lot of the noise that comes with a traditional setup and allows everyone on the team to work when they feel most productive. Still, we’re looking forward to seeing each other in real life and we bring everyone to the same location for a retreat four times a year where we make the most of the time together.

What’s your setup? Have you ever thought about going to a remote setup?