CommonWealth Magazine | Going Remote: A Playbook for Success From A Taipei CEO
By Weiting Liu
If you’re struggling with the decision to let your office-based employees work from home right now, the answer is simple: you should.
Right now, if your team does their work on computers, you’re lucky: they have the option to work from anywhere if given the right tools and management support. This also helps limit people moving around the city during the pandemic.
My company, Arc and Codementor, began experimenting with optional remote work in 2019 from our Taipei office. By 2020, we had transitioned to being a remote-first company (our processes and tools are optimized to make team location irrelevant).
The best part? Going remote was far easier than we expected. We overcame our initial anxieties about it while experiencing benefits like stronger talent retention, continued growth (our team has doubled!), and seamless business continuity.
If you’re ready to go remote and help your team work from home more effectively, here’s how to transition smoothly.
The basics of going remote (in a hurry)
Make the decision
Announce the decision and ask everyone to be patient with the upcoming changes. If possible, prepare some FAQs in advance to help ease your team’s anxieties.
Understand that they are also struggling with many new stresses at the moment, including COVID, possibly teaching children, and potentially other people in their house also working from home. This isn’t “normal work from home.” Right now, this is “COVID work from home.”
Ensure people have equipment
Everyone will need, at minimum, a desk and chair, a computer, a headset, and fast internet. You may need to circulate e.g. a Google Sheet for people to fill in anything they’re missing.
If you have location-limited networks, etc, ensure that people will have secure virtual access to these too. Now is also a good time to review any relevant policies.
Select your software
Working remotely means managing and communicating remotely. Fortunately, there’s now lots of great software. At minimum, you’ll need a tool for:
- Project management, so people can check the status of tasks. We primarily use Notion, Trello, and Asana, as well as software developer-specific tools like Github.
- Messaging/chat, such as Slack or Microsoft Teams.
- Video conferencing, such as Zoom, Google Meet, or Around.
- Document-sharing (more on this below).
Start digitizing information
When working remotely, people need to be able to access the company’s documents entirely from the cloud. If you’re currently a paper-based company, it’s time to start digitizing.
Prioritize the documents and notes people need immediately — scan necessary documents and take photos of any information that can’t be scanned (e.g. whiteboards). Upload these to a shared online drive.
Announce where and how these digitized documents are being stored (once you have time to sort through them!). We primarily use:
- Google Workspace (cloud-based documents and spreadsheets)
- Notion (for policies and teamwork)
Your team will need to ensure that document sharing permissions within the company are turned on.
Managing your now-remote team
How do you manage people you can’t see? Are they even working?
It’s time to update both your mindset and your practices. Here are some tips for success.
Experiment with team collaboration
Remote work is still fairly new, so best practices often change. Be flexible as you develop new processes, and let your team find new ways to collaborate well.
We also use emoji reactions to make our intentions explicit on Slack. For example, we add an eyeball emoji to show we’ve read a message and are working on it, and add a check mark emoji when you’re done. This way, expectations and progress are clear for the person on the other end.