Hybrid Work Guide

HYBRID WORK GUIDE

REMOTE-FIRST APPROACH The remote first approach means that you should treat all members of your team as if they were working remotely, regardless of whether they’re in the office or not. A few quick tips for taking a remote first approach are: • Treat all of your team the same regardless of where they are working from.

• Be proactive about communication with all team members, and encourage them to do the same with one another.

• Communicate any important information on remote platforms (Slack or email) first, before making any announcements in person.

• Make sure that your meetings have the capacity for remote-dialins.

Prefered communication Channels Everyone has their own preferred methods of communication, however to create some consistency within RemoteTechPeople, we have this basic guide:

A Direct Slack Message Quick questions for specific people that should take a few minutes at most to answer

Hybrid Meetings Every meeting you create should have a remotefirst approach in mind. This is often as simple as including an element of video conferencing, and thinking through how all members of the meeting can get involved.

When responding to a meeting invite, Google Calendars now allows you to indicate whether you’ll be attending in person or online by toggling the arrow next to the “Yes” response:

A Slack Post Any general questions that aren’t urgent should be posted in an appropriate Slack channel, so everyone can interact and share answers.

A phone call Phone calls should be used when you have an urgent or important question or message

Email Message Help ease the stress of overflowing inboxes.

Projects requiring feedback, client communications, and work formalities should be sent via email.

This is a quick and easy way to give the organiser of the meeting a heads up of your joining style, allowing them to plan more appropriately.

If you’re the organiser of the meeting, consider creating points in which to actively ask the online participants for their opinions and thoughts. It’s often much harder to join in the conversation when most people are in the room and you’re online, so being purposeful about making the remote team members feel included is important. This usually works best if you acknowledge the people dialling in remotely first before the people in the room, so they feel engaged immediately.

DAYS IN THE OFFICE We trust you to choose when you’d like to work from the office, and when you’d like to work from home. There’s no fixed number of days you are required to be onsite, however Tuesdays are a big meeting day where most people will likely be in if you’d like to commit to coming in on a particular day.

3 DAYS OFFICE, 2 DAYS REMOTE

was the most popular choice for our team, but they’re welcome to find a schedule that works for them.

Letting the team know where you are While we have flexible work arrangements, it’s important that the rest of the team knows where you are on any given day. To allow everyone to have visibility over whether you’re in the office or at home each day, you can simply set your Slack status accordingly. That way you can tell at a glance where everyone is.

TOOLS TO MAXIMIZE YOUR HYBRID WORK

Hour of Power

Huddles

The concept behind an hour of power is to give yourself the space and time to deeply focus on work. It’s an hour without distractions, where you can get stuff done. You may like to have a specific time for your hour of power on a weekly schedule, or you may prefer to implement hours of power as needed when work starts to get full on.

Huddles are voice chats that are perfect for quick collaboration when everyone can’t be in the same room.

Starting a huddle in a chat, group message or channel in Slack will turn on your microphone so that anyone who joins the huddle can hear you and vice versa. Huddles also allow you to share your screen and write on others screens too.

To ensure you have space to focus in your hour of power, you can snooze your Slack notifications for an hour:

People in the chat, group message or channel can leave and join the Huddle as needed too, making it easy to collaborate on the fly.

No Meeting Day No meeting day is relatively selfexplanatory. It’s ideal to have days that you know are free for interviews and deep focus work, and having a no meetings day helps create space for that.

Meeting Day

Then set your status to let the team know you’ve entered the focus zone.

You may also want to block the time out in your calendar too.

Meeting day is the other side of the coin to no meeting day. It’s a preferential day in which it’s best to schedule meetings so it’s possible to have a focused time and space for collaboration. For RemoteTechPeople, our meeting day is preferentially Tuesdays.

WHAT DOES SUCCESS LOOK LIKE FOR US? We want you to feel like you can find your own balance between collaborating in the office and focusing at home.

Our three main metrics for success are:

Productivity

Collaboration

Wellbeing

through anywhere, anytime work and collaboration

equity across all hybrid work touchpoints and between team members

through strengthened social connections, team culture, and a healthy work-life blend

If you have any suggestions, thoughts or feedback on how we’re going in reaching those goals, please feel free to reach out to us at any time, we value your feedback!