Virtual Workplace Basics

Introduction

CivicActions employees live all over the US and beyond. We work out of home offices in Oakland, New York and Toledo, Spain – with clients from around the globe.

This means our project teams are made up entirely of distributed employees. Below are some tips and strategies we've developed to stay connected and productive when working remotely.

For additional tips, check out this blog post by Alaine Karoleff: Working in a Distributed Team Environment.

Starting and Ending a Day with a Remote Team

When beginning your work day:

  • Open Slack so your teammates can see that you are online and available. If you'd like, say good morning or "hello" in the #general channel when you log in.
  • Check your CivicActions email and calendar for updates.
  • Open Harvest so you remember to log your hours.

When ending your work day:

  • Let your (project) team know that you're heading offline and ensure that no one needs your input before you go.
  • Close Slack so that you don't appear to be online when you're not.
  • Log your hours for the day in Harvest every day

Communication Best Practices

  • Err on the side of over-communication. Proactive over-communication is better than under-communication, especially when you are working with a distributed team. It's good practice to share short updates on the progress of your work throughout the day. Ask questions and reach out, especially during training.

  • Assume team members are working asynchronously. We use the chat program Slack for most communications. This ensures that all of our communication is documented, organized by channel, and easily searchable at a later time. See Basic Communication tools for related best practices.

  • Use email for more formal communication. In some cases, email may be a more appropriate communication channel than Slack; see Basic Communication tools for more information about email best practices.

  • Follow the 30-minute rule. We encourage engineers to follow a 30-minute rule when working on a technical challenge: don't spend more than 30 minutes banging your head against the wall on an issue - if you're blocked, reach out to members of your team, or ping #engineering.

Talking Timezones

As a company, we usually reference time using Pacific Standard Time (PST, or PT for short). If you're chatting with your whole team or even just a few members, it's best practice to reference time in PT.

There are some cases in which we reference other time zones, usually because of a client's location. In these cases we may refer to meeting times in ET and PT. We may say something like, "The scrum call is at 9:00PT/12:00ET."

When in doubt use both PT & ET and make sure you're clarifying the timezone when you mention time!

  • PT: Pacific Time
  • MT: Mountain Time
  • CT: Central Time
  • ET: Eastern Time

Virtual Workspaces

Team members share images and tips about our virtual workplaces in Our Workspaces. Join the board, have a look around, and consider adding your own cards and photos.