will zuhause bleiben
how willhaben tech staff deals with working from home during the corona crisis
It has been more than two weeks since the Austrian government imposed restrictions on our daily lives to stop the exponential growth of the number of people infected with the novel coronavirus. Since that day, all of willhaben’s tech staff works from home. While willhaben is in the fortunate position that all our products are online and therefore not directly affected by the forced closing down of stores, cafés and restaurants in Austria, sending everyone home to work remotely from one day to the next has big implications for how we work. This is true especially for a company like willhaben that values a corporate culture based on teamwork, direct person-to-person communication, resolving problems together rather than individually and, last but not least, spending coffee and lunch breaks with colleagues.
In this blog post, we want to share some recipes, habits, tips and tricks that we have observed over the past few days that help keep in touch with colleagues and keep morale high during extended periods of working from home.
Have lunch and coffee breaks together
Just as our normal workday does not only consist of work, but also of lunch and coffee breaks with your colleagues, many teams have these “informal meetings” with various online tools.
It’s important not to forgo breaks as they help structure your work day and keep productivity high. Days can look very monotone in longer periods of working from home if no breaks or regular working hours are observed. If you can’t just walk to the coffee machine in the office to have a chat with a college, have it online! One team, for example, has set a fixed time each day where everyone gets some coffee or tea and joins a channel in slack to have a chat together.
Another team has lunch together, and even when eating in front of a screen might sound weird at first, the participants are looking forward to having a meal with their colleagues this way every day.
Create “public spaces”
Video conferences are the equivalent of meetings to discuss one particular topic. But much of our work at willhaben also lives on random encounters in the hall where many work-related problems are discussed and solved.
These public spaces are a bit harder to create online, but it is possible. At willhaben we currently use a discord channel, a tool normally used by gamers, to simulate our hall in the office. Anyone can join, there is no agenda set and no specific topic to discuss. People meet and say “hi”, ask about how their day was and, of course, also discuss work and their current obstacles, professional and private ones.
Many people are stuck at home alone, and these open virtual spaces might be the only interaction they have except for attending regular meetings.
Observe rituals
There are many formal and informal rituals teams have in the office, some of them can be transferred to working from home, new ones are created.
At willhaben, we usually have a monthly breakfast with the whole staff, which of course was cancelled. However, one employee brought up the idea that on the set date for our breakfast, we would share pictures of our home-made breakfasts instead.
Another team relaxes some of the rules of the daily standup, so that team members can also share something personal during their turn.
Pair programming, reviewing and testing
Already an established practise at willhaben, pair programming and testing becomes more and more important. Both techniques have proven to work very well for knowledge sharing and taking ownership of code that the team has to work with. Having direct social interaction with your colleagues that we all long for these days, is an additional benefit of these practises.
From personal experience, I found pair reviewing especially valuable. Instead of doing code reviews on my own, the author walks you through his or her work. Discussing changes and improvements is part of the process and feedback can be given immediately.
Large scale meetings
Since we all started working from home, we already held some larger scale meetings with an audience of more than 50 persons. Basically, we’ve established two methods. Pre-recorded presentations and live sessions. These meetings bring their own set of challenges, but the pros and cons of each method are obvious.
Pre-recorded presentations can be viewed by everyone when it fits their personal schedule and questions can be handled afterwards — either asynchronously or in smaller groups. The biggest drawback of this method is the lack of live interactivity. On the plus side, you don’t need a steady connection to view the video. We’ve seen this method work well for general announcements and status updates.
When a little more interactivity is needed, we’ve also held live meetings with audiences well above 50 persons. Besides the usual meeting etiquette, such as being on time, everybody has to mute their microphones. Luckily, most video conferencing software allows the host to mute all other participants, in case someone forgets about this rule. To address questions from the audience, we experienced good results with live feedback tools, that allows the participants to enter questions and their peers to up- and downvote them in real time. This gives the presenters the opportunity to address the most upvoted questions live in front of the audience, while answering the rest later in written form.
Schedule your work day
Last but not least, it is important to have a regular work schedule. It is tempting to just start and stop working as you please when you don’t have to leave the flat, house or, in some cases even the room to go to work.
Some teams have developed the habit of telling all co-workers via chat message when they start and stop working, when they are leaving for the day or weekend. This is not to track their time, but just to know who is “here” and who is already gone for the day.
#stayathome
Working at home is a small contribution to the goal to stop the spread of the virus. Nurses, doctors, supermarket cashiers, bus and truck drivers, just to name a few, whose work is essential, home office is not an option. Remembering why we stay at home can help to cope better with monotonous days and cabin fever.
Thanks to Michael Osl for writing the paragraph about “large scale meetings” and Adrian Bolonio for the beautiful “work day schedule” graphic which replaced my own ugly one ;-)
