💻 Remote Work vs In-Office Work. What’s best?

Lessons from someone who played both games

You don’t play tennis with the rules of basketball, do you?

Yet you are working remotely with the rules of in-office work. Or vice-versa.

I was a fully remote worker for over a year. That meant I was out of commuting distance and coming only when asked for (2-3 days every 3-6 months)

Then Amazon announced the RTO (Return-To-Office) and I decided to move again and go back to work in-office.

This post is not about arguing one is better than the other.

What I want is for you to find the benefits in your modality of work.

⭐ In this post, you’ll learn:

• The benefits of each work modality

• Practical strategies for both remote and in-office work

• The risks of having a hybrid model

👛🛖 Remote work benefits

#1 More focus, less distractions

This impacts the quality of your deliverables. Just because you go deeper in your work, you can deliver better artifacts.

Even if your work depends on others, in big companies, you’ll depend more on people outside your team. Set up a predictable communication approach rather than improvising.

#2 More time in your day

No commute. No time lost finding a meeting room in an office or finding a spot to have lunch.

You can use this extra time for your priorities. For some, it’ll be working on initiatives for your growth. For others, it’ll be personal life.

#3 More flexibility

This depends on your job. Find an agreement on which hours are you expected to be available and overlap with your team.

Many people work their 8 hours in a different schedule than the nine to five. You may pick up your kids from school or go to the gym on a longer lunch break.

🎲🛖 Rules of the game of remote work

#1 Manage your visibility

You also manage your visibility working in-office. But remote, it’s twice as important.

People won’t know your progress unless you provide clear standup updates.

Develop the self-awareness to know when you are blocked and apply the strategies in 🦆 Are you blocked? (And how to unblock yourself).

#2 Set expectations on asynchronous messaging

You think you must answer fast so people see you are working and not on the sofa.

That’s exactly the distraction preventing you from focusing.

Batch your communications. The only synchronous communication is meetings.

#3 Ask questions the right way

In-person, a casual sync can conclude super quickly.

But being remote, the closest is a meeting and still has more friction.

Leverage well-asked questions: Give context, share your progress and blockers, and share what you’ll do as the next step.

The other person will answer you in a single response, validating your approach or pointing to new information.

#4 Be intentional in connecting with people

With your managers, in most companies it’s the default to have 1:1s. But when you are remote, leverage recurring 1:1 meetings with your peers too.

If I were starting over again, when I was remote I’d set a recurring 1:1 meeting with one or two of the most tenured engineers in my team.

Setting 1:1s with everyone doesn’t scale for engineers. Create room for a casual meeting. For example, playing online games every Thursday/Friday afternoon.

#5 Look for opportunities to meet in person

Working fully remotely is much easier if you have met these people in person before.

Body language and voice make up most of the communication. Don’t be forever someone behind a screen.

Consider this even if you prefer people leave you alone. I thought the same but I always enjoyed meeting people in person. There’s resistance to changing your situation because it has momentum.

👛🏢 Working in the office benefits

#1 Unblock situations with a quick chat

You could spend an hour investigating how to answer a question someone made, creating a document, sharing it for review…

Or you could quickly chat with that person to understand what’s the intention of their question.

Most of the time, we misinterpret text messages. If this also happens to you, use conventional comments. Express explicitly the intention of your comment.

#2 Discover your surroundings

You have regular meetings with your team. But in an office, there are other teams whose work doesn’t overlap with yours.

Yet, the connection with them can be valuable for collaboration on engineering programs and tooling.

I just discovered an A/B testing tool the team next to me was working on. How did I find out? Talking with someone from that team on our way to having lunch.

#3 Break the ice before it freezes

It’s harder to ask for support from people you don’t interact with.

Just a “good morning” when you walk into the office is breaking the ice.

In-person, it’s easy to maintain relationships warm.

#4 Time outside and a separation between work and life

When working remotely we all should spend time outside, take breaks… That’s hard because it’s not forced.

Commuting forces a change in scenery, and some fresh air even if you are not walking all the way.

It also puts a boundary between work and life. Even if you do more work in the evening at home, the intensity is different.

🎲🏢 Rules of the game of in-office work

#1 Create a cultural agreement around interruptions

Your peer being next to you doesn’t give you the right to interrupt them.

A good agreement is having to ask in Slack before talking in person.

If your peer wants to focus, they’ll put an emoji in Slack or just mute notifications for a while.

But they can’t turn off your voice if you talk directly

#2 Create a strong network of connections to find what you need

When working remotely, you are doing most of the work yourself. This includes the initial investigations, discovering your options…

In person, you can connect with people and soundboard your ideas as part of your initial investigations.

Later, your actions are more focused in one direction after an initial screening.

#3 Find depth moments

As knowledge workers, we need depth of focus. complex problems are not solved by talking forever.

Most of your meetings have a recurring schedule, and the middle of the day is unpredictable.

It’s typical not to have meetings during the first hour of the day. That’s the moment to “eat your frog” working on your most important task

A good tip is to start an hour earlier in the morning to get even more focused time. This doesn’t mean working extra hours if you can negotiate finishing one hour earlier.

🎯 A final note: Hybrid sucks

I mentioned I came back to in-office work with Amazon’s RTO.

Most people weren’t fully remote like I was. This means for some time, they were in-office regularly and I was not.

Having part of the team discussing things in an office and some people fully remote is tricky.

You’d need to work with the communications mechanisms of a fully remote team. But those mechanisms introduce friction for the people in office.

The outcome is usually a loss of visibility between them.

I like the “hybrid” modality of going to the office a few days a week and working from home with the others. This allows teams to plan which days they want to meet in person and which days they are all acting like a fully remote team.

👏 Weekly applause

This is a list of good resources I went through this week:

• Should you Stay Technical as an Engineering Manager? by

  The Hybrid Hacker
  The distinction between hands-on work and staying technical is worth sharing, The line can be blurry for most people.

• What I learned from the book Software Architecture: The Hard Parts by

  Tech World With Milan Newsletter
  Before diving into a thick book, read a summary. This is the entry-point to know if the book is for you or not. I read this one in particular when it was too advanced for me. I would have benefited from strategizing better my reading like Raviraj mentions here

• Leaders: How to Coach Engineers to be Great Mentors by

  Techlead Mentor
  Mentoring is something you can train, and teach. If you want to become a better mentor, read this post. If you want to mentor others so they become better mentors, read it as well.

• 2024 Guide to Mentoring for Software Engineers by

  High Growth Engineer
  Amazing post to know how to provide value as a mentor. You provide value 1) by example 2) by listening first and only later giving a recommendation. Don’t impose your ways

• Leverage Fast Feedback by

  Developing Skills
  . This is exactly what the leadership principle bias for action is about. It’s not shutting down your brain and acting crazily, but reduce reduce the feedback loops.

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