Go The Distance: Slack Tips For Remote And Distributed Workers
Today, many of these far-flung colleagues are working together in Slack. With a few extra considerations, however, remote teammates can not only collaborate, but shorten the distance between them too.
The importance of trust and visibility
After talking to dozens of people in different industries about how they use Slack across distances, the topic of trust came up early and often in our conversations. Working with remote or distributed colleagues requires trust and creative thinking from all parties.
In the previous century, managers could track how many hours their employees sat at an office desk near them. Today, those metrics could be replaced by lines of code written, number of help tickets resolved, or number of pieces produced, but it's important to figure out ways to accurately and fairly measure the effectiveness of employees, regardless of their location.
For this reason, visibility is a key aspect Slack can provide to distributed teams. A well-organized, transparent Slack team with channels arranged by topic and projects makes it easier to see everyone's output, even those far from headquarters. When remote workers post as often to Slack as their onsite counterparts, chances are they're being just as productive.
Slack integrations can also help promote visibility among your remote and distributed employees:
- Programming tools like Github and Jira let engineering managers see the output of all their developers, wherever they may be.
- File and document apps like Google Drive and Dropbox let marketing teams keep tabs on everyone's work.
- For those in customer support, tools like Zendesk and Intercom can report into relevant Slack channels, letting managers see how well their help center team is faring around the globe.
Meanwhile, things like daily stand-up meetings can give every member of a team visibility and take place entirely in Slack.
Shortening distances with video
Every remote and distributed worker we interviewed relies heavily on video conferencing to maintain face-to-face connections with their team. Slack comes with its own built-in audio and video features. If your team prefers other tools, there are apps available from popular services like Zoom, Google Hangouts, and BlueJeans that also make it easy to start a video conference from Slack whenever you need one.
Screen-sharing is another aspect of Slack's own video conferencing feature worth noting. You can share your screen with others on a video call and allow them to either draw on your screen or enable a cooperative mode in which other people on a call can move their mouse around and interact with your shared screen. This feature is key for things like pair programming, when two people in different locations collaborate inside a single screen, writing software code together interactively.
Help your team connect
User profiles can help employees get to know one another, and once customized for your team, you can share location, languages spoken, current time zone, and direct reports below and managers above, as well as topics of expertise and other relevant personal details.
All this information is handy when you're doing cross-functional work with people you don't interact with daily, but it's especially the case for those working from afar. It helps them figure out the best time to schedule meetings and with whom, and even learn how to pronounce names correctly before the next company-wide event.
For distributed teams, time zones can be both an advantage and a challenge. In Slack, you may want to denote which channels are shared across distributed teams and set expectations that conversations are asynchronous—answers to questions may take longer to appear as offices come online at different times of day. Stating it clearly in the channel topic and purpose fields is a great way to communicate channel rules to your team. Some teams find that having offices post end-of-day summaries helps distributed teams catch up on activity as they get started each morning.
Teams may also want to set expectations around offline discussions that others might have missed—say, a discussion summarized and posted in a team channel after a few members had an epiphany over lunch, or ideas arising from hallway conversations posted into relevant channels. Both are great ways to create a culture of transparency and sharing that's more inclusive for everyone on the team.
Set expectations around offline discussions that others might have missed.
It's important that we not forget the power of a direct message over long distances. For each time you might think, I should pop by my coworker's desk and ask him about this when you're the same office, you can easily send a DM with your question instead if he happens to be far away. For managers and their direct reports, a DM also provides a quick method of private communication without the formality or structure of email.
Helping remote teammates helps all teammates
Optimizing Slack for workers near and far certainly helps those who work in different locations, but it can benefit everyone. Using Slack in this way means that parents with a sick child can work from home smoothly. If a manager needs time to recuperate after a broken ankle, she can stay home but continue to easily keep tabs on her team. If someone in your workforce has a disability that prevents him from being in an office space, Slack can offer a way to keep him productive and connected to everyone.
A culture of openness, transparency, and public discussions taking place in Slack is going to result in a good team culture at any company, but it's also a key to remote and distributed workers feeling like equal members of your team.
Lessons Learned From Working Remotely As An Accountant
When I first looked at the possibility of finding an accounting job I could do remotely, the odds didn't look too good. Most of the accounting jobs that were open to remote work were tax-related, which didn't align with my current accounting experience and was not the type of job I was interested in. Considering the amount of paperwork staff accountants typically deal with and how closely I worked with others at my in-office job, I figured accounting was out of the question when it came to working remotely.
Fast forward to a few years later…I came across a job opening at Zapier, a 100% distributed company, for an accountant role and knew I had to go for it! I had already set up an office at home that was a happy environment that I was ready to use. I also saw other benefits of being able to work remotely other than utilize my new happy space:
- Save time and money by removing the commuting portion of my day: over 13 hours a month on time and $80 a month on my gas and even auto insurance (since I was using my car less, my auto insurer lowered my rate).
- Reduce my carbon footprint by at least 2.3 metric tons of CO2 a year!
- A chance to benefit my health and well-being. Working from home allows me to make healthier meal choices, work in a cleaner office environment (and I get to control the thermostat!), and use my commuting time to jump on the treadmill every once in a while.
- The ability to work from anywhere such as coffee shops, co-working spaces, or visiting friends and family.
I was nervous at first since I didn't know what to expect. How would an accounting position work in a remote world and how easy would it be to balance my work and home life, since my home was now also my work? Now that I'm six months in, the transition from working in such a paper-heavy environment to a practically paper-free one was easier than I thought. It ispossible to have a role that's not traditionally remote-friendly and still thrive.
Working Remotely as an Accountant: Lessons Learned
Meetings: When I worked in an office, I sat through many meetings that were either scheduled or impromptu, and there's nothing different in a remote setting other than it's via video conferencing. (Well maybe that and the elimination of having to find a conference room that hasn't already been booked.) It's just as easy to have impromptu meetings here at Zapier as it would be in any office. Spin up a Zoom meeting and share the link in your Slack channel and you can have that same sort of spur of the moment meetings, as long as all the participants are online at the same time.
Communication and water cooler moments: Communication is key when it comes to working on a remote accounting team. In my past experiences in working in an office, I would find out information from just hearing other conversations happening around me that gave me context of what was happening with the rest of the team. With remote work, you don't get that opportunity in the same way. But then there's Slack.
"Default to Transparency" is one of our company values, so it's good practice to use public channels as the main form of communicating in Slack even if your question is specific to one person. This will help keep the rest of the team in the loop on what others are working on and prevent folks from feeling isolated. Plus, if you have fun Slack channels set up like "#fun-food," you get the same camaraderie as you do in an office, but just at everyone's most convenient times.
Work: As for the accounting aspects of working remotely, I've found it's not much different from working in an office. We still have a weekly team meeting, 1:1 meetings, collaborate on shared files, knock out month-end financials together, and ask for each other's help/perspective on tasks we are working on. We use a lot of cloud-based apps that allow us to share and work on files together.
- With Quickbooks Online we are all able to log in to add in journal entries, run reports, import transactions vs the desktop version which would limit access to one person.
- Sharing spreadsheet files are easy with the ability to save Excel files in Box, or use Google Sheets and Excel Online, which both allows for the team to work simultaneously on one file.
- We also use Google Docs often when working on writing policies and company announcements. It's a great way to share your work with the team and allows for everyone to add notes and editing suggestions.
- Notejoy is another tool we use to collaborate notes as a whole for the Ops team. We've used this tool to track our weekly meeting notes, draft our team's weekly update post, and save any other notes that would be helpful to share with the team.
Zapier: Creating Zaps (our word for automated workflows between apps) has helped me decrease the time I spend on mundane tasks and helps to keep me up to date on tasks I need to work on. I use one Zap to reduce the amount of time I spend saving invoices that we receive to our box folder, and another to alert me on who has turned in an expense report. And yet another Zap to automatically add cards to my "To Do" Trello board for weekly recurring items.
Working remotely may seem like a foreign concept in the accounting world, but when you're set up with the right applications and an awesome team, it's totally achievable! (P.S., Zapier's fully remote and hiring.)
