We believe that #ElTiempoEsHelicidad and that people at work can earn time to dedicate to what they most want, be it their hobbies, family, friends ... or work and sell more :). And that's why we did SumaCRM at the time, now Efficy .
And in that sense, both my partner Alfredo and I really wanted to work from wherever we wanted , in my case from the beach, because I am in love with the sea and kitesurfing.
http://tajarat.com.pk/ strives to be Pakistan's biggest real estate developer ever, guaranteeing the highest international standards, prompt execution, and lifetime customer loyalty. With projects like capital smart city
I wanted to kitesurf in my spare time
But we started the company in Madrid, where we are from, and there is no beach. At 2 years we were already 8 people and we were still in Madrid, but I did not want to put it off any longer. So I made the hardest decision up to that point .
The idea was that I would test the work remotely, and if it went well, little by little we would open it up to the rest.
The next to try it was the CTO, and he liked it so much that he put it as a condition to stay. Also, as the plan was to hire more programmers, they would also work remotely, there was no going back ….
What was a philosophical proof became a necessity
Ufff that was scary ... If in Madrid there was a beach we would not have started the remote one. But it went well! ?
So in this post, I want to tell you the worst and the best of my experience these 2 years, because even if you are not thinking of doing remote there is one thing that is GOLD and that also works for face-to-face work.
In fact, at Efficy the programmers are full remote, and on the other hand, the commercials prefer to work from our office in Madrid in order to keep the energy and interaction between them high . Although they are also flexible ?
The worst: "The head"
It is not the same to work 1 day from home (that day you are super productive) than working remotely every day ?
Working from home has 1,000 interruptions . But I'm not talking about the typical ones like " the fridge, the TV or the favor of running {any errand} because you totally work from home ... "
For me the worst have been my thoughts on making another plan because I'm at home. Specifically "kite".
How do you see people kitesurfing ... on any given Tuesday at 11 haha. So…
This was me at 3 months:
Hahahaha I was all day thinking « Oysters the wind has come out and what a devil! I go down for a little while to kite and go up later? » . I did not, because I am super Nazi with myself with the schedules to be productive , but yes, I ended the day exhausted by wear and tear.
This is me now hehe
This photo is from yesterday, now I am going to a coworking center where I go skateboarding along the promenade in 5 minutes (it is also the milk because it is a windsurfing shop at the bottom)
Working remotely is NOT necessarily working from home.
In "my new office" I no longer have " the interruptions in my head " and when I finish working I also dedicate the afternoon to kitesurfing, but I no longer go crazy during the day haha.
What is GOLD: «Agile methodologies»
We are "social beings" so we like to work with people and on a common project. In my case, shortly after starting the remote work, I had the feeling of being isolated . And it was hard, but the solution was precisely the best I have found in remote work, and it is also 100% applicable to face-to-face work.
The remote exposed many inefficiencies in our processes.
To solve it, we began to follow agile methodologies in a more senior way:
- Dailys : A daily 15 minute meeting to put everyone in the same boat.
- Weeklys : A weekly meeting where we see metrics.
- Retrospectives : A meeting every 15 days (after the weekly) where we see where we can improve.
- Off-sites : A quarterly meeting where we see the RoadMAP.
- 1on1 : A meeting (in our case every two months) with each person on the team.
- Design Thinking : A method to develop the following functionalities based on meeting with different stakeholders and talking about the problems and not the solutions.
Thanks to these "nimble meetings" I no longer felt isolated. On the contrary, now I feel that we are even more in the same bathyscaphe than before .
In any case, it is still important to "be together in the same room" since as social beings it is the best way to get to know you personally (and if not in the end, the feeling of not belonging to a common project also reappears). Every 2 months we meet the whole company for 3 days in the office. ?
