How I became remote
It was November of 2012 was my team was forced to become remote. The word “forced” is not placed lightly, there was no other option for us. Wither we became remote or we needed to drop the project. Such a change was unthinkable to me back then. I had been working for the past ten years in IT and back then distributed teams were something completely alien to me. Fast forward to January 2020, present-day. I cannot see myself working in any other way.
First, let’s get to the beginning of this story. Back in 2011, I was working on a small startup called Qualcanal. We were a small team of five: myself, my two co-founders and two developers. The whole team had known each other from past experiences in the consultancy world. We had always worked in the same office and had gone through many hardships and successes together. The implicit dynamic, that emerged from that previous experience was an integral part of what made us work well together.
In October 2012 we were accepted to join the winter batch for 500 Startups accelerator. It was a big step and we were very excited. It also meant that — since we were all located in Brasilia — we needed to decide how to handle that part of the team would be in Mountain View for the next 3 months of the program. Moving the whole team to the Valley would be too expensive, especially in such short notice (we had only two weeks to prepare ourselves). The decision was to split the team. The three co-founders went to the program whilst the other two developers would stay in the office.
Needless to say, it was a complete disaster at first. With the team split into two sites communication was broken. Changes in direction, learning points and decisions were not shared properly. This made us unable to move as fast as we used to do. The issue was not in the lack of tools. Back then we used a lot of Skype for Calls, Campfire for chatting and emails were the norm for even the most mundane messages. They were just fine for a team of our size. The issue was that we didn’t know how to use them to create a dynamic closer to what we had when we were all together. Celebrating accomplishments went unnoticed, making progress invisible. Strategic decisions and even actions were made without everybody knowing about the whys and hows, or even getting feedback about it. To make matters worse, we had a timezone difference of 6 hours. Which left a very small window for shift overlap between the two sites.
We didn’t succeed to improve until the end of the acceleration program. February came, we all went back to the office happy with our fundraising, but troubled by our team dynamic. Unfortunately, going back to have a full co-locate was not an option. March was coming and I was supposed to spend the next 9 months in Canada. Another team member also had to move to another city, since her spouse got a new job. We needed to learn to go remote.
As the team discussed its issues, we accepted that we needed first to improve our communication. Over the next months, we succeeded and failed many times to change our team dynamics. Focusing on being honest about when problems aroused and worked to fix them started to push us forward. I also believe that having a co-founder away from the office helped a lot to our improvement. This meant the option of using interpersonal channels for every decision making was not out of question. The 1-hour timezone difference also helped, since we were very attached to synchronous interactions.
Improving communication was the tipping point to kickstart our adaptation to the remote way of work. We became more aware and capable of responding to changes and emergencies. We created and used our channels and tools more efficiently. For example, anyone was able to meet everyone on Campfire and get fast help throughout the day. Over time, even the team in the office started to practice working from home more and more often, since they need to be in the same place was not a requirement anymore.
When I returned to Brazil, there was no reason to keep the team co-located anymore. The hard part of our transition was already gone. In the end, I fell in love with this way of working. It is even hard to summarize the number of benefits it has to my personal and working life. Needless to say that after Qualcanal, I was sure that it was the only way I wanted to work in the future. And that this is how I’ve been doing since then.
