Managing a Team Remotely

I originally had the idea for this post months ago, when we were really starting to get into the swing of working full time remotely. I have however put off writing on here since, so this never got very far. As an attempt to maybe write a bit more, I thought I'd pick up this idea again and contrast with how my thoughts on working remotely were a few months ago, to how I feel about it now.

The Beginning

We'd always offered working for remotely for a couple of days a week to everyone past their probation, but most people didn't take up on it very often. And frequently when they did, they didn't set up their environment correctly. They knew they would only be working from home for a short period of time (mostly taking larger assets on memory sticks, maybe not setting up their environment as much as they would like etc). It was obvious we were going to have to work from home full time at some point.

My team almost exclusively worked online anyway, using services like Gitlab and AWS. However the other development team and the art team also needed to be able to work remotely, with most of their work being on an internal server. Plans had been in place to move the other development team to use the same setup that we did, but they kept being put off. We had to make sure everyone had a machine they would be comfortable working on and they had a area set aside fit for working at. I also needed to make sure people had tested they could actually access the VPN and the internal file share for passing larger assets around. Most people said they were happy with their home set up, although we allowed one or two people to take their work PCs home. I think someone took their chair as well, which I think is a sensible move if your chair will cause problems for your back.

A few months in

I expected us to take a little hit in productivity at the beginning and slowly regain it. To end up stuck around maybe 90-95% productive compared to being in the office.

It's always hard to tell exactly how effectively people are working, but to be honest it felt like people were actually working harder at first. Maybe to prove they weren't just slacking off at home - I'd seen it before when people worked from home for other reasons, but I didn't think it'd extend out to having to work from home. So what I actually saw was maybe a bit more productivity from my team. Before the lack of face to face meetings, little chats and being generally always around each other meant things started to get lost. This was mostly as new games started up, discussing the specs was much harder, and with each new build of the games our QA might miss a few of the extra things we'd done. To combat this we've pushed to make sure everything is logged, right from the beginning of the game.

8 months in

Last? month we could start thinking about what we were going to do to maybe get people back in. Having given it a fair amount of thought, I actually don't think it's worth my team being back in the office. All of our work is on remote servers, people have their work machine and their phones, so they can develop and we can test our game on at least 2 devices. There doesn't seem to be a big barrier in our communication either, frequently having calls and staying in touch on Slack pretty much all day.

I checked with the team to see if they were comfortable coming into the office, and everyone came in for our standard monthly development meeting. We did these every month anyway but remotely we were definitely missing the point of them. Having them back in the office feels great we can clear up any gripes anyone seems to have. It also gives me time to talk through any problems or HR related things my team had. It was super nice to see everyone again and the conversations were much easier and more full.

We also have our game kick off meetings in the office, with as many of the design team & art team as we can. This is to go through the smaller details before starting the game, which helps out with missing the day to day face to face contact with the art team. I believe it'll also be worth getting QA in on the kick off meetings just to help out with his idea of how things should be.

Working From Home Going Forwards

With frequent in-office meetings with the development team, and the devs still being comfortable to ping the art & design team as often as needed, I don't see working from home as a standard being a problem going forwards.

I do however think our QA will continue to struggle with not having the face to face conversations to be able to ask how things should act, but hopefully with some more training, confidence and experience the gap should close there.

The art and design team will need to fill in more game details earlier and the dev team will need to perhaps fill in more gaps with their own creativity than before, but again I feel with more experience with remote working, this problem will go away.

Our art team have also had a new starter since lockdown started, only meeting most of the team face to face for the first time a few months after starting. Them being able to do this comfortably makes me feel like it won't be too much of a problem to roll any new starters into our team and get them up to date.

One massive benefit that I think we'll gain is that suddenly, when we can travel again, it makes visiting family much easier for my developers from SSpain and Portugal. There's no longer need to take the whole visit as annual holiday and maybe only really get a few days with the family, instead maybe taking a week for a 2 week visit, and fitting in the work around when their families are busy. The flexibility in our working times along with not needing to be in the office makes this completely not a problem.

Overall I think it'll be an interesting and not necessarily a bad change for my team to work remotely full time, and my worries about it being more difficult to manage have mostly been cleared up.