One day, I was telling an acquaintance about my remote job. After I explained what I was doing and mentioning it was a 100% remote company, she asked me: isn’t it weird that you can’t talk for real with your teammates? I don’t know what would I do if I couldn’t do that! My short answer was no, it’s not weird.
Now here’s the long answer I wish I had thought of at the time.
Feeling like a “human working with other humans” is tough when you only have your computer in front of you all day long. I’ve already talked about mental health, but it’s also important for companies to make efforts to keep the human aspect alive in everything they do… we all want to be happy at work! Although this could apply to any work environment, it’s especially important in a remote team.
Since my first day in KISSPatent, I haven’t felt like working remotely is a challenge or that I don’t feel I’m part of the team because I’m not working in the same place as everybody else. Since day one, I’ve felt a nice team culture.
Now that I’m part of the team, I know this is how we stay human in our remote work environment.
We might not be working under the same roof but we keep everything as human as possible!
We’re humans first
I mean, duh, yeah, this is just so obvious but hear me out. When you’re working remotely it’s easy to feel like a hired freelancer that just does whatever they’re asked for (not that there’s anything wrong with that) without giving any input.
We acknowledge that we’re humans first and that we’re part of the team because we’re talented, smart, and resourceful. We’re not robots that are here just to finish tasks.
We’re expected to give opinions, to be creative, and to ask questions.
We’re transparent and open
It’s impossible to know what everybody’s doing all the time but, when it comes to major tasks, we keep everything as transparent as possible. Slack, Trello, and our weekly meetings help us do this.
We’re transparent and straight-forward about what we think about any topic or project we’re working on. If something’s not working or if it’s not right, we’re encouraged to say so.
Being a global team requires global thinking. We have to be open to all kinds of ideas because we come from very different backgrounds, have very different abilities, and live in completely different contexts. This translates into our way of working.
We’re open to anyone weighing their opinion or giving ideas during our calls or conversations in Slack. I love that anybody can “raise” their hands in our meetings and say, “hey, I’ve been thinking about this… what do you guys think?”
And everybody is encouraged to put in their two cents.
That’s also why one of the things we always do is giving feedback. In my case, for example, I can get feedback on posts like this one or in any design I’m working on. Especially when we’re talking about designs, feedback always makes my designs better, otherwise, they end up having A LOT of elements and unnecessary things.
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We ask for help
One of the best things about being part of a team is that you can ask for help whenever you need it. I was a freelancer for a long time and I got used to solving everything on my own.
It’s refreshing (and it honestly takes the weight off my chest) to know that if I don’t know how to do something or some task is just too big for me, I can reach out to Carlos or Meghan, or anybody else and they can help me. I’m also glad to know that I can help out whenever someone needs something. This is what teams are for!
This also comes from recognizing each others’ strengths. We know that somebody else could do things faster than us just because they’re better at it, it’s no problem, we’re just glad someone can help us out!
We celebrate
Even though I had already worked in a lot of content for KISSPatent, the post on remote meetings was my first one published in this blog. I told everyone in our Slack channel and everybody congratulated me. It’s a small thing, but it’s meaningful that people took the time to react, say some nice words or even share a gif.
But this is not just about me, as you can see below.
We were celebrating the launch of our Trademark Guide!
Celebrating together that we published something, that we finally made that Typeform work the way we wanted it to work, or that someone mentioned us on Twitter is something that we do every week.
We’re happy to congratulate whoever was involved in any accomplishment, we recognize that humans are behind that and we tag them!
Celebrating our accomplishments is something we do often!
We share personal moments
We know when somebody is traveling. We know when it’s snowing in Budapest because Peter shares videos. We know that Christian was a DJ in his past life just like Xavier was a rapper. We know that Jessica went to a cacao ceremony and that Rachel spent a day with elephants. As I mentioned in my post about remote meetings, we do have water cooler conversations where we mention details about our lives.
Clapping to one of our coworkers, Xavier!
In the true sense of the word, we care for each other. Especially during difficult times like the Coronavirus outbreak right now, we like to know that everybody’s doing ok.
We have a sense of humor
I don’t know how this happened but we all kinda share the same sense of humor… which is a relief! We take our job very seriously but we share jokes and funny experiences whenever we want.
It’s like you would do in an office environment… but online.
To finish this...
I’ll do it with a short true story. When I was applying to get this position at KISSPatent, I had a video interview with Peter and Carlos. They talked about how they (now we!) do things inside the company, I talked about my experience, we shared our expectations. We covered all the information I needed to know (I guess they also got the information they needed from me haha) and we had some small talk.
I immediately felt what I now know is KISSPatent’s team culture, and I knew that, if I got the job, I’d be part of a team… not just some random person creating content for them. It was comforting to realize that what I thought was really true… plus some extra funny gifs in the middle!
Contact us today or check out more information on how we do remote work.
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