The disadvantages of working remote
Let's start with the best thing about remote work, and that is it gives everyone more freedom. People have more control over their own time. We believe this contributes to your happiness and that is in the end to the most important thing, to design your life towards this goal.
We were always a remote team. But with everything in life, it has its disadvantages.
Remote work can be lonely, and it is harder to feel the emotions of your team members.
With tools like Basecamp, Slack, Skype it's super easy to stay in touch. But it's hard to see the emotions of your colleagues.
If you work in the same office, you can feel and see your colleagues. Within this energy, you can get a sense of how they feel.
The obstacle is the way.
After discussing some of the obstacles we face with the team, we decided to figure out how we can solve this for ourselves over the next couple of weeks.
We asked ourselves how we can design a tool that supports more empathy within our team.
The idea we are working on now is that during the day a couple of questions should be asked. It should be a straightforward and simple task, so it doesn't cost you to much time and effort. And it should be fun to use, something that is underestimated while building products.
The results are visualized in a dashboard, which is a calendar view because the time also has some influence on how you feel, or if you should contact a colleague.
We are now using a simple prototype that we build with Airtable, and we like it a lot.
More importantly, it makes us more self-aware, and we talk more about what motives us.
The culture of your company is super important for building meaningful products for the long term. And even more important, to be happy and excited about the work you are doing with each other.
We will keep playing around with this concept over the next couple of weeks. So would love to hear some feedback.. Are you working remotely? Any challenges, or would you be interested in a tool like this?
Let me know :)
