3 Tips for Working Remotely in Practicum Projects During Pandemic
As Mckinsey’s research shows, “Hybrid models of remote work are likely to persist in the wake of the pandemic”, especially for “a highly educated, well-paid minority of the workforce” such as high-tech companies. Remote working is the new normal after the coronavirus hits especially for the Technology space. There are already 27 companies that have switched long-term remote work and over 70% of them are tech companies. For example, Twitter has announced that its employees will work permanently. You might start wondering, how will working remotely in a startup look like when all of a sudden, the intimate, “small group” startup atmosphere is interrupted by this global pandemic? And more importantly, how to deal with the change?
As a UC Davis M.S. Business Analytics student, I am honored to share my remote practicum project experience during our partnership with REEF, a startup with over $391 million annual revenue. Our role is more like an consultant trying to help the real-world client to define and solve their business problems using analytics.
No one is perfect in the beginning of learning, we all learn from experience, no matter if it’s from ours or from others. There are three things I wish I could have known before this remote project, so I wrote this article to help you master remote working in a startup environment, and these tips also apply to those who started their journey in remote working in general.
1. Setting up Your Remote Working Environment
Working remotely is very different from a typical work day or class day, where you can separate your own work time, meeting time and relax time by change of space. Working from home, however, forces you to work and live in the same space, and what’s worse is that, it’s hard to strike a balance between your own work time and your team meetings throughout the day.
I have encountered this challenge in the beginning as well. One of my practicum teammates is also my roommate, and we have worked together to solve issues with devices like echo and meeting conflicts. I can imagine for those who live with their families while working from home will have more challenges.
To solve this problem, I suggest setting up your remote work environment, separate your work environment from your living space. It will help you separate your working life from the rest of your life, physically and mentally. Scientific research has proven that the boundary work tactics that include separating work and life space are helpful in terms of reducing stress and work-life conflicts, thus improving individuals’ work efficiency. If you share your living space with others (living with your family, roommates, etc.), it would be helpful for you to communicate your schedules and avoid interruptions. In my project, it works out well that me and my roommate made separate work spaces.
2. Mastering Your Communication at Remote Work
Remote work also poses a bigger challenge in communication. Normally, you can talk to your colleagues face-to-face, while working remotely would let you do so. It’s even more challenging for people who are new to the company, like us, a student consulting team working with a startup client. During the past 3 months of practicum, we have faced a lot of challenges such as time zone differences, unexpected project change, and point of contact switch. During the process, we realized one of the most important solutions to tackle these challenges is effective communication, both internally and externally.
First, increase transparency in scheduling. Share your schedule if possible to increase scheduling efficiency, and if there are time zone differences in your team, convey messages in a clearer way. Take my team for example, we needed to cope with the time zone difference with the client and even among the team. To deal with that, we convey our messages in a clear manner when scheduling meetings (e.g., adding PST/EST in our messages) and try to align with our client’s schedule.
Second, choosing the Right Communication Channels. Consider prioritizing your messages by level of urgency. If it is a “code red” message, you would consider calling or messaging people directly. This is just like walking into their offices when you have urgent problems. If the urgency level is intermediate, you can communicate through slack, Microsoft Teams or email, depending on the most frequently used communication tools your company uses.
3. Building Meaningful Relationships
Bonds matter. Although remote work makes it hard to build relationships, you can always figure out how to know more about each other by online icebreaker games. Don’t be afraid to do more video meetings, as suggested by NUMA, a company famous for remote working practices in New York. Also, try to schedule more 1 on 1 meetings to check in with your manager and mentor. It always helps to build solid relationships with your mentor, your seniors, and even colleagues from other departments. Relationships are also resources. In our project, we were lucky enough to have mentors and professors to help with both technical and management guidance, through weekly huddle meetings. We were stuck at transitioning our project scope from labor optimization modeling to operation and business intelligence, but it was through 1 : 1 meetings with our direct managers, we were able to build trust on each other and deliver results that benefited both our skills profiles and the company.
What’s the Result?
You might be curious about the result of our project with REEF. Well, we are still in the middle of the project, but it’s proven that doing the three practices mentioned above helped us overcome most of the remote working challenges, helping us adapt to unexpected project changes, and grow with the startup! The best thing about remote work is that you get to take control of your time, and reflect on ways to improve your work otherwise you think under normal circumstances. Now, if you were to start your remote work, what would you have done differently?