This document aims to help companies transition to remote work mode quickly. As such, it is designed to be practical and easy to apply sacrificing completeness, among other things. It will bring your company to the 80/20 sweet spot from which you can make further improvements in due time.

This guide is structured to suit the different scale perspective of the org: The individual, the team and the org (inter-team), so that you do not need to read the entire guide to get quick value.

The most important thing to understand is this: replicating the same patterns as a physical office when working remotely will end in disaster. Remote work is inherently different and there is as much to unlearn as there is to learn.

The individual

Work environment

Find a good place in your home to set up a work environment. Working in the same place regularly helps you form work habits.
A good place to work is quiet, isolated from the rest of the house, well lit, and with a window (important). If you have a spare room, perfect - most will not. Do not be tempted to work from the bedroom. If you are tempted to work from your living room, try to do so without facing your TV to avoid possible distractions.
You should have a chair and a desk, this setup helps put you in a “work” mindset unlike laying on the couch in front of the TV. When selecting a chair, try to find one with armrests that will allow your wrists to remain straight over your keyboard and mouse.
Chair location: in front of the window or in some distance from the wall so that your eyes can change focus when you look up from the screen and get some rest.
Laptop ergonomics: go over this short guide. If you do not have an external keyboard, mouse and monitor and/or a laptop stand (very likely), follow the “occasional use” section and make sure to take more breaks (see below in work routine). Hand rests can be improvised by folding a towel.
Focus management:

Turn off all non urgent push notifications - including personal communication (whatsapp / telegram etc).
Try to schedule collaboration sessions in advance (as meetings) and build your breaks around them.

Internet connection:

Use ethernet if you can - Wifi is not always reliable in home environment
Remember you can use your phone as an access point if needed

A/V: headphones - preferably over ear so your ears don’t hurt. Get a screen if possible. Install flux or a similar app to adjust screen brightness and color by daylight

Work routine

Try to keep steady hours, although they may differ from your normal office hours
Create a “workday start” and “workday end” ceremonies. This has been shown to help your mind transition to “work mindset”. Some people walk “to work” around the block in the morning and then “walk home” in a reverse direction at the end of their workday. Find your own ceremony. Even a simple thing like changing clothes to your “work” clothes will help put you in the correct state of mind.
Take breaks. It is very easy to miss this as no one will ask you out to lunch or coffee. When you take a break, it is advisable to engage in a physical activity which involves your wrists. Throw and catch balls, juggle, play with a fidget cube. You can use a variety of techniques like The Pomodoro Method or even just scheduling recurring breaks in your calendar.
Try to avoid mixing work and non-work activities. It is a good idea to take prolonged breaks for other activities (e.g. an hour long sports break) but multitasking or interleaving activities (e.g. cooking) can have adverse effects on your productivity.
Turn off notifications: chatter on whatsapp, slack, telegram, emails etc will grow significantly. If you think you are distracted now, just wait. Schedule times to go over your notifications. More on this in the communications section.
Time management: in the absence of visual clues for work hours your calendar is your best friend. Setup meeting reminders (recommended 30 minutes early notification) and go over your calendar daily. Additionally, keep your calendar up-to-date and visible to co-workers, so they know when you are available

Tasking

Working remotely should actually change what you work on.

When you're at the office with your teammates - it's much easier to focus on one thing, and when you get stuck - get unstuck, by talking to the relevant party, or try to find the relevant party by talking to someone twice removed. In remote assume you'll get stuck, and won't be able to get unstuck.

Prioritize unblocking others when people ask you for help. We’re all in this together.
Make sure you have more things to work on, so when you inevitably get stuck - you can switch context and be productive.

Manage a backlog of unblocked tasks you can work on when the most important one gets blocked - prefer tasks that unblock others. Spend some time daily on grooming that backlog, so when you do want to jump in and start working on one of them you could do so without external assistance.

Psychological wellness

When you are working from the office, your workplace keeps you happy and productive by giving you intellectual stimuli and social interactions. At home, you become completely responsible for creating your own social life. Some people experience feelings of isolation and loneliness, insecurity in personal performance and anxiety.

Invest in your work by investing in your self-care, which can be as easy as plugging a few jumping jacks and a few breaks for personal phone calls in your daily routine. The key is consistency. One afternoon walk or one lunch break with a colleague or friend won’t eliminate these mental health challenges. Making a daily commitment to healthy injections of well-being on a regular basis whether they are long or short.

Create boundaries between your personal and professional time by defining a dedicated space and time to work. Dress up to work (it’s tempting to work in your pajamas. Don’t)
Take scheduled screen breaks during your workday.
Have some of your breaks outside in the fresh air and sunlight (get some coffee).
Light physical exercise will boost your endorphins and decrease anxiety
Build a support group - your colleagues are experiencing the same you are right now working from home - talk to them, exchange advice and support. Your connection with them will boost your creativity and battle loneliness
Play a musical instrument? Play it during the breaks!.

Collaboration

One of the biggest changes when moving to remote work is that chance meetings are completely gone. You will not see people in the corridor and suddenly remember you had something to discuss with them. People will not wander into conference rooms at exactly the right moment, nor will you be able to pull them in for a short consultation from a nearby room. Collaboration becomes much more rigid and planned. In addition, humans operate by visual clues which are now gone. This has some downsides but also upsides:

Your personal time can be better protected from interruptions
Spontaneous discussions with colleagues are gone
No water cooler talks, which means you are unlikely to hear about things by chance
Cost of momentary help/collaboration is much higher
You don’t know what everyone is doing because you don’t see them anymore
Your teammates are no longer top-of-mind

This situation requires adapting to and embracing new methods of collaboration.

Some tips

You are more likely to engage others if there is something to bite. E.g. if you share an empty document and then start working on it, people are unlikely to engage. If you write a few paragraphs first your chances of getting help are much higher
Calendar visibility helps your team know when you are working and/or busy

Write down everything

When working remotely it is important to write down everything. In full remote mode, unlike working from home a day or two a week, you will never have a chance to braindump and sync in person. If you don’t write down what you did, what you thought, what you intend to do - no one will know and you will eventually forget about it. Writing things down has several additional benefits:

Documents can be iterated on and improved over time
Documents can be leveraged for collaboration (Google Docs, notion, etc)
Documents can be searched
Documents can be shared asynchronously
Documents serve as organizational memory even after you moved on
Writing things down has been shown to make you more aware and thoughtful about them

Yes, writing things down will slow you down at first but over time the overhead will reduce as you become more proficient in writing. The long term impact on you and your time will be well worth it.

Provide full context

When we communicate, we are used to having back-and-forth chatter. I will say something, you will ask for clarification and so forth until we are both sure information has been properly transmitted and understood.

When done in person, this process is very quick: I can see the puzzled expression on your face and infer that you need more information and the latency between questions and responses is seconds. All of that changes when we work remotely: communication latency is much higher, the conversation may intermittently span several hours and all visual clues are gone. In this situation, it becomes crucial to provide full context and minimize misunderstandings and back-and-forth. Furthermore, we want to promote autonomy of action for our collaborators. Consider the difference between:

“Hey can you change the color of the red bar on the top of the website to yellow”

With

“Hey, customer support data shows that a significant number of color-blind users are confused by the red bar at the top of the website. We need to change it to a different color suitable for colorblind people. I suggest yellow”

In the second example, we have eliminated the need for questions like “which red bar” or “why are we doing this”; our collaborator can now proceed to operate autonomously hunting down more problematic areas on the website and make appropriate decisions with minimal communications.

Another important point is that gathering context is expensive. If I receive an email without full context I may need to search the CRM and ticketing system for the history of this task which may take 10 minutes. In the worst case, I will need to recall from my own memory which is extremely taxing on focus and energy.

Strive to make every email the last in the thread. If you have failed and the thread of messages continues back-and-forth escalate to a synchronous medium (“Hey! Mind chatting on zoom for a minute?”). See sync vs async for more info.

Never ping someone via chat with a message saying just: "Hi". Instead, make the message reasonably self-contained:

"Hi, I am working on this. Got stuck here. I was wondering if you could help with that."

Context checklist:

Why this?
What happened previously?
Where is the relevant data? (links!!!)
What info is required?
Who needs to be informed?
Action items (What needs to be done/decided)
What/Who are the dependencies/dependent of this?
Don’t assume/ask for a solution. Explain the problem and what you did

Organize content

Proactively initiate contact and self-unblocking

“In remote, no one can hear you scream” - unlike the office, the barrier for pulling help from your teammates is much higher. No one will notice you are wrestling a problem for 2 hours, nor will they see your frustrated face at lunch. This makes it imperative that you are aware of the need to proactively pull in help and share information. If you don’t, no one will know what is going on with you. In theory, you could wait for others to reach out, but this too will never happen if they don’t adopt the same policy!

Decide on time budget after which you will ask for help (“if I don’t solve this in an hour, I’ll ask Sarah”)
Regularly check on your teammates to see how they are - on both professional and personal levels.
Share information on what you do (if it’s code you can push regularly to your work branch or share over slack in the project channel on which features you are working on)
Refer to sync vs async to understand how to minimize the cost of contact
Where applicable - make a decision and notify others, rather than suggest a solution and wait for approval. This is not advocating anarchy, rather common-sense decision-making: when you think you’re suggesting something that will 95% be accepted - it’s better to say “Unless someone objects - I’m going to do X” than “I think X is best - does everyone agree?” - saves a lot of time and potentially an expensive synchronous meeting.

This is a common pain point for juniors, who often hesitate to interrupt their teammates. By reaching out with your problems you are making it socially acceptable for others to reach out as well.

Communications

With the elimination of face to face and chance meetings, communications channels will become much more active and noisy. This forces us to become better at communications and mindful of using different mediums in the right way.

Sync vs Async mediums

Communication channels are divided into synchronous mediums (V/C, voice calls) and async mediums (emails). Some mediums can be used as both sync or async (whatsapp, slack) which may become a problem as the conversation transitions between the modes without notice (more on this later).

Synchronous mediums are:

Expensive
Blocking
Low latency
Contextfull

Asynchronous mediums are:

Non-blocking (you can schedule reading emails at your leisure)
Cheap
High latency
Contextless

This has several implications. Async mediums:

Are easy to flood because they are cheap to the sender and there is no pushback from the receiver
Require expensive context rebuilding if the message does not contain it
Can become out of sync (“oh! I missed your email”)

Sync mediums:

Have pushback
Require full attention and stop you from doing anything else
Super expensive for group communication (4 people can have 2 concurrent smooth meetings or 1 noisy meeting)
Allow for quick decisions when managed correctly

In order to correctly utilize the strength and weaknesses of async and sync mediums, use the following checklist:

Always start with async medium, providing full context

There is a chance this will suffice and sync comm will be avoided
Sync comm (e.g. V/C meeting) will be shorter
Turn this into the meeting agenda if

If async comm diverges, switch to sync medium
If there are more than 5 people involved, stick to an async medium
Appoint a meeting moderator (her job is to enforce the meeting etiquette)
Circulate meeting notes/minutes after the meeting asynchronously

Sync medium etiquette and discipline

Due to the extreme cost of sync mediums, it is important to maintain proper etiquette and discipline. Consider that the cost of a V/C meeting is proportional to the number of attendees, regardless of how many people actually speak in it.

Be brief
Stay on topic
Predefine the stop condition of the meeting (e.g. what decision do you need to make) and end the meeting when this condition is fulfilled
Circulate an agenda before the meeting, which includes the relevant context and stop condition
Appoint a meeting moderator. The moderator is responsible for:

Enforcing staying on topic
Making sure everyone has a chance to comment
Keeping a timer on relevant meetings (e.g. daily updates)
Taking meeting minutes and notes
Ending the meeting when the stop condition is reached

Record the meeting if possible so that it can be leveraged asynchronously

Mixed mode mediums

Some communication mediums can alternate between synchronous and asynchronous modes. E.g. whatsapp, slack where people often have entire conversations when their full attention is in the chat but suddenly disengage and go do something else. This is a big problem as the other side needs to wait a significant amount of time (time out) before they understand their collaborator has disengaged. Another problem is that when you initiate a chat you don’t know the cost of interruption - is this going to be sync (expensive) or async (inexpensive)?

Set expectations by explicitly declaring a policy (e.g. Slack is always async unless otherwise requested by one party)
Notify the other party if you are transitioning from one mode to another

Private vs Shared channels

Communication channels are largely divided into private and shared channels. Private channels are visible only to people on the conversation (e.g. emails, whatsapp, DM on slack) and shared channels are visible to everyone (e.g. slack public channels, shared Google Docs, wiki, Jira)

Each company chooses its own way of communication, important notes on that:

Company tools like: Slack are the proper tools to share work related information
Private tools: Whatsapp/Telegram/Phone/Private Email… are bad places to share work related information

The reason for this is simple: anyone can reach the relevant information even if someone didn’t think in advance they need it - in short, information is discoverable. Also, information shared in the company tools is stored and if someone leaves the company the information is not lost unlike the private tools.

Always default to public channels unless you have a good reason not to. In a private channel, if someone was not invited for whatever reason (often by mistake!) they will be out of the loop.

Emails

Pros:

Common
Global - works with external parties as well
Documented - those who received it have to purposefully delete it to “lose” it.
Can be easily shared with a lot of people
Everyone at this point knows how to automate things (auto label, archive, delete…)
Very formal communication (you can officially resign using it :) )

Cons:

Very high latency - people tend not to check them every minute
Easily missed - companies tend to send a lot of things in emails this creates a lot of noise
Doesn’t have personal notifications
Not discoverable If you miss someone he will never be able to search for it

Emails are here for long (long) term async conversations, meaning - if you want to start a project which you have discussed with someone over slack/VC and need to have a procedural sign off process for that an email would be a great medium for that, if you want to quickly ask a question and need the response faster than in 2 weeks this would be a bad medium.

Some pointers:

Use the TO, CC and BCC correctly to avoid spamming everyone

TO - Who should take action on this email
CC - Who should participate in the conversation
BCC - Who should be aware of a specific snapshot in time for the project

What to do when you are in TO, CC or BCC

TO - You are expected to respond and take action on the email with something like: “Will start on DATE”/“Started on DATE” or “Won’t do because: EXPLANATION
CC - If you have something important to add please do with “Reply-All” otherwise wait for the one in TO to reply
BCC - You are there for an FYI if you want to reply please choose a specific list of people who would receive the reply

In any case try hard not to spam everyone with huge lists and “Reply-To-All”
Conversely, when you need to get responses - be explicit (but polite!) about your expectations and set a deadline (again - be polite!). It’s much better to say “I’ll appreciate any feedback you might have by EoD Wednesday” than “What do you think?”.
Also - prefixing the subject line with “[ACTION REQUIRED]” goes a long way to getting a response if you really need one.
Emails with announcements are fun, and they lift morale - please have everyone in BCC in them and only the team which you want to praise in the CC list this way everyone would be able to do: “reply all” and write “great work” without spamming the entire company with “great work” emails which might be fun when you are 5 people but a whole different story when you are 10s of people it becomes noisy.

Slack

Pros:

Instant notifications
Allows for short informal conversations
History, searchable
Can have multiple participants in a single conversation
Integrations which allow automation

Cons:

Can create a lot of noise
Private channels can be a lost treasure trove of knowledge
Without good practices you might find yourself with a lot of distractions and noise
Private - you can’t easily add external participants

Slack etiquette and discipline checklist

Default to public channels - This way you will ensure that everyone can take part in the conversation. Often the person you initially targeted is not the only one with the answer. If others can see the question they can jump in. Also, it helps people understand what is going on
Stay on topic - Make sure that content you send is in the context of the channel for future search/reference
Open channels for particular discussions / incidents (you can archive them when done)
Use threads in public channels to fork a conversation and reduce noise, without making it private or losing the info to a separate channel
Social interaction/memes are fun, but try to limit them to social channels as they create noise
Refrain from using @here/@channel as you are forcing sync mode and for people who are in multiple channels this creates a lot of noise
Refrain from creating nameless groups with a group of people, try to have the conversations in shared channels and if none exists for this topic open one
Before asking for something in a channel try searching for it using Slack search
Slack has a highly configurable do-not-disturb mode. Use it.
Separate info channels (with mostly bots/integrations) and collaboration channels (with mostly humans)
Mute channels you are only tangentially involved with. E.g. you don’t need notifications for #support if you are not working in support.

Whatsapp/phones

Both of those methods are very personal and do not contribute to the company's knowledge transfer/preservation and collaboration

Phones are for extremely important communication, since it’s an invasion to someone's privacy when you are working remotely (ask yourself: if someone is not next to his desk would you call him or wait for him to show up?)
Whatsapp is a private method of communication, I do understand that a lot of small companies rely on it but all the knowledge that is shared there in a non-official group is lost to the company in the long term

V/C

Pros

Highly engaging
Low latency
Promotes empathy and social bonding

Cons

Expensive (highly synchronous)
High overhead (IT and bandwidth issues)
Content not discoverable (even if the meeting is recorded and isn’t private)

V/C meetings are very good as the final step in decision-making (after collaborating via an async medium where most preliminary issues are resolved), for meetings where the social aspect is very important (e.g. feedback), and for resolving situations where async discussions are going nowhere. They are a bad fit for distributing information, status updates, preliminary discussions and anything that doesn’t have a clear agenda or stop condition. Use with care.

You might find that people speak a lot especially after a long while of remote work due to social starvation. Have the meeting moderator send those discussions to another meeting/channel so that people still get a “vent” solution and still keep the meeting on topic.

Keep meeting minutes for decisions made in the meetings and send them to the participants.

V/C etiquette checklist

Avoid large meetings (more than 5 people). If you need more, use video streaming + chat
In group meetings: assign a moderator
Mute your microphone when not speaking
Consider turning off video to save bandwidth
Start every meeting with 2-3 minutes of small talk
Wait for your turn to speak. Due to latency it’s easy to step on each other’s toes

The team

Communications

When you switch to remote work, the minimal communication cost within the team has more than doubled. Essentially you switched from throwing a sentence in the room and getting an automatic response to at least two send message/check message cycles, which means 2 people getting interrupted 3-4 times each, with significant latency. Furthermore, the bar for initiating a conversation is now much higher. Another important change is that visual clues about the state of team members are gone. You don’t know who is busy and should not be interrupted, who is free and who is frustrated, nor is it easy to see your words are understood. Without adjusting your methods, two things will happen: there will be high noise on comms and silos will form. In other words, you will be wasting a lot of time communicating and no matter how much you communicate it won’t be enough. Your only hope is reducing signal-to-noise ratio drastically and encourage people to share information in an asynchronous medium - this means building new habits and communication network.

Daily, weekly, stand-up, etc

You may be tempted to have V/C meetings for the entire team for sync. Don’t (refer to the V/C section above for details). Instead, have a chat/slack meeting (can be initiated automatically by a bot message at a specific time) and have every team member reply on the thread. That way people can chime in asynchronously, the meeting is logged and discoverable and people don’t get bored.

Feedback meetings, 1:1, etc

This is what V/C is good for. Schedule in advance and provide an agenda. Remember these meetings can be very stressful when done remotely. It is important to make sure both parties know in advance what will be discussed and pay extra attention to the psychological state of each party.

Whiteboarding sessions

Drawing: It’s very tempting to use online “whiteboard” solutions (e.g. in zoom) but drawing with a mouse isn’t very convenient. Use pen and paper and send a photo using your phone (use google drive, dropbox or Adobe scanner), order a cheap graphic drawing pad or confiscate your kids tablet.

Design documents, joint decisions

Start with a shared document, detailing the context, suggested solutions, etc
Publish the document in relevant Slack channels where it is visible to potential stakeholders
Schedule an online meeting (can be V/C, slack often good enough) so that the deadline is clear. A week is usually enough.
Anyone can comment on the document, but only the stakeholders participate in the meeting
Collaborate on the document until the decision meeting. If an agreement has been reached you can call off the meeting
Use the meeting to quickly decide on any leftover issues in the document

Once you gain some experience with this method, you will find it is highly efficient and 95% of the times faster than physical conference meetings - as they often result in a second and third meeting due to failures (perhaps a key person was not in the room?).

Team monitoring: leave no one behind

Managers: This is a communication challenge, so check on your people. Check on them at least once a day to see if they require any sort of assistance. You don’t have to provide the assistance, but as a manager it is your place to connect your team - have them talk to each other, initiate contact with each and make sure they are not stuck and screaming where no one can hear them.
Set up a daily routine to get updated with your whole team, and in smaller task related groups.
Try to check on them using V/C calls and not only text, as sometimes it will ease an employee to hear / see someone else and feel less lonely.

Social interactions

If most of your communications with people outside your team is written - make sure there is a space for non-work related topics. Allow people to vent their discomfort, and try to make them feel a part of a whole.
Engage your employees / teammates / colleagues with humor in relevant public channels so no one feels left out.
Schedule V/C meetings to allow people to see each other and socialize, otherwise this might never happen. Encourage people to express themselves in those meetings by bringing drinks, funny clothing and items, etc.

Reducing contention and coordination

The org

Communications

All hands meetings

Like all large scale meetings, all hands need to transition to async format. Suggested protocol:

Circulate agenda in advance
Have everyone pre-submit their questions and suggested topics
The meeting itself happens in video streaming (1 to many)
After the meeting, collect feedback (feedback forms/slack/doc)
Announcements from management can be sent as a recorded video, but allow your team to comment and ask questions in a public channel - assign a specific time for Q&A.

Working across the globe (time zones)

Make sure the timezone of every person is well known
Have people mark their work hours, this helps with scheduling across time zones (e.g. using google calendar “propose time”)
Use tools like Calendly to ease cross time zone scheduling
Keep a list of public holidays/vacations of each locale/country where people are. Helps with scheduling, project tracking, vacations, etc.
Weekly work days differ between countries (e.g. Israel work days are Sunday-Thursday)! Make non-overlapping weekly rest days “no meeting” days.
Bias towards async comms. Double schedule important meetings so people from different time zones can attend.
Take advantage of time zones using “follow the sun” practices for on-call and other online response duties (e.g. customer support)

Human support (HR) and logistics

Make sure you have the home addresses of everyone
Delivery services still work in most countries. You can send supplies to your workers:

Laptop stands
IT equipment and office supplies (keyboards, mouse, etc)
Gifts

Make sure you have status on all personnel! Who is sick, tired, not working today, etc. No one should fall off the radar

Recruiting, job interviews, etc.

On-boarding new employees

Prepare a new employee logistic kit - basically a list of stuff to order from Amazon/your favorite supplier. This usually includes a laptop, essential IT stuff etc; Often you’d want to send a welcome packet as well with company swag, a welcome aboard card etc. Send the logistic pack ahead of time
Prepare an IT on-boarding kit - everything needed to get new employees to login to essentials: email, slack, google docs, etc. Since the new employee has no physical access to IT personnel you need to securely send the initial password or sign up link.
Assign an on-boarding mentor and have the mentor V/C the new employee on her first day. Remember, the new employee will not meet anyone from the company for quite some time. The mentor is the face of the company
Prepare an employee portal - basically a doc with links to main systems (slack, HR, wiki, docs, etc) and addresses of relevant people/departments (IT, HR)

Inter-org

Tools

Video Chat

Remote workspaces

Useful for when someone’s laptop went up in smoke.

Chat

Slack (or one of the numerous alternatives)
IRC (yes it still works well and is free)

Collaborative docs

Google Docs
Dropbox paper
Notion.so

General collaboration

Asana/Trello
Github/Gitlab
Calendly (scheduling meetings)
Doodle (scheduling, polls)
Strigo
Sunsama.io

Where to go from here

Gitlab’s all-remote guide
Basecamp’s “Remote: office not required”