When 2020 began, nobody imagined how the whole world would change and our habits at the same time. The way we work has been greatly affected, although there were already many who teleworked before, especially in the digital sector. Kypseli was conceived from the beginning as a remote studio, so the processes and culture were defined taking this factor into account as well.

Today, I’m here to tell you how we work so that remote work isn’t a problem. First of all, I want to say that this is our experience and in a sector in which it isn’t necessary to be physically in a specific place.

Culture

I’m going to start with the main course: Culture. It’s an issue that is never taken into account when we talk about working on remote but, personally, I think it is the point that has the most impact.

We’ll talk more in depth about corporate culture in future but, in short, culture can aim four directions: Control, competence, cultivation and collaboration. The more we move towards a culture of control, the more difficult it will be to implement a remote working model in the company. A culture away from control favors working on remote and even makes us more productive, since we will have fewer distractions during the day.

In the case of Kypseli, we’re developing a culture of growth or cultivation. Even so, we also share many of the aspects of the collaborative one. In a collaboration culture, we can find some obstacles, which we’ll discuss in this post.

Communication

As I mentioned before, collaboration is one of our main pillars. Whether it’s between us, with clients or with collaborators, communication is key for good teamwork. We need means of communication that allows the team to speak quickly and effectively. It’s important to have separate channels to categorize the type of information we receive and so that the generated content will be easier to find in the future.

For small questions that are resolved in one line, chatting is fine. However, we have found that for any problem that requires more than two interactions, a quick video call is more effective.

Meetings

We have meetings to plan each day, week, month, quarter and year, to tell what each of us is working on, detect blockages, find out if we can help, coordinate for the rest of the day… And all this through video call, since facilitates communication and reduces the time we dedicate to it.

Although it is not a characteristic only of remote work, we take into account punctuality and meeting times to optimize our efficiency.

Interactions

As I said, we try to speak directly when we need something concrete that won’t be a couple of questions and answers. And this is for two reasons:

• Efficiency: We save time of asking, waiting for probably another question, for the answer and for the answer to the first question. It’s much quicker when you find a moment when both parts are available.
• Interaction: When we work remotely sporadically, we may not feel the need to talk to people because the rest of the days you see them in the office. However, after several months, we realized that it was nice (even necessary) to talk every now and then besides the day planning in 10 minutes. This allows us to empathize more with our interlocutor, create stronger bonds in the team and increase productivity. In addition, a more relaxed conversation allowed us to come up with new ideas, insights and solutions that otherwise would not have been given.

Professional and personal life

For the vast majority of people, it’s difficult to separate personal and professional spaces. To be as effective as possible, it is best to physically separate the spaces, so that once the working day is over, we can close and tidy everything. Some of us use the same personal computer to work, and we also need to separate both spaces within it so that they don’t interfere negatively.

This obviously should also apply to presencial work, but it becomes more complicated when you share the same space.

There are people who aren’t significantly stressed by this, until they try to separate the spaces and realize that it was affecting them much more than they imagined.

Anything else?

I’ve tried to summarize the most important points for us to work remotely. Personally, I fully understand that there are people who prefer face-to-face work, and vice versa, in addition to the fact that it depends greatly on the nature of it. Whatever it is, I hope the day will come when everyone can freely choose where to work.

If you have more ideas that you want to share, comment or send me a message to improve our way of working.