Looking Back Over Our First Week of Having a Fully Remote Team

We're always looking at ways we can continuously improve our processes, so today we had a retrospective which focused on how this week has gone.

• 20 March 2020
• By Maria Bell
•  Productivity

Part of the Remote Working series:

Part 1: The Mesomorphic Guide to Working From Home
Part 2: Communication When Working Remotely
Part 3: You Can With a Kanban
Part 4: Looking Back Over Our First Week of Having a Fully Remote Team
Part 5: The Mesomorphic Guide to Holding Your Own Retrospective

As we come to the end of our first week of the entire team working remotely, it’s time for a Working From Home retrospective. Retrospective may be new terminology to some of you, and I will go more into the processes behind the scenes in my next blog. Seeing as it’s a Friday, I figured I’d end the week on a lighter note!

There are so many benefits of having a retrospective. They can be done individually, within your team or across multiple departments and can be used in a variety of contexts. It creates a space for you to sit down and focus on what went well, what didn’t go so well and create action points for you to implement so that you’re continuously improving on whatever it is that you’re holding your retrospective on. Here are some points covered in our retrospective from this week.

What has gone well?

• Blogs - overall we have seen a good response to our blogs, and we’ve had a couple of networking opportunities come out of it. Keep your eyes open for collaboration pieces in the future.
• Work progression - we haven’t fallen too far behind whilst settling into our home offices.
• Stand-ups - As highlighted in our communications blog, stand ups really help communication between team members. We have noticed that when user cameras aren’t turned on for whatever reason, that there can be a tendency to talk over each other when we can’t see body language. So we are going to look at how we can improve here.
• General coordination - Generally speaking, we’ve felt that the coordination between team members has gone pretty smoothly. There have only been a couple of small hiccups so generally given the chaos of the week this isn’t bad!

What hasn’t gone so well?

• Away From Keyboard - sometimes we don’t know when our colleagues are away from their keyboards.
• Getting in touch with employees from other companies - we’re finding our sales pipeline has frozen up a bit whilst our prospects have been adjusting to their new desks.
• Mental health concerns - the feeling of being cooped up, and just generally unable to get some peace and quiet to concentrate came up in conversation. I’ve also discovered during the week that my screen breaks have been slipping.

What are our action points for the next week?

• Keep up with the blogging! - If you have requests for topics to be covered, please give us a shout!
• Virtual coffee breaks - in addition to our stand ups, we are going to have virtual coffee breaks for when we feel like we just need a yarn rather than a work talk. We’ll use Slack for this.
• Be more mindful of saying good morning on comms channel first thing.
• Quiplash - we’re going to investigate this online game as another method of keeping up informal chat between the team.
• Letting the rest of the team know when away from keyboard (AFK)
• Virtual beer after work on a Friday

As we come to the end of the first week of many people working from home for the first time, we hope that you have found these blogs have helped spark conversations around some of the challenges of working from home. If you have any feedback or want to talk more about the topics we have covered so far, please get in touch at contact@mesomorphic.co.uk