What's new
Fantasy Football - Footballguys Forums

Welcome to Our Forums. Once you've registered and logged in, you're primed to talk football, among other topics, with the sharpest and most experienced fantasy players on the internet.

Work From Home Folks - Best Structure For Company? (1 Viewer)

Joe Bryant

Joe Bryant

Guide
Staff member
Thanks for the discussion here on Packy's article on WFH. I think he's right about the trends. 

Footballguys has been this way from the start. 

But we still could improve I think in keeping everyone connected it seems. 

For you people in companies that use a good bit or total Work From Home, what organizational structures do you companies using that are effective for keeping teams connected and communicating?

We use Basecamp and I mostly like it. But I know there's a zillion different things out there.

What do you use or have you seen used and what do you think is good?

 
Size of company is going to matter, a lot.  Type of work is going to matter, a lot.

That said, Teams is a really good platform, and if you already use Microsoft for e-mail or the Office desktop suite, it may well be included in your existing license or subscription.

 
Rich Conway said:
Size of company is going to matter, a lot.  Type of work is going to matter, a lot.
Click to expand...
Sure. Say for a company that's about 50 people that need to work together in some fashion.

Our work is all easily done remotely and it's planning, creating and producing digital content. 

We have about 15 that work a ton and then another 35 or so that are more peripheral. But still need to be connected tightly when needed. 

 
Last edited by a moderator:
There are a lot of variables that would affect the response. I think the most important factors of remote work are:

  • people need to self-manage - what i mean is that people need to have a goal (or a list of tasks) and be able to sustain themselves for days at a time with no communication. If you have a top-down management or micromanaging style, then remote is not going to work.
  • regular checkins - while people should be able to sustain themselves for days at a time, that is not ideal. 10 minutes checkin every morning with a team of 5-7 where everyone can report what they are working on that day. Sometimes I've seen the checkins done via Slack and that works.
  • easy methods of communication - when people need to communicate, it needs to be easy to do so (eg. Slack or Teams)
Most of the companies I worked for (or am familiar with) use some form of Scrum. It was not designed for remote work but it adapts well to remote work. You will get many opinions on it (some people HATE it) but it is a good structure that can be adapted to different types of work. The essentials are that you create small teams (5-7 people) with a shared objective. Then the team plans work in 2 week (you can adjust the length) cycles called sprints. At the start of the sprint, you create a backlog of tasks that need to be completed in that sprint. You have a 10 minute meeting every morning (the scrum meeting) to check in. People are only supposed to talk about 3 things: what they worked on yesterday, what they are going to work on today and if they need help with something. At the end of the sprint you review the work and your process to find improvements. People are generally free to manage their time how they want as long as they accomplish all of the tasks in the sprint.

Tools of the trade

  • Slack (or Teams) - Not sure how any remote company would survive without Slack or Teams
  • Google Meet / Zoom - Teleconferencing is obviously a must
  • Google Workspace (or Office 365) - Being able to share / work on shared documents is critical
  • Any task management software - There are so many of them that it is hard to single one out (Basecamp is certainly a good option)
  • Discord - I don't get the appeal, but some of the younger co-workers love it.
Finally if you have not read the books (Rework and Remote) by the founders of Basecamp, I highly recommend. They will make you think about work differently. I am not a believer in all the things they profess (eg. they don't like Slack because it causes too many interruptions) but they have great insight on working more efficiently.

 
tymarsas said:
There are a lot of variables that would affect the response. I think the most important factors of remote work are:

  • people need to self-manage - what i mean is that people need to have a goal (or a list of tasks) and be able to sustain themselves for days at a time with no communication. If you have a top-down management or micromanaging style, then remote is not going to work.
  • regular checkins - while people should be able to sustain themselves for days at a time, that is not ideal. 10 minutes checkin every morning with a team of 5-7 where everyone can report what they are working on that day. Sometimes I've seen the checkins done via Slack and that works.
  • easy methods of communication - when people need to communicate, it needs to be easy to do so (eg. Slack or Teams)
Most of the companies I worked for (or am familiar with) use some form of Scrum. It was not designed for remote work but it adapts well to remote work. You will get many opinions on it (some people HATE it) but it is a good structure that can be adapted to different types of work. The essentials are that you create small teams (5-7 people) with a shared objective. Then the team plans work in 2 week (you can adjust the length) cycles called sprints. At the start of the sprint, you create a backlog of tasks that need to be completed in that sprint. You have a 10 minute meeting every morning (the scrum meeting) to check in. People are only supposed to talk about 3 things: what they worked on yesterday, what they are going to work on today and if they need help with something. At the end of the sprint you review the work and your process to find improvements. People are generally free to manage their time how they want as long as they accomplish all of the tasks in the sprint.

Tools of the trade

  • Slack (or Teams) - Not sure how any remote company would survive without Slack or Teams
  • Google Meet / Zoom - Teleconferencing is obviously a must
  • Google Workspace (or Office 365) - Being able to share / work on shared documents is critical
  • Any task management software - There are so many of them that it is hard to single one out (Basecamp is certainly a good option)
  • Discord - I don't get the appeal, but some of the younger co-workers love it.
Finally if you have not read the books (Rework and Remote) by the founders of Basecamp, I highly recommend. They will make you think about work differently. I am not a believer in all the things they profess (eg. they don't like Slack because it causes too many interruptions) but they have great insight on working more efficiently.
Click to expand...
This is a great answer.  I do want to address the "Tools of the trade" section, as there is some overlap on some of the above.  I'm not terribly familiar with the details of Slack's feature set, but am very versed in Teams and the entire Microsoft suite.

To the overlap I mentioned, Teams includes video conferencing, very similar to Zoom.  The base Teams license allows audio/video conferencing over internet, but does NOT include an audio dial-in (i.e. I can't call in via a phone number; I have to join using a browser or Teams client).  Audio dial-in exists, but is an add-on license.  Similarly, you can use Teams to store/share/work on documents, but it is not necessarily an ideal doc repository for every use case.  Most Microsoft licenses that include Teams will also include OneDrive for Business and/or SharePoint Online, which would cover most use cases for document storage. If anyone wants to get more granular regarding specific Microsoft licensing, I can definitely help via PM.

 
If you have the right people on board and they are engaged I find you don't have to do much except give them the tools they need.  Slack would be my #1 recommendation by far as a great communication tool.

 
Ron Swanson said:
If you have the right people on board and they are engaged I find you don't have to do much except give them the tools they need.  Slack would be my #1 recommendation by far as a great communication tool.
Click to expand...
Thanks. Do you have some detail on how you've found Slack to work best? It's gorgeous and intuitive but we used it for about a year and found it unbearable with the noise. We weren't able to effectively harness the important projects and tasks and instead were overwhelmed with the back and forth. It felt more like group text on steroids.

But I know it's wildly popular. Do you have some best practices or can you point me to some articles you've found to be helpful there?

 
I've used several tools for meetings and most have strengths/weaknesses but I'll say Microsoft Teams and the overall collaboration/experience is phenomenal and much better than I ever expected.  The only complaint I have is it can sometimes drag a little - but from a functionality perspective it works great and allows me to seamlessly WFH.

 
What I need are ways to 

Develop and define projects

Have todo's tied to projects

Collaborate in specific teams.

Group chat to discuss and keep folks engaged.

We do all that now pretty well with Basecamp. But it can still be clunky sometimes. We may have the best thing for us but I'm always looking to improve.

 
Joe Bryant said:
Thanks. Do you have some detail on how you've found Slack to work best? It's gorgeous and intuitive but we used it for about a year and found it unbearable with the noise. We weren't able to effectively harness the important projects and tasks and instead were overwhelmed with the back and forth. It felt more like group text on steroids.

But I know it's wildly popular. Do you have some best practices or can you point me to some articles you've found to be helpful there?
Click to expand...
Dedicated channels with only the needed people for that project in the channel. Larger group channels are fine for larger discussions/announcements/etc. but do get noisy if they are too broad. Kind of like here.  Some threads do wind up working as catch all threads but by and large more specificity is better.

I don't really use it for task management. That's more of an Asana/Basecamp thing in my opinion. More as an email replacement for groups with common daily issues or project focused. For instance a team within the company would have a channel for daily communications. Or I may start a channel as a discussion channel for a particular project that I want to iterate with a group on in lieu of a group email that gets messy or is hard to follow or a phone or video call that requires everyone at the same time.

It's really a replacement for inter-company email and other communications that are less centralized.

 
Joe Bryant said:
What I need are ways to 

Develop and define projects

Have todo's tied to projects

Collaborate in specific teams.

Group chat to discuss and keep folks engaged.

We do all that now pretty well with Basecamp. But it can still be clunky sometimes. We may have the best thing for us but I'm always looking to improve.
Click to expand...
The first three are Basecamp/Asana.

The last two are Slack.

 
Joe Bryant said:
Thanks for the discussion here on Packy's article on WFH. I think he's right about the trends. 

Footballguys has been this way from the start. 

But we still could improve I think in keeping everyone connected it seems. 

For you people in companies that use a good bit or total Work From Home, what organizational structures do you companies using that are effective for keeping teams connected and communicating?

We use Basecamp and I mostly like it. But I know there's a zillion different things out there.

What do you use or have you seen used and what do you think is good?
Click to expand...
Microsoft Teams.. I've been supporting it since it was released..  It took a few years for it to find its way, but our CEO has stated that having us switching completely to it, including phones, a year before covid is what made this situation work.

He stated to the board that without our teams hard work of rolling it out and training Employees on the use, he is not sure we would have done as well as we have through these trying times. :thumbup:

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Joe Bryant said:
What I need are ways to 

Develop and define projects

Have todo's tied to projects

Collaborate in specific teams.

Group chat to discuss and keep folks engaged.

We do all that now pretty well with Basecamp. But it can still be clunky sometimes. We may have the best thing for us but I'm always looking to improve.
Click to expand...
With Microsoft Teams, you now get Microsoft Lists which gives you a lot of what you asked above( project tracking, to do, etc..) You can use the free version to test it out.. I have a personal account I used to collaborate with our Fantasy Football league when we couldn't meet live to draft and use it to communicate with all that use the cabin in Canada. :thumbup:

 
Joe Bryant said:
Thanks. Do you have some detail on how you've found Slack to work best? It's gorgeous and intuitive but we used it for about a year and found it unbearable with the noise. We weren't able to effectively harness the important projects and tasks and instead were overwhelmed with the back and forth. It felt more like group text on steroids.

But I know it's wildly popular. Do you have some best practices or can you point me to some articles you've found to be helpful there?
Click to expand...
Turn off notifications. You can set it so you only get notifications when you get direct messaged or mentioned. I personally turn off all notifications and just check it randomly throughout the day. Too many notifications make it hard to work.

 
tymarsas said:
Turn off notifications. You can set it so you only get notifications when you get direct messaged or mentioned. I personally turn off all notifications and just check it randomly throughout the day. Too many notifications make it hard to work.
Click to expand...
Thanks. It wasn't the notifications. It was the just the overwhelming noise. I think it may have been more our structure on it but it was impossible for us to filter out the important from the not. I need to look at some detail on exactly how companies are setting up channels and how they organize. 

I'm also pretty averse to going back and forth between apps. I like to discuss the project in the project. But again, I know tons that do great with this. 

 
Joe Bryant said:
Thanks. It wasn't the notifications. It was the just the overwhelming noise. I think it may have been more our structure on it but it was impossible for us to filter out the important from the not. I need to look at some detail on exactly how companies are setting up channels and how they organize. 

I'm also pretty averse to going back and forth between apps. I like to discuss the project in the project. But again, I know tons that do great with this. 
Click to expand...
Totally fair. I've become pretty adept at tuning out the noise. I generally assume that people will tag me on conversations I need to be in. The rest is optional reading.

As for channels, they generally break down in a few categories for us. We have team channels, client channels, project channels, role channels (eg. developers or sales) and company wide channels. We only subscribe to channels that apply to us. We also try to keep the company wide channels reserved for actual company wide news. Generally your team channel will have the most activity. I could see project channels having more activity if you are more project based.

I also understand the comment of flipping back and forth between multiple apps. I generally only use our task tracking app (jira) once or twice a day. We try to make larger tasks that take up a whole day rather than lots of small tasks. The only things that get communicated in jira are things we want to keep a permanent record of. That being said it can be confusing to go back and forth, like trying to follow two conversations. Slack is not good at project management so might not be a good fit for your use. Seems like Teams might have more functionality regarding task management but I'll let other people speak to that as I am not familiar.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
tymarsas said:
  • regular checkins - while people should be able to sustain themselves for days at a time, that is not ideal. 10 minutes checkin every morning with a team of 5-7 where everyone can report what they are working on that day. 
Click to expand...
Great answer overall, but I think the above is too much. I think frequency depends on a myriad of factors, but my default setting would be once/week with a second on-call time if necessary. 

 
AAABatteries said:
I've used several tools for meetings and most have strengths/weaknesses but I'll say Microsoft Teams and the overall collaboration/experience is phenomenal and much better than I ever expected.  The only complaint I have is it can sometimes drag a little - but from a functionality perspective it works great and allows me to seamlessly WFH.
Click to expand...
I don't know what IT did to resolve our drag issue, but whatever they did it's been non existent since Sep. Teams has a lot of bells and whistles I'm not familiar with because I don't need them, but those that have speak glowing of them - and it's been a perfect fit for us. Project management and communications have been seemless all with very little 'noise' and that's exactly what we need.

 
MAC_32 said:
Great answer overall, but I think the above is too much. I think frequency depends on a myriad of factors, but my default setting would be once/week with a second on-call time if necessary. 
Click to expand...
Totally fair. I prefer the daily check in to hold myself accountable and understand what my teammates are working on. Many people think it is excessive. There are other ways to do it that are less disruptive. One method I have seen is to post a quick one liner on a team channel in slack. I agree it is highly dependent on many factors so you definitely have to figure out the frequency that works best for your team.

 
Ron Swanson said:
Dedicated channels with only the needed people for that project in the channel. Larger group channels are fine for larger discussions/announcements/etc. but do get noisy if they are too broad.
Click to expand...
I'm in media and this is how we use Slack, and it works very well. I am on one channel for my immediate team, another for all the teams overseen by my editorial director, and another for the entire news division. The latter is generally only used for a midday meeting about what articles to put in the daily email that gets sent to all subscribers to the news division's website. I don't find this setup distracting at all, and no one from my team has complained to me about it. I also use it for one-on-one exchanges with the people on my immediate team, generally when I need an immediate answer about something. 

For videoconferencing, our division generally uses Zoom, as does upper management, but some of the other divisions use Teams. 

And my team uses Onedrive to keep the schedule of what articles we plan to post on what days. 

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Joe Bryant said:
What I need are ways to 

Develop and define projects

Have todo's tied to projects

Collaborate in specific teams.

Group chat to discuss and keep folks engaged.

We do all that now pretty well with Basecamp. But it can still be clunky sometimes. We may have the best thing for us but I'm always looking to improve.
Click to expand...
Monday.com is one of the best for this. 

Its well designed and engaging interface

project based with ability to assign and track tasks

Its pricey though. I have not used it directly b/c im pretty much a 1 man shop, but as I grow, i've been testing and evaluating  project management suites. 

A few others I looked at were:

Freedcamp

FunctionFox

Dubsado (but this is for more service based business and client communication)

Zoho

Wrike

Assana and Trello are also very popular and mostly free but can really ramp up with some paid add ons.

 
glvsav37 said:
Monday.com is one of the best for this. 

Its well designed and engaging interface

project based with ability to assign and track tasks

Its pricey though. I have not used it directly b/c im pretty much a 1 man shop, but as I grow, i've been testing and evaluating  project management suites. 

A few others I looked at were:

Freedcamp

FunctionFox

Dubsado (but this is for more service based business and client communication)

Zoho

Wrike

Assana and Trello are also very popular and mostly free but can really ramp up with some paid add ons.
Click to expand...
Thanks. I've been intrigued by the Monday.com ads. They look slick.

We've also used Clickup some for our tech projects and that seems similar. 

 
MAC_32 said:
Great answer overall, but I think the above is too much. I think frequency depends on a myriad of factors, but my default setting would be once/week with a second on-call time if necessary. 
Click to expand...
Thanks. This is the kind of thing that I'm trying to balance too. 

I'm not a fan of meeting just to meet. But it's easy to be isolated and not have clarity on everything. 

The other thing is who is in the meeting. It sucks if someone is having to sit there while others talk about something that has no effect on them. 

But I don't want to have to repeat and distribute more than I have to. 

It's a balance. 

 
My team has a weekly Teams meeting to give status updates so everyone knows what is going on. 

Additionally, I have one on one meetings with each of my staff on a weekly basis to discuss issues, performance and whatever else they want to talk about.

Finally to encourage people to talk to each other instead of just messaging or email, we have social time scheduled a few days per week. Talk about anything except work. 

 
baaloc1968 said:
My team has a weekly Teams meeting to give status updates so everyone knows what is going on. 

Additionally, I have one on one meetings with each of my staff on a weekly basis to discuss issues, performance and whatever else they want to talk about.

Finally to encourage people to talk to each other instead of just messaging or email, we have social time scheduled a few days per week. Talk about anything except work. 
Click to expand...
Forced social time? No thanks.

Weekly one on ones? I'll pass.  We're both functioning adults, if we need to talk, just give me a ring. If I need to talk I'll do the same.

I'll admit, weekly status meetings are a crutch of mine that I'm trying to break.

I know I'm coming off as snarky but this just reeks as the antithesis of what a great modern workplace can be.  Hire the right people, hold them accountable, and let them run, Mr. Lundbergh.

 
Ron Swanson said:
Forced social time? No thanks.

Weekly one on ones? I'll pass.  We're both functioning adults, if we need to talk, just give me a ring. If I need to talk I'll do the same.

I'll admit, weekly status meetings are a crutch of mine that I'm trying to break.

I know I'm coming off as snarky but this just reeks as the antithesis of what a great modern workplace can be.  Hire the right people, hold them accountable, and let them run, Mr. Lundbergh.
Click to expand...
My team and I have been working remotely for years.   I used to do one on one calls but ended them after a few months.  It’s easier just to call as needed.  If things are going smoothly the calls felt awkward.    

We do start every week with a 30 minute call and it continues to be helpful.   The team has a chance to interact, discuss projects, collaborate a little and plan to assist each other more as needed or interested.   Structured weekly meetings may not be right for every team but if they are positive, I would keep them.   

 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

H
Remote Part Time Work From Home options?
Replies
19
Views
878
Tick
Tick
Lehigh98
Home Office Setup Ideas and Work from Home Advice
Replies
40
Views
898
PlayaHata
PlayaHata
General Malaise
$$ How Much Do You Spend Per Work Day On Lunch?
2
Replies
99
Views
2K
belljr
belljr

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 2 (members: 0, guests: 2)
Top