Being distributed and remote-first comes with its fair share of challenges. One of the biggest challenges is probably related to how "attendance at the office" is perceived at the company. Here is our take on it!
Our working week consists of five days devoted to work for external clients and 10% of that time, Investment Time, dedicated exclusively to learning, other projects, or open source contributions.
We work an 8-hour day, with a fully-flexible schedule. The hours adopted by most people in Nebulab is between 9:30 AM and 6:30 PM, considering about an hour for lunch. However, you'll see a lot of people coming in and out of the (virtual) office (on Slack) at all times, depending on how they chose to work during that particular day of the week.
Organizing the schedule must, in any case, be a team effort: those who choose a very unusual schedule must be careful to inform everyone they are working with so as to not prevent others from performing their work.
Work happens from anywhere you want, as long as it's the right place for doing proper work. This flexibility in terms of time and place is possible thanks to the discipline of our team and continuous and attentive use of ad hoc tools.
Remote work comes with serious challenges that must be handled in advance, to prevent them from negatively affecting your productivity and that of the entire team.
Basic principles
Remote work is not simply a benefit, but a philosophy in itself and an alternative to co-located work. As such, it should be approached with the same focus and care we use when working from the office.
Remote work requires the collective effort of those who work remotely and those who work from a physical office. If one of these two groups is not sufficiently involved, it will not work.
A well-implemented remote-first philosophy improves everyone's work quality, bringing calmness and transparency to communication, decisions, and daily work.
If you are working remotely, you are at the office. If you need to do anything else, inform the team and ask for permission. Working while you are doing something else is not acceptable because it affects not only your productivity but also the productivity of those you work with.
Adopt transparency by default. Ensure that all communication takes place in public channels unless it is strictly necessary to keep it private, so that everyone is informed on what is happening.
When you work remotely, it is up to you to ensure you have the tools and the environment to be as productive as possible.
Requirements
Your productive space. A space dedicated exclusively to work. When you are there, you are at the office. This space must allow you to do your work without disrupting your or your coworkers' productivity (e.g. if you need to hop on a call, you can't work from a coffee shop!).
A good Internet connection. It is frustrating to be in a meeting with someone you can't understand or who disconnects continuously. If you intend to work remotely, invest in a good Internet connection. If you need help, we can find a solution together.
Making an exception
Life is complicated and things happen. We all need to make a small exception to the rule every now and then. Perhaps someone in your family is sick and nobody can take care of them, but you don't want to take a whole day off. Proactive communication is key in such situations. Inform others that you may not be accessible at all times; nobody will object.
In any case, if situations of this type happen often, talk to your manager and we will find a solution together.
Tracking
At Nebulab, our consulting roots make time tracking vital. While it can feel reductive to quantify one's invaluable contribution in mere hours or minutes, the reality is that monthly invoicing based on time or output is a cornerstone of the consulting industry.
Note: Attendance tracking is eventually used to generate invoices.
We get it: no one's truly fond of time tracking. That's why we've designed a system that balances fairness and flexibility, ensuring we meet our invoicing obligations without compromising on the well-being and trust of our team.
How many hours per day
Your contract includes the number of hours you are expected to be at the office during a regular work day. Considering our distributed nature, "hours at the office" roughly means "hours spent working", including small pauses, like it would in a physical office.
Tip: If you signed a full-time contract, that means you should track 8 hours/day of presence.
During this time, you should consider yourself "at the office" meaning that you're around, ready to do active work and to collaborate with the rest of the team. This doesn't mean that you cannot take a break and go for a brief walk or that you need to be sitting in front of your computer for the whole 8 hours.
How to track hours
Full flexibility is possible when it comes to when you work. At any given time during the day, you can clock-in/clock-out with Bob, our HRIS tool of choice. This will allow some pretty flexible scheduling as you are free to start/stop the timer whenever you need to account for events of your personal life.
You'll be required to submit your timesheet at the end of the month to compute the amount of overtime and PTO hours you did, with very little maintenance needed. This timesheet eventually ends up being part of the invoices that we emit to clients and used as analytics to understand overall team health and efficiency.
Requesting Paid Time Off (PTO)
The only thing that requires a bit of planning ahead is requesting full days of Paid Time Off (PTO). We do this so that everyone is informed that you won't be available and they cannot count on your help on that particular day/week.
Note: Scheduling PTO days is the only thing that needs to be done in advance.
We firmly believe that sustainable work rhythms lead to the best results. For this reason, we're of the view that overtime often detracts more than it contributes, making it something we generally discourage.
However, we recognize that exceptional circumstances (i.e. addressing a critical issue preventing customer transactions on an eCommerce application, may arise).
In such rare instances, your engineering manager can request overtime, but it's essential that such requests receive leadership approval before proceeding.