Navigating Daily Life at NFN Labs
Our Remote Work Setup, Tools, and Challenges
DEC 06 2022 • Sonaal Bangera
The whole covid situation has gotten better now, but boy has it left a profound impact - changing both our personal and professional lives drastically to the point that WFH culture has become a way of life!
Ever since the lockdown began, we at NFN Labs have gone fully remote and are continuing to do so till date. Through this post, we shall be sharing some thoughts on how we sailed through the transition; how we set up simple communication protocols and shipped high quality stuff out into the world.
HOW WE WORK
When we were at office, communication was easy and face-to-face. Since we are a small team, everyone knew what the other person was working on - thanks to our daily tea time catch up at 11 am. With remote work, we found some simple ways to keep everyone in the loop. Here is what we do.…
WEEKLY TEAM CATCH-UP
On Monday evenings, there is a catch-up call where the past week’s progress is reflected on and the upcoming week’s goals are fixed. All team members give their inputs and everyone gets a basic idea of who is working on what. We speak about upcoming projects and client meets along with general business updates. Apart from work, we also discuss technology, business and everything else under the sun! Whenever a project reaches a good point, the team does a visual demo of the work so everyone can see the progress.
WORK PROCESS
We work Monday - Friday, mostly between 10.30 am and 6 pm. Work is fairly flexible as we don’t have any micro-management or mandatory daily meetings. Team members just keep their availability status posted and we work our way around that. On Fridays, project members collaborate amongst themselves and discuss if things are going as per plan. Demonstrations are prepared, changes are reviewed and the teams wrap up and get ready to catch-up with everyone else on Monday to update the progress.
DAILY STANDUPS
For every project we are working on, we have a dedicated 15-min daily call where we review the previous day’s task completion status, discuss blockers and set goals for the next work day.
INTRA-TEAM COMMUNICATIONS
The QA team, Design team catch up weekly and the Dev team - monthly to share updates on work and new technologies in their domain.
Apart from these, for any internal communication - be it for clarifying trivial doubts or anything else, we focus on async updates.
HOW WE COMMUNICATE AND COLLABORATE
Communication happens async on slack and for catching up, we use huddles and g-meet. Slack, G Suite, Telegram are the main platforms we use for conversations, document storage, sharing, scheduling meetings / calls etc.
SLACK : All day to day conversations happen here. We have separate channels for every project we are working on where we post updates and have huddles for discussions. Apart from these project based channels, we have also created the following.
#availability - We enter our login time here everyday and also post whenever we go AFK so the members don’t ping us then!
#general - All the members are in this channel. Any information not specific to any project is posted here. This could be new tools for the team to check out or company related updates
#team-wins - About our products that have been shipped, team members learning something new, good feedback from our clients or someone writing a great review for our products. Every tiny accomplishment is celebrated in this channel
#interesting - Anything that the team finds interesting related to work
#personal-finance - Posts on investment and long term wealth creation
#support - For product feedbacks and emails sent to NFN’s support system
#random - A place for non-work banter, links, articles of interest, memes, movie talks, politics, humour or anything else which you'd like concentrated in some place other than work-related channels.
TELEGRAM: We have a group on Telegram which basically serves the same purpose as the #random channel, but is mostly active during non-work hours. We share tweets, daily happenings, pics from in-person meets here.
G SUITE: Sharing storage, documentation, video calls, demos , e mails… you name it - we use Google workspace for literally everything.
Gmail - For all formal communications
Google docs sheets and slides- Documentation, Presentations, Management work
Google drive - All common documents about projects and the company are kept in a shared folder for easy access
Google keep - To make notes, to-do-lists
Calendar - To keep track and remind us of meetings, weekly-catchup calls, daily scrum calls. Most of us have integrated it with Slack so members can know if we are busy in a meeting!
Google Meet - Our primary mode of conducting meetings other than slack calls / huddles. These are scheduled on a daily / weekly basis as per the project.
THE TOOLS THE TEAM USES EVERYDAY
Having seen the communication tools, let’s jump straight to the applications we use on a daily basis to keep shipping things.
Productivity tools: Here are some of our favourite utility / productivity tools that we swear by. We believe these to be great suggestions for your business as well!
TickTick: With Calendar, Reminder, Focus Timer, Habit tracker and several more features, TickTick is really a one stop shop for managing daily tasks efficiently.
Cron: This is the next-generation calendar app for professionals and teams, making modern work more efficient and joyful. You can integrate Cron with other tools as well for doubled-up productivity!
Notion: For note-taking, idea-organising, creating mood boards and progress tracking.
Scrcpy / Vysor - For displaying and controlling Android devices through USB connection.
AText: Cross-platform text expander tool which lets us utilise short codes or keywords to lazily quickly write a piece of text.
Scribe: This chrome extension helps cut down the time spent switching between browser windows or word documents thereby streamlining process capturing and documentation.
Colorzilla: To easily pick a colour from any part of the screen and use them for our own programs!
Operations: Bills, bank statements, accounting and all financial transactions - Zoho Books and Payroll are where we go!
Design: Figma!! The design-team uses Figma to make designs for web and mobile interfaces and the rest of us follow it to proceed with development.
Mind maps: Are your ideas all over the place? Channelize them through tools like Miro, MindMeister, Whimsical and FigJam! Create and collab with their user flow, architecture diagrams and more.
Jira: Last but not least, the one single tool that all of us undoubtedly use is Jira. Right from setting product vision, roadmap making, gathering feature requirements, managing stakeholders and budgets, tracking every day processes, logging in work, assigning tasks, adding and tracking bugs - Jira basically does everything!
CHALLENGES WHILE WORKING REMOTE
Network and power issues are obviously the biggest culprits here. The last thing we want is to suddenly turn magician and vanish during important client calls! Remote meetings must ideally be the most efficient way to catch-up but ironically a lot of time gets wasted as we keep asking others if we are audible / have slow internet connection. Why, reports even say that the most used business phrase in 2020 was - “I think you’re on mute”!
Another issue is us not feeling ‘connected enough’ with our colleagues. Say what you may about the perks of WFH, but nothing beats face-face convos. Some also feel more productive when they are present at the office.
But hey, these are issues the entire world is facing and the way to go about it is to make the best use of the situation! 82% of the employees in the world prefer WFH, says study. I mean, who doesn’t like working while snacking with PJs on!
For more team bonding we are planning meet ups with team members across the state and beyond. We also believe that keeping things flexible and fun paves the way for focussed work and are constantly looking for solutions to make work culture better!
If you want to learn more about why we transitioned to a Remote first company - Click here
