Miss the office. Confession of a team accustomed to working remotely

Since March 16, when we were asked to “isolate” ourselves from the office, more than five weeks passed. During this time we managed to:

  • run wild from articles “How to go online”, “How we went online”, “5 tools for working with online”;
  • spend hundreds of unnecessary extra phonings, while colleagues, after reading articles about online, played with zoom;
  • teach colleagues not to include video so as not to break into the intimate life of wallpaper with flowers and women without makeup;
  • to dismiss those who have lost the ability to imitate violent working activity (it was long overdue, but then it became obvious to everyone).

Our skepticism towards sofa experts was based on several years of formation of a large distributed team, in which:

  • 10 work remotely, and God forbid we saw them once, and then by chance;
  • 20 have jobs in one office, 12 in another, everyone has a free schedule and the ability to come / not come, come anytime, work from anywhere.

And at first, almost nothing has changed for us. But in the fourth week, we realized that the office played an important role in our lives. For the entire fifth week, we struggled with nostalgia and finally formulated 10 opportunities that we took away with him.

1. The ability to quickly cling new employees

When you’re not Yandex, it’s hard for you to lure people because everyone wants Yandex. But when you have a cool office, where, for example, a beautiful view from the window or a funny “masterpiece” of abstractionism on the wall, there is a chance to compete for the minds and hearts of the candidates.


The view from the office window is good anytime, but the sunsets work out especially

To the absence of a beautiful picture of the office is added the absence of a beautiful picture of ourselves. Indeed, an office with abstractionism on the wall can only be an office with abstractionism on the wall, on which people walk with the inscription ASS on a T-shirt.

As a result, during the quarantine period, we lost four candidates whom we could be hunted down if we conducted interviews in the office.

What do you think: Since we can’t cling to the office, we will cling online. For example, to attract new people in support, we made a landing, where they tried to describe how cool we are.

2. The ability to spontaneously flood

Now the flood has to be planned and inserted into the schedule. In the office, it happens by itself: when you are talking through a hole in the wall between the offices, you choose pizza on the occasion of a successfully sent mailing to a million people or just knowingly exchange glances at human stupidity.

When we were in the office, it seemed that online flood took up all the chats. But this is not so: being on a remote site and ceasing to flood in person, we almost stopped flood online. Here is such an interesting addiction.

What do you think: End every Friday hour with talk of nothing. The main rule is that we don’t talk about work and the coronavirus. Sometimes we even play online puzzles. We noticed, by the way, that the focus of preferences of some players has shifted from strategy games to associative ones like Dixit.

3. Ability to use legs and tongue

How saving and sweet these words sound now. “SchA, wait, I’ll come – we’ll discuss it,” “can you come?”, “Come on with your voice.” And this voice is not an incoming signal in the Telegram, but a living voice of a living person who looks in your eyes, and problems with him are somehow solved magically very quickly and easily.


Fact: site redesign issues in the corner on ottomans were resolved faster. Everything gets better when you look a person in the eye

We began to understand each other worse behind words in chat rooms, make more mistakes and spend an incredible amount of time correcting errors.

What led: Dramatically from Generation Z, they became Generation X. As soon as we feel that something is about to become incomprehensible, we pick up the phone and call. For a dry message in the messenger you can not see the emotional color. Because of this, we sometimes think to ourselves that a colleague was suddenly offended by something, while his calm and friendly voice on the phone clearly shows that in fact everything is in order.

4. The ability to watch in two monitors

And also sit on a comfortable chair at your favorite desktop and type on a cool keyboard. The infrastructure question arose sharply when we were forced to make a full-fledged office out of our workplace at home. It (the workplace) was not ready for this, and we were not ready to feel such a strong dependence on the usual office utensils.

Studying statistics, we saw that we are not alone in this. The statistics are not ours, but American, but very indicative: in March the demand for monitors there grew by 172% (almost three times), and for computer desks – by 89%.


Full version can be found here.

What led to: made a couple of illegal sorties into the office and learned to take more regular breaks during the working day.

5. The ability to go their several thousand steps

We went out to smoke, in a cafe, to a store – and walked our 3000 steps in the office. The road to and from home added a couple more thousand. And now we were almost zoozhniki.


The glass ceiling is a lot of sun and a great view of the “high-rise on Kudrinskaya”, at any time of the year a trip to a vending machine for coffee turns into a walk around the city

In the apartment, the distances close so much that the opposite effect is observed – you adjust the workplace so as to minimize your body movements. Therefore, the refrigerator opens exactly so that it can be done with one hand, without being distracted from the monitor.

What do you think: Notify each other when another online workout starts on youtube. We replace the steps with the press and push-ups.

6. The opportunity to learn from each other

Each of us is something good. For example, Sveta masterfully works with the word, Lisa communicates best with users, Olya masterly controls the developers. When we are next to each other, we see each other’s skills in action and consciously and unconsciously adopt them.

Now we are focusing on each other’s direct competencies and are only addressing work issues when we need something from each other. We lost the opportunity to “spy” and write down another life hack from a classroom colleague in our notebook.

What do you think: since you cannot learn from each other, you can learn … something one and all together. Chose English.

7. Ability to turn off the phone

One monitoring application reported that my screen time increased by 60% last week. It increased – because if earlier we checked the phone once every few hours, because the most important thing was in direct communication with each other, now communications have switched to instant messengers. Plus, we became afraid to miss a phone call from a colleague whose message could accidentally scroll through one of the general chats.

What do you think: focused on several chats and left all the others.

8. The ability to communicate with tags

“We understand each other perfectly” turned out to be not a phrase from a romantic comedy, but a characteristic of a competitive team. While one spends a paragraph of the text on a prelude, we spend 2-3 words on it, and we are freed up time to solve the essence, and not to explain what each of us means.

And while we are learning to maintain information symmetry, our team tag cloud is not expanding – we live with the tags that we invented in the offline era.


The team sticker pack, which was drawn by a familiar artist, helps us a lot. Each phrase was born in a specific situation, and this insures perfectly from the alignment of the class “We have already passed this”

What do you think: In response to the change in communication in chat rooms, we also decided to pay closer attention to the project documentation – so that at least everything would be nice and without tags there.

9. The ability to work on each other’s projects

Each of us has working projects, and efficiency increases when we connect to each other’s projects. When you sit in the same room, you involuntarily get into other people’s projects that are discussed above your ear, at least in the “they didn’t ask me, but I will say” mode. There were also options: “ask for advice”, “take a fresh look”, or even “move pixels” together. Caught in isolation, we each focused on our project, and found that each of them began to develop more slowly than it could.

What do you think: hold part of the projects and rebuild the team so that we reload into each other’s projects. For example, paused calendar promotion 2035.events, which they talked about, and slightly froze the service Leader data.

10. The ability to support each other in critical situations

After all, online does not allow you to see your colleague all the time and feel that right now he needs to be patted on the shoulder in a friendly way or say a good word.

One day we quarantined big online competition and violated the regime of self-isolation, coming to visit each other, straying in pairs to make it easier. Similarly, we let results of the participation of his team in one project, sitting physically at 12 nights in one room – it was so much more fun and easier, and at some point free hands were found to bring food.


Field events taught us how to make an office out of nothing anywhere. At the educational intensity Island, our headquarters got such an “aquarium” with two outlets. Two hours later, we stole armchairs, ottomans, a coffee maker from the office there – and spent the next two weeks there, leaving in shifts and for a short while

What did: purchased by power engineers, so that if the quarantine is strengthened and each other doesn’t come to each other, they don’t save a sleepless night on the next big-time project.

Do you miss the office like we do? Add if we missed something.

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