It’s not easy joining a new company during covid times, let alone joining remotely and working with people you won’t meet for another year.
Since joining last May, I’ve learned (and unlearned) a few things about working with strangers. I hope you’ll find some nuggets here to apply to your own work and team.
Note: This is my personal experience and I know every team/company culture is different. Take what you can; leave the rest. 😊
1. Explore new ways of being present
Onboarding to any new role is exciting, and there’s already momentum built up from joining a new company. The first 6 months for me flew by. The months afterward, though, passed by slower and slower. 8 months in, I started to think I was already indifferent about my job.
The city was shut down, the company announced it would reopen summer 2021, and my co-workers decided to leave CA temporarily. With all this uncertainty, it was understandable to feel demotivated at work, because my energy and purpose came from in-person collaboration sessions, coffee 1:1’s, and bumping into folks in the elevator. How could I replicate that in a remote environment?
I hosted coffee chats where teammates could casually drop in and say hi.
Only a few joined.
I started a social chat channel to share memes and what we did over the weekend.
It grew so big that no one posted anything for fear of being judged by people they barely knew.
So social video calls didn’t work. No one wanted more meetings. And social chats got too awkward.
Where’s that happy medium?
I’m still trying out different methods, but so far 1:1 chats with my colleagues worked the best. I would randomly pick someone from my 30-person design team and “cold” message them, asking about their day or what they were working on. It never felt awkward because we were all in the same boat, having joined remotely.
2. Everyone’s busy and calendars are jam packed, so you’ll need to collaborate smarter.
I work in a “video-on during meetings” culture, which can fatigue anybody. At my previous company, nobody turned on video, and meetings turned into pointless syncs where only two people actively talked while everyone else stayed on mute.
Having video on helps reduce distraction and keeps everyone engaged, but it’s also necessary to set a boundary. For me, I actually found that turning it off during low meeting days keeps me in a flow state.
FigJam (Figma collaboration tool) launched last month and it has been a game-changer for my team. Before, we would discuss issues over google docs, but to be honest it was BORING. One day I suggested FigJam, and once everyone hopped into the jam file, they went crazy playing with the emoji statuses and doodling smiley faces. It freed us from being so professional for once and gave us room to have fun while working through problems.
Real-time collaboration is awesome, but it’s important to capture learnings afterwards. Another way we collaborate is through writing posts and cross-sharing them with all our teams. We’re not an email-heavy company, but we document thoughts, weekly updates, and org-level announcements through posts. For some, it’s their main method of collaboration.
Lastly, I’ll mention VR meetings! Sadly, I haven’t tried this out yet but I’ve seen video recordings of it where people become avatars in a conference room. It captures spatial audio pretty well, but I wonder if VR can handle whiteboarding well.
3. No one is going to know what you’re doing. Share your work. And share again.
The hardest thing about remote work is making sure people can see your work. Since people can’t casually stop by your desk anymore, you need to proactively communicate your work out to your team. In my first month, my design mentor told me I’d be spending 70% of my time communicating/collaborating/sharing work. I didn’t believe it, until I gradually saw more meetings booked on my calendar, long chat threads, and weekly update posts.
To be honest, that 70% was more important to my career growth than my design craft, because at the end of the day people needed to vouch for me if I wanted to level up. I needed to get as many eyes on my work as possible. This also meant I had to be strategic with how I shared. For example, if I shared designs during a meeting, I’d followup with a link to my designs in the group chat. At the end of the week, I’d summarize my work in a post and share with my product and design teams. While this may seem tedious, it never hurt to overshare.
Thanks for reading! I’ll share a couple more lessons in the next post. Let’s jump to cool stuff 👇
Cool Stuff
Alright I briefly mentioned FigJam but now let’ dig into it.
Doesn’t it look so yummy? It works great on your morning toast or charcuterie board.
HA.
Fig jam is great, but really, FigJam might be better. I bet you Figma had this name ready since the start of the company.
So…what is FigJam..?
It’s a playful online whiteboarding tool for teams to brainstorm together in real-time!
How does it work?
Download here: https://www.figma.com/figjam/
A FigJam is a different type of file in Figma. You can create a blank FigJam or drop in a template created by the Community.
You can freehand draw, drop shapes and wire them effortlessly, post stickies, import images, chat with floating cursors, and hopefully much more after Beta.
So how is this different from other collab tools, like Mural or Miro?
It’s built off the Figma foundation of design elements (and auto-layout), so you can copy a Figma artboard into FigJam and be able to edit the text within.
Vice versa, you can copy FigJam elements (like stickies) and paste them in Figma and it’ll preserve the auto-layout component, while you edit the text.
Auto-snap and alignment exists in FigJam, so you can arrange your work very quickly compared to other tools.
Each component in FigJam has four anchors where you can quickly connect to other components, removing the need to align and redraw arrows (such a pain in Mural).
Real-time cursor chat that disappears after awhile, so it’s lightweight and scrappy.
In-house stickers or import your own from a Figma component library.
And so much more, thank god I don’t have to use Mural anymore 😂.
Try out FigJam and let me know what you think in the comments below!
Pt 2 will be up next week. Cheers,
Amy