[Note from Pat: The following is a guest post by Cristian Orozco. Cristian is one of the partners of an ​FE exam prep​ startup called PrepFE. He is a graduate in civil engineering from the University of Tennessee. Cristian’s experience includes working both for large multinational and smaller engineering companies. He is now working remotely, splitting his time between PrepFE civil engineering consulting.]

The COVID pandemic has (forcefully) pushed many teams into what many consider the future of work: teams that work fully remote or a hybrid of remote and traditional on-site work. Many engineering teams were unexpectedly pushed into remote working without ever getting a chance to get ready for it.

In this blog post, we will discuss some tips and tricks to greatly improve the remote work experience for your team as well as how remote work affects the different aspects of an engineer’s professional life. The stories and ideas below come from my experience after working remotely at two different companies with two totally different approaches to remote work. One company, PrepFE, tends to be very tech-centric while the other, a civil engineering consulting firm, is more cautious with costs when embracing new technologies.

Team communication when working remotely

As mentioned previously, my experience working remotely has happened at 2 (or 3) different companies. Each company tackled remote working slightly differently with different outcomes. Communication is where PrepFE’s early tech adopter attitude has made it shine over other companies. PrepFE (a team of 4 people in 3 different cities) uses ​Slack​ for all internal communication. Team communication with Slack rivals that of the communication in an office. It truly doesn’t feel too far off. What differentiates Slack from more traditional instant messaging systems is that Slack really facilitates group chat for business, rather than one-on-one communication. Slack is set up in a way where other team members can also see the chat between a group of individuals, very much like it would be in an office. The person not currently part of the conversation can choose to jump into the conversation if s/he feels like it’s appropriate. There are no commitments or expensive procurement processes with Slack. The same is true for another popular alternative – Microsoft Teams. Both products offer no-commitment free trials. You could tell your team ​hey, this week we’re going to try out this chat called Slack, and if we don’t like it, then we can just go back to how we were doing things… not much to lose. ​The free trial is a great way to test out the product.

The smaller engineering consulting firm that I also worked for part-time opted to not use Slack and continues using email, phone calls, and text messaging for remote communication. On paper these tools would appear to provide the same experience as Slack, but that hasn’t been the case. In this case, remote working feels like it is actually hurting the team. The four employees often find themselves overlapping with each others’ work or not knowing what has or hasn’t been done. There is too much friction in communicating small things multiple times a day with phone calls and emails to the point where employees just guess at what’s going on. I think Slack and Microsoft Teams create a communication environment for remote teams that rivals that of an in-office team. In summary, your team communication could be similar to your in-office communication, but you have to use Slack/Microsoft Teams in order to realize that. I don’t recommend you move your team to remote without Slack/Microsoft Teams. There will be too much friction trying to communicate with other team members.

Mentorship of young engineers when working remotely

If your team includes several entry-level engineers that require mentorship, remote work can make that more difficult. Remote work won’t necessarily kill mentorship for young engineers, but it adds friction to the system. There are no software solutions out there that really focus on facilitating mentorship in remote teams. You will simply have to be patient, be open to do screen-sharing, and get comfortable with long phone calls with your mentees.

Using sophisticated engineering software when working remotely

This one is hard to control as it is likely your IT department that sets the software-security rules for your team. Using VPN and working out of a proprietary shared drive can make working on the computer sluggish. Software licenses, such as AutoCAD, sometimes live on a server that you must connect to in order to access. Connecting to this server via VPN is what can make remote work sluggish. If you would like to transition into long-term remote work, you would need to limit the amount of work you do while connected to the VPN and your company’s proprietary shared drive. As an alternative, you could work out of some cloud storage solution such as Dropbox/Box and then periodically migrate some files from Dropbox/Box back to the company’s shared drive. It’s that continuous VPN connection that some large companies have that really slows down the clicking when working remotely.

Employee morale and recruitment when working remotely

Morale while working remotely is a bit of a toss-up. Some people love remote work, while some prefer the camaraderie of working with colleagues in person. There’s no better way of knowing your team members’ preferred work style than simply asking them. One HUGE advantage of offering remote work is that you greatly increase your recruitment pool. You are no longer constrained to qualified professionals in your community. You now can go recruit professionals anywhere in the country, and sometimes internationally, and no longer have to worry about convincing them to relocate to your city.

Keeping your team productive when working remotely

Many managers are afraid that if they aren’t physically present around their employees, some employees might slack off a bit. This concern is completely understandable, and it is fair to think this could happen. A remedy for this is to ask your employees to keep a detailed daily log of their activities done each day. This log is simple and it can be done in a simple shared spreadsheet, such as the one below:

The engineering consultant I worked for remotely used this spreadsheet log to keep track of employees’ activities, and it was rather effective in making sure work was still getting done efficiently.

One step further would be to implement a task management system. Popular options are Asana, Trello, and Notion. You can keep an inventory of all the tasks, prioritize, assign them, comment on them, set deadlines on them, and attach images and files as necessary. Each service has their own pros and cons, but using one of these is a great way to keep all the team in alignment and meet your goals.

Overall, the pros of remote work outweigh the cons. If there is a silver lining to the pandemic is that it has pushed us engineers out of our comfort zones into trying a new way of work. Once the pandemic is over, will you bring your team back to the office or continue remote work?