How we moved the whole company to remote work in 3 months

Symph had worked from an office since the day it was founded. People could work remotely now and then, or on a set schedule, but the office was the default, so moving everyone to work from home all at once was new for most of us.

COVID-19 reached the Philippines in January with the first positive case, and more cases followed over the next months. The Cebu City government (most of us live in Cebu City) had not put the city under quarantine yet.

March 14: We decided we needed a rotating remote work scheme right away. We announced it to everyone and sent a form so we could work out how to arrange it.

The survey answers showed that a lot of us were exposed to the virus, so we decided everyone would work from home starting March 16.

March 16: Day 1 of working from home. The Cebu City government put the city under community quarantine the same day.

We set up accounts on Discord, a chat tool most of us had never used, since we had been on Slack for years. We moved to Discord mainly for its voice channels.

We agreed on two policies:

• Everyone joins the morning sync (a Discord video call) and the evening retrospective (in Parabol, more on that below).
• Everyone stays in a voice channel the whole time they are working. It gets us in sync with the team much faster than chatting and waiting for replies.

Our developers built a bot for our Discord server and named it "Symph-chan", a name that doesn't sound much like a bot. Symph-chan automated a lot for us, so now we can:

• Log attendance in our database by typing "wfh" in the #attendance channel.

• Tell the team we're away from the keyboard or on a break by typing "brb" and how long we'll be gone in #checkin-updates, then "back" when we return.

• Tell the team we're done for the day by typing "checking out" in #checkin-updates.

Daily retrospectives

Our daily retrospectives are what made this transition work.

At the end of every day we get on a call with everyone and use Parabol to collect feedback on what went well, what went wrong and how we can improve.

The feedback ranges from stories that have nothing to do with work to comments on company-wide changes, and we encourage all of it. We ask everyone to be honest, however "bad" something seems, because it all counts. It helps that people add these items as cards in Parabol anonymously.

A retro every day might sound like too much, but it let us spot problems early and fix them before they grew. By April we were back to full productivity, and we are really happy the retros worked.

April: Working from home made it hard to keep the things our culture runs on, which are staying connected, doing meaningful work and having fun.

Everyone shared ideas for lifting team morale, and from their feedback we tried a few things, including:

• A game tournament

• Morning check-ins with #jwu selfies

Some activities worked and some didn't, so we kept changing them and asking for more ideas in the daily retros.

May 22: Positive cases were going up every day and reaching our local communities. We expected this to last more than a few months, and we didn't want the team back in the office until it was completely safe, so we decided to stay remote for the rest of 2020 and after that, indefinitely.

So we closed our office for good (we had been looking for a new one for a while anyway). The money we used to spend on rent and utilities now goes to the Symphers' home workspaces. We sent everyone a one-time workspace grant, and we pay a monthly subsidy for home internet and electricity bills.

June-July: We are proud of how well the team has worked through such a big change. We keep updating our working agreements with everyone's feedback, and we have tried more fun activities:

• Virtual team dinners

• Trivia nights

• Life Stories, TED Circles and iamRemarkable

(You can find more remote activities we recommend, with links to the tools, in this post. Symphers also shared their own tricks for staying productive at home here.)

Because everyone adjusted quickly and worked together, we could help the Symphers and their families get through a hard time, and we will keep doing that however we can.

Nothing beats seeing each other and doing all this in person, but until we can, we will keep adapting and learning.

On August 7, 2020 (Friday) at 1 PM we are running a live webinar with our CTO Albert Padin and other business owners about how they moved their companies to remote work. If you want to listen and ask questions, register here and we'll send you a link to the call.