Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

We at Grubhub want the best people regardless of where they live, which is why we’ve been very supportive of people who work remotely. But Grubhub has a secret advantage that makes it particularly good for remote workers: it’s spanned multiple locations for years. “Knowing that my coworkers have already bought in to the idea of a distributed team and that the company has invested in the technological and organizational infrastructure to enable remote employees is what makes me confident that I have room to thrive and grow at Grubhub,” says Evan, technical lead engineer based in Vancouver, BC.

That culture has encouraged some remarkably productive people working remote. Will, a technical fellow and brains behind much of our cloud infrastructure, lives in Sydney, Australia. Carolyn, lead systems engineer in decision engineering, works with an entirely remote group from her home in Philadelphia. Ben, senior product delivery manager, was so productive working from his home in Temecula, CA, that we awarded him our highest internal honor, the Silver Platter Award.

So what is it that makes our notable remotables live their best remote life? In this article, we’ll discuss what helps them stay on top of their work, as well as talk about how Grubhub supports them as an office of one.

Home is where the office is

One of the big benefits of working at home is shortening your commute to the distance from your bed to your couch. But to maintain productivity, you need a space in your house that is used exclusively for work. “A home office is ideal, but it can also be an otherwise unused dining room table or breakfast nook.” says Jon, lead software engineer, based in Durham, NC.

As a remote worker, you spend a lot of time in that space, so hook yourself up with a sweet pad. “Having comfortable furniture, a wifi extender to get a better signal, and display monitors are worth investing in,” say Ankit, a team lead in software engineering who works out of the San Francisco bay area. But no matter how sweet, it still needs to be separate. At the day’s end, you need to go ‘home.’ “I have a corner of my basement setup as my office,” says David, senior product manager in Detroit, MI. “This allows me to easily separate work from home life.”

It’s not enough to make it look like an office — it needs to feel like an office. That means you need to act like you are going into an office, where your co-workers wear real pants. “Dress like you’re going into an office,” says Alastair, our director of DesignOps in Santa Barbara, CA. “Start work at the same time each day, and finish at the same time each day. Don’t work on the couch or slosh about in your PJs for half the day.”

Little things you do before you officially start work for the day can help you transition from a cozy bed to work. It can be tempting to check email in the morning and dive right in, but a pre-work morning ritual helps — shower, have coffee and breakfast, and put on your working person outfit. For Carolyn, “A morning stroll with my dog Wally and a strong local coffee brand are my go-to before hopping on my daily strategy sessions.”

Wally, waiting for a pull request, which is what engineering dogs call walks.

The flip side of having home distractions invade your office life is your office demands leaking into your free time at home. “Most of the time our team covers all 24 hours in the day, and it’s easy to be on all the time,” says Carolyn. “Our calendars show our time zones and when we’d rather be drinking wine and watching Netflix. We have to religiously use the snooze feature, since communication is often asynchronous and happens at odd hours.”

But that doesn’t mean you can’t move between these spaces during the day. “Don’t forget to take breaks,” says Alastair. “Go downstairs and do the dishes. Have a cup of tea on the patio. It’s okay to do this — remember that the folks in the office have likely already spent part of the day discussing sports ball and the like. You need to have your time to pause, too.”

Collaborative action at a distance

But no remote worker is on an island — they work with a team, sometimes as a lead. Connecting them with their distant co-workers needs good communication tools that integrate into everyone’s daily routines. Poor tools can leave remote workers feeling stranded. “If the go-to communication channel for your organization includes the phrase ‘carbon-copy’,” says Alastair “then things aren’t looking great.”

Like a lot of large companies, the only way we can get everyone on the same page is by getting them all in the same room. That means sending out meeting invites, often to people in multiple offices. That cross-location mindset makes technology an integral partner in any meeting. “Since there is a lot of cross office collaboration everyone is used to adding video conferencing to meeting invites,” says David.

Every conference room at Grubhub has a video screen and hi-def cameras to help us connect with our distant co-workers through easy to use Bluejeans connections. “There’s nothing which can kill your remote working buzz quicker than a bunch of your coworkers struggling with a crappy room system whilst you sit haplessly on the other end of a video call,” says Alastair. Everyone in the offices spends a lot of time with these systems, and I don’t mean to brag, but we’re pretty much experts. So no remote workers have their time wasted.

But remote employees have an additional challenge: they need to make sure they are seen and heard during these meetings. “You have to be good at interrupting people (politely),” says Alastair. “This means no floating heads that pop up with a ‘Hey guys!’ and then disappear 30 minutes later having said nothing else. If you need to raise your hand to be noticed, then go for it. Don’t sit back and let the meeting wash over you.”

For Grubhub, almost every conversation that doesn’t happen in video conferences happens in Slack. Every team, location, and business section has their own Slack channel, and ad-hoc channels sprout all the time. While Grubhub facilitates communication with good tools and a culture of conversation in those tools, remote employees need to make themselves seen and heard. Mathew, Philadelphia-based Product Manager, says, “A remote employee must not be afraid to reach out to anyone, in any way (within reason, of course) to converse and ask questions, since the answers won’t come from organic interaction.”

But having all your communication occur in a single application can be a double-edged sword. “The sheer quantity of chats I receive is a bit overwhelming. Reading every message immediately would mean I don’t do anything other than read chat,” says Jon. “My biggest helper in this area has been setting up the audio alerts on my chat client in such a way that it alerts me when important messages come in, and less important chats do not cue an audio alert.”

Jon found that he could manage these chat requests just by changing his status in Slack. “Ever since I started putting up my ‘at lunch’ status each day, I get a lot more chats that say something like ‘Hey, when you’re back from lunch can you look at this?’ as opposed to ‘Hey, can you look at this?’ followed by my co-worker silently thinking that I’m ignoring them or that I’m generally inattentive.”

How you communicate can be just as important as what tools you use. Even though you may have access to some face-to-face interactions via video calls, most of your communication will be through text. And text is notoriously bad for nuance. “Remote employees have to ensure they speak and write in ways that both engage the reader and leave little room for misinterpretation,” says Mathew. And they need to extend that understanding of the medium to others. “We must resist passing judgment on the communications of others — tone, intent, etc., can be super hard to parse from email/Slack/fast-moving meetings.”

For our remote designers, they face an additional challenge. Design work is collaborative, as much of the decision making process happens in whiteboarding sessions with sticky notes aplenty. For that, they use Mural. “Mural allows everyone to virtually add a sticky note to the ‘Board’ simultaneously,” says product designer Nazanin in San Francisco. “It mimics the same experience as doing the same thing on a real whiteboard.”

Ultimately, you’ll be able to tell how well your personal communication strategy works by how often your coworkers ensure you’re part of important discussions. “If you’re being caught up on conversations that happen offline which impact your work, that’s great,” says Alastair. “If the moment you realize you were out of the loop on a conversation is when you view the production version of the app you’re working on, then that’s not so great.”

Smells like team spirit

We all know that not all conversations at work are about work. You bump into someone in the break room, ask about their weekend, and make future interactions smoother with a little bit of friendly banter. “It definitely isn’t impossible to build rapport while being remote, but it is a little more challenging and requires a little more effort,” says Ben. “I often joke around with people by telling them that I talk to my cats more than I talk to humans.”

This is where those so-called time-wasting Slack channels come in handy. For remotes, #dogs-of-grubhub and #cooking become your primary water cooler. “An effective team requires strong connections among its members,” says Carolyn. “These ‘water-cooler’ channels help build that. They make teammates who may actually be 3000 miles apart feel close.”

Sent remotely to #cats-of-grubhub by Nicole in London

With modern video conferencing technology and always-on broadband, there are other ways to get that feeling of in-person contact. “I pieced together a monitor, a webcam, a speaker / mic combo, and a chrome box that the IT folks let me use and hooked it up to an always-on Google Hangout,” says Jon. “This really helps me feel like I’m in the office; just hearing the background noise of people talking to one another and the clicking of keyboards. It also means that if someone wants to have a quick conversation with me, they can just walk up to the monitor and say ‘Hi.’”

“Oh, hi Jon.”

When teams or offices have happy hours or celebrations, remote people can play, too. Just dial them in through a laptop and carry their face around the room. “Big win happy hours remotely? Sure, why not!” says Carolyn. “Even though some of us pop that bottle of rose cava in Philly or DC to recognize a big milestone, we’re all enjoying it together.”

Even with the magic of modern technology, it’s nice to shake a hand in person, to see whose Slack you’ve been lighting up. We try to make sure that our remote employees get at least some time in an office with real people, so we spring for a flight to either New York or Chicago every so often. “If you’ve been working with someone for a year and you’re not sure which of you is taller, this isn’t a good sign,” says Alastair.

Grubhub delivers on working remotely

Grubhub has been great place for remote employees for a while now. We manage to have people around the world make meaningful contributions to quickly moving technology platforms. And our in-office technology makes that easy. “Grubhub is setup very well for remote employees,” says David.

Successful remote working requires a partnership between the company and its remote employees. The company needs to provide the infrastructure and attitude that makes every remote worker feel like a full team member. And the remote workers have to have the self-determination to drive their success with their distant co-workers. But if the company values and supports its remote team members and instills behaviors in its co-located team members, remote employees can be just as productive as those on-site.