Companies are built on professional relationships, and when working remotely, trust and transparency are key in your relationships with your team. As I said before, be explicit in your communications and ask your team to do the same.
Here are a few ideas from our team:
1) One-to-ones: keep up with the routine of 1-2-1 meetings. We all have our different styles, but I can’t stress how important it is to have focused time at least once a week with people on your team when you’re working remotely.
In our case at Hotjar, everyone came to work here knowing that it’s a remote-first company, but I can understand how hard it can be to adjust to working from home, and how easily someone could start to feel isolated.
Here’s a checklist that can help you set up more effective 1-2-1s.
2) Routine and team rituals: revisit the routine and team rituals you had in-office, and make sure they still make sense.
Our team works in one-week iterations, in a loose 'Scrumban' fashion (that’s ‘Scrum’ + ‘Kanban’). We start off the week with a planning session, and end on Friday with a retrospective and demo. These sessions really help us switch our brains on and off to start and end the work week, especially since we work at home, where many of us are also managing our families, too.