Team CalendarHero: Our First Week of Working from Home

Ever tried to keep your company and team together during a pandemic? 

Yeah, us neither. Remote working isn’t anything new to the CalendarHero (formerly Zoom.ai) team. We’ve always had a work-from-home policy, but like many of you, we’ve never experienced it with a health crisis, social distancing, and toilet paper in desperate demand. 

All TP jokes aside, we know this is a tough, unsettling time for many businesses and teams. We feel incredibly fortunate that our company can still be operational remotely, and help other teams transition to virtual meetings seamlessly. 

So, after one week of working remotely during COVID-19, we’ve summarized what’s working for our team, from tech stack advice to self-care and how to keep your company culture intact while apart. 

Practical Matters: Our Remote Work Tech Stack

We use Slack as our communication hub

Our team doesn’t use email internally. Quick conversations, sharing documents, and project collaboration all take place via Slack. We create channels to chat about both business and casual matters. A channel like #Product is reserved for product updates, questions, and releases and a channel like #WhatMadeYourWeek is a space for team members to share personal highlights. We also book meetings directly in Slack using our own integration. It helps our team stay connected and centralizes our communication. 

We have lots of video meetings using Zoom.us

As we all know, video is the next best thing to in-person meetings. Staying connected as a team is important in our company culture, so we schedule a daily 9:30 am team standup to check-in with each other, share relevant updates, and ask questions. Sometimes our kids and pets make appearances, and that is more than okay with us. It’s important to embrace that we are working from home and not pretend that those factors aren’t there. We also take out the manual work of setting up video meetings with our Zoom.us integration to automatically book video calls. 

We automate meeting scheduling with CalendarHero

Like many teams right now, working remotely means the volume of meetings you have has gone up. Since you can’t swivel your chair around to talk to Joel in Customer Success or take a quick coffee break with the engineering team, you’ll need to arrange more virtual meetings. We use our own scheduling software to instantly book team meetings and share availability without any back and forth. It’s helped our team focus more on the purpose of our meetings rather than meeting logistics. 

The Routine: How we Practice Self-care

Here’s how our Head of Operations Komal is staying in good spirits while remote, despite missing our team a lot. 

Our Head of Operations Komal Salvi enjoying a cup of joe

• Regular light banter with the team on Slack

• Going for walks (while keeping a safe distance from others)

• Standing on her balcony with a cup of coffee each morning 

• Setting clear boundaries between work and personal time 

• Drinking lots of coffee and playstation

As you can see coffee is essentially a core value on the team… 

Is it any wonder we made it an official meeting type? You can easily make your usual coffee meetings virtual by adding video conferencing. 

We’ve found our environment is key to creating an enjoyable, productive workspace at home. We recommend working away from areas of your home you typically relax in and getting as much natural sunlight as you can.

Here’s our Head of Product Jill’s trusty home work station

If you’re like our CEO whose home office is in his basement, then adding a tropical background to your Zoom.us meetings and wearing summer shirts can help, or at least it seems to be working for him. 

Team Culture: Share your best memes

Need we say more? Sharing memes and humorous content gives us a reason to laugh and stay personally connected to one another. Here’s one of the memes that made its rounds last week.

Since we couldn’t have our typical Friday team lunch, our Full Stack Engineer Michael suggested we post what we’re eating. Hey, when you’re in social isolation, even conversations like these seem riveting. 

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that learning to work from home as a team is a process.

Here’s a great example of what your video meetings may have started off as last week… 

It will take some trial and error before you and your team find your groove.