Optimal Workshop on the road: How we’ve made it work remotely
Like many companies, at Optimal Workshop we offer flexible hours and the option to work from home on occasion. This means that people may have a late start to drop their children at daycare or school, take a flexible lunch break to fit in a gym session or spend the day out of the office in order to get through some work that requires extra focus. However, up until recently the company has had less experience with longer-term remote working. We currently only have one permanent remote staff member, Paddy, our customer success manager who is based in Dublin, Ireland.
Stepping into the remote unknown
Over the past year or so, we’ve had three employees work remotely for more extended periods of time while combining this with personal travel. Matt, our designer and front-end developer, spent the summer in Canada to take advantage of Whistler’s world-famous bike park. Ellery, our Salsa-dancing software developer spent a year traveling through Central and South America with his dance partner and fiancée, Amanda. And I’ve just returned from five months across seven countries and three time zones where, amongst other adventures, I was keen to put my foreign language skills into practice.
For all of us, it was our first experience of working remotely for such an extended period of time. Fortunately, we already work almost exclusively in the cloud across the company. GitHub, Google Suite, Trello, Intercom, InVision, Evernote and of course Optimal Workshop are some of the tools where we spend our time, and Slack is where the majority of office communication takes place. We also record and distribute key company presentations, including our weekly Friday release demos. This ensures that everyone is on the same page, whether they just happen to be off sick that day or are on the other side of the world.
From our remote locations, we worked on a range of projects including improving the process of adding members to team accounts, adding the ability to organize Reframer project tags by groups and colors and researching the challenges users face when analyzing OptimalSort results. Read on to learn about how we tackled the challenges we encountered, as well as the professional benefits that we each gained from the experience of working remotely.
