Many engineering leaders are finding that remote work in today’s circumstances is causing fatigue. Kids and roommates are home, you may not have a proper desk setup, there’s no commute time to zone out and collect your thoughts, and you have to call or type questions to your coworkers and wait for answers instead of looking over your shoulder and quickly asking them. If you’re not able to properly manage your time you’re liable to burn out real quick, and so will your team.

We sat down with engineering leaders in the enrich community and discussed ways to combat a back-to-back, non-stop work day.

Managing meetings

Meetings are a great way to stay connected to your team, but make sure they’re efficient or they can be a time sink. Every meeting should have a topic, goal, and leader, and everyone at the meeting should know what/who each of these are. Set time limits on your topics and force yourself and the team to move on once you’ve hit those limits.

Tip from an enrich engineering leader: remote meetings can feel detached and formal, or even create more stress on team members who have to take time away from individual work to attend. Consider nominating a team member to own the psychological feeling of digital meetings. Have someone flag when meetings are being scheduled back-to-back, or interject with something to lighten spirits during the meeting like a random trivia question.

Making time to think

Here are a few tips from engineering leaders in our community on how to set aside time to get your work done.

• Institute ‘no meeting days’ – pick one day a week and ban meetings to help everyone catch up on individual work.

• Create ways to connect asynchronously – Create a Slack channel or use Stack Overflow to post questions and tag team members, create a Google Doc that acts as an idea board where team members can comment and add on their own time.

• Put time on your calendar to exercise – not only will this help reduce stress and keep you healthy, it gives you a chance to tune out, organize thoughts, and just think.

• Take a fake vacation – let your team know you’re on vacation and won’t be responding to chats or emails, but take the time to work by yourself.

• Forced mental health day – insist everyone on your team take a day off to recharge

• Switch to compact meetings – use Google Calendar’s ‘Speedy Meeting’ function, which schedules meetings 5 or 10 min shorter than the typical 30 or 60 min meeting. The extra few minutes can be enough to flesh out notes or digest what you’ve just discussed.

• Create a knowledge base for team members to easily access information – with so many sources these days it can be hard to quickly find what you’re looking for, stealing precious minutes from your day. While it’ll take a lot of initial effort, having a single place to search for things will save you time in the long run. Try a tool like Notion or Zendesk, or create a wiki with Google Sites.

• Use a tool like Toggl or Clockify to track what you’re working on – knowing where your time is going is the first step to determining if there are more efficient ways to spend your time, or if you’re truly in need of additional resources.

Keeping your team engaged

Here are a few tips from engineering leaders in our community on how to help keep your team feeling connected while physical proximity is off the table.

• Lunch and learns – ask different team or company members to host a lunchtime discussion about a topic that interests them. Have the team bring their lunch to the video conference and get their mind off the day-to-day.

• Shadowing program – Get buy-in from other department leaders and match someone from your team with theirs. Have them spend an hour on a video conference where they do a demo or training session for each other to keep visibility across functions.

• Set up a remote hackathon – engineers love to have sanctioned work time to hack on their own projects.

• Reach out to someone new everyday – this is a great tip for personal life, as well as work life. Call or chat someone you don’t normally talk with during the day just to say hello and break the monotony of quarantine.

• Recreate the casual office dynamic – set up time on video conference for watercooler talk, or a happy hour, where team members can pop in and out as they please.

• Remote pairing sessions – use a pairing tool like use-together.com
 to allow engineers to code together.

• Add time to stand up for arbitrary questions – start everyday asking how people are doing, what they did over the weekend, what shows or movies they’ve been into lately.

Be sure to have regular check-ins with your reports. How’re they feeling about their work? Are they needing additional support? Where do they stand with their goals? If your team is happy and able to get their work done efficiently you’ll be able to delegate effectively and keep your own stress level down.