The remote work handbook

Experiences from others

The best way to learn how to make remote work a success is to hear from others who have already done it.

• Hear from Dana
• Hear from one of our graduates
• Hear from Sander

Share your experience

If you want to share your experience, send us your story and we will post is on this page. To give you a guideline on what to talk about, you can use the following questions:

1.⁠ ⁠Why did you decide to pick a remote assignment in the first place? 2.⁠ ⁠⁠What is your home situation? Living alone, with my family, with others, etc 3.⁠ ⁠What were your expectations upfront? 4.⁠ ⁠How did you experience working fully remote in the end? 5.⁠ ⁠What did you like about working from home and why? 6.⁠ ⁠What were your biggest challenges and why? 7.⁠ ⁠What are some tips to give to other people when working from home? 8.⁠ ⁠Any other thoughts you may want to share.

Guide for successful remote work

Working remotely is quite different from going to the office. There is no natural interaction with colleagues and the rhythm of going to the office and getting back home is missing. So it can be quite a challenge. Here are some tips and tricks we received from people that have worked from home.

Read our full Guide to effectively work remotely. If you really want to learn from the founders of remote work, please look at GitLab’s guide to All-Remote.

Tips & tricks

Below already some quick tips & tricks from our side:

1. Get up and dress yourself the same way as if you would go to the office.
2. Set a clear start and end time for your work day.
3. Take clear breaks for lunch and dinner. Do not work and eat.
4. Get out at least once a day for a walk, get some groceries, etc.
5. Schedule a 25 minute coffee chat with colleagues regularly for some social chat.

What to expect

Our Guide to effectively work remotely describes in much more detail what to expect, but here is a brief summary of what to expect.

A remote workday is different than an office day. You are on your own and it is up to you to get your work done. So expect a great deal of responsibility to get started and finish your work in time.

To make sure you are not overwhelmed, you will have a 1:1 meeting with a manager at least once a week. Daily check-ins via our communication platform are used to ensure you always have an option to tell someone how things are going or if you are stuck with something.

With remote work, it is also less visible to your colleagues what you are up to and what you are working on. That means you need to put in a little extra effort into visisbility of your progress. You can do this by working in shared documents, opening op work items cq. merge requests and keeping progress in these work items / merge requests. Do not underestimate this. It is incredibly important in a remote environment to keep track on your progress on a daily basis.

The 5 principles to make working from home a success:

1. Treat your workday as a normal office day
2. Schedule an online coffee chat or take time to meetup during the day
3. Feeling lonely? Find local remote workers and meet up
4. Make your progress visible via shared documents, work items or merge requests
5. Use the communication channels early and often