Webinar highlights: Embracing the new normal of remote work

Recently in May, we held a Nulab Drinking Code Remote webinar in Singapore called  ‘Embracing the New Normal of Remote Work’. 

It was a joint collaboration with TeamSpirit — users of our Cacoo online diagramming tool, whom we did a user interview with early this year. 

For the agenda, we invited TeamSpirit to share findings and recommendations from their internal survey on remote working. Followed by a discussion panel on their remote work processes, challenges, and how they see remote work in the future.

The speakers from TeamSpirit are:

• Ace Htike, Assistant Manager of Engineering, and Development Lead 
• Jerry Ye, Senior Software Engineer
• Anni Zhang, Software Engineer

You’ll find the full webinar video embedded below, but here are some highlights from it:

On the remote work process:

“We have daily stand-up meetings, the purpose is to ensure that everyone knows what is happening in the team and if any member is stuck, someone can immediately step up and help resolve the issue, so that no one is stuck or left behind.” – Ace Htike.

On measuring productivity:

“By the end of the day what we are looking for is results, and not about how many hours you clocked. We set out the target on what we are going to do during our stand-up meetings, and the next morning, we just report what we have achieved. I think it’s important to change the process from time-oriented to result-oriented during these times.” – Ace Htike.

On tools used for work and collaboration:

“On the collaboration front, we’re using Cacoo for drawing diagrams and concepts for sharing during our meetings and discussions. Because especially right now everyone’s working remotely, there’s no common whiteboard for us to draw our design. Using Cacoo with the live annotation, it alleviates some of these issues.” – Jerry Ye.

On work-from-home challenges:

“I think it’s very important to let family members know that actually you are working at the moment and to let them understand that you will cater some time for them later in the day.” – Jerry Ye.

“I feel I will forget to exercise because of the psychological pressure to stay home, so I feel that health is becoming an issue. So I really have to remember to take breaks or to even just stretch for five minutes. That’s what I try to do to at least maintain my health.” – Anni Zhang.

On remote working as the new norm:

“It (remote working) can become more prolific as companies become more open and explore remote working as an option but the fact remains that there are many factors that restrict the possibility of remote working… So it’s very subjective… I don’t think that remote working will replace the office as the paradigm, it’s more like a supplement to the traditional way.” – Anni Zhang.

“Companies are slowly starting to realize that people can actually work from home and still be rather productive. I think it just alters some of the fundamentals of work, especially for startups and digital transformation firms, moving towards a more remote setup… but it’s not going to be a dramatic shift that everyone’s going to be remote working straight away.” – Jerry Ye.

“It’s very important to have processes in place… Companies cannot really expect their employees to provide the same level of productivity by just giving them a tool… There’s going to be a drop in productivity in the first few days of usage. So it’s very important for companies to step in now and make sure employees are comfortable… We should prepare some time for them to get used to the tools. So we should start now.” – Ace Htike.

Check out the full event video here:

For updates on future events, please stay tuned to our recently refreshed events page!