WFH hacks from a remote space-tech team

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the modern world upside down. New rules and etiquette of “quarantine” communication forced many companies to switch to remote work. Despite this, the corona-virus outbreak didn’t affect that much Precious Payload’s everyday business processes because our team has been working remotely since its foundation. Team of 6, we all live in different places: New York, Dubai, Moscow, Sochi, Ho Chi Minh, Abu Dhabi. So we are pretty good not only in helping to get your business to space but in using the most convenient digital tools for organizing the remote work of the company. And in this post, we want to share our ‘work from home’ experience with anyone who may be interested because for any business, including space-related one, staying in touch in such a weird time is a primary task.

Zoom

We love Zoom. This is the best platform for conference calls. At Zoom, we conduct daily internal team meetings and also use this service for remote meetings with our clients and partners.

 

Asynchronous voice chats

Calls are not always convenient. Therefore, we use WhatsApp or Telegram chats for voice texting. This format allows you not to lose time on scheduling a time for a quick call. Record a voice memo if you want to tell your colleagues about key issues and things after meeting with clients and investors, you can make it on the run. A small hack: text short explanations for your voice messages, if you have a group chat. For example: “Daria (TO WHOM), this is feedback on your offer (SUBJECT LINE)”.

 

Miro

An infinite white-board, Miro is an excellent visualization tool to help make our calls more efficient. It is convenient for use during brainstorming, storytelling, and fixing general arrangements. We use this tool to design the processes that underlie the Precious Payload service functionality.

 

Task Managers

Being a team distributed around the world, we know firsthand how important is to appoint the responsibility for every task and track the implementation. There are a lot of digital task managers to help your team with remote collaboration: Trello, Asana, Jira, Airtable, and others. We in Precious Payload love Kaiten because it can:

• create multiple desktops on one screen;
• calculate team performance metrics, so transparency and continuous improvement of the workflow can be ensured.

 

Notion

We use this tool not just for notes, but for building a common knowledge base. We record everything in Notion. This allows the Precious Payload team to stay in a single informational environment and get information within and out of the team, for partners and customers. Notion also informs you when someone creates a new note or makes changes to existing ones.

 

And a few more hacks for remote work:

• record video calls to keep the key points;
• make regular calls to stay in touch with the team:
  • at the beginning of the week to determine with goals;
  • 15-mins every day to determine the status of tasks using the task manager;
  • at the end of the week – summing up the results of the week to determine what was done and what can be improved next week.
• fix all tasks and deadlines in the task tracker, enter the rule: no card in the tracker – no task; 
• record the criteria for the task conclusion so that everyone could clearly see that it is done;
• put all calls and appointments on the calendar: no appointment on the calendar – no appointment at all;
• don’t forget to make the final calls at the end of the week; summing up and discussing difficulties and moments that can be improved is key in remote work, since not being nearby, problems are often underreported and remain unsolved.
• if you need to share some information, backed up by video and pictures, to a large number of people – record a video and share the video with the team; collect feedback through text and voice messages, and calls.
• create team task boards using digital task managers accessible for every team member and move the cards sharing the task manager screen during the daily team call so that everyone sees the dynamics and current status of the tasks.

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And we would happy to provide you with interesting #knowyouroptions reading if you get bored at home. Check these:

Three Eras Of Space Launch For Smallsats

How To Build a Business On Hosted Payloads And Space Expertise?

The Future of Secure Encryption: In-Orbit Quantum Key Distribution By SpeQtral

Modular Satellites And Ridesharing Beat Price Of Space Mission

How To Make Satellites Cost Like Cars?

 

We used illustration <a href=”https://www.freepik.com/vectors/space”>Space vector created by stories – www.freepik.com</a>