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Kayako’s Guide to Remote Work in Customer Support The best teams are built upon people’s differences and their strengths. Startups are a great example of where people from different backgrounds and experiences collide to make magic. The key is having a diverse group of people with different skills. This helps drive innovation, competition, unrestricted thought, and openmindedness. In order to bring together people from such diverse backgrounds, it’s becoming more and more common for companies (particularly startups) to widen the net and recruit people living in different cities or countries to work as remote employees. Remote workers started Kayako, and they continue to drive our success to this day. Jamie Edwards, co-founder, started at Kayako as a remote worker in London while CEO, Varun Shoor, worked in India. It wasn’t until four years later that Varun and Jamie would meet for the very first time. Kayako continues to hire remote workers to take advantage of a global talent pool today. But how can companies build a culture when employees are spread out all over the globe? Often, coworkers that have been working together for months will have never have met in person. The key is to build culture right from the start: during onboarding.
Contents: Chapter 1: Onboarding Remote Workers: How to Do It Right to Build Team Culture Chapter 2: Providing World-Class Remote Training Chapter 3: How to keep connected to your team in different time zones Chapter 4: Staying Productive When You Don’t Have an Office
Chapter 1. Onboarding Remote Workers: How to Do It Right to Build Team Culture Getting on-boarding right is key to building team culture in a company of remote workers. What exactly is onboarding? For many companies, onboarding is just the process of giving new people logins and showing them where they can make their coffee. What onboarding should be is a structured process of introducing new hires to the company, the work environment, their coworkers, and any processes or documentation they need to be familiar with. It’s the time when new recruits learn and unlearn things that
they need to know to fit into the company culture and do their jobs effectively.
How to onboard remote workers properly Onboarding isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach – you should tailor your onboarding schedule for each new hire. Before you dive into preparing your onboarding program, consider your new employee’s role, responsibility and skillset, and the company culture. These things will determine how you approach your onboarding planning for each individual. Here are my five tips for how to get your remote hires through their first few weeks at your company feeling like they’re one of the team.
1. Be clear on expectations Setting clear expectations is key to a good onboarding program. Expectations should be set around what the new team member should achieve from the onboarding process, and also what the team lead or manager should provide. Make sure that both you and your remote team member are clear on: Their key areas of responsibility Organisational values Individual goals and wider team goals Time frames for onboarding, goals and reviews
Document the onboarding process and share this with your new team member so that they can refer to this if they have any questions later. Make sure that at the end of each day during onboarding, you review these notes and expectations with your team member so they can ask you to clarify anything they are unsure on.
2. Enable communication with the right tools
Communication is more difficult for remote workers. It’s important to give them the tools they need to make long-distance communication easier, both for one-to-one conversations and group discussions. Initially, video calls is the best way to communicate with a remote employee. Speaking to a person face-to-face, even if it’s on a screen, helps you develop a relationship with them much more quickly as you can see facial expressions and gestures as well as tone of voice. Remote workers should be able to easily communicate with anyone in the business almost as easily as if they were in the office, or they will spend time trying to get in touch. Messaging or collaboration apps are essential for remote workers to be able to communicate seamlessly with coworkers. There are several good options for communicating with remote workers: Slack or other instant messaging tools Video calls (Google Hangouts or Skype) Conference calls Central repositories for storing documentation (Google Docs or Github)
3. Encourage a culture of openness and acceptance
It’s important to have a culture where people are willing to share new ideas, thoughts and experiences with one another, and in turn listen and accept one another’s approaches. When onboarding remotely, it’s important to remember that there may be cultural differences, and it’s vital to make sure new joiners don’t feel alienated and feel they have the opportunity to express themselves freely. Introduce the new hire to teammates early on Encourage the remote worker to share their thoughts and experiences with the rest of the team and vice versa Make sure the whole team is open and willing to accept the new starter Introducing your new starter to coworkers early on helps them settle in more quickly and understand who to go to for help or to discuss certain topics. It will help them to build relationships, which are so important for happiness and satisfaction in work.
4. Facilitate self-guided learning
Make sure you have a schedule and documentation prepared before you begin onboarding your new team member. It’s even more important to have solid training guides in place for remote workers because they won’t always be able to ask you or other coworkers for help. There are a few options for guides: Product documentation (online documents or PDFs) Self-help articles Process and policies
Performance tracking tools Online training tools Along with guiding the self-learning process, you should also set measurable performance targets and goals so that your team member knows what to aim for.
5. Outline processes and policies
Language differences may cause difficulties for onboarding remote workers. You need to make sure you’re equipped to overcome this barrier. Processes and policies should be documented and they should be open, visible and transparent for all new hires, but especially remote workers as they won’t be able to pick these up through casual conversations in the office. It’s really important to have these processes and policies decided on, clearly documented, and accessible. Here are some best practices to help you: Prepare all documentation before the new hire begins Keep a record of all agreements and meeting outcomes Talk through all areas discussed in policy documents so your new hire understands them Create FAQs for easy reference
The takeaway on onboarding Sometimes you have to look outside your local area to find the best people for your team. Not only will they bring their professional skills, but they’ll also bring new ways of thinking into the organisation.
It is worth investing the time into onboarding your remote workers properly. If you onboard well, you’re more likely to keep hold of your employees for longer, and have happier, more engaged remote team members.
Chapter 2. Providing World-Class Remote Training Think back to your school or college days. How many hours could you sit still and listen to someone speak to you? There’s a limit to how much you can passively absorb. Training programs are not usually tailored to individuals, so it may not fit their goals or learning style. But training has its uses and its place. It’s great for new hires in their initial weeks, and for introducing your team to new product features, topics and approaches.
Good training programs accommodate both guided learning and private study. You can do this through mentorship and on-demand training materials. If you want to bring active learning into your training culture, assign mentors to get your team up to speed.
Building a mentorship process from scratch Mentoring can take a number of forms depending on your team or company structure, but it must happen regularly and be actionable. Mentors should be able to point a finger at specific interactions and recent performance. Then they should use small-scale formats — 1on-1 sessions, peer mentorship or real-time coaching — to give feedback and work on making tangible improvements. Mentoring customer support agents in the early months allows them to quickly pick up knowledge and skills that they might miss if they’re were looking at a whiteboard, or reading a training manual.
Choosing the right mentor
Choosing the right mentor is vital to the effectiveness of the onboarding and training process. A mentor is there to answer any questions and provide daily support for the new team member. If you operate 24-hour support, timezones can make the mentoring process difficult. But if teams are split across different timezones you can choose the right person from the day or night team to support the new staff member.
If this is your first international hire, ask your mentor to work a split shift so they’re available in the new employee’s critical learning hours. This will accommodate the new employee and meet the demands of your support queue.
Create daily focus periods of interactive learning
Training new support employees is dependent on active learning. Watching videos, lectures, or reading documentation can only go so far. New employees are nervous but ready to go. Don’t dampen their energy with training that rivals studying a dictionary! Create active learning environments where recruits can interact with their mentors in real time. If your product is complex, create daily focused periods so mentors can go deep into functionality. Don’t overwhelm support employees in their first few days! Crossed wires can do more damage than good when operating a complex product. Beware of your mentor over-delivering information to your support team member with extended lectures and facts about your product or service. Ask questions to prompt thoughts by the new recruit about the product. Engage their curiosity and creativity – these make wonderful tools for active learning. Conduct live or remote training sessions so you can answer all of the subject questions in real time. One-to-one training is vital for new employees. Ensure they don’t sit
in a room isolated and bemused by the software before them. They’ll end up resenting the company, when all they needed was a mentor. In the core training, Kayako assigns a mentor to new staff to explore the basics of product functionality.
When to use training materials
There is a time when recorded material is useful. Humans are exposed to a lot of stimuli everyday. Consider the billions of commercials and advertisements you see on the web, TV, and billboards. There’s just no way you’d remember them all! Consider one-to-one training sessions in the same way. It’s a lot of note-taking and information for a new employee to process. Here’s where video training can help build product knowledge. It gives them a chance to rewatch clips, look closely at the content, and to better understand what is happening. Our focus as human beings doesn’t let us take in and process this much information at one time. Kayako uses Grovo to train new support team members through video. Our Grovo training takes new staff on a journey through a previous conversation to show how we tackled it. The training starts by revealing the problem the customer faces, and then we go about diagnosing it. We focus on explaining what we are doing, and why, while recording what we are doing on screen.
In a support role you’re actively looking for issues that should be passed onto the correct teams. Explain what to look for, and the essential information to be collected. Then in a corresponding video you might show how to log an issue for the engineering team to be debugged. Training within an orientation period gets you going. The true work towards a high performing support team happens in the first few months.
Chapter 3. How to keep connected to your team in different time zones How many times have you finished off the last bite of your lunch and wished that there was either more food, or you had more time to spend?
For people in support, the emotional implications of our work can carry through even when we are not on the clock—for some of us, that may show up as checking our phones right before bed for CSAT scores, for others, it may be overthinking how we could have made a support interaction better while finishing up the last scraps of leftover macaroni and cheese. The question is: how can we protect ourselves against that? Sure, you can put your phone in a locked box when you’re not on the clock, but realistically you’ll still be thinking about it. One way to start breaking that cycle is to give yourself enough time to step out of your support shoes and back into your regular life. The way that I choose to do this, and would recommend you try, is by using a split shift. A split shift is when you work a few hours (usually around half of your shift) in the morning time, take a long lunch break, and then return later in the afternoon or evening to finish your work. Sounds like a pretty simple concept, right? That’s because it is! People that work retail schedules or varied shifts have been practicing split-shifts for years, but it’s just starting to see a resurgence in the tech world in tandem with the rise of remote work. While it may sound good to you, you might question how to get your company to see the value in something like this. Taking a long break sounds awesome, but will it really add any additional benefits for your support organization? Luckily, split shifts offer a ton of boosts to emotional health and productivity; especially in the realm of support.
Emotional grounding Everyone has had an interaction with a customer that left them feeling less-than-energized. While these are often the exception rather than the rule, they can certainly throw a wrench in our gears. On a regular schedule, these interactions can cause a butterfly effect throughout the rest of your day, and may even change the way you interact with your peers. Taking a split shift and allowing yourself the time you need to step away from the problem can be just what you need to reset the rest of your day.
Split shifts give you better coverage Many companies are trying to make the switch to global support, but getting or hiring for extra coverage can be tricky. Split shift work gives you the benefit of being able to work a larger (albeit spread out) chunk of time. An example of split shifts on a USA schedule could have you start work earlier than any US colleagues (that work regular 9-5 schedules), and ending later than them as well. The usefulness of this is two-fold: 1. We can catch trouble or outages earlier than they might have been detected otherwise 2. Cover any lunches or breaks that my European counterparts might need.
This also skews you into working both some West Coast and European hours, which can be useful if someone is out sick. As a manager, this benefits you by being able to spend time with teams in different time zones when prior to that you might have been set to one specific zone. Instead of taking time outside of regular work hours, shift your schedule so that at least an hour of your time spreads across each of your zones. Even if you have employees as widespread as Europe and Australia, you will be able to spend a bit of time with each of them every day that your team operates.
Schedule time for team 1:1s
As a manager (new or otherwise), you can struggle trying to come up with the most perfect and productive way to use your time: you need to get to know the status of what your employee is working on, how they feel, any bumps in the road coming up—it’s a lot of information to cover! Let us take a little bit of the stress out of the equation for you and help you rock conducting one-on-one meetings with employees. Whether you are remote or in-person, the environment in which you meet your employees is important. Find a great online service that will allow you to have face-to-face videos whenever you need. Make sure that it is reliable for you: imagine if you were in a meeting with one of your team members in person and ran out fifteen minutes into the meeting with no explanation? That’s what it’s like when you get disconnected from a video chat while remote.
One-on-ones done remotely are just as awesome as one-on-ones done in person, but you need to be considerate of the same things: is the room and environment where you are conducting the one-on-one steady? You wouldn’t have a one-on-one in a place where you were going to be interrupted, so you should do the same when conducting them remotely. Make sure you have good headphones, a steady internet connection, and a private room so you can devote your attention to your employee.
What to do with all that time in the middle? As a manager, having better coverage with people spread out across shifts, and time zones means that your customers may get a quicker response—especially if you have specific support representatives that are responsible for multilingual support. As an employee, feeling more emotionally buoyant allows you to provide a better and even more personalized experience for each customer that you communicate with. But, further than that, what you choose to do on your break, whether it be napping, meditating, exercising or just eating can make an even larger impact on how the rest of your day goes.
Why not use your added time to practice mindfulness and better your support interactions? For example, according to a study done by the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, practicing meditation can make a huge difference in how you engage with your coworkers and customers, but also how much stress you feel.
Less stress makes for more natural, comfortable interactions with your customers—imagine having a conversation with a stranger at the grocery store on a Sunday afternoon when you’ve got nothing else to do in comparison to how you’d chat with them if you were running late for a dinner party? The same premise goes for how you talk with your customers under similar pressures.
Take a time out, and get a quick bit of shut-eye to rejuvenate
If you’re more of a napper, taking a nap can improve your memory and make you move even more quickly once you get back to work. In their post on how naps affect your brain, Buffer posits that along with the myriad physical health benefits that napping offers, napping can improve recall and boost your memory. Having trouble remembering where you put that link you wanted to send to the customer? We’ve all been there, but maybe a nap could have helped.
Unleash the power of a split shift While all of these things may sound like they’d make an improvement to your organization or personal life, it might not be as easy as just telling your team that you want to start splitting your shifts. Armed with the evidence above and a plan for how you can enact on the benefits of a split shift, you’re one step closer to creating more mental and emotional space to provide even better support.
Chapter 4. Staying Productive When You Don’t Have an Office As working remotely grows in popularity, so does the emphasis on setting up remote workers for success. Remote work can be rewarding, liberating, and a path to a flexible work-life balance with a company located on the other side of the world. According to Stanford Business School, people who work from home are not only happier, they’re more productive, too. But, the untold truth is: it can also be isolating, exasperating, and an unending source of stress because you live where you work and work where you live. Whether you work from home in customer service or another industry, the tricks are to find balance and, above all else, stay productive.
How do Kayako employees that work from home in customer service stay productive when we don’t have an office? After some dangerous self-reflection and two engaging conversations with Kayako colleagues, Daniel (Customer Support Advocate) and Kelly (Selfservice Content Manager), here is six keys to staying productive from a virtual office:
Own your business
Lack of motivation is the most insidious detriment to productivity. Working in a traditional office every day provides external motivation in the forms of sharing space with colleagues, direct oversight from a supervisor, IT security protocols, and walls to keep you from wandering about when motivation wanes. Depending on your industry, you may have daily, hourly or other quotas you need to meet. As a remote worker, other than the quotas, much of that external motivation is easy to circumvent. That’s why disciplined internal motivation is so important for remote workers to possess at the outset or develop quickly. Charles Duhigg says in his book, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive, that, “Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed.” Take the perspective that you’re running your own business. If you don’t get the work done, then no one else does. If no work gets done, then no money comes in. If no money comes in, then eventually you’ll be asked to box up the belongings in your virtual desk.
"It’s important for me to keep up the habits that you would have at a traditional onsite position. There’s a huge amount of personal responsibility that goes into managing your workload. Do your laundry, take showers, and don’t take shortcuts." Daniel. "I only work for a day out of my home office before I change venues. On a normal day, I’ll try to work in a coffee shop in the morning. Then I’ll go work out of my home office. Then I’ll go work out of one of the local breweries or someplace else for the afternoon. I have a co-working space; that’s helpful because it’s nice to be around other productive people." Kelly.
Even if you split time between a traditional office and virtual office, thinking of your remote location as a satellite or franchise office of your employer reminds you that if you’re not motivated, then someone else will be.
Flip a switch There is plenty of advice on how to design your virtual office. Some think the space is important. Others want you to focus on the amount of sunlight. The one absolute essential is that you find ways to flip a switch from home mode to work mode. Without the physical separation you get by going into an office, it’s up to you to figure out how you achieve the level of focus necessary to be productive. "If I need to reset, then I’ll close out of everything, disconnect and come back to it. I’ll get out of the room and walk the dog for a few minutes." Daniel.
"When I start to feel that slump, changing what I’m looking at helps, or I’ll go workout, or just having a conversation with another person is all it takes." Kelly.
After you define your virtual office—whether it’s a room or sequence of events that narrows your focus—you need rhythm and instruments to find your groove.
Find your rhythm Remote work is rarely a nine-to-five gig. Whether you’re assigned a shift or you just need to get work done, how you schedule your day before and after you flip your focus switch will contribute to your level of productivity. This is called finding your rhythm, and you have to do it to survive the solitary, stationary island of a remote worker. There’s a real danger of blurring the lines between your professional and private lives to the point when you walk through your front door you’re not sure if you’re at home or at work. To avoid this, Daniel looks to cycling, making music and Uber driving to help keep him in rhythm. Kelly moves. "It’s really important for me to stay in rhythm. I’m completely in motion when I’m not working because I’m dormant when I’m working. Before work I’ll ride my bike. After work, I drive for Uber." Daniel. "If I don’t switch it up, then I just get into my own head. It turns into a giant echo chamber of, “Oh, you’re not working on this fast enough,” or “Oh, you should be doing this other thing.” If I sit in the same chair in the same place for too long then I start to go a little
bit stir crazy…Sometimes all it takes is having a conversation with my barista." Kelly.
It’s also important to start and finish the day with momentum. “To get over the feeling that I’m always on the clock, I make a to-do list for the next day at the end of my day,” Kelly said. I do this, too. It helps make a clean break from work to home life at the end of the day, and it saves you from scrambling to get organized at the beginning of the next day.
Try every instrument
Collaboration tools make it easier to stay engaged and productive while working from home. Your employer provides some, but take the initiative (without breaking any of your company’s IT regulations, of course) to try tools that keep you focused and in rhythm. And don’t be afraid to try new tools because with working remotely growing in popularity, so is the market in collaboration tools. "We can use any tools we want to get the job done. Kayako encourages us to “think like a freak.” And it pays dividends…I wouldn’t be able to do this job without a password manager. Kayako is run with no fear. They’re willing to explore new tools to make us more effective in our jobs." Daniel. "We rely heavily on Slack…I’m obsessed with Todoist. If it’s not on Todoist then it doesn’t exist for me." Kelly.
Some of the tools Daniel and Kelly rely on for collaboration and productivity include:
Dropbox F.lux Google Hangout Google Docs GoToMeeting JIRA Skype Slack Todoist Trello White noise and ambient music (Noisli and Focus@will)
Look to the mothership While you have to take more initiative to be productive, your employer and colleagues will play major roles in enabling, supporting, and rewarding you. Just because you work from your own office doesn’t mean that you work alone. Companies like Kayako rely on remote workers to provide expertise and experience that they cannot find locally. To capture and leverage what remote workers can offer, companies have to expand their community to include all of their remote workers. "There’s always someone there to reassure me. They’re just so positive and forward thinking on education and learning. Even when I make a mistake, they help me see the silver lining." Daniel. "A big advantage at Kayako is that we are all plugged into what everybody else is doing so we can keep pace with a project… everyone here is very self-driven.
If you think another tool or service or meeting will help you improve productivity, then you have to ask your employer to help make it happen. They may not be aware of the gap since they don’t see or even talk to you every day." Kelly.
When in doubt, over communicate. You don’t have the luxury of working in an office and being able to pop into a cubicle to ask, “What’s the ETA for X?” You need to be more direct. Otherwise, the stress of uncertainty—and Kelly’s “echo chamber” of self-doubt—will start to eat away at motivation.
How to improve your productivity Again, as a remote worker, much of the responsibility to make yourself more productive falls on your shoulders. You know when your energy flags, the kinds of interactions that set you back, and the warning signs that you’re not being as productive as you want to be. It’s up to you to make yourself more productive. "I want to improve my technical knowledge. Kayako gives us access to online training—free of charge—for things like Linux Academy, PHP programming, and it’s my personal responsibility to get caught up so I can be more efficient. This job can be humbling sometimes and I want to get to the level of the people I work with so I can get it done faster." Daniel. "I’m trying more time-boxing techniques where I sprint for 20 minutes to completely focus on a single task. I’m trying to find one that fits so I can get drafts out a bit faster." Kelly.
Expect more production than your brick-andmortar counterparts As a remote worker, you get the advantage of time. No commute. No tracking down conference rooms. Fewer impromptu meetings. No office distractions. While this can isolate you if you let it, you can also use the time to get more done than your colleagues back in the office. So if you read this to start your day, then toss the pajamas into the hamper, get a quick workout and start implementing these six keys to be more productive: 1. Be accountable for your productivity. 2. Discover your focus triggers. 3. Be deliberate about scheduling your whole day, not just your workday. 4. Stay informed about the latest collaboration and productivity tools. 5. Over communicate with your employer and colleagues. 6. Know your weaknesses and take the initiative to strengthen them. Then go for a walk, drive for Uber, or chat with your barista. You need to get out of the house!
