Open Office Hours: Sharing our Virtual Office Expertise

[avatar user=”Laure Haak” size=”thumbnail” align=”left” /]

So here we sit, at home, talking to each other over pick-your-favorite web conferencing system, trying to co-manage kids and/or pets and/or bandwidth. My teen-age kids tell me their generation is now called the Zoomers. I’ve seen comments on any number of social media platforms about being in meetings all the time, and how this is more exhausting than going to the office and meeting face to face. I also hear people talking about social distancing feeling more like being in an isolation chamber. Humans are social animals (even us mostly-introverts), and to many this feels like torture.

Though the social isolation aspect of COVID-19 is new for everyone, ORCID has operated in a virtual office from our beginning.

Founded in 2010, ORCID has never had a central office, building, or other physical shared space. We were one of the early pioneers of a completely virtual office. We use a virtual office service for our mailing address, which we chose (in part) because of the street name. After about two years, the Board stopped asking staff when we would invest in a building. They saw that it was entirely possible to run an organization without one. We can hire the best people from anywhere in the world, engage with communities where they live, and offer flexibility in creating a workday that enables staff to manage their lives with more ease. Being virtual enhances our resilience.

So, how do we do it?

We live by the principles of agility. As a non-profit, our mission, values, and principles guide our work. We engaged in scenario planning to establish core strategies, which we use to establish annual goals. We embrace synchronicity and asynchronicity. We use online tools which are also spectacular at enabling transparent collaboration. We trust each other to get our work done whenever and wherever we happen to be. We care deeply about our community, and we know we must ask questions and share our plans and progress openly with the community.

When a new person joins the ORCID team, we send a laptop, set them up in all of our online tool environments, and review our mission and goals. Most people are ready to go, from a technology perspective, in less than a week. Harder is onboarding into payroll, because each location has its own employment regulations, taxes, vacation days, pension, etc. We currently have 37 staff working in 15 countries, and several US states which each have specific employment regulations.

How to choose tools? Based on what we need to accomplish. Here this is broken down by activity and urgency.

Ideas and Decisions

We use synchronous meetings to discuss ideas and make decisions, both internally (weekly) and in external working groups (monthly) and interest groups (quarterly). We use a variety of online meeting tools, including Zoom, Google Hangouts, Skype, Slack, and GoToMeeting. We are careful to have a clear agenda for meetings and to have prepared materials that are linked to the agendas. We take notes and action items, and we monitor progress. Synchronous meetings are critical but we can’t spend all our time in meetings. We need time to take action on the decisions.

Materials and Code

We use a variety of platforms to develop materials for synchronous meetings and follow up on action items, including Google Docs and Github, which we augment with content management and collaboration tools including DropBox, Drupal and WordPress, and Figshare. To do this work, we set aside 2-4 hour blocks of time not in meetings or responding to email. Time to think rather than react. Some people like to start the day doing work that requires longer concentration, others like to end the day that way. Either way, this protected time enables the deeper thinking that planning requires.

Projects and Progress

Collaboration is a bedrock value of ORCID. We manage projects and track our progress using Trello, Salesforce, and Quickbooks. We spend time defining and refining core team responsibilities and articulating agreements within and between teams. We use team and project Trello boards to organize our work, make timelines explicit, share tasks, and @ people within and across the organization who can help complete projects. For more fine-grained and faster communication we use Slack. We share statistics on a weekly basis and are rolling out an analytics facility this year to better visualize progress and longitudinal trends.

Values and Culture

Each team works differently, and we allow for agility and creativity in what tools are used and how they are deployed. In addition, we have people from many countries and cultures and timezones. We are diverse, and must be inclusive. To help us work together effectively requires more than our mission. It requires trust and transparency. As we have grown, we have spent more time exploring our values. We recently rolled out our Dignity at Work policy. We dig into our values by having each team live a value each year, and staff annual performance goals include how our work supports our team value. This year, teams are developing charters to augment their core responsibilities. We do this because how we work is at least as important in what we work on.

Our collaboration toolbox