Rootconf 2019

Working remotely and running a remote & distributed team seem like black magic to many, however, many companies across the globe, e.g., Zapier, Gitlab, Elastic, etc. have already started working remotely for many years now. Remote working has a number of advantages for the company and it’s employees as well:

• Save cost of running an office
• Hire talent from anywhere across the globe
• Work from anywhere: hill station, beaches, countryside, anywhere where you have good internet connection
• Work life balance
• And lots more

In spite of so many advantages and live examples, still many organizations, many in India, are skeptical to adopt a remote work culture. It’s Okay to be skeptical. That’s where this session comes in to the picture. Setting up a remote working environment is not as easy as flipping a magic wand. It needs a lot of efforts and brainstorming in setting the right cultural values, hiring process, choosing the right toolchains to setup an efficient remote & distributed workplace.

In this session, we want to share everything we’ve learned about running a remote team — our successes and our failures. We also want to hear from other’s (entrepreuners, team leads, manager, organizations, etc) about their experiences on working remotely or trying to setup a remote workplace: challenges they faced, how they solved them and their success stories.

Key takeways:

• Learn how a remote/distributed workplace works
• How to setup a remote/distributed team that works
• Advantages, challenges and how to work around them

Last but not the least, learnings from this session will help you to make your current workplace better and cool.

Outline

This session is going to be an interactive one, encouraging audience to participate in the discussion, from the start. The panelists will kickstart the session and moderate it so that the session flows in the right direction and is able to cover the outlined topics. The following points will be addressed during this session:

• What’s a remote team and why?
• How to build a remote team
• How to hire a remote team
• How to build a culture in a remote team
• How successful remote teams evaluate employees
• How to build strong relationships in a remote team
• How to run a company retreat for a remote team
• Remote office setup and how to work faster and efficiently
• How to work in different timezones
• How to avoid burnout in a remote team
• How to find and get hired for a remote job
• User stories

Requirements

Participants must meet at least one of the following requirements to attend the session:

• Currently working in a remote team
• Managers/Team leads/Entrepreuners/CXOs planning to start a remote team
• Managers/Team leads/CXOs/Employees planning to migrate to a remote team or have a flexible working culture when people needn’t be in office to work
• People sturggling to manage a remote team
• Anyone curious about working remotely

This session will be a success if

• People in leadership roles get convinced that a remote team is possible and it works, and gets motivated to give it a shot
• People struggling to manage a remote team find some solutions
• People learn something to be more productive at a remote workplace

Speaker bio

Panelists:

Ratnadeep Debnath AKA rtnpro works as a Site Reliability Engineer at Zapier. He has deep interest in Kubernetes and CNCF projects. He loves contributing to Open Source and mentoring people to start their Open Source journey. When he is not coding, he likes spending time with friends and family, practise Mantra Meditation or cooking.

Aravind is passionate about evangelizing technology, meeting developers and helping in solving their problems. He is a backend developer and has six years of product development experience. Currently he works at Elastic as Developer Advocate and looks after the Developer Relations function of India. Previously, He worked at McAfee Antivirus as a Sr. Software Engineer in Cloud Security Domain. He has deep interest in Search, Machine Learning, Security Incident Analysis and IoT tech. In his free time, he plays around Raspi or a Arduino.

Ramya Authappan works as an Interim Quality Engineering Manager, DevProducts at Gitlab.