Working From Home: Our New Normal
It's been three months since our office team went fully remote, and we've learned a few things. Some expected. Some surprising. Some we probably should have figured out a lot sooner.
Here's our honest report on what working from home looks like for a small e-commerce team in Vancouver (and beyond).
The Setup
Before COVID, our setup was simple: a small office in Vancouver where the core team worked, plus a handful of contractors and partners scattered across different time zones. Going remote meant the Vancouver team suddenly had to adapt to what our international colleagues had been doing for years.
Turns out, they'd been doing the hard part all along. We just didn't realize it.
Our first week was a mess of Zoom links that didn't work, Slack channels nobody could find, and one memorable incident where someone accidentally shared their screen during a video call while their partner walked through the background in a towel. (We've all agreed never to mention who it was. But if you're reading this, Derek, we still think about it daily.)
What Worked
Slack became our office. We created channels for everything — not just work stuff, but #pets, #cooking, #random, and #good-news. The non-work channels turned out to be the most important ones. They kept us human when everything felt robotic.
Async communication. This was the big revelation. Not everything needs a meeting. Not everything needs an immediate response. Learning to write clear, detailed messages and trusting that people would respond when they could? Game changer. Our meetings dropped by about 60%, and productivity actually went up.
Daily standups — but short. Fifteen minutes, max. What are you working on? What do you need? How are you feeling? That last question matters more than you'd think.
Virtual coffee dates. Every week, we randomly pair two team members for a 20-minute video chat about absolutely anything except work. It felt forced at first. Now it's everyone's favorite thing. Our customer service lead and our warehouse manager discovered they're both obsessed with Korean dramas. Who knew?
What Didn't Work
All-day video calls. We tried this in week one. By Wednesday, everyone had "Zoom fatigue" and dead eyes. Lesson: cameras on for meetings, cameras off for deep work. Your face doesn't need to be visible eight hours a day.
Recreating the office at home. Some of us tried to set up perfect home offices with standing desks and ring lights and professional backgrounds. Others worked from their kitchen table, their bed, or in one case, a closet (great acoustics, apparently). Both approaches worked fine. The lesson: let people figure out what works for them.
Pretending everything was normal. It wasn't. People were scared, lonely, overwhelmed. The worst thing we did early on was try to maintain "business as usual" energy. Once we dropped that act and admitted that things were hard, everything got better.
The Silver Lining
Here's something we didn't expect: going remote opened up our world. Before COVID, hiring was limited to people who could commute to our Vancouver office. Now? We can work with the best people regardless of where they live.
In the past three months, we've brought on a product photographer in Toronto, a customer experience specialist in the Philippines, and a data analyst in Berlin. Our team has never been more diverse, more talented, or more spread across time zones.
It's not always easy — scheduling across Pacific, Eastern, Philippine, and Central European time means someone is always having a meeting at an unreasonable hour. But the range of perspectives and skills we've gained makes it more than worth it.
The New Normal
We don't know when or if we'll go back to a traditional office. Honestly? We're not sure we want to. What we've built over the past three months — the trust, the flexibility, the tools, the culture — feels like something worth keeping.
We're a better team now than we were in March. Not despite going remote — because of it.
— The Boxiki Team