The Week Everything Changed
In the second week of March 2020, the UK went into lockdown. Like every other business, we had roughly 48 hours to transition an entire engineering organisation from office-based to fully remote. No gradual rollout. No pilot programme. Just: make it work, starting Monday.
This post is about what we learned in those first chaotic months, what we got wrong, and what changes became permanent improvements to how we work.
The Immediate Technical Challenges
VPN capacity: Our VPN was sized for occasional remote access, not 100% of the workforce simultaneously. The first Monday was a disaster of connection drops and bandwidth constraints. We emergency-scaled our VPN infrastructure and moved to split-tunnel configuration to reduce load.
Development environment access: Engineers who'd relied on office network access to development databases, staging environments, and internal tools suddenly couldn't reach them. We accelerated our move to cloud-hosted development environments and implemented proper zero-trust access controls.
Video conferencing scale: Our Zoom account was sized for occasional client calls. Suddenly every meeting was a video call. Licensing, bandwidth, and meeting room logistics all needed immediate attention.
The Human Challenges Were Harder
The technical problems were solvable with money and urgency. The human problems were more complex.
Isolation hit differently for different people: Engineers living alone in small flats struggled with isolation. Engineers with young children struggled with constant interruption. Engineers caring for vulnerable relatives had cognitive load we couldn't see. One-size-fits-all policies didn't work.
Communication patterns broke down: The casual hallway conversations, the overhearing of discussions that sparked ideas, the quick "got a minute?" desk visits — all gone. We had to deliberately recreate these interactions, and the recreations never felt quite the same.
Onboarding new team members became genuinely hard: How do you absorb company culture through a screen? How do you build relationships with colleagues you've never met in person? Our new joiners during 2020 had a materially different experience, and it showed.
What We Changed
Async-first communication: We moved from "meetings are the default" to "async is the default, meetings are for specific purposes." More written documentation. More Slack threads with considered responses. Fewer "quick syncs" that could have been messages.
Explicit working hours flexibility: We stopped expecting everyone online 9-5. Parents might work 6am-9am, then 12pm-3pm, then 8pm-11pm. As long as the work got done and people were available for genuinely collaborative sessions, we didn't police hours.
Regular 1:1s became non-negotiable: In an office, you notice when someone's struggling. Remotely, you don't. Structured 1:1s with every team member, every week, became essential for maintaining connection and catching problems early.
Documentation quality improved dramatically: When you can't tap someone on the shoulder to ask how something works, you write it down. Our runbooks, architecture docs, and onboarding guides improved more in 2020 than in the previous three years combined.
What We Got Wrong
We over-indexed on video calls initially: In the first weeks, we tried to recreate office presence with always-on video. It was exhausting. "Zoom fatigue" is real. We learned to use video deliberately, not constantly.
We underestimated the impact on junior engineers: Senior engineers with established relationships and deep context could work independently. Junior engineers who needed mentorship, pair programming, and casual guidance struggled more than we recognised.
We assumed it was temporary: For the first few months, we treated remote work as a temporary inconvenience. We didn't invest in proper home office setups, ergonomic equipment, or long-term tooling. When it became clear this was permanent, we had to retrofit those investments.
What Stuck
When offices reopened, we didn't go back to the old ways. The improvements were too valuable:
- ·Async-first communication remains our default
- ·Flexible working hours are permanent policy
- ·Documentation standards stayed high
- ·Hybrid working is the norm — office time is for collaboration, focused work happens wherever works best
The pandemic was a forcing function for changes we should have made years earlier. The crisis made us better at remote collaboration than we'd ever have become through gradual evolution.