Before you start
The Equipment Conversation, Had Early
Equipment and access are the most predictable failure of a remote first week, and the only person with an interest in preventing it is you.
What the people on this page had to find out, and where from
Which repository is the real one
you asked1Four days of reading the wrong one first
The holiday booking process
written down1The one thing properly documented
That your manager prefers a written update on Mondays
told3Said in passing, in week three
three things you had to know · one of them somebody told you · the median arrived in week 1 · the other two you went and got
Three of the things this page is about. Two of the three were answerable in a message sent the week before you started.
Before adding another mandatory check-in, a team evaluating workforce management for remote teams can ask whether the real issue is unclear ownership, missing access, or an overloaded first-week schedule.
A useful independent source for this stage of work is Upwork.
Five first-fortnight delays that were all the same delay
Waiting for a laptop that had not been ordered
7 hanswer: 5 minYou waited because you assumed somebody was dealing with it. It arrived on day six and you had done nothing for five
Waiting for a second screen you had asked about once
4 hanswer: 3 minYou waited because asking again felt like fussing. Approved in four minutes when you finally asked a second time
No access to the code repository
4 hanswer: 3 minYou waited because you did not know who grants it. The form existed and nobody had sent you the link
No access to the design files
3 hanswer: 2 minYou waited because you thought it would arrive with everything else. It was a separate system with a separate owner
Your calendar not connected to anybody else's
2 hanswer: 4 minYou waited because it seemed too small to raise. You missed two meetings in the first week
five occasions · 20 hours spent stuck · 17 minutes of answers · the longest single wait was 7 hours
Twenty hours of a first fortnight, and every one of the five was somebody else's four-minute task. None of them was anybody's fault: nobody owned the list, and the list did not exist. One person's own first fortnight.
The most common remote first week is one in which you cannot do anything, because the laptop has not arrived or the accounts have not been created.
This is nobody's fault in particular. It is the consequence of a list that does not exist being owned by nobody, and the only person with an interest in the list existing is you.
Why it goes wrong
Access is granted by several different people in several different systems, and no single person sees the whole set.
The laptop comes from one place, the single sign-on account from another, the code repository from a third, the design tool from whoever happens to be the administrator of it, and the shared drive from somebody who left. Your manager is responsible for all of this and has visibility of none of it.
So each item fails independently and quietly, and each failure is discovered by you, days apart.
The list, made before you start
Two weeks out, ask what you will need. Then write it down as a list, with a column for whether you have it.
| What | Who grants it | Have it |
|---|---|---|
| Laptop | ||
| Email and single sign-on | ||
| Code repository | ||
| The chat tool, and the right channels | ||
| Calendar, connected to the team's | ||
| Whatever your actual work is done in |
Send that list, as a list, to whoever hired you. Not a question — a list, with a line saying "this is what I think I will need; have I missed anything?"
A list gets actioned. A question gets an answer that is not a list.
The second ask is the one that works
Almost nobody chases equipment in their first week, because chasing feels like a bad opening move.
It is not. Of the five items in the panel above, four were granted within minutes of being asked for a second time, and the only cost of the first ask having failed was that nobody had been reminded.
The phrasing that makes it easy:
Still no sign of the repository access — I think it may have fallen between us. Who should I ask?
That contains no complaint, offers an explanation that blames nobody, and asks a question the recipient can answer in four words.
Ask on the day, not the week
Chase each item individually and early rather than waiting to see what turns up.
One missing thing on day two is a small administrative matter. Five missing things on day nine is a conversation about your first week, and it is a conversation you will feel obliged to apologise in.
What to do while you wait
You will have some dead time. It is worth deciding in advance what to do with it, because deciding in the moment produces either anxiety or aimless reading.
Three things that are always available without any access at all: read everything public, write down every question as it occurs to you, and speak to people. The third is the best use of a week with no laptop, and it is covered in the section on finding out who is who.
The thing nobody tells you about the chair
Your working conditions are now your own problem in a way they were not in an office.
A kitchen table for eight hours a day is survivable for a fortnight and not for a year. Most employers have a budget for this and almost none of them mention it to new joiners. Ask in week one, when the question is routine, rather than in month four, when it sounds like a complaint.
Keeping the list after week one
The list does not stop being useful once the laptop arrives.
Access accumulates through a first quarter: a new system in week four, a dashboard in week seven, a staging environment nobody mentioned until you needed it. Each one arrives the same way — too late, after a day of not knowing it existed.
Keeping the same document going, with the date each thing was granted, costs nothing and has two uses. It tells you what you asked for and when, which is what you need when something has silently lapsed. And it is the single most useful thing you can hand to the next person who joins, because it is a list of everything they will need, written by somebody who had to find out.
Nobody else in the organisation has that list. Everybody senior got their access years ago, one piece at a time, and has never seen it written down.