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How One Packaging Engineer Solved Remote-work Obstacles

A typical and more ideal way of working is “in-office.”

April Bonner Photo

When working in a cross-functional project team, it is easier to work with the different functional teams when you are able to see them every day. If there is an issue or if you need to simply ask a question, you could just walk to the person’s desk for a quick resolution. Working on a remote team is very different from an “in-office” environment and requires more communication and other soft skills to have a successful project.

Since 2017, I had been working remotely on a project where the entire cross-functional team—except for me—was in one central location. Just by habit, I initially was approaching this project just as I would if it were an “in-office” or non-remote project environment. I learned quickly that I had to change my approach. Here, I am going to explain some of the issues and situations I faced and what I did to overcome them.

Early on in the project, one issue I faced was my team members not fully trusting me. Since this was a remote project, it is hard to develop meaningful relationships with team members. As a packaging engineer, one of my daily tasks is to work with product development so I can develop the best possible packaging system for the product. The problem was that the team was fighting against me on what packaging to use. As the subject matter expert, this was very frustrating for me. In order for us to be successful, I knew I had to do something to win my team’s trust.

Two-step approach

First, I started to take frequent trips to their physical location to meet the team face-to-face and develop those relationships. My manager encouraged me to take as many trips as possible because he also knew the importance of building relationships within a remote project team. Second, it was important to respectfully inform the team who the packaging subject matter expert is—me! Before their former company was acquired by my company, the team was accustomed to outsourcing packaging, and they were responsible for all the packaging design inputs to give to the third-party vendor. Once I had those conversations with the team and frequently visited the site, things were a lot better.

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