Richard Liu, Head of Engineering at Earnin, has written some best practices for remote work to make teams more effective during coronavirus lockdowns.

As the world hunkers down to weather the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), work is shifting gears as well. In many industries, working from home (WFH) is going mainstream. It’s a smart way for companies to limit the potential exposure to the virus and keep employees safer while at the same time remaining productive.

Working from home is not a new concept. Most of us in the tech industry have worked from home occasionally, but it is uncharted territory when the entire company is working remotely. This poses several challenges and opportunities — and there is a lot to determine in setting up the right systems for company-wide WFH scenarios. At Earnin, we approached this as a learning exercise before we implemented it on a broad scale. For the week before implementation, we asked several teams to work remotely for a test phase. We collected data during this test, helping us see what worked and what didn’t. Through this process of ‘dry runs’ we developed a set of best practices which we’ve practiced in the past week. While we’re still refining and improving those best practices, I wanted to share what we’ve learned in hopes that it will help more companies who find themselves WFH in new ways.

A New Set of Challenges and Opportunities:

Working remotely has its benefits — it allows people to focus on individual deliverables and often provides the time and space for people to concentrate on difficult or intense tasks. Modern open-office layouts have stripped workers of quiet spaces, and WFH can be a refreshing break from the buzz of the workplace.

However, WFH makes a lot of things more challenging, especially communications. Remote teams often miss out when it comes to the critical conversations and relationship building that are so important to team cohesion. While video conferencing and collaboration technology do bring teams together, remote work makes it harder to read body language, hear what people are saying, read in-room dynamics, ask follow up or side questions, or drop by and quickly sync with a coworker at their desk. It is even more difficult to conduct a brainstorming session when everyone is on a phone or logged in via video.

The good news is that most people save a significant amount of time by not commuting. In the past week our team members have used the time they would normally spend commuting to talk and message with their colleagues more, which has helped overcome those communications challenges.

Below are some of the best practices we have developed for remote teams at Earnin. We have segmented them into company-level, team-level and individual-level tips. These are not hard and fast rules, and I expect they will evolve and change over time. Since we are an approximately 300-person startup, these suggestions may work best for startups, but there should be some things that work for departments in a larger organization as well.

Best Practices:

For the Company:

1. Keep the same goals as you normally would, but provide more clarity. Our customers must remain our top priority — we don’t have the option to be less aggressive on achieving our business goals, just because we’re working remotely. Since remote workers have a harder time dropping in to clarify things, each level of leadership should take extra effort to make sure their teams have a clear understanding of expectations.
2. Ensure you have critical coverage for the most important areas of business at all times. Working remotely gives people the flexibility to walk the dog or take lunch whenever they want. This can lead to gaps in coverage if people don’t coordinate schedules — this is especially important in mission-critical areas of the business.
3. When working remotely is uncharted territory, managers need extra tools and training. For example, at Earnin, we’re using bots to help monitor the level of communications across teams, review velocity, and help in other ways.
4. Executive office hours are important — especially when there isn’t a physical office. Make sure executives and teams hold a time on their schedule when they’re available to answer questions from anyone in the company.
5. Maintain transparency — establish a communications channel visible to the whole company where key initiative leaders can submit weekly status reports and get feedback from executives. This will help ensure everyone is up to speed.

For Teams:

1. Continue to host meetings as if you were in the office. This is an important factor in maintaining a productive cadence. We often schedule and budget our time around meetings. Delaying or canceling meetings will not only impact the way a team spends time but also deadlines and workback plans.
2. Use team channels on Slack, Hangouts, Whatsapp or whatever tools your company uses as much as possible. Avoid small group chats and one-on-one threads unless it’s a confidential or personal conversation. This way everyone can benefit from the dialogue and have access to fuller context for their work. Do not over worry about message overloading. In a remote working environment, making sure people are sharing enough information is more important than word economy.
3. Establish standard routines. Start the day with a 9 am standup meeting over Slack or Zoom. Some teams at Earnin have found the Slack standup app helpful for tracking progress. When people can’t make these “meetings,” have team members post their daily top three priorities in the team channel.
4. Start a team-wide Zoom session throughout the day for those who are not bandwidth-constrained so that people can talk to each other easily. People should feel free to leave the session for other meetings.
5. Do not forget about fun. Relationship building is such an important piece in our professional life. Since we cannot have happy hour or hallway jokes and laughter anymore, we need to be more creative. Try to find something suitable for your team, such as personal storytelling or watching funny Youtube clips together during lunch time.

For Individuals:

1. Effectiveness is tied to having the right tools and using them the right way. Install commonly used apps on both your laptop and phone so that you can join video conference app from your phone when the VPN on your laptop slows down your video conferencing. Add phone numbers to Slack profiles or email footers so people can reach you for quick answers if needed. A short phone call is not an excessive interruption and can replace the quick in-person drop by conversations you would normally have at someone’s desk.
2. Strictly follow your normal daily routine. Avoid delaying meetings with the hope you will meet in person at a later time.
3. Flag issues or slow-downs to your manager or function leader right away — not doing so may just compound delays for you and your team. When you flag an issue, you’re benefiting the entire team.
4. At the end of the day, ask yourself two questions:
   “Am I as productive remotely as I am in the office?” If not, figure out why and explore ways to improve.
   “Are all critical communications done?” If not, finish up before you log off.
5. Step away for 10 minutes: Find time throughout the day to step away from your desk — stretch, get some exercise in, or grab a cup of coffee. Taking short breaks every couple of hours will help improve your productivity and focus.

Over the coming days, many of us will find ourselves navigating new WFH situations. By ensuring that efficiency and communications remain high at the company, team and individual levels, remote work forces can be as productive, if not more so, than traditional work forces.

Best Practices for Effective Remote Working was originally published in earnin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As you know, we’re all about fighting financial unfairness at Earnin. We first tackled the antiquated and oppressive two-week pay cycle, but we know there’s another huge burden keeping people down in America: medical bills. Four out of every five Americans live paycheck to paycheck, without the resources to weather financial emergencies, and often, just $500 in healthcare expenses is enough to cause them a financial catastrophe.

Medical bills are the leading cause of personal bankruptcy and one of the most common major expenses for millions of people. According to a recent survey, 57% of people have been surprised by an unexpected bill for care that they believed their insurance would cover. And 41% of working-age Americans — 72 million people — are struggling to pay medical bills, or are paying off medical debt. That’s up from 34% in 2005.

Medical bills can impact anyone, at any time. No matter how much someone has in savings, a costly healthcare expense can cause immense financial strain. But people living paycheck to paycheck are the most vulnerable to this risk.

Those problems can quickly spiral, leading hard-working people into a cycle of financial misery that can seem nearly impossible to escape.

Some people’s only option is to avoid doctor’s visits altogether, which saves them money in the short term, but can lead to even more expensive health issues in the future. Then, on top of higher medical bills, they may also have reduced income from missing work due to medical appointments — which exacerbates the cycle.

Every day, people from all walks of life have to make choices which the wealthy never have to grapple with — like having to choose between paying for a doctor’s appointment or the gas they need to drive to work. Over time, the cumulative effect of these financial choices can add up to poor health, negative impact on a job, family tension, and overall unhappiness. None of that is fair.

There’s a way out

But here’s the good news — there is a way out. The truth is, many medical bills can be negotiated down or paid in installments, and in some cases, they can even be forgiven in full.

It may seem counterintuitive that medical providers are willing to negotiate their bills, but the fact is the providers want to be paid, and insurance companies take a long time to settle bills. So negotiating a somewhat lower bill can be a quicker path to settling a patient’s balance.

Yet healthcare providers rarely publicize these options, so few people know they exist. We want to ensure that no one in the Earnin community has to face financial hardship as a result of medical expenses. And that no one chooses to forgo healthcare because they’re worried about the expense.

Introducing HealthAid

This is why we’re proud to announce HealthAid, our new medical bills negotiation product. Available first to our community in the coming weeks, and later to the public more broadly, HealthAid gives you an ally — a professional trained in medical billing — who can negotiate any unpaid medical, dental, vision, or mental health bill on your behalf, free of charge.

To use HealthAid, all you need to do is get the Earnin app, upload a photo of your unpaid bill, and add your date of birth (or the patient’s date of birth — we can negotiate on behalf of you or a family member). Within two business days, we’ll send you an updated — and likely reduced — statement, along with a proposed repayment plan with the lowest possible bill offered by the provider.

During our beta trial of HealthAid, we were able to find savings for about 90% of people. Based on the savings we have seen up until now, we estimate that our HealthAid negotiators can save community members an average of $100 per medical bill. And the higher the outstanding balance, the more likely it is that we can negotiate a discount. In one extraordinary case, we even got a patient’s $48,000 bill fully forgiven. While we don’t expect to see this every day, we’re proud that we were able to keep one person from otherwise inevitable bankruptcy.

There are no fees and we don’t take percentages of the discounts. It’s that simple. If we’ve been able to negotiate a discount for you, you can thank us by paying any amount you choose, if you choose to at all.

Why a more fair system means paying what you choose

The most important thing we can do as a company is to assist our community in fighting financial hardship, and unfairness, by giving folks the tools that allow them to keep more of the money they work for in their own pockets. And our community-supported model means that you choose what you would like to pay, and those tips keep us in business.

Join our waitlist to be notified when HealthAid is available, and soon we could be negotiating a discount on a medical bill for you.

Why Earnin is Tackling Medical Bills was originally published in earnin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Financial System Doesn’t Work for 78% of Americans — Earnin Is Fixing That

In the United States, we’re told that anyone can rise above their station through hard work. But in the richest nation on Earth, four out of every five people live paycheck to paycheck, and almost half of Americans wouldn’t be able to come up with $400 in an emergency. The financial system is standing in the way of the American dream. We shouldn’t accept that.

The financial system makes it expensive to live paycheck to paycheck — from monthly banking minimums to crippling overdraft fees to credit cards designed only for the wealthy.

There has to be a better way. That’s what Earnin is building.

It’s time for a fairer financial system

Earnin is a platform of community-supported financial products that give people the tools to take control of their financial future.

We believe it’s time for a new and fairer financial system — one in which people don’t face financial ruin because the system is rigged against them. We’re on a mission to build it, guided by a commitment to put people first and improve their financial lives, let people pay what they choose for their financial tools, and develop a community that supports each other.

The first challenge: Attacking the antiquated pay cycle

One of the most overlooked and unfair elements of our system is that people only get paid two weeks after they work. Every year, a trillion dollars of Americans’ earnings are held back in the pay cycle, even as their employers can invest it and earn interest on it, just because that’s how the system works. At best, it’s inconvenient; at worst, it leads to a cycle of debt, because there are so few options when unexpected medical bills, car repairs or school costs arise, as they inevitably do.

We need the money we work for when we need it. Every day, for example, people lose jobs because they can’t access the money they’ve earned to pay for gas to commute. Left with few choices, they miss a day of work (and a day’s pay), borrow money, skip bills and pay late fees, or buy gas anyway and take the financial hit of expensive overdraft fees. Every year, Americans spend more on overdraft fees — $34.3 billion in 2017 — than they do on fresh vegetables. Those overdraft fees, by the way, subsidize “free” banking services for more wealthy Americans, or those who can easily afford them.

This unfair system costs Americans billions of dollars and creates enormous stress and strain on tens of millions of people. And it has other hidden costs. Your kid’s birthday rarely falls on payday, so celebrations have to wait. Even new shoes have to wait. A study of over 40,000 lower-income consumers in the U.S. shows that spend on non-essential items increase right after payday.

We want to change this system by making it fairer for everyone.

Our approach: Your de facto banking app

To us, it’s simple: If you’ve earned money, it’s yours and you should be able to use it whenever, and wherever you want — it shouldn’t be held back. We’re using technology to break the rigid pay cycle to allow people to tap into their earnings when they need it most.

The heart of the Earnin platform is Cash Out, which gives you real-time visibility into your earnings and allows you to use the money you’ve made but have not yet been paid.

You simply download the app, share details about where you bank, and tell us where you work. Then, Earnin keeps track of how much you’ve earned each day. If you’d like to Cash Out, you simply choose the amount — up to $100 each day and $500 per pay period — and we’ll send your earnings straight to your bank account for immediate use. If you’d like, you can also leave a tip. But it’s not required. Then, when payday comes, we simply deduct the amount you cashed out and any tips you may have elected to provide.

Earnin can also protect you against overdrawing your bank account by alerting you if your balance is low and automatically cash out funds into your bank account. Thanks to Cash Out, our users are half as likely to overdraw their accounts as the average person.

We built a financial calendar so you can see at a glance what bills are due and how much is in your bank account. Our members may only cash out a handful of times per month, but our data shows that they open the app 25 times a month, largely to see how they’re tracking financially. We’ve become their de facto finance app.

You choose what to pay

We don’t charge people to use Earnin. We offer all our tools — both existing and new ones coming soon — without any required fees, hidden costs, or loans. Why? Because we believe everyone should have access to smart financial tools — and using them shouldn’t break the bank.

Before Earnin, most of our users turned to friends and family for financial support. The support they receive comes from a place of trust, understanding, and compassion. This ethos drives our very existence and our model.

Earnin is built on the belief that technology can level out unfairnesses and inequality, and should be able to access our products, whether they are able to pay us or not. Our community-supported model — where people pay what they choose — has led to an engaged community and a growing service.

A vast majority of our community members have tipped at least once, but sometimes people don’t tip at all. We do not pressure you, our customers, or make you feel ashamed for what you can, or cannot, pay. In five years, no one has been removed from the service for not tipping.

A lot of people think it sounds too good to be true. But it’s not. It’s simply what we think is fair, and it’s how we think we can change the system to be more helpful and uplifting. This is a radical change from the current American financial system, where draconian fees, interest, and payment terms disproportionately hold down those who can least afford it.

Our community pays it forward

Our community tells us time and again that Earnin has made their lives better, often under very trying or stressful circumstances in between pay periods.

We’ve also heard that our members want to help each other out because they understand what it’s like to grapple with hard times. That’s why we created Pay it Forward, which lets members leave a tip that supports not just our company, but other community members — if they feel so inspired.

The results have been a testament to the goodwill that blossoms inside a community when people feel seen and appreciated. So far, members have covered more than 44% of others’ tips. More than 10 million people have sent thank you notes after receiving such an unexpected kindness from a fellow community member.

“I have learned that by giving, it always comes back to you doubled,” one community member told us. “Even if your tip is small, pay it forward because it keeps all of us from paying fees and high rates when we band together as a community.”

What’s next

Our members know that for too long the system has been unfairly stacked against them, and there’s no reason it has to be like that, and there’s no reason we can’t change it. We believe we’re creating a better way. We’re standing up for fairness and letting each of us take back control of our own financial destiny.

Our community works hard every day to keep their heads above water, and we’re proud to lift them up when they need us most. And we’re just getting started. We have more plans to build community-supported products that help those who the system is not working for so stay tuned.

The Financial System Doesn’t Work for 78% of Americans — Earnin Is Fixing That was originally published in earnin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Earnin is an app that gives people access to their money as they earn it, without having to wait for payday. When Earners leave work, our technology automagically pushes their day’s pay into their Earnin account. But today, Earnin users who worked at Walmart stores throughout Texas are finding a little something extra in their bank accounts: $100 as thanks for sacrificing their Thanksgiving holiday.

Millions of men and women struggle financially in the United States, often having to work multiple jobs and shifts. They are too easily forgotten and our donor chose to remain anonymous to shine the light on them.

Everyone at Earnin was excited to make this happen. We kept picturing Walmart employees in Texas walking out of a hard day at work and receiving $100, just because. Working in secret just made it more fun for all of us.

Working at Walmart on Thanksgiving? was originally published in earnin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.