Thanks for putting this up for feedback. I read with some interest. For me the biggest piece that was missing was evidence that the ideas work.
The content sounds aspirational “wouldn’t it be nice if” and not grounded in lived experience. You should definitely put some information in your intro about who you are and where you’ve seen these ideas work, and from what viewpoint you are coming from. This would add more credibility.
For example, it is not self evident to me that async is inherently better for decision making or assigning tasks. It is better for decision communicating and task tracking, but either in chat or a voice call it is so much faster to communicate the nuances of a complicated assignment or ask. You also may want the persons input on the issue at hand. You also may need a _quick_ decision.
Did you get my copy of draft-propsal-final-joe(bob3)-2020-05-01.2020-01-05(5).PDF.final.txt.zip in the last email thread? You know. The one that has a different subject than this email.
This is great. One of the biggest challenges I find with WFH is the lack of serendipitous communication/idea flow and the sense of loneliness that comes with being by yourself all day. While remote work has many benefits and the principles make sense, it would be great if some of the positive's of office work could be recreated in remote work
Potentially there are software solutions that help solve these issues?
Hey, our team builds and uses Remotion (https://www.remotion.com/), which is really great at enabling those spontaneous conversations that you might be missing from a traditional office. You might call a coworker to ask a quick question (e.g. "where was that file we were talking about last week?") and because it feels so frictionless to get into a call, you're more likely to have more social, casual chats. It's more 1-1 chats and fewer entire-team meetings where it's too awkward to ask someone about their weekend. Try it out!
Also some comments.
I have managed remote workers, and am current a new remote worker myself.
As a manager (of managers), I think the one on one meetings are the meetings not to skip. Certain not more than once. These are times to check in and get a sense of how people feel. To listen and to support often people just want to complain, or want to hear some praise. I insist on video for these meetings.
As a manager I am interuptable, if my teams needs me I want to be available.
As a manager I try not to interrupt my teams. Just because a question popped into my head, asking in chat will interrupt others, possibly many other, because I have role power and influence.
I like the concept of evergreen comms, but that's a hard reality to realise. Probably easier in small organisation, but in a big enterprise you will still have email, people create price chat rooms, people call each other and are not going to capture the content. Vendors and partners will use different tools. Personally I have WebEx, Zoom, Teams and Google something. I don't have much choice.
I have been running a fully remote company for more than 5 years now. Some thoughts that have worked for me that are related to this guide:
a) Consistent timings - the employee choose their hours but they should try to keep it consistent through the week. This is a variation on the idea of fully flexible timings where people can work each day whenever they want.
b) We do pairing exercises (~1 hour spread over a week) to increase the 'socialize' component. The pairing can be as simple as two people (A,B) get together at the start of their day and update each other on their progress. End of the week, during the sprint call A gives B's update and vice versa. This helps break the ice because many of my engineers (and me) do not socialize unless there is work happening in the background.
c) Managers should understand that most people (in my experience) begin liking remote work and then start hating it somewhere between their 3rd and 6th month. People feel depressed and miss the environment of an office. I feel like managers should keep an eye out for this dip and assist early.
How have you guys dealt with C? It’s definitely something I have felt and am currently pretty keen on getting back to the office even though it probably isn’t the best thing long or short term.
I don't have a general solution. We warn all new hires about this problem when they start. Just knowing you will go through this phase is often useful in catching the problem early. We rely on the support structure of everyone who has gone through the pain recognizing the symptoms in others early. We try to infuse some change to the working pattern of the person - like increase the 1:1 communication or have them help someone else or make them present something at a virtual brownbag or teach something to the rest of the group. These tasks help to a certain extent because new people seem to feel good when they contribute to a group. But I don't think there is any easy way other than just accepting this is going to happen and that you need to experiment your way through this problem.
Most ebook formats support hyperlinks. EPUB is basically an enhanced version of HTML. I read a fair amount of ebooks, and DRM-free EPUB is my preferred format.
I agree, but when reading book-like HTML content I miss bookmarking, highlighting and note-taking. Ideas for how to solve this? Other than personally by keeping a separate document for notes while I read.
One thing that's worth adding is for individuals to see the impact of their individual tasks on the company's overall goals. When everyone's working in an office you're going to interact with other parts of the company and you'll organically connect with the person who uses that report you're building.
In a remote environment those organic interactions do not happen and teams tend to be more siloed. So managers have to make more of an effort for employees to understand how their actions contribute to another team's success.
Without that holistic view it's not possible for workers to act independently.
The concept around evergreen communication is interesting. However, I do think chat gets impersonal fast. And it's hard to make the team feel connected.
There are tools like vlokit [0] which is a video-first chat platform. By letting people express ideas and give feedback through video/audio, it makes it easier to connect with the group. Without the constant need to get into a meeting for it.
It's also great to discuss off-work topics your team might be interested in.
> * Employees: Do not create new meetings. Move all meetings to discussions in your task manager, track output in the source of truth. Although some meetings are needed, it's better to cancel them and add as necessary, than to keep them and taper off.*
This seems like the hardest thing to get right. I would rather walk barefoot downtown rather than asynchronously resolve something in Google Docs/Jira comments over the slow course of two days, versus grabbing the relevant people into a quick video call to discuss and come to a conclusion in 15 minutes.
> Avoid email or WhatsApp as much as you can. They are private by nature and make it harder for people to jump in if needed.
Hallelujah!
To extend upon that, I think companies should pick one medium for internal communication and stick to it. Doesn't have to be Slack, but it can be Slack. Keep email for external communication, of course.
At every company I've worked some people would start threads in Slack and others would start them through email. This is a pain in the ass because now I've got to pay attention to 2 programs and email is just generally inferior for group communication.
Nice. Good luck with history preservation if you work at a big company, though. At many places chat messages are set to be deleted within a few days. I expect law firms would be pretty strict with their data retention as well.
Tooling isn't the problem - it's litigation discovery. Companies don't want to keep records around that could be subject to discovery, so they set up retention policies to delete emails older than X months, and chats older than X days. It seems to me that any company over ~1k employees gets to the point where they start worrying about these things.
BTW, I really like the book. Will be sharing it with a few managers that are struggling to get remote work because they don't get the fundamental tools.
I have actually tried doing everything in markdown when I initially released the book, but then I figured that for it to look the way I want the quickest way is to Google Docs & export as PDF.
Then I figured I can export as HTML and this is how this version was born (manual tweaking was and still needed)
The content sounds aspirational “wouldn’t it be nice if” and not grounded in lived experience. You should definitely put some information in your intro about who you are and where you’ve seen these ideas work, and from what viewpoint you are coming from. This would add more credibility.
For example, it is not self evident to me that async is inherently better for decision making or assigning tasks. It is better for decision communicating and task tracking, but either in chat or a voice call it is so much faster to communicate the nuances of a complicated assignment or ask. You also may want the persons input on the issue at hand. You also may need a _quick_ decision.