4 ms·

Yep, this is absolutely correct in my experiences. I'll chime in, since I'm a remote employee at a company that is hybrid remote/on-site but with the vast major

by scruple 10y ago

Yep, this is absolutely correct in my experiences. I'll chime in, since I'm a remote employee at a company that is hybrid remote/on-site but with the vast majority of employees being on-site. Long story short: I actually started on-site but negotiated part-time remote. Then after about a year of that my spouse accepted a dream job offer on the other side of the state and so it was no question that we were moving. They wanted to keep me on and so I transitioned to full-time remote. It has it's ups and downs. From my experience, it depends on the team and ultimately the lead and/or the manager. If they get it, it's good. If they don't, don't bother. My last team, it was beautiful. Everything worked great. It became obvious to me after transitioning away from that team just how much extra work my manager was doing to keep his remote employees in the loop. With the team I'm on now, it's not working at all. Why? Because, as you so eloquently put it: > the people who were remote were out of the loop on almost everything... If you have a watercooler chat with someone about a feature, it's easy to forget that a remote colleague wasn't there for the discussion/not document what was said. This is exactly the problem I am facing down. About a month ago, I even tried talking to my manager about it. Even going so far as using this exact phrasing. His response was that I should come to office for 1 or 2 day trips! Completely missed the point. I'm not surprised, I guess I just expected some effort. I'm trying to remain positive but it's tiring. I can do good work and make progress but I'm with a lead who is insulating me from meetings and it feels deliberate. The few times I am invited in to a meeting, it's easy to see that he accepts and assumes credit for _the teams_ efforts. He was hired recently as a Senior, our manager wanted him to transition to a Lead, and he's actually landed somewhere around trying to be an architect. Ranting aside, when I bring my concerns up to him it's obvious that there's no attempt to better understand the issues/challenges of the hybrid approach. It doesn't help that he's never worked with remote employees before, either.

kartickv 10y ago
I don't see why your manager missed the point. If the "vast majority" of employees are onsite, then it seems reasonable to expect the few who aren't to come visit, or otherwise change their working style, rather than the majority to change their working practices for the few. Particularly if it's the same state in the same country and not, say, a 20-hour flight from Bangalore to San Francisco. Am I missing something?
- scruple 10y ago
  Yes, I believe you must be. I'm referring to where the OP said that as a remote employee I feel out of the loop on a lot of things. So, I tell my manager that I'm missing important information about the projects I'm working on because people have these infrequent, but important, impromptu meetings and those details don't exist outside of those spoken words and their heads and his response is to tell me to come to the office more often. To do what, exactly? This is strikes me as missing the forest for the trees. The fact is, this entire team is all on Slack and we all have email and we all use zoom. We have internal Wiki's for documentation. We have JIRA. And on and on. The point is, there are plenty of established avenues available for people to dissiminate this sort of information but it doesn't happen. I don't think that I'm asking them to modify their behavior by asking that they include their team members or to remember that they exist when they have those impromptu meetings.
  - kartickv 10y ago
    You ARE asking them to modify their behavior when you say that they should use Slack/email/whatever other tool for your benefit, or that they shouldn't have an impromptu chat around the water cooler because you're not around. Since you're in the minority, you can't demand the majority change their working style for you. It's up to you to fit in to how the majority works, say by showing up in the office. Or you'll miss out important information, which will be to your detriment, not theirs. > To do what, exactly? To communicate with others the way they apparently prefer to communicate — in person. And to build relationships, which lead to working smoother, and prevent misunderstandings from snowballing. It's easier to get pissed off with someone over email than in person. There are many advantages to facetime. You can decide to forego those, but you can't tell others to, just because you want to.
    - BlackFingolfin 10y ago
      I think you still missed the point: If he is there every now and then, then he still has missed all the water cooler discussions that happened while he was not there. It's not as if they will see him and say "ah, right, now that I see you, we discussed this and this last week when you are not here.". The only way to fix this is with some concious effort to reproduce the results of water cooler discussions explictly -- and if you spend that effort anyway, you might just as well do it via Skype or Slack... He doesn't have to be on-site.
ghaff 10y ago
>His response was that I should come to office for 1 or 2 day trips! I understand he missed the point in this case. However, if a company is willing to pick up the travel costs associated with a partly distributed team getting together on a semi-regular basis, that's often a pretty good approach. Yes, processes should be such that ongoing communication is good. However one of the costs of having a more distributed workforce (which has various benefits to the company, including financial) should be a bigger T&E budget.
- scruple 10y ago
  I do make trips up every quarter, and they do reimburse expenses, but they are unarguably disruptive and occasionally burdensome to my life and my family.
- nojvek 10y ago
  It seems that having great speech to text would make remote teams workable. Meeting notes are automatically taken and organized into a searchable journal
  - passiveincomelg 10y ago
    If nothing else, that would at least be an improvement over "let's take a photo of the whiteboard after this one hour ad-hoc meeting and attach it to the jira ticket".
mikekchar 10y ago
I think there are a couple of challenges. You are right that it is hard for people to understand how easy it is to get out of the loop. On the other hand too, if you are in a team with people who are politically motivated, it's pretty easy for them to actively exclude you if they think you are danger to their goals. For me (being remote and even 9 time zones away), I've tried to scale back my own ambitions. It's hard because I've worked as an agile coach for a long time, so I'm used to having quite a lot of influence. I think trying to reinvent yourself to work for other people's success can be useful. It can be a different style of political game. You need to show how they are better off with you than without you. It's not nearly as depressing as I'm sure this sounds. Just a different way of making a contribution.
- scruple 10y ago
  That makes sense and it's good food for thought, thanks.

by scruple 10y ago

kartickv 10y ago

I don't see why your manager missed the point. If the "vast majority" of employees are onsite, then it seems reasonable to expect the few who aren't to come visit, or otherwise change their working style, rather than the majority to change their working practices for the few. Particularly if it's the same state in the same country and not, say, a 20-hour flight from Bangalore to San Francisco. Am I missing something?

scruple 10y ago
Yes, I believe you must be. I'm referring to where the OP said that as a remote employee I feel out of the loop on a lot of things. So, I tell my manager that I'm missing important information about the projects I'm working on because people have these infrequent, but important, impromptu meetings and those details don't exist outside of those spoken words and their heads and his response is to tell me to come to the office more often. To do what, exactly? This is strikes me as missing the forest for the trees. The fact is, this entire team is all on Slack and we all have email and we all use zoom. We have internal Wiki's for documentation. We have JIRA. And on and on. The point is, there are plenty of established avenues available for people to dissiminate this sort of information but it doesn't happen. I don't think that I'm asking them to modify their behavior by asking that they include their team members or to remember that they exist when they have those impromptu meetings.
- kartickv 10y ago
  You ARE asking them to modify their behavior when you say that they should use Slack/email/whatever other tool for your benefit, or that they shouldn't have an impromptu chat around the water cooler because you're not around. Since you're in the minority, you can't demand the majority change their working style for you. It's up to you to fit in to how the majority works, say by showing up in the office. Or you'll miss out important information, which will be to your detriment, not theirs. > To do what, exactly? To communicate with others the way they apparently prefer to communicate — in person. And to build relationships, which lead to working smoother, and prevent misunderstandings from snowballing. It's easier to get pissed off with someone over email than in person. There are many advantages to facetime. You can decide to forego those, but you can't tell others to, just because you want to.
  - BlackFingolfin 10y ago
    I think you still missed the point: If he is there every now and then, then he still has missed all the water cooler discussions that happened while he was not there. It's not as if they will see him and say "ah, right, now that I see you, we discussed this and this last week when you are not here.". The only way to fix this is with some concious effort to reproduce the results of water cooler discussions explictly -- and if you spend that effort anyway, you might just as well do it via Skype or Slack... He doesn't have to be on-site.

ghaff 10y ago

>His response was that I should come to office for 1 or 2 day trips! I understand he missed the point in this case. However, if a company is willing to pick up the travel costs associated with a partly distributed team getting together on a semi-regular basis, that's often a pretty good approach. Yes, processes should be such that ongoing communication is good. However one of the costs of having a more distributed workforce (which has various benefits to the company, including financial) should be a bigger T&E budget.

scruple 10y ago
I do make trips up every quarter, and they do reimburse expenses, but they are unarguably disruptive and occasionally burdensome to my life and my family.
nojvek 10y ago
It seems that having great speech to text would make remote teams workable. Meeting notes are automatically taken and organized into a searchable journal
- passiveincomelg 10y ago
  If nothing else, that would at least be an improvement over "let's take a photo of the whiteboard after this one hour ad-hoc meeting and attach it to the jira ticket".

mikekchar 10y ago

I think there are a couple of challenges. You are right that it is hard for people to understand how easy it is to get out of the loop. On the other hand too, if you are in a team with people who are politically motivated, it's pretty easy for them to actively exclude you if they think you are danger to their goals. For me (being remote and even 9 time zones away), I've tried to scale back my own ambitions. It's hard because I've worked as an agile coach for a long time, so I'm used to having quite a lot of influence. I think trying to reinvent yourself to work for other people's success can be useful. It can be a different style of political game. You need to show how they are better off with you than without you. It's not nearly as depressing as I'm sure this sounds. Just a different way of making a contribution.

scruple 10y ago
That makes sense and it's good food for thought, thanks.