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Our team has slowly, by accident shifted to remote first during summers, when our deadlines are the furthest out. First one person moved, and we let them stay o

Our team has slowly, by accident shifted to remote first during summers, when our deadlines are the furthest out. First one person moved, and we let them stay on and work remotely. Then another. Then two of three of the remaining individual contributors switched to core hours, but are otherwise gone. Now my boss has been remote for two weeks. It’s interesting in that it happened without discussion and without proactively addressing the new cultural issues that arose. Communication has dropped unless you’re on a call, and you never know who is on what call so it’s difficult to gauge the tempo of work any given day. Communication has become a “procedure” that must be intentionally addressed, which leads to awkward conversations about the weather in our daily standup that has morphed into a call to keep in touch for the people that are off site and don’t want to be politically left out. It wastes my time. A lot is lost in translation. Productive spontaneous conversation between more than two people is basically gone. A lot of work has disappeared into Slack DMs instof channels, visibility lost there. I understand a lot of this could be fixed with cultural and procedural changes. But I find it weird that you have to implement procedures and controls to replace something you get for free when you are all physically in the same place. And from my experience at least, getting it wrong has absolutely been bad for our team’s work product. Based on this experience I’ll never be working on a remote team again

matwood 7y ago
> A lot of work has disappeared into Slack DMs instof channels, visibility lost there. We announce DM stats in our monthly company meeting. Our goal is everything in a public channel unless it absolutely is a private matter. > something you get for free when you are all physically in the same place. But did you really? Were all those conversations documented? What I realized is that many conversations end up being around what was talked about and what was the decision made X months ago. Many other conversations were around communicating said decision to someone else or someone new. All these telephone game style conversations go away if you can forward someone an email chain.
- moorhosj 7y ago
  I’ve never run into a colleague from another department on an email chain. It happens frequently in our office kitchen. I don’t that that, or the ability to simply walk over to someone’s desk should be discounted.
  - wolco 7y ago
    Working in a bigger place you may not have the same physical access. The smaller the place the more opportunity for cross department chatter remote or in person.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- patagonia 7y ago
  Yeah really. That’s called documentation. Some of my ideas are dumb and a waste of time. They don’t need to be documented to suggest to some future person they need to waste their time reading through to get to the point. If anything productive comes out of the conversation it should be documented. Including how decisions were made in some instances. But I don’t want to read through banter and try to decipher what someone meant out of context years later because all I have is a Slack convo that was a “conversation” not “documentation”. In conversation I have certain expectations of the known context and background the person I’m speaking with is aware of. When writing documentation those details are different. Conversation logs are not documentation. I would argue an email forwarded to me out of context has a higher risk of telephone game style error introduction than properly written documentation. Also in person there is a lot of non verbal, non explicit communication. That is mostly lost.
icebraining 7y ago
> for free It's not, though. It's actually quite costly. I agree with you that implementing procedures is annoying and that collaboration suffers somewhat; that is a cost too. But getting everyone to a single building every day is expensive in many ways as well.
- sct202 7y ago
  It seems like the added cost/time of communications for a remote group is less than the cumulative commute times for everyone, but it has to be a priority and part of the deal.

matwood 7y ago

> A lot of work has disappeared into Slack DMs instof channels, visibility lost there. We announce DM stats in our monthly company meeting. Our goal is everything in a public channel unless it absolutely is a private matter. > something you get for free when you are all physically in the same place. But did you really? Were all those conversations documented? What I realized is that many conversations end up being around what was talked about and what was the decision made X months ago. Many other conversations were around communicating said decision to someone else or someone new. All these telephone game style conversations go away if you can forward someone an email chain.

moorhosj 7y ago
I’ve never run into a colleague from another department on an email chain. It happens frequently in our office kitchen. I don’t that that, or the ability to simply walk over to someone’s desk should be discounted.
- wolco 7y ago
  Working in a bigger place you may not have the same physical access. The smaller the place the more opportunity for cross department chatter remote or in person.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
patagonia 7y ago
Yeah really. That’s called documentation. Some of my ideas are dumb and a waste of time. They don’t need to be documented to suggest to some future person they need to waste their time reading through to get to the point. If anything productive comes out of the conversation it should be documented. Including how decisions were made in some instances. But I don’t want to read through banter and try to decipher what someone meant out of context years later because all I have is a Slack convo that was a “conversation” not “documentation”. In conversation I have certain expectations of the known context and background the person I’m speaking with is aware of. When writing documentation those details are different. Conversation logs are not documentation. I would argue an email forwarded to me out of context has a higher risk of telephone game style error introduction than properly written documentation. Also in person there is a lot of non verbal, non explicit communication. That is mostly lost.

icebraining 7y ago

> for free It's not, though. It's actually quite costly. I agree with you that implementing procedures is annoying and that collaboration suffers somewhat; that is a cost too. But getting everyone to a single building every day is expensive in many ways as well.

sct202 7y ago
It seems like the added cost/time of communications for a remote group is less than the cumulative commute times for everyone, but it has to be a priority and part of the deal.