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I'm pretty sure it's just a knockoff of discord voice channels. Knockoff aside, the idea is a place where you can come and go without the formality of explicit

I'm pretty sure it's just a knockoff of discord voice channels. Knockoff aside, the idea is a place where you can come and go without the formality of explicitly managing a group call. I've used it a few times with my team and it's basically "everyone just work on whatever they were working on, and if a question arises go ahead and ask, we're all here and we will answer". It's not a core part of our daily workflow, but I know some all remote teams who do "everyone on huddle between 1-3pm every day". They say they really like it.

Trasmatta 5y ago
> It's not a core part of our daily workflow, but I know some all remote teams who do "everyone on huddle between 1-3pm every day". They say they really like it. Oh god this is my nightmare. I can't imagine trying to get any focused work done like this.
- phamilton 5y ago
  It's only a 2 hour block and if you are heads down on something you just tell your team that and stay out. Nobody is enforcing anything, it's just a bit of team culture building which is difficult when everyone is remote.
- 8note 5y ago
  We did that for an hour daily for a while. It fixed the "schedule 15min meetings for 5min conversations" problem that we had before, since most of the conversations can wait, and everybody can hear about the topic and participate as they like. It leaves the rest of your time in the day to be focussed. Unfortunately, our new manager didn't quite like it and scheduled meetings over top of it, so if you really wanted to talk to somebody about something, you'd end up waiting extra days, or just scheduling a meeting instead. "That's interesting, let's bring it up in work chat tmw" was a great way to stay focused throughout the day
- twic 5y ago
  We do this but with a perpetual Zoom meeting. It works for us. But i think my team is strange. We build software to do some vital business task, which is used by people actually responsible for that task. There are four developers and two users. All six of us are on the chat. 95% of the time, the chat is silence, as everyone is doing their job. 4% of the time, it's the users talking to each other to coordinate something they're doing; i can mostly tune this out because it doesn't directly involve me, but it's good for the developers to maintain some vague awareness of it, because it might be something we can help with, or suggest a way to improve the software. The other 1% of the time, it's developers talking about something urgent, that's worth interrupting me for. We also have regular meetings, separate to the chat, where we have deep conversations. And we have a couple of Slack channels (one for the four developers, and one for all six of us), which we use for conversations which aren't worth taking to chat. A key fact, i think, is that the channel is mostly silent. If it was full of developers getting into deep technical conversations all day, it would be a productivity destroyer.
kazinator 5y ago
But a group call isn't formal; it's just something anyone can start, which results in a call object being visible as a message in a certain channel, that people can freely join and leave. The call UI can be minimized into a little floater that can be put into the corner of the screen and you can configure the mic to be muted by default.

Trasmatta 5y ago

> It's not a core part of our daily workflow, but I know some all remote teams who do "everyone on huddle between 1-3pm every day". They say they really like it. Oh god this is my nightmare. I can't imagine trying to get any focused work done like this.

phamilton 5y ago
It's only a 2 hour block and if you are heads down on something you just tell your team that and stay out. Nobody is enforcing anything, it's just a bit of team culture building which is difficult when everyone is remote.
8note 5y ago
We did that for an hour daily for a while. It fixed the "schedule 15min meetings for 5min conversations" problem that we had before, since most of the conversations can wait, and everybody can hear about the topic and participate as they like. It leaves the rest of your time in the day to be focussed. Unfortunately, our new manager didn't quite like it and scheduled meetings over top of it, so if you really wanted to talk to somebody about something, you'd end up waiting extra days, or just scheduling a meeting instead. "That's interesting, let's bring it up in work chat tmw" was a great way to stay focused throughout the day
twic 5y ago
We do this but with a perpetual Zoom meeting. It works for us. But i think my team is strange. We build software to do some vital business task, which is used by people actually responsible for that task. There are four developers and two users. All six of us are on the chat. 95% of the time, the chat is silence, as everyone is doing their job. 4% of the time, it's the users talking to each other to coordinate something they're doing; i can mostly tune this out because it doesn't directly involve me, but it's good for the developers to maintain some vague awareness of it, because it might be something we can help with, or suggest a way to improve the software. The other 1% of the time, it's developers talking about something urgent, that's worth interrupting me for. We also have regular meetings, separate to the chat, where we have deep conversations. And we have a couple of Slack channels (one for the four developers, and one for all six of us), which we use for conversations which aren't worth taking to chat. A key fact, i think, is that the channel is mostly silent. If it was full of developers getting into deep technical conversations all day, it would be a productivity destroyer.

kazinator 5y ago

But a group call isn't formal; it's just something anyone can start, which results in a call object being visible as a message in a certain channel, that people can freely join and leave. The call UI can be minimized into a little floater that can be put into the corner of the screen and you can configure the mic to be muted by default.