8 ms·
I've been working 100% remotely for about 6.5 years now. Overall I love it. However, there are very real drawbacks that have taken me awhile to fully realize.
by jofer 4y ago
I've been working 100% remotely for about 6.5 years now. Overall I love it. However, there are very real drawbacks that have taken me awhile to fully realize.
For me, the primary one is that it's _way_ too easy for everyone to get deeply frustrated with each other. Social interactions and chit-chat lead to a better understanding of people and a more accurate mental model of what people actually mean when they say something.
Written text is the majority of remote communication. That's both good and bad. It's a much lower bandwidth form of communication than face-to-face in terms of being able to pick up intent and understand the context of someone's mood/etc in what they're saying. The same goes of communication over webcam. It's higher bandwidth than written text, but still lower than in-person.
When you're fully remote, you'll much more commonly misinterpret folks intent. You'll also more commonly have your intent misinterpreted.
At least in my experience, this tends to lead to a much higher rate of frustration and more frequent extreme misbehavior when everyone is remote.
I don't have an easy solution. Occasional in person meetings help a lot, but they're hard to do well, and easy to do poorly. Having 200 people in the same room for 2 days doesn't really help the situation, as there's zero time to get to know anyone.
- brundolf 4y agoThis is a big one that it took me a while to fully appreciate I've found that even just turning my camera on in Zoom meetings makes a difference. Joining the standup call a little early, having "face to face" chitchat, builds up a small buffer of rapport that significantly improves empathy and perceived intent Especially if you need to have a conversation where there might be some existing friction/tension/frustration, doing it over video instead of text or just audio will hugely increase the good-faith nature of the conversation And of course, the occasional in-person hangout helps too, if you happen to be in the same city as your coworkers. What's important is that you each form an impression of the other as a human being, and not just as a faceless mechanism in the org that may be helping you or getting in your way at a given moment
- marrone12 4y agoJust FYI, it's "rapport" not "repor"
- brundolf 4y agoEdited, thanks :)
- tmaly 4y agoI agree with joining the meeting a little early. It is nice to catch up with people. I am in a hybrid situation now, so I try to take different team members out for coffee and give them some one on one face time when they are in the office on the same day me.
- dcreager 4y ago> having "face to face" chitchat, builds up a small buffer of rapport that significantly improves empathy and perceived intent On my team we have a weekly 30-minute meeting for non-work-related updates. A chance to talk about whatever you did in the past week outside of work, or about anything else that currently interests you. It typically prompts a lot of follow-on conversations in Slack afterwards. It might be nicer if this happened organically, and didn't require an explicitly scheduled meeting. But we consider it important enough that we carve out the time to make it clear that it's a team norm.
- throwawaysleep 4y agoFollow the Hacker News guidelines at work. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
- IshKebab 4y agoA noble goal but in practice you can't force people to do this.
- throwaway2037 4y agoThis only works in a small team or a small company -- "high trust scenario". As soon as your team grows to medium/large (or company same) -- "low(er) trust scenario", then politics really matters. This rule can be thrown out the window. People will show one face to you and another to their manager.
- tra3 4y agoI remember the epics fights I would get into with my online irc buddies when I was a youngun Remote work is not a panacea, there are tradeoffs. Investing more effort into building remote relationships is definitely worth working at home and not having to commute. Excellent insight.
- nabakin 4y agoI've been working remote for about a year now and haven't had this issue. Maybe that's because 90% of our communication is done during meetings where we have tone to convey intent
- jherdman 4y agoI’ve been remote a little over 9 years now. When I read a message that sounds a bit hostile, or the tone sounds a bit off, I reread it in an intentionally happy voice. Sometimes this helps me reframe it. Failing this I simply reach out on a video call.
- Karrot_Kream 4y agoI've spent a lot of effort trying to be present in Zoom now that we've gone all remote. I've invested in a decent setup. I connect using ethernet on my work laptop so there aren't any latency concerns. I have a high quality headset so there's no feedback and good quality audio. I have a nice camera and some lights to make sure my face is illuminated. I rely a lot on whiteboarding at work, so I try (and find this to be a huge pain point, I'd love alternatives) to use an old Wacom tablet to draw in GIMP (well Seashore, but I dislike both) to whiteboard over Zoom. Whiteboarding still gives me the most heartburn in my setup. I still find it hard to build new connections over Zoom but I find that by putting effort into being present over Zoom that I connect much better and others are encouraged to have smalltalk with me before/after meetings.
- sylens 4y agoExcalidraw[0] is the best tool I've found for whiteboarding over Zoom. Just enough structure to let you quickly sketch out what you're talking about, but without the rigidity of a Visio or Lucidchart. 0: https://excalidraw.com/ https://excalidraw.com/
- tmaly 4y agoIt is a little bit more effort, but you can mirror an ipad/ipad pro to your desktop. It is a much nicer whiteboard than wacom especially if you have the apple pen.
- commandlinefan 4y agoAlthough I've had the same observation, I've been observing it long before I started working remotely: I'd drive 30-45 minutes into an office and then spend the day emailing or IM-ing people in different cities, countries and continents. It's been over 20 years since even most of the people I interacted with on a daily basis were anywhere near the same physical location as I was.
- throwaway2037 4y agoDo you think your situation is common / average? I would say "no" from my experience. If those people could sit next to you, do you think your collaboration would be higher?
- jofer 4y agoYeah, it's not limited to remote specifically, for sure. I had the same experience in an office setting when working as an internal consultant at a big corporation. I'd often be helping teams on the other side of the globe on short-lived projects. When you don't ever meet the people you're working with face to face, it's just easier to misinterpret what people say.
- adverbly 4y ago> Written text is the majority of remote communication. It's the majority of office comms too...
- jiveturkey 4y ago> I don't have an easy solution. Isn't RTO pretty easy?
- dogman144 4y agoagreed, really good point and I use “be nice twice” as a way to try to avoid it. The other aspect is I try to avoid participating in the “social media of work,” which I guess is like the resulting meta-community created by having work built in a Slack with text-based communication. People get themselves into the dardnest trouble over a work Slack thread they just couldn’t drop.
- quantisan 4y agoRegarding too easily getting frustrated over messaging, I have only one rule to avoid that and it's been working well for me -- Whenever any message threads that requires more than back and forth once over, hop on a Zoom call.