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Not something mentioned in the article, but something I've found super useful at my current (fully remote) job is the concept of "office hours". Where I am, eac
by eschneider 4y ago
Not something mentioned in the article, but something I've found super useful at my current (fully remote) job is the concept of "office hours". Where I am, each team has a hour or two each week where folks are "available". For some teams, like mine, most folks show up for the video meeting and we go over whatever short topics we've accumulated over the last few days with whomever, or just work muted if it's not something relevant to us. Very casual. Other teams are generally offline, but if you tag them in their team's slack channel, they'll pop on their video meeting link and you can go over whatever you need to. Nice.
It's not a solution to all problems, but ends up being a nice 'hallway conversation' substitute where you don't _quite_ know who you need, or just need to ask some questions and don't want to go to the trouble of scheduling a meeting just for that.
And since the whole thing is informal, it doesn't feel like a time waste, even if you're not 'involved' in what's going on. YMMV, of course, but it seems to work for us.
- Rayhem 4y agoI propose office hours in every single retrospective we do and it never gets any traction. I've tried proposing "office hours". I've tried proposing them with a bit of an explanation as to why I think they're a good idea. I've tried proposing them with a lengthy explanation as to why I think they're a good idea. My conclusion is that people don't want to engage with retrospective items that aren't first-order helpful. "Doing X solves problem Y for person ME right now" type things. Office hours smooth communication, but that in and of itself doesn't fix a problem -- it paves the road to fix other problems.