3 ms·

I haven't read the book, but I think that if he added one sentence to point 1 in his summary, the first three points are really everything you need to know to m

I haven't read the book, but I think that if he added one sentence to point 1 in his summary, the first three points are really everything you need to know to make remote work effective. Point 1 (treat everyone as remote) is the most critical, but his elaboration on "tools, meeting setup, information exchange, communication, documentation, and opportunities" should be extended further with "Provide all employees with guidance and training on how to work remotely. In particular, people need to understand that working meetings held remotely often bring out the worst in people on opposite ends of the communication spectrum (those who monopolize the floor, and those who are reluctant to participate). A meeting facilitator should explicitly facilitate participation, so that everyone who has something to contribute, does, and no one prevails simply with volume. On point 2, about use of asynchronous communications - it probably is implied, but one key part of this is making sure that everyone in the team understands and observes the rule that you are expected to be asynchronously available most of the time, and should go dark only when it's absolutely necessary for your work. One thing I found helpful with distributed teams is making a status available on asynchronous channels called "Ping me on the hour" which is a way of saying, "I'm heads down, don't interrupt unless the world is ending, but I surface if necessary every top of hour."

kbutler 4y ago
> expected to be asynchronously available most of the time "during core working hours". See other point about establishing boundaries between work and personal life. It is helpful to establish expected contact/response timings, such as: - email - async. checked a few times/day. turn off notifications - slack/chat - async. notify of direct messages & high priority channels, other items checked periodically - phone/voice/video calls - synchronous. only for things that justify immediate interruption. Will respond with at least a "What's up?/In a meeting/etc." unless completely unavailable.
blueboo 4y ago
A phenomenon that unites these points is the result of extended COVID WFH: in the aggregate, to some significant degree, remote work habits seem to be persisting in in-person work environments. It’s a double-edged sword: You’re pinging the guru down the aisle for advice rather than walking over to her. So no one gets to overhear the guidance, but then again, she can triage your request with her Slack usage. As a result, our in-person work situations have never been so quiet (outside of lockdowns). The value of in-person is thereby seemingly perceptibly lessened. Are we losing or recouping the value of that serendipitous spark of collaboration that executives wax poetic over? (Was it ever a thing?)
- jmoak3 4y ago
  I've worked jobs that pre-covid that were exactly what you describe, where 80% of the time we'd just ping one another without getting up. You never knew if you were ruining someone's concentration, so pinging over slack let them shift gears when it was best for them. It's why I'm a large proponent of remote work - outside of lunch and meetings, my work experience compared to one of those (IMO bleak) environments is largely unchanged. Working in an exciting and lively office is the ideal in my opinion, but it's hard to stumble into those - I feel like these days by definition the people who make an office a great place are the same people with the ability to control their experience i.e. choose remote work. The ones who make offices bleak are the same people who force others/ must be forced to go in to be productive haha
  - walnutclosefarm 4y ago
    I've worked that way for 20 years. The product group I lead, e.g., from 2006 through 2014 was a total of 150 or so people, located in 4 up to 8 campus facilities on 3 different continents, and at least 40 or so individuals whose only office was at home. If you looked at all the individual "deliverable" teams in that group, I don't think there were any that didn't have key contributors who were not co-located. So they all functioned essentially as everyone remote, all the time. (The downside to that arrangement for me, since I was responsible for the entire group, was that a work day spanned the entirety of the hours I was will to be awake. One soon learned to be brutal about blocking out non-work hours during your local usual business hours so you could accomodate the 5 and 6:00 AM calls that required people from Eastern and Western Europe, and the 8 and 9:00PM calls that got Asia, Singapore and Australia on board. We tried to keep individual teams from being constituted from more than 2 continents just to keep some sanity in people's lives).

kbutler 4y ago

> expected to be asynchronously available most of the time "during core working hours". See other point about establishing boundaries between work and personal life. It is helpful to establish expected contact/response timings, such as: - email - async. checked a few times/day. turn off notifications - slack/chat - async. notify of direct messages & high priority channels, other items checked periodically - phone/voice/video calls - synchronous. only for things that justify immediate interruption. Will respond with at least a "What's up?/In a meeting/etc." unless completely unavailable.

blueboo 4y ago

A phenomenon that unites these points is the result of extended COVID WFH: in the aggregate, to some significant degree, remote work habits seem to be persisting in in-person work environments. It’s a double-edged sword: You’re pinging the guru down the aisle for advice rather than walking over to her. So no one gets to overhear the guidance, but then again, she can triage your request with her Slack usage. As a result, our in-person work situations have never been so quiet (outside of lockdowns). The value of in-person is thereby seemingly perceptibly lessened. Are we losing or recouping the value of that serendipitous spark of collaboration that executives wax poetic over? (Was it ever a thing?)

jmoak3 4y ago
I've worked jobs that pre-covid that were exactly what you describe, where 80% of the time we'd just ping one another without getting up. You never knew if you were ruining someone's concentration, so pinging over slack let them shift gears when it was best for them. It's why I'm a large proponent of remote work - outside of lunch and meetings, my work experience compared to one of those (IMO bleak) environments is largely unchanged. Working in an exciting and lively office is the ideal in my opinion, but it's hard to stumble into those - I feel like these days by definition the people who make an office a great place are the same people with the ability to control their experience i.e. choose remote work. The ones who make offices bleak are the same people who force others/ must be forced to go in to be productive haha
- walnutclosefarm 4y ago
  I've worked that way for 20 years. The product group I lead, e.g., from 2006 through 2014 was a total of 150 or so people, located in 4 up to 8 campus facilities on 3 different continents, and at least 40 or so individuals whose only office was at home. If you looked at all the individual "deliverable" teams in that group, I don't think there were any that didn't have key contributors who were not co-located. So they all functioned essentially as everyone remote, all the time. (The downside to that arrangement for me, since I was responsible for the entire group, was that a work day spanned the entirety of the hours I was will to be awake. One soon learned to be brutal about blocking out non-work hours during your local usual business hours so you could accomodate the 5 and 6:00 AM calls that required people from Eastern and Western Europe, and the 8 and 9:00PM calls that got Asia, Singapore and Australia on board. We tried to keep individual teams from being constituted from more than 2 continents just to keep some sanity in people's lives).