5 ms·

They aren't really twisting anything. A 20 minute in person chat over a whiteboard can save weeks of back and forth on written communication. It's not that cra

They aren't really twisting anything. A 20 minute in person chat over a whiteboard can save weeks of back and forth on written communication. It's not that crazy. My work place has "do what you want policy, but we want to encourage remote work and shrink our leased offices". My team at least has 4 people that come to the office regularly, and 2 that work remotely 100%. The #1 complaint of full time remote workers is they feel we all agree on designs and decisions and they just get to see a doc that 4/6 have already signed off on verbally and they feel not involved. I have no idea how to "make them feel involved" nor do I care tbh. I'll always do what's more efficient and what reduces red tape. If that's me just standing up and saying "hey A, B, and C, you guys got a sec? Here is a problem I found, mind going to the whiteboard real quick" will always trump "shit, let me look at everyone's calendar and schedule a 30 minute meeting" then get an email asking about agenda, and 2 people who have personal conflicts and someone asking to reschedule last minute. > Verbal communication is usually a huge time waster and can be outright disrespectful if someone prefers to rob everyone's time and digress and to push the "distilling" part onto everyone else - if the distilling even happens before everyone has tuned out and just agrees to finish yet another meeting. You do far more pointless meeting and verbal communication when everyone is working remotely anyway. A conversation that just needs 3 people will now involve 12 because everyone needs to forward a meeting invite to everyone they think might even be remotely interested. The "outright disrespectful" is just a people problem. outright disrespectful people will be outright disrespectful in both verbal and non-verbal communication.

politelemon 3y ago
> A 20 minute in person chat over a whiteboard can save weeks of back and forth on written communication. We noticed this as well. Now we come in at least once a week. Is there any way that the same level of speed of collaboration can be achieved remotely? We use all sorts of tools but we've not been able to achieve that kind of productivity and it honestly irks me.
- waboremo 3y ago
  Try the ones that try to mimic the whiteboard experience, Apple Freeform, Microsoft Whiteboard, Explain Everything, Invision, Milanote, Miro, etc. It really is such a powerful format, as long as some ground rules are established (not creating a totally new board every single time, as there's plenty of space due to digital format, and to prioritize expanding space use rather than wiping each other's notes). Couple this with a more instant communication form, ie voice chats, and there isn't much else to need when it comes to collaboration. With the added benefit of async communication, you can leave notes to each other on the board/build off things without having to actually be together at the same time. I will note that if you have a tablet and compatible pen (with app support), it makes it all feel so intuitive. But some people get into the flow of clicking and dragging components with text it's not a big difference.
  - eddythompson80 3y ago
    The "animation" part is my biggest problem with these services. with a physical whiteboard, you get to do your own getto animation. Do you want to express the flow of data/requests in a service? easy, just draw them as you're expressing them. Do you want to express a node replacing a node, draw the arrows, use an eraser and you're done. You've essentially created the "animation" part in real life without any need to learn or know "animation" software which is too complicated. in 2020 when we were all forced to work from home, I bought a really expensive Wacom tablet thinking that I can use that to replace a white board. The logistics of it all was just too complicated. telling everyone on the meeting "wait, shut up. let me grab my tablet. Let me connect my tablet. Let me share my screen. Can you see my screen? let me start drawing. Can you see my drawing? oh I'm drawing too fast and you can't see the arrow's direction? oh sorry I'm not used to drawing on a tablet. I'm pointing to "this". Can you see "this"? what do you see? no that's not what I was pointing at. I'm point at "this" not at "that". Let me disconnect and connect again." might as well just cancel the project and look for another job.
    - waboremo 3y ago
      You don't have to use any animation software with them either. What you're doing on a physical whiteboard is utilizing symbols. So use symbols on the whiteboard app. Change node colors, change node border, add stickers, whatever is appropriate for the team and the app used. The scene has got substantially better, to the point where your situation is actually quite overcomplicated. You don't screen share anymore, most of these apps support multiple people on it at the same time and have indicators for what they're focused on/adding to (their cursors). If you do want to use a tablet, and I do, I just connect to the app on my iPad to draw on, while still using my macbook to view the document as a whole/indicate what part I'm really focusing on/keep the voice chat going/etc. There's no lag or slowdown, and I only have a 100mb connection, it's not as if it's transferring an entire netflix movie to me. COVID has substantially improved so much remote work, it's unfortunate a lot of that has been clouded due to experiences early on from the rushed forced implementations!
StopHammoTime 3y ago
If you’re a team of 6, and 66% of you can go into a room and without prompting, why can’t you just dial in the people who are working remote (if they’re available). If they’re constantly not available, maybe there are other reasons they can’t come that should be followed up on. I just don’t believe that most of your team is not busy and then all of the remote workers are never available at the same time. Working remotely is a culture. It is very easy to turn your ad-hoc in-person meetings into ad-hoc “here’s a link to an online meeting”. Get your work to buy you an iPad Pro and an Apple Pen and you even get the whiteboard experience. I have worked in many places where teams are located in different states or offices (but still work in the office). Is it okay to not engage a 1/3 of your team because they work at a different office? What if you’re the app team and your network has issues, but the network team is in another building? Do you just not dial them?
- nightpool 3y ago
  It's just the reality of how scheduling time works remotely vs in-person. In-person you have immediate and implicit knowledge of who's available / what everybody's schedules are, etc, so by using that knowledge you can seem to "magically" pick times that everybody is available. Remotely, you have a much larger coordination overhead because there's no passive knowledge of who is or isn't available, and people's schedules aren't synced up. > What if you’re the app team and your network has issues, but the network team is in another building? Do you just not dial them? I don't know, but I would honestly absolutely hate to work at a company like this just as much as I dislike working remotely. When you're already dealing with the large barriers / restrictions that naturally grow up between different teams and then you add in the mix of not being in the same physical location, it's bound to be a recipe for never-ending meetings and scheduling nightmares that make it impossible for work to get done without mountains of ritual.
  - stormking 3y ago
    In reality you're just disrupting everyones work and bully them into putting your problem first.
    - 3y ago
the_gipsy 3y ago
And writing up a doc in 20 minutes can save months of back and forth. A said x to B, B said y to C, C said z to A, and it's all wrong but "we discussed it so it's good, right?" - months of endless meetings and fixing up wrong in-everybody's-head specs. > If that's me just standing up and saying "hey A, B, and C, you guys got a sec? Here is a problem I found, mind going to the whiteboard real quick" will always trump "shit, let me look at everyone's calendar and schedule a 30 minute meeting" then get an email asking about agenda, and 2 people who have personal conflicts and someone asking to reschedule last minute. This is what's disrespectful. If you're incapable of synthesizing the problem effectively into written form, then honestly you're the problem here. It takes a given amount of your time, where you can think twice and edit the document and synthesize ideas well, objectively better then dumping your stream of thoughts on everyone. Then, others may spend much less, or more, time on it on their rhythm. This flexibility makes it more efficient and respectful of others. The scheduling is a 100% solved problem. Google calendar/mail let's you pick a free slot in a matter of clicks. But do you need the schedule a meeting immediately all the time? It all just sounds like bad management and incapacity of expressing ideas well in written form. The kind of job anybody with half a brain cell can do.
- eddythompson80 3y ago
  > And writing up a doc in 20 minutes can save months of back and forth. Luckily in-person communication doesn’t exclude that. Write to your heart content. Go nuts. Who cares. On the other hand, 100% remote communication excludes all other forms of communication
stormking 3y ago
> If that's me just standing up and saying "hey A, B, and C, you guys got a sec? Here is a problem I found, mind going to the whiteboard real quick" will always trump "shit, let me look at everyone's calendar and schedule a 30 minute meeting" then get an email asking about agenda, and 2 people who have personal conflicts and someone asking to reschedule last minute. That's a big fat strawman. The same way I can gather some people from the office for a five-minute adhoc whiteboard session, I can start a quick group chat about a topic and turn it into a video conference if necessary. No scheduling or agenda required.
- eddythompson80 3y ago
  No. PERIOD. Written communication is inherently significantly more complicated. To "jot down" any idea you need to consider how that record will further be shared with others. If I were to write an .md file with a bunch of terms that only the 6 of us know what that's all about, then make a bunch of assumptions based on that. All it takes is one of the team members who doesn't agree to forward that written record to a management person then adding their own context (which I never got to add my own context) and get the whole thing vetoed from a much high authority than I care to argue with. In a written communication, I need to elaborate and explain every single thing to everyone regardless of their knowledge level. Then add links to those who don't know. Then add links to the link to those who don't know. Then eventually schedule a meeting to discuss the proposal. then a meeting to discuss the results of discussing the discussion of the proposal.
  - drewcoo 3y ago
    > In a written communication, I need to elaborate and explain every single thing to everyone regardless of their knowledge level. Because ESP, gestures, and pheromones don't work over Zoom? I'm not buying this. Also, you've moved the goalposts again. The GP suggested video. Not writing a book in Markdown.
    - eddythompson80 3y ago
      > Because ESP, gestures, and pheromones don't work over Zoom? I'm not buying this. Yes they don't work unless you have a company/team policy of "everyone must turn on their camera 100% of the time". You can say something in a meeting with 14 people, take a quick look and see 10 people nodding and 4 perplexed (or 4 people nodding and 10 perplexed). Can't do that with 14 static avatars. As far as I know no company has such policy. When a team in my company tried to enforce it, their manager got a quick call from HR saying they can't do that.
u801e 3y ago
> The #1 complaint of full time remote workers is they feel we all agree on designs and decisions and they just get to see a doc that 4/6 have already signed off on verbally and they feel not involved. I have no idea how to "make them feel involved" nor do I care tbh. Suppose instead of just two people who are 100% remote, you have 8 people who are remote out of a team of 12 (the rest come into the office regularly). The 8 people who are remote find a problem, hash out the design in chat/video, write up a document and the 4 people in the office get to see a document that 8 out of 12 have signed off on. The remote people have no idea how to get the in office people feel involved, nor do they honestly care.
- nightpool 3y ago
  The problem is that this just doesn't happen like that. Instead, 1 person of 8 will write a document, 1 or 2 people will review it, and then either 1) you'll have to schedule a meeting to finish the review with everybody else (in which case you're paying a high synchronization tax), 2) you just give up and go ahead with no review or 3) you'll have to keep bugging people to review it async and it won't get done. What we're saying is just "remote work pays a higher coordination tax". That's a tax you can maybe decide is worth paying for various reasons (talent pool, work-life balance, etc), but acting like the tradeoffs don't exist is just wishful thinking.
- TapWaterBandit 3y ago
  > The remote people have no idea how to get the in office people feel involved, nor do they honestly care. This is a strange example because for a remote worker every other worker is "remote" so why would they ever exclude other workers from a group email? Remote workers have only one style of communication available (digital) whereas in-house have two styles (in-person & digital). There is no functional difference for the remote workers in communicating with all other workers but for the office workers there is.
  - eddythompson80 3y ago
    Exactly. Pick a lane. 100% remote or 100% in office. Long before the pandemic, we were 100% in office but we had one 100% remote team member. We never had any problems because Robert understood that he was the only remote person. There was a distinct section of "Robert update" in the team weekly meetings just to recap what we all agreed on and to update Robert. Robert knew that and worked around it. We also knew that any decision we made didn't involve Robert and that we had to minimize impact on him whenever possible. If it wasn't possible, then we needed to update him as soon as possible. Luckily Robert never worked on core components with many fuzzy interfaces to other component. Both him and us agreed long ago that it wasn't feasible. If we all decided the whole team is remote, we could work with that. If we all decided the whole team is in-office, we too can work with that. Having a split team inherently dictated split responsibilities.

politelemon 3y ago

> A 20 minute in person chat over a whiteboard can save weeks of back and forth on written communication. We noticed this as well. Now we come in at least once a week. Is there any way that the same level of speed of collaboration can be achieved remotely? We use all sorts of tools but we've not been able to achieve that kind of productivity and it honestly irks me.

waboremo 3y ago
Try the ones that try to mimic the whiteboard experience, Apple Freeform, Microsoft Whiteboard, Explain Everything, Invision, Milanote, Miro, etc. It really is such a powerful format, as long as some ground rules are established (not creating a totally new board every single time, as there's plenty of space due to digital format, and to prioritize expanding space use rather than wiping each other's notes). Couple this with a more instant communication form, ie voice chats, and there isn't much else to need when it comes to collaboration. With the added benefit of async communication, you can leave notes to each other on the board/build off things without having to actually be together at the same time. I will note that if you have a tablet and compatible pen (with app support), it makes it all feel so intuitive. But some people get into the flow of clicking and dragging components with text it's not a big difference.
- eddythompson80 3y ago
  The "animation" part is my biggest problem with these services. with a physical whiteboard, you get to do your own getto animation. Do you want to express the flow of data/requests in a service? easy, just draw them as you're expressing them. Do you want to express a node replacing a node, draw the arrows, use an eraser and you're done. You've essentially created the "animation" part in real life without any need to learn or know "animation" software which is too complicated. in 2020 when we were all forced to work from home, I bought a really expensive Wacom tablet thinking that I can use that to replace a white board. The logistics of it all was just too complicated. telling everyone on the meeting "wait, shut up. let me grab my tablet. Let me connect my tablet. Let me share my screen. Can you see my screen? let me start drawing. Can you see my drawing? oh I'm drawing too fast and you can't see the arrow's direction? oh sorry I'm not used to drawing on a tablet. I'm pointing to "this". Can you see "this"? what do you see? no that's not what I was pointing at. I'm point at "this" not at "that". Let me disconnect and connect again." might as well just cancel the project and look for another job.
  - waboremo 3y ago
    You don't have to use any animation software with them either. What you're doing on a physical whiteboard is utilizing symbols. So use symbols on the whiteboard app. Change node colors, change node border, add stickers, whatever is appropriate for the team and the app used. The scene has got substantially better, to the point where your situation is actually quite overcomplicated. You don't screen share anymore, most of these apps support multiple people on it at the same time and have indicators for what they're focused on/adding to (their cursors). If you do want to use a tablet, and I do, I just connect to the app on my iPad to draw on, while still using my macbook to view the document as a whole/indicate what part I'm really focusing on/keep the voice chat going/etc. There's no lag or slowdown, and I only have a 100mb connection, it's not as if it's transferring an entire netflix movie to me. COVID has substantially improved so much remote work, it's unfortunate a lot of that has been clouded due to experiences early on from the rushed forced implementations!

StopHammoTime 3y ago

If you’re a team of 6, and 66% of you can go into a room and without prompting, why can’t you just dial in the people who are working remote (if they’re available). If they’re constantly not available, maybe there are other reasons they can’t come that should be followed up on. I just don’t believe that most of your team is not busy and then all of the remote workers are never available at the same time. Working remotely is a culture. It is very easy to turn your ad-hoc in-person meetings into ad-hoc “here’s a link to an online meeting”. Get your work to buy you an iPad Pro and an Apple Pen and you even get the whiteboard experience. I have worked in many places where teams are located in different states or offices (but still work in the office). Is it okay to not engage a 1/3 of your team because they work at a different office? What if you’re the app team and your network has issues, but the network team is in another building? Do you just not dial them?

nightpool 3y ago
It's just the reality of how scheduling time works remotely vs in-person. In-person you have immediate and implicit knowledge of who's available / what everybody's schedules are, etc, so by using that knowledge you can seem to "magically" pick times that everybody is available. Remotely, you have a much larger coordination overhead because there's no passive knowledge of who is or isn't available, and people's schedules aren't synced up. > What if you’re the app team and your network has issues, but the network team is in another building? Do you just not dial them? I don't know, but I would honestly absolutely hate to work at a company like this just as much as I dislike working remotely. When you're already dealing with the large barriers / restrictions that naturally grow up between different teams and then you add in the mix of not being in the same physical location, it's bound to be a recipe for never-ending meetings and scheduling nightmares that make it impossible for work to get done without mountains of ritual.
- stormking 3y ago
  In reality you're just disrupting everyones work and bully them into putting your problem first.
  - 3y ago

the_gipsy 3y ago

And writing up a doc in 20 minutes can save months of back and forth. A said x to B, B said y to C, C said z to A, and it's all wrong but "we discussed it so it's good, right?" - months of endless meetings and fixing up wrong in-everybody's-head specs. > If that's me just standing up and saying "hey A, B, and C, you guys got a sec? Here is a problem I found, mind going to the whiteboard real quick" will always trump "shit, let me look at everyone's calendar and schedule a 30 minute meeting" then get an email asking about agenda, and 2 people who have personal conflicts and someone asking to reschedule last minute. This is what's disrespectful. If you're incapable of synthesizing the problem effectively into written form, then honestly you're the problem here. It takes a given amount of your time, where you can think twice and edit the document and synthesize ideas well, objectively better then dumping your stream of thoughts on everyone. Then, others may spend much less, or more, time on it on their rhythm. This flexibility makes it more efficient and respectful of others. The scheduling is a 100% solved problem. Google calendar/mail let's you pick a free slot in a matter of clicks. But do you need the schedule a meeting immediately all the time? It all just sounds like bad management and incapacity of expressing ideas well in written form. The kind of job anybody with half a brain cell can do.

eddythompson80 3y ago
> And writing up a doc in 20 minutes can save months of back and forth. Luckily in-person communication doesn’t exclude that. Write to your heart content. Go nuts. Who cares. On the other hand, 100% remote communication excludes all other forms of communication

stormking 3y ago

> If that's me just standing up and saying "hey A, B, and C, you guys got a sec? Here is a problem I found, mind going to the whiteboard real quick" will always trump "shit, let me look at everyone's calendar and schedule a 30 minute meeting" then get an email asking about agenda, and 2 people who have personal conflicts and someone asking to reschedule last minute. That's a big fat strawman. The same way I can gather some people from the office for a five-minute adhoc whiteboard session, I can start a quick group chat about a topic and turn it into a video conference if necessary. No scheduling or agenda required.

eddythompson80 3y ago
No. PERIOD. Written communication is inherently significantly more complicated. To "jot down" any idea you need to consider how that record will further be shared with others. If I were to write an .md file with a bunch of terms that only the 6 of us know what that's all about, then make a bunch of assumptions based on that. All it takes is one of the team members who doesn't agree to forward that written record to a management person then adding their own context (which I never got to add my own context) and get the whole thing vetoed from a much high authority than I care to argue with. In a written communication, I need to elaborate and explain every single thing to everyone regardless of their knowledge level. Then add links to those who don't know. Then add links to the link to those who don't know. Then eventually schedule a meeting to discuss the proposal. then a meeting to discuss the results of discussing the discussion of the proposal.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  > In a written communication, I need to elaborate and explain every single thing to everyone regardless of their knowledge level. Because ESP, gestures, and pheromones don't work over Zoom? I'm not buying this. Also, you've moved the goalposts again. The GP suggested video. Not writing a book in Markdown.
  - eddythompson80 3y ago
    > Because ESP, gestures, and pheromones don't work over Zoom? I'm not buying this. Yes they don't work unless you have a company/team policy of "everyone must turn on their camera 100% of the time". You can say something in a meeting with 14 people, take a quick look and see 10 people nodding and 4 perplexed (or 4 people nodding and 10 perplexed). Can't do that with 14 static avatars. As far as I know no company has such policy. When a team in my company tried to enforce it, their manager got a quick call from HR saying they can't do that.

u801e 3y ago

> The #1 complaint of full time remote workers is they feel we all agree on designs and decisions and they just get to see a doc that 4/6 have already signed off on verbally and they feel not involved. I have no idea how to "make them feel involved" nor do I care tbh. Suppose instead of just two people who are 100% remote, you have 8 people who are remote out of a team of 12 (the rest come into the office regularly). The 8 people who are remote find a problem, hash out the design in chat/video, write up a document and the 4 people in the office get to see a document that 8 out of 12 have signed off on. The remote people have no idea how to get the in office people feel involved, nor do they honestly care.

nightpool 3y ago
The problem is that this just doesn't happen like that. Instead, 1 person of 8 will write a document, 1 or 2 people will review it, and then either 1) you'll have to schedule a meeting to finish the review with everybody else (in which case you're paying a high synchronization tax), 2) you just give up and go ahead with no review or 3) you'll have to keep bugging people to review it async and it won't get done. What we're saying is just "remote work pays a higher coordination tax". That's a tax you can maybe decide is worth paying for various reasons (talent pool, work-life balance, etc), but acting like the tradeoffs don't exist is just wishful thinking.
TapWaterBandit 3y ago
> The remote people have no idea how to get the in office people feel involved, nor do they honestly care. This is a strange example because for a remote worker every other worker is "remote" so why would they ever exclude other workers from a group email? Remote workers have only one style of communication available (digital) whereas in-house have two styles (in-person & digital). There is no functional difference for the remote workers in communicating with all other workers but for the office workers there is.
- eddythompson80 3y ago
  Exactly. Pick a lane. 100% remote or 100% in office. Long before the pandemic, we were 100% in office but we had one 100% remote team member. We never had any problems because Robert understood that he was the only remote person. There was a distinct section of "Robert update" in the team weekly meetings just to recap what we all agreed on and to update Robert. Robert knew that and worked around it. We also knew that any decision we made didn't involve Robert and that we had to minimize impact on him whenever possible. If it wasn't possible, then we needed to update him as soon as possible. Luckily Robert never worked on core components with many fuzzy interfaces to other component. Both him and us agreed long ago that it wasn't feasible. If we all decided the whole team is remote, we could work with that. If we all decided the whole team is in-office, we too can work with that. Having a split team inherently dictated split responsibilities.