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You have to work it even within tech companies. I have been working remote for years before the pandemic made it mainstream. In one of the companies I worked f
by hosh 3y ago
You have to work it even within tech companies.
I have been working remote for years before the pandemic made it mainstream. In one of the companies I worked for, I was not the first remote worker. The first person in the company pioneered the tech, practices, and culture to make it work as a hybrid. After I came in, bit by bit, the engineering team went remote. So when the pandemic hit, the company had already had a mode of work that more or less helped out the rest of the company.
These things were not free. The pioneer had to really put himself out there to implement the remote best practices. By the time I got there, most of that was in place.
- n4r9 3y agoI'd be grateful to read a little more detail about what those best practices are, if you have a chance?
- hosh 3y agoI think I have only read a couple articles about it, but I don’t have them. Just off the top of my head, unorganized: - manage outcomes instead of time spent - Explicit presence: as a remote worker, you have to be explicit and deliberate about making your presence known. Status emojis, socialization, and “thinking out loud” threads - Use [async] tags in messages whenever you can to help manage urgency of reply. Same with statuses - Daily standups become even more important in order to promote social bonding, including brief chit-chat right before everyone shows up. Video if you can. It is about the only time the team bonds together - Use the zoom chat for backchannel, so that you can still get something out without interrupting the speaker - Having said that: Slack history records everything. Do not use Zoom chat as meeting notes. Put that into Slack, and then into Confluence/Notion/OneNote. - Shared documents to work out a plan over Zoom helps keeps things focused - You will be exercise writing a lot more. Leverage that. Be more thoughtful about replies. You can always link to conversations in tickets and documents - Make use of do not disturb and periods when not to recieve notifications - Keep your calendar up to date. Make sure to block out maker time (focus time), lunch, async times, and when you are running errands. That way, people can quickly schedule a time with you if needed - Slack huddles in open channels can simulate drop-in calls. If you like pairing, you can start a huddle with yourself and work there. Rename the huddle to make it clear that you are open to drop ins, add a summary in the huddle thread to make the work visible - hybrid meetings suck. People in person have to make more of an effort to make people who are remote in known. Conference rooms should be setup to put zoom folks on the wall, and zoom folks should put their video up. (It works better as all in person or all zoom meeting) - team, dept, and maybe company should periodically bring everyone together onsite to do the things you cannot do remote
- hosh 3y agoMaybe I should write a small, well-organized ebook about this for sale. I’ve been looking for small side project