5 ms·

What tools are needed for better remote management?

datadrivenangel 3y ago
More formal communications and explicit cultural norms around communication. People in office do tend to communicate organically with the humans around them, but online it's much harder.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Sometimes I wonder if those of us who prefer remote work are just the same set of people who found "communicate organically with the humans around them" to be a major hindrance to their productivity. Increasingly more over time, I have come to really miss the office I went to every day before I worked remotely. I miss having coffee and lunch with people, saying hi on the way in and out, and I really miss having team meetings and 1:1s and brainstorming sessions in person. But I don't miss my desk even a little bit. I spent as much of my time as possible working from private cubbies. When I'm working, I don't want people around, and I don't want to be pulled into "organic" communication. In practice, the best process (for me) in an office setting was to ping people asynchronously - "hey let me know when you have a moment, I want to brainstorm about xyz" - and then get together when it works for both of you. But this is the same process used in remote work! The downside is you can't walk-and-talk or get a coffee together or find a spot with a whiteboard, everything is soul-sucking video calls. But for me, losing the "organic"-ness of communication, specifically, is a pro, not a con.
  - clocot 3y ago
    [dead]
luch 3y ago
a videoconfering system that is reliable and easy to use is essential to remote management. You need to have as little friction as possible to propose a 1-1 or a 15 min roundtable to quickly brainstorm something orally. Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in order to defuse sticky situations based on partial infos or misunderstandings. Such tools can be panopticon-y so you need to explicitly specify which convos "spaces" are private and which are subject to management interference.
- hardware2win 3y ago
  So, teams?? Basically industry standard
  - auggierose 3y ago
    Teams is not reliable. It's a steaming pile of dog shit.
    - scaryclam 3y ago
      As are the rest of them in my experience. Zoom has been hands down the worst for me, seconded by Teams and then Meet.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        Zoom has been far and away the best of the meeting tech I use. Excellent audio processing and generally reliable. (Also a nice convenient slack interface, so /zoom <RET> <RET> starts a Zoom meeting and pastes the connection info into the channel.) Teams was okay. Meet was okay once I figured out how to grant it the MacOS access it needs. Chime started in early pandemic as a terrible, terrible joke of a product and then evolved to being a close 4th place.
- pie420 3y ago
  You just described Teams, Slack, Skype, and Zoom. all ubiquitous and industry standard.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Erm, also Meet and the rest of the Google Suite (Chat).
  - throwaway2990 3y ago
    All trash. A meeting in person is always shorter cos you don’t deal with audio issues a talking over each other and the mountain of other issues from remote calls. No amount of money in good hardware fixes this no matter what anyone claims.
shortrounddev2 3y ago
I read an advice column in the Washington Post a couple weeks ago [1] in which the person writing in was asking for advice about implementing RTO mandates. They work for a non-profit and found it hard to manage people remotely. Their complaints were: > 1. They have daily check-in meetings with everyone on the team to make up for the lack of impromptu chats in the office > 2. Collaboration is harder over email than in-person. As an example, they have to produce reports for stakeholders regularly, which requires input from several people. They sync their work by frequently emailing each other changes to the document > 3. Socializing with coworkers is more difficult, which results in less social capital for people to advance their careers with For each point, the author pointed out that there are simple technological and management solutions for each: > 1. Stop doing daily check-ins and trust your reports to do their jobs on their own time table. You didn't do daily check-ins in the office, so don't do them now > 2. Stop using email. It's the worst format of online communication. Slack, MS Teams, etc. have been around for a while. Use them and the features available to you to collaborate. Additionally, use document editing software like MS Word or Google Docs to edit the same document within a cloud account simultaneously instead of sending files to each other. This tech has existed for sooooo long that it should be considered a bit of an embarrassment if a manager in 2024 doesn't know about it yet > 3. Work socialization must become intentional, and opportunities for advancement should be based off of merit and output instead of personal relationships But it seems pretty clear that companies which mandate RTO are simply not equipped, technologically or intellectually, to run such an organization. It's not that remote work is inherently less productive, it's that managers are unable or unwilling to adapt their processes and communication to make it work. Final note: it seems like another big problem with managers is they find they have little work to do if they are not monitoring people all the time and dragging them into unnecessary meetings. I think they feel threatened by the fact that their jobs are being automated away by software --- [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/01/10/hybrid-work-management-challenges/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/01/10/hybrid-wo...
- alberth 3y ago
  > 2. Stop using email. It's the worst format of online communication. Slack, MS Teams, etc. The difficulty with this, is that work can spiral quickly into just spending the whole day responding to chat (slack/teams/etc) and no one ever gets any actual work done.
avensec 3y ago
Soft tools for people. Some individuals need training on how to manage remote vs in-person effectively. General discourse likes to identify the older generation as the ones who lose object permanence. The "if they aren't in a seat, they must not be working" mentality. Well, tomorrow's older generation is here today, learning to follow that same behavioral pattern. We have to begin training the culture today if we want to influence the future.
- scaryclam 3y ago
  I've found it also needs to work both ways. My manager can only do so much, and if I don't communicate with them, they can't do anything about it. Some of my colleagues have been horrible at remote working, not telling anyone what they're doing, even after being asked multiple times, at appropriate times. Some people are just really bad at remote working, on both sides of the manager/report relationship. It's not only bad managers at fault here.
crowcroft 3y ago
One thing I've never seen work well is on boarding grads with no work experience. During COVID I onboarded a few grads into my team (for context we managed paid media for a SaaS company). We had a good track record of bringing in grads and training them on the job, but the cohort that came in during COVID had a terrible experience, and despite our efforts I'm not sure we ever really provided a good onboarding experience for them, and I don't think the training they received was nearly as effective as the training we used to provide in person. I think WFH is often great for experienced professionals, but ever since that experience I have felt really bad for young professionals trying to make a start in their careers.
- helij 3y ago
  We successfully onboarded a few grads and interns these last three years and all are productive team members today with a clear path for career progression as well. Some of them were already promoted to positions with more responsibility. I always see these arguments and understand it can be hard. It can also not be hard and work well.

More formal communications and explicit cultural norms around communication. People in office do tend to communicate organically with the humans around them, but online it's much harder.

sanderjd 3y ago
Sometimes I wonder if those of us who prefer remote work are just the same set of people who found "communicate organically with the humans around them" to be a major hindrance to their productivity. Increasingly more over time, I have come to really miss the office I went to every day before I worked remotely. I miss having coffee and lunch with people, saying hi on the way in and out, and I really miss having team meetings and 1:1s and brainstorming sessions in person. But I don't miss my desk even a little bit. I spent as much of my time as possible working from private cubbies. When I'm working, I don't want people around, and I don't want to be pulled into "organic" communication. In practice, the best process (for me) in an office setting was to ping people asynchronously - "hey let me know when you have a moment, I want to brainstorm about xyz" - and then get together when it works for both of you. But this is the same process used in remote work! The downside is you can't walk-and-talk or get a coffee together or find a spot with a whiteboard, everything is soul-sucking video calls. But for me, losing the "organic"-ness of communication, specifically, is a pro, not a con.
- clocot 3y ago
  [dead]

luch 3y ago

a videoconfering system that is reliable and easy to use is essential to remote management. You need to have as little friction as possible to propose a 1-1 or a 15 min roundtable to quickly brainstorm something orally. Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in order to defuse sticky situations based on partial infos or misunderstandings. Such tools can be panopticon-y so you need to explicitly specify which convos "spaces" are private and which are subject to management interference.

hardware2win 3y ago
So, teams?? Basically industry standard
- auggierose 3y ago
  Teams is not reliable. It's a steaming pile of dog shit.
  - scaryclam 3y ago
    As are the rest of them in my experience. Zoom has been hands down the worst for me, seconded by Teams and then Meet.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      Zoom has been far and away the best of the meeting tech I use. Excellent audio processing and generally reliable. (Also a nice convenient slack interface, so /zoom <RET> <RET> starts a Zoom meeting and pastes the connection info into the channel.) Teams was okay. Meet was okay once I figured out how to grant it the MacOS access it needs. Chime started in early pandemic as a terrible, terrible joke of a product and then evolved to being a close 4th place.
pie420 3y ago
You just described Teams, Slack, Skype, and Zoom. all ubiquitous and industry standard.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Erm, also Meet and the rest of the Google Suite (Chat).
- throwaway2990 3y ago
  All trash. A meeting in person is always shorter cos you don’t deal with audio issues a talking over each other and the mountain of other issues from remote calls. No amount of money in good hardware fixes this no matter what anyone claims.

shortrounddev2 3y ago

I read an advice column in the Washington Post a couple weeks ago [1] in which the person writing in was asking for advice about implementing RTO mandates. They work for a non-profit and found it hard to manage people remotely. Their complaints were: > 1. They have daily check-in meetings with everyone on the team to make up for the lack of impromptu chats in the office > 2. Collaboration is harder over email than in-person. As an example, they have to produce reports for stakeholders regularly, which requires input from several people. They sync their work by frequently emailing each other changes to the document > 3. Socializing with coworkers is more difficult, which results in less social capital for people to advance their careers with For each point, the author pointed out that there are simple technological and management solutions for each: > 1. Stop doing daily check-ins and trust your reports to do their jobs on their own time table. You didn't do daily check-ins in the office, so don't do them now > 2. Stop using email. It's the worst format of online communication. Slack, MS Teams, etc. have been around for a while. Use them and the features available to you to collaborate. Additionally, use document editing software like MS Word or Google Docs to edit the same document within a cloud account simultaneously instead of sending files to each other. This tech has existed for sooooo long that it should be considered a bit of an embarrassment if a manager in 2024 doesn't know about it yet > 3. Work socialization must become intentional, and opportunities for advancement should be based off of merit and output instead of personal relationships But it seems pretty clear that companies which mandate RTO are simply not equipped, technologically or intellectually, to run such an organization. It's not that remote work is inherently less productive, it's that managers are unable or unwilling to adapt their processes and communication to make it work. Final note: it seems like another big problem with managers is they find they have little work to do if they are not monitoring people all the time and dragging them into unnecessary meetings. I think they feel threatened by the fact that their jobs are being automated away by software --- [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/01/10/hybrid-work-management-challenges/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/01/10/hybrid-wo...

alberth 3y ago
> 2. Stop using email. It's the worst format of online communication. Slack, MS Teams, etc. The difficulty with this, is that work can spiral quickly into just spending the whole day responding to chat (slack/teams/etc) and no one ever gets any actual work done.

avensec 3y ago

Soft tools for people. Some individuals need training on how to manage remote vs in-person effectively. General discourse likes to identify the older generation as the ones who lose object permanence. The "if they aren't in a seat, they must not be working" mentality. Well, tomorrow's older generation is here today, learning to follow that same behavioral pattern. We have to begin training the culture today if we want to influence the future.

scaryclam 3y ago
I've found it also needs to work both ways. My manager can only do so much, and if I don't communicate with them, they can't do anything about it. Some of my colleagues have been horrible at remote working, not telling anyone what they're doing, even after being asked multiple times, at appropriate times. Some people are just really bad at remote working, on both sides of the manager/report relationship. It's not only bad managers at fault here.

crowcroft 3y ago

One thing I've never seen work well is on boarding grads with no work experience. During COVID I onboarded a few grads into my team (for context we managed paid media for a SaaS company). We had a good track record of bringing in grads and training them on the job, but the cohort that came in during COVID had a terrible experience, and despite our efforts I'm not sure we ever really provided a good onboarding experience for them, and I don't think the training they received was nearly as effective as the training we used to provide in person. I think WFH is often great for experienced professionals, but ever since that experience I have felt really bad for young professionals trying to make a start in their careers.

helij 3y ago
We successfully onboarded a few grads and interns these last three years and all are productive team members today with a clear path for career progression as well. Some of them were already promoted to positions with more responsibility. I always see these arguments and understand it can be hard. It can also not be hard and work well.