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I find people doing remote work constantly missing big parts of information that is passed around verbally and doing extra work / being less efficient because o

I find people doing remote work constantly missing big parts of information that is passed around verbally and doing extra work / being less efficient because of this. We already use chat rooms, individual chats, tickets, video conferencing, email, dashboards, whatever. But sometimes the bandwidth of just sitting with someone and looking at a problem together is so much higher that you can solve big issues in a very short time. I think some psychologists could study this, it's right up their alley - what is lacking in remote co-operation devices. I personally think it's partly that you need to see what the other person is looking at and also you must be able to observe their body language. A way to do "Look here, this is important in about 0.1 seconds." But I have no evidence.

snorkel 13y ago
Agree. Remote works well for teams of developers that can be heads-down for days working on one product or one component with few external dependencies to coordinate, but for teams that have many different responsilities and need to stay in pace with other teams then you can't beat being all in same physical location.
wlk 13y ago
I can address first of the issues you have mentioned: I have worked both in situations when whole company is working remotely or only one/two people of out dozen were. In the second case, those people were very often left out of the most communication that was happening in the office, and for them it must have been not very good situation to be in. There was no general plan for handling this situation and trying to include them in meetings and decision making process. But when whole company is working remotely, the situation is completely different, everyone is at the same level, and you really can make it work.