Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.
How to find comfort for and include characters that don't like the spotlight? At least not during early phase/brainstorming.
I've worked with many great people that hate to handle things without their usual group first, and will stall until a reasonable approach can be presented. Which means creating shadow communication process - the more you push for "discouraging 1:1" the more they will hide.
What your organisation did with such "incompatible" people, relate them until the team left likes how they work, or were there better ideas?
In my experience, most of the time this can be solved by resetting expectations. Once people learn that asking basic questions won’t open them up to mockery, things move a lot smoother for everyone.
After all, a culture on 1:1 communication has a lot of downsides. The same question gets asked repeatedly, replies don’t become searchable, the same people (usually the most experienced) end up being constantly tapped for answers
No one is inherently "incompatible". It's mostly the environment influencing their behavior. There needs to be a culture where everyone feels comfortable speaking up and working outside silos, and that is always driven by management and senior eng leaders. For example do junior engineers get constructive criticism on a bad idea or design or are they yelled at and penalized? If the latter, of course everyone will think twice about being open.
And even then you can only do so much. If someone really doesn't want to participate then, well, it's on you to decide how to deal with that.
I’d want this as much as I used to enjoy open floor plan at the office… Discouraging 1:1 and private communication in my experience would actually have 100% opposite effect of what you are describing. This is equivalent to discouraging pair-programming which while may not be everyone’s cup of tea many find extremely productive
I can appreciate the thinking here, but it not ideal. Different details are relevant to different people. And async is inefficient for many situations. Yes publish findings/results, but overcommunicating has a cost.
Better to create different channels (sync, async, 1:1, broadcast), provide guidance and trust workers.
It's not necessary about trust, or relevancy. I believe motivation is contagious, and making communications hearable/visible for all most of the time can be beneficial because of this.
Slack / IM often, don't demand a response instantly though, async & remote go hand in hand.
Put important stuff in email not slack/IM
Have a company wiki
Prefer video calls for alignment
Write to each other often, spend time crafting written narratives, 1-pagers, amazon 6-pagers etc. to share ideas, make people read them, use google docs or ms word online and get comments inline in the document using those tools, follow up on video calls to confirm alignment.
Gitlab has a handbook for this stuff, they are a 100% remote business and very open about their practices: https://handbook.gitlab.com/
One thing people miss about remote work is that it's inherently transactional. Show up to a meeting, get or give what's needed, then go back in your hole. This is nice but for many people the lack of genuine social interaction is a killer.
A few jobs ago we set up Donut (donut.com) to set up a couple 15- or 30-minute 1:1s per week and tried to stick to the rule that we weren't supposed to talk about work, just chat about whatever. A replacement for break room chatter, not Yet Another Meeting. It didn't always work very well but when it did, it was great.
Some of the best conversations I had were with an autistic SRE who spent his first month telling everyone how autistic he was in case we needed to know. He did better virtually than he would have in person - lack of eye contact due to camera angles, maybe? So yeah, this has value even for you neuro-atypical, "I don't need chatter, just code" types.
> This is nice but for many people the lack of genuine social interaction is a killer.
Emphasis mine.
This difference of what people consider genuine or not, some people even including the medium itself in their definition of "genuine", sounds like another possible cultural difference that must be kept in mind when communicating with others.
All work (in-office or remote) is inherently transactional. If I am in an office, I have to pretend to have genuine social interactions with people. Social bonds made between colleagues have will happen organically. No in-office mandatory fun.
I never pretend that co-workers are my friends. I just understand they are co-workers and treat them as such. so then if I was forced to have mandatory socialization and fun I would quite despise it. if I wanted to interact with them, I would reach out and schedule one-on-ones as would happen IRL
Donuts are okay, I've used it at 2 different companies now, but I inevitably find myself disabling it after 2-3 months on the job, usually when I start getting repeats. Maybe it would be okay if you could silently veto who you got paired with. No offense to some of my coworkers but I groan when paired with someone who isn't very conversational where I know I'm going to have to shoulder the burden of finding something to talk about.
ALL work is transactional. I solve your problems, you pay me money.
I have family and friends for "social interaction" and "meaning". I do not seek that from a job, nor do I want a job that claims to provide it.
Any recruiter that tells me "our company is like a family" gets a reply that says "so i can cry on your shoulder in case of a bad breakup, and you'll help me move furniture?" and then gets blocked.
This is such a simplistic take. There is a huge gulf between "We are a family" saccharine corporate BS and "I am a cog in the machine. I am forced to make conversation. Hello Coworker How Do You Do" robo-employee mnemonic.
Personally I prefer to work with people who have a sense of humor, self-awareness about the importance (or lack of) of our work, have some interesting things to talk about it, can be surprising, etc. They don't have to be my best friend ever but I don't want to be bored.
The "we're like family" phrase can mean many different things in the work environment, so don't read too deeply into it.
That being said, it's often a sign of poor management; managers will use "we're like family" instead of addressing problems that they need to address. It can create a very stressful situation if you're a high performer, because the expectations and handholding quickly get unreasonable.
(The song "Surface Pressure" from Encanto explains the situation exactly.)
For example, I once worked with a manager who used the "we're like family" excuse when incoming tickets were incomprehensible and missing critical information. He was just copping out of his job, which was to set processes and make sure new employees knew the processes. Instead, his expectation was that I would handhold the organization through the ticketing system.
> but you might say hi if you walk past their desk
No. I would never interrupt someone's flow for a "hi". What an insane take. Those like you, interrupting us for a "hi" and throwing us off a good thought process when you "walk by", is one of the main things which make us all want to work remotely, far from you, protected by a need to have a purpose for your "hi".
Try to reduce the number of required sync meetings in favor of async alternatives. For the required sync meetings, make sure there is a rock solid agenda and EVERYONE knows what is expected from them going in. Make sure the meetings cover meaningful material and helpful to all attendees. Encourage everyone to speak up and contribute. If you find certain individuals not contributing or not prepared, proactively have a conversation with them outside the meeting to reset expectations.
For async communication, it can still be helpful to set specific windows of time for things to get discussed. Example, Mondays 9am-Noon ET we review/discuss sprint goals. I like to record short videos with Loom to kick off discussions like this. Make sure to center these types of communication around specific tools, e.g. JIRA, Confluence, Google Docs, etc. Make sure the discussions convert to traceable decisions in your tooling.
What becomes apparent very quickly outside the imposed rigidity of a physical office is that different individuals and different roles all have different optimal communication patterns. And people can get really fussy if they aren't getting the structure/tools/freedoms/whatever that they feel they need.
And so the answer to your question is ultimately much more idiosyncratic than you're hoping it to be. Whatever answers you find here, take them as inspiration for things to try out rather than specific things to do.
With that said, effective communication patterns tend to naturally snowball, so if you can start getting people feeling connected and collaborative, you'll find that they'll naturally keep that up and build on it.
But you are going to need to throw some spaghetti at the wall to see what your team needs in order to get that process started.
This is what my last, 6 person, startup used, and it was really helpful. It lowered the barrier to having a quick discussion, since you could see if someone was at their "desk" or busy in a meeting.
Also you can see if other teammates are having a discussion or co-working in a common area, which made for some ad-hoc co-working sessions.
When we tried it, gather.town set an awkward expectation that team members had to stand at their virtual desk, otherwise they weren't _actually_ online / working.
That tracks. To me, gather.town is an attempt to replicate office dynamics in a remote setting. In an office, being AWOL is looked down upon. I can see how gather.town builds the same expectation.
In my experience, this expectation gets set either way. Whether that be a green light on slack or having your video on for all calls.
Gather is great. I think it lowers the barrier to chats just enough to make it more organic. In particular I find it's really great if you're having a 2-3 person conversation and realize someone else would be really valuable to add. You can just glance at their desk and see if they're available, "wave" to them, etc.
I'm surprised at all the positive mentions of gather town. It just looked like a childish gimmick to me? I was tempted to log in and make some jokes about the pool being closed but I didn't want to out myself like that at work.
> This would be insanely disruptive to me and I think most of my team.
> There are much better ways to handle this.
Hi! You could probably turn this from a low-effort rant into a productive comment by removing the first 2 lines of your comment and expanding the last one into something informative.
WhatsApp is very common for smaller simpler projects, and I'm pretty happy with it.
My main communication related complaint is when it just doesn't happen at all.
Plans change and nobody tells me so I work on cancelled features, only one person actually knows what's happening and they're busy so you don't want to ask them about every detail, minutes are not taken at meetings.
I also would prefer calenders be managed better. Google shared calendars are amazing, I'm sure there's something similar people like for bigger projects where some people use apple... But nobody seems to really see the need for anytime like that.
Figure out how to have some kind of face-to-face relationship. This could be an annual all-hands trip, or otherwise take a week to fly out and spend time with the person you work with.
You learn A LOT about each other when you interact face-to-face. I once worked with two developers in India, and assumed that the shy one was just so-so, and the talkative one was brilliant.
After some deep day-long conversations, and a few day trips, I realized my assumptions were completely wrong: The shy one was shy, and the talkative one spoke before thinking.
---
More recently, I started work with a hybrid team. I live 60 miles from the office, but it's brutal commute. I go in once a week.
First, we use Missive to integrate email and chat. This way everything's in one place, properly threaded, and we can easily discuss emails internally in context. Much much better than GMail + Slack.
Second, I run video chat office hours twice a week (Tuesday/Thursday). Anybody can drop in to discuss anything — or not, if there's no need. This lowers the activation energy for "in person" discussions that otherwise might not get scheduled and promotes async work the rest of the time.
Third, regular company offsites! Even a few days a year is good.
Video calls. If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong. Configure it such that starting a video call takes no more than 4 clicks.
Have a company-wide General/Coffee chat where people talk about arbitrary things. It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours.
Write lots of short documents -- especially for designs. Review them much like you would review code. This can be as simple as Markdown documents in your repository using your normal code review tool. Ensure all documents are listed in a single easy-to-find index of some sort.
> If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong.
Depends on how you work? A video call every day would be too much for me, but two a week seems alright. I'm also not a fan of daily meetings in person either, though.
Agree with the occasional relaxed "coffee chat", and having a repository full of good documentation, but...
>If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong.
That seems excessive to me, especially if everyone is also staying connected via chat, emails, etc. Weekly meetings are about my limit, considering I also have work to do, meetings with external stakeholders, ad-hoc meetings, etc.
> It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours.
This sounds fun to have a b.s./watercooler chat channel. It'd be cool if Slack had that feature but I wonder if that's a non-starter for corporate reasons.
Workspace Owners and Org Owners can adjust retention settings for public channels. Private Channels and DMs can also be set by members if allowed by admins.
One thing I've found useful is to have deliberate google meet calls when having planning discussions or firming up decisions.
I set up the recording and transcription and then up front we define the problem and what we want the outcome to be. Afterwards I give the transcription to ChatGPT and get it to summarise the content, decisions, etc and add that to our documentation with a link to the recording.
This helps you stay on the same page and also gives context to people who werent present about what has been discussed and decided.
Huge bias here as I work for Figma, but multiplayer collaborative editors like Figma do wonders.
We run nearly everything out of a figma or figjam file. Retros, planning, etc. There's something really nice about being able to see everyones cursors at once, and feeling like you're collaboratively creating something. Presos and slide decks often feel very one-direction from a data flow perspective, which becomes problematic for remote-only roles.
Use video chat for meetings (encourage camera on but don't require it - management should lead by example)
Be kind. Reach out using other forms of communication (like snail mail) if you want to encourage each other with thank you notes, etc.
Use some kind of shared wiki for long term 'shared ownership' documentation. Don't be afraid to lead by example. Don't be obtuse. Give visual examples of processes, technical components, etc.
Lean into visual examples everywhere you can (screenshots, mock-ups, diagrams, etc).
In video chat, screen share and encourage use of annotations when discussing things. (Zoom has this feature and it's awesome)
Use an agile cadence. Encourage people to share questions / concerns at story grooming sessions (which should be regular). Also encourage feedback at retrospectives (which should also happen regularly). Managers should lead by example in blameless retrospectives and lean into positive feedback.
If you're a team of all dudes (or any one thing), you have a blindspot with perspective. You should rectify that.
Regular group discussions (not standup) are important. My team meets 30-60 minutes four days a week to discuss technical details and long term strategy.
It plays two important roles
1. establish rapport between team members
2. gives known space for issues. Leads to Better balance of focus time and group convo
This is the most important meeting of the day. Create doc to people can add things to the agenda. Managers job is to keep the meeting relevant, efficient.
Outside of that. Devs encouraged to pair together separately for troubleshooting.
1:1s are critical early on. DO NOT CANCEL THEM. And keep them relevant
On the softer side, I found remote work to be painfully dry the past few years so created a small Slack extension to add color / life / levity to internal communication. Collect team quotes & images, make memes. It's added a lot of joy to teams, especially eng teams.
The most important thing to me about remote communication is making time for "coffee catchup" to chat about non-work things.
We literally sit down with a fresh coffee for 5mins just as we might when crossing paths in the office. Find common topics among colleagues to shoot the breeze - football, video games, cars, etc.
Soon you'll have cross-team relationships with people who might never work directly together.
Distributed startup founder here. We love Figma, keep in touch with Gather.town, and have been very happy with Flat.app for keeping us from Asana/Slack hell.
1. gather.town
2. Zulip (nuances of design much better than other chat systems for remote work specifically)
3. the 'latent energy' is going to be lower when people aren't eating lunch together and rubbing shoulders. you have to bring the energy to an empty room all the time when working remote. this also has to be exemplified by founders. doesn't mean loudness but instilling a sense of urgency etc.
Still some warts, truthfully, but the core of it is just better for finding information and structuring things.
Integrations are also easier.
Definitely one of my more controversial additions to my company, but the pure volume and quality of conversations would he impossible otherwise. You would be required to wade through a lot of irrelevant dialogues otherwise.
If you find yourself constantly trying to explain stuff visually, invest on a graphics tablet. Even a "cheap" <100 EUR goes a long way.
As for the "whiteboard", just opening Excalidraw when you need it is very low friction in my experience. Google Jamboard and Miro were okay-ish, I guess, but for me the simplicity and responsiveness of Excalidraw is still better.
I've integrated draw.io into our Confluence. We can now create inline diagrams right in the page being edited. Resulted in higher quality documentation, with a lot more diagrams for even mundane things. I generally work in pictures, so it's great for me.
But I do agree, excalidraw is great. I recon its an importan skill to be able to confidently and quickly whip up a diagram while in a call. I worked with an engineer who preferred MS Paint, but he was really good at it, and it resulted in him explaining tricky concepts really elegantly.
First off learn to relax. breathe. Just because people aren’t constantly communicating doesn’t mean nothing is happening.
Learn to embrace long pauses in video calls. Learn to accept that a response to a message sometimes takes several minutes or even an hour to come through.
You said everything is going well. Okay, so what’s the problem then? The amount of communication currently happening clearly must be sufficient, otherwise things would not be going well. Right?
Get used to the idea that someone isn’t necessarily there when you message. Try to predict when you’ll need to talk to someone and send the message with the info you need.
Document. Everything. Confluence needs to become your best friend. You and your colleagues rely on this information to keep up on things they might miss.
When you’re planning work, especially with lots of uncertainty, optimise to be inefficient. It’s better to start with 20-person calls at the start of a big project and cut them down later than to have 3-person calls and realise you missed critical people 2 weeks before your target date.
On the flip side, once you know what you’re doing, keep your status checks lean. Invite only the leads you need and write down the outcomes to share with the wider team.
Be willing to change your communication habits as you grow. A weekly all-hands is fine for a 10-person startup. It’s a monumental waste of time when you have 200 people across 5 departments.
Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.
How to find comfort for and include characters that don't like the spotlight? At least not during early phase/brainstorming.
I've worked with many great people that hate to handle things without their usual group first, and will stall until a reasonable approach can be presented. Which means creating shadow communication process - the more you push for "discouraging 1:1" the more they will hide.
What your organisation did with such "incompatible" people, relate them until the team left likes how they work, or were there better ideas?
Core values are core values, and for better and worse, everything is not for everyone.
If all-communications-are-public is the company culture, then the company culture is also not to accommodate that alternative communication style.
Because any out of channel communications require multiple people to participate, not just the person who prefers it.
In my experience, most of the time this can be solved by resetting expectations. Once people learn that asking basic questions won’t open them up to mockery, things move a lot smoother for everyone.
After all, a culture on 1:1 communication has a lot of downsides. The same question gets asked repeatedly, replies don’t become searchable, the same people (usually the most experienced) end up being constantly tapped for answers
No one is inherently "incompatible". It's mostly the environment influencing their behavior. There needs to be a culture where everyone feels comfortable speaking up and working outside silos, and that is always driven by management and senior eng leaders. For example do junior engineers get constructive criticism on a bad idea or design or are they yelled at and penalized? If the latter, of course everyone will think twice about being open.
And even then you can only do so much. If someone really doesn't want to participate then, well, it's on you to decide how to deal with that.
I’d want this as much as I used to enjoy open floor plan at the office… Discouraging 1:1 and private communication in my experience would actually have 100% opposite effect of what you are describing. This is equivalent to discouraging pair-programming which while may not be everyone’s cup of tea many find extremely productive
In addition slack search becomes a great onboarding tool.
Massively agree with this. It can be difficult to create a culture where everyone talks in the open but it can save so many little and big mistakes!
I can appreciate the thinking here, but it not ideal. Different details are relevant to different people. And async is inefficient for many situations. Yes publish findings/results, but overcommunicating has a cost.
Better to create different channels (sync, async, 1:1, broadcast), provide guidance and trust workers.
It's not necessary about trust, or relevancy. I believe motivation is contagious, and making communications hearable/visible for all most of the time can be beneficial because of this.
100% this. The fact that teams does not have an easy voice channel is a disgrace.
Every team needs a one-nine (CB channel for chat/truckers)
Slack / IM often, don't demand a response instantly though, async & remote go hand in hand.
Put important stuff in email not slack/IM
Have a company wiki
Prefer video calls for alignment
Write to each other often, spend time crafting written narratives, 1-pagers, amazon 6-pagers etc. to share ideas, make people read them, use google docs or ms word online and get comments inline in the document using those tools, follow up on video calls to confirm alignment.
Gitlab has a handbook for this stuff, they are a 100% remote business and very open about their practices: https://handbook.gitlab.com/
consider personal readme's if your team is a bit larger (example): https://gitlab.com/swiskow/swiskow
One thing people miss about remote work is that it's inherently transactional. Show up to a meeting, get or give what's needed, then go back in your hole. This is nice but for many people the lack of genuine social interaction is a killer.
A few jobs ago we set up Donut (donut.com) to set up a couple 15- or 30-minute 1:1s per week and tried to stick to the rule that we weren't supposed to talk about work, just chat about whatever. A replacement for break room chatter, not Yet Another Meeting. It didn't always work very well but when it did, it was great.
Some of the best conversations I had were with an autistic SRE who spent his first month telling everyone how autistic he was in case we needed to know. He did better virtually than he would have in person - lack of eye contact due to camera angles, maybe? So yeah, this has value even for you neuro-atypical, "I don't need chatter, just code" types.
> This is nice but for many people the lack of genuine social interaction is a killer.
Emphasis mine.
This difference of what people consider genuine or not, some people even including the medium itself in their definition of "genuine", sounds like another possible cultural difference that must be kept in mind when communicating with others.
All work (in-office or remote) is inherently transactional. If I am in an office, I have to pretend to have genuine social interactions with people. Social bonds made between colleagues have will happen organically. No in-office mandatory fun.
I never pretend that co-workers are my friends. I just understand they are co-workers and treat them as such. so then if I was forced to have mandatory socialization and fun I would quite despise it. if I wanted to interact with them, I would reach out and schedule one-on-ones as would happen IRL
Donuts are okay, I've used it at 2 different companies now, but I inevitably find myself disabling it after 2-3 months on the job, usually when I start getting repeats. Maybe it would be okay if you could silently veto who you got paired with. No offense to some of my coworkers but I groan when paired with someone who isn't very conversational where I know I'm going to have to shoulder the burden of finding something to talk about.
ALL work is transactional. I solve your problems, you pay me money.
I have family and friends for "social interaction" and "meaning". I do not seek that from a job, nor do I want a job that claims to provide it.
Any recruiter that tells me "our company is like a family" gets a reply that says "so i can cry on your shoulder in case of a bad breakup, and you'll help me move furniture?" and then gets blocked.
This is such a simplistic take. There is a huge gulf between "We are a family" saccharine corporate BS and "I am a cog in the machine. I am forced to make conversation. Hello Coworker How Do You Do" robo-employee mnemonic.
Personally I prefer to work with people who have a sense of humor, self-awareness about the importance (or lack of) of our work, have some interesting things to talk about it, can be surprising, etc. They don't have to be my best friend ever but I don't want to be bored.
The "we're like family" phrase can mean many different things in the work environment, so don't read too deeply into it.
That being said, it's often a sign of poor management; managers will use "we're like family" instead of addressing problems that they need to address. It can create a very stressful situation if you're a high performer, because the expectations and handholding quickly get unreasonable.
(The song "Surface Pressure" from Encanto explains the situation exactly.)
For example, I once worked with a manager who used the "we're like family" excuse when incoming tickets were incomprehensible and missing critical information. He was just copping out of his job, which was to set processes and make sure new employees knew the processes. Instead, his expectation was that I would handhold the organization through the ticketing system.
100%
I think you can read between the lines of the OC.
They obviously meant social interactions in remote environments are inherently transactional.
You never make a zoom call just to say hi to your coworker when your mouse moves past the icon, but you might say hi if you walk past their desk.
You sound like a joy to have as a coworker…
Again… read between the lines. Think a little bit into what i said. Think about it a little critically
There are important ad hoc interactions that you have in an office that you don’t when you’re remote.
I personally prefer remote, but recognize that it’s easier to collaborate in real time in person.
> I [...] recognize that it’s easier to collaborate in real time in person.
Not everyone is you and not everyone agrees with that evidence-free claim
Try to reduce the number of required sync meetings in favor of async alternatives. For the required sync meetings, make sure there is a rock solid agenda and EVERYONE knows what is expected from them going in. Make sure the meetings cover meaningful material and helpful to all attendees. Encourage everyone to speak up and contribute. If you find certain individuals not contributing or not prepared, proactively have a conversation with them outside the meeting to reset expectations.
For async communication, it can still be helpful to set specific windows of time for things to get discussed. Example, Mondays 9am-Noon ET we review/discuss sprint goals. I like to record short videos with Loom to kick off discussions like this. Make sure to center these types of communication around specific tools, e.g. JIRA, Confluence, Google Docs, etc. Make sure the discussions convert to traceable decisions in your tooling.
>For the required sync meetings, make sure there is a rock solid ...
What about a rock band instead?
What becomes apparent very quickly outside the imposed rigidity of a physical office is that different individuals and different roles all have different optimal communication patterns. And people can get really fussy if they aren't getting the structure/tools/freedoms/whatever that they feel they need.
And so the answer to your question is ultimately much more idiosyncratic than you're hoping it to be. Whatever answers you find here, take them as inspiration for things to try out rather than specific things to do.
With that said, effective communication patterns tend to naturally snowball, so if you can start getting people feeling connected and collaborative, you'll find that they'll naturally keep that up and build on it.
But you are going to need to throw some spaghetti at the wall to see what your team needs in order to get that process started.
If you're in similar time zones, try https://www.gather.town/ ?
I've used it for remote conferences, and I like its 2D UI. Real sense of space there.
This is what my last, 6 person, startup used, and it was really helpful. It lowered the barrier to having a quick discussion, since you could see if someone was at their "desk" or busy in a meeting.
Also you can see if other teammates are having a discussion or co-working in a common area, which made for some ad-hoc co-working sessions.
When we tried it, gather.town set an awkward expectation that team members had to stand at their virtual desk, otherwise they weren't _actually_ online / working.
That tracks. To me, gather.town is an attempt to replicate office dynamics in a remote setting. In an office, being AWOL is looked down upon. I can see how gather.town builds the same expectation.
In my experience, this expectation gets set either way. Whether that be a green light on slack or having your video on for all calls.
Gather is great. I think it lowers the barrier to chats just enough to make it more organic. In particular I find it's really great if you're having a 2-3 person conversation and realize someone else would be really valuable to add. You can just glance at their desk and see if they're available, "wave" to them, etc.
I'm surprised at all the positive mentions of gather town. It just looked like a childish gimmick to me? I was tempted to log in and make some jokes about the pool being closed but I didn't want to out myself like that at work.
This would be insanely disruptive to me and I think most of my team.
There are much better ways to handle this like using gitlabs handbook.
To me this is the equivalent of having to be on camera all day. Am I idle if my avatar hasn’t moved or interacted with something in game?
> Oh god, please kill it with fire.
> This is horrible.
> This would be insanely disruptive to me and I think most of my team.
> There are much better ways to handle this.
Hi! You could probably turn this from a low-effort rant into a productive comment by removing the first 2 lines of your comment and expanding the last one into something informative.
WhatsApp is very common for smaller simpler projects, and I'm pretty happy with it.
My main communication related complaint is when it just doesn't happen at all.
Plans change and nobody tells me so I work on cancelled features, only one person actually knows what's happening and they're busy so you don't want to ask them about every detail, minutes are not taken at meetings.
I also would prefer calenders be managed better. Google shared calendars are amazing, I'm sure there's something similar people like for bigger projects where some people use apple... But nobody seems to really see the need for anytime like that.
> No plans to be in person
Figure out how to have some kind of face-to-face relationship. This could be an annual all-hands trip, or otherwise take a week to fly out and spend time with the person you work with.
You learn A LOT about each other when you interact face-to-face. I once worked with two developers in India, and assumed that the shy one was just so-so, and the talkative one was brilliant.
After some deep day-long conversations, and a few day trips, I realized my assumptions were completely wrong: The shy one was shy, and the talkative one spoke before thinking.
---
More recently, I started work with a hybrid team. I live 60 miles from the office, but it's brutal commute. I go in once a week.
Try using video meetings through virtual frosted glass via MeetingGlass (https://meetingglass.com/).
This will give you the feeling of being at the same desk, with the opportunity for quick, spontaneous conversations and collaboration.
Here you can find articles about virtual frosted glass: https://meetingglass.substack.com/
We do three things:
First, we use Missive to integrate email and chat. This way everything's in one place, properly threaded, and we can easily discuss emails internally in context. Much much better than GMail + Slack.
Second, I run video chat office hours twice a week (Tuesday/Thursday). Anybody can drop in to discuss anything — or not, if there's no need. This lowers the activation energy for "in person" discussions that otherwise might not get scheduled and promotes async work the rest of the time.
Third, regular company offsites! Even a few days a year is good.
> I run video chat office hours twice a week
I used to do that with a large remote team. It was extremely helpful with onboarding, and keeping a dedicated space for technical discussions.
Video calls. If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong. Configure it such that starting a video call takes no more than 4 clicks.
Have a company-wide General/Coffee chat where people talk about arbitrary things. It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours.
Write lots of short documents -- especially for designs. Review them much like you would review code. This can be as simple as Markdown documents in your repository using your normal code review tool. Ensure all documents are listed in a single easy-to-find index of some sort.
> If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong.
Depends on how you work? A video call every day would be too much for me, but two a week seems alright. I'm also not a fan of daily meetings in person either, though.
Agree with the occasional relaxed "coffee chat", and having a repository full of good documentation, but...
>If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong.
That seems excessive to me, especially if everyone is also staying connected via chat, emails, etc. Weekly meetings are about my limit, considering I also have work to do, meetings with external stakeholders, ad-hoc meetings, etc.
> It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours.
This sounds fun to have a b.s./watercooler chat channel. It'd be cool if Slack had that feature but I wonder if that's a non-starter for corporate reasons.
Workspace Owners and Org Owners can adjust retention settings for public channels. Private Channels and DMs can also be set by members if allowed by admins.
> It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours.
Your legal and HR departments will be much less enthusiastic about this idea if your org is big enough to have either.
> It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours.
Probably wise to run that by counsel.
One thing I've found useful is to have deliberate google meet calls when having planning discussions or firming up decisions.
I set up the recording and transcription and then up front we define the problem and what we want the outcome to be. Afterwards I give the transcription to ChatGPT and get it to summarise the content, decisions, etc and add that to our documentation with a link to the recording.
This helps you stay on the same page and also gives context to people who werent present about what has been discussed and decided.
Gemini is actually good for audio transcriptions, I tried other AI tools that were much worse.
I didn’t find another good use of Gemini, but the audio transcription combined with the summaries were great. Best I’ve seen.
Huge bias here as I work for Figma, but multiplayer collaborative editors like Figma do wonders.
We run nearly everything out of a figma or figjam file. Retros, planning, etc. There's something really nice about being able to see everyones cursors at once, and feeling like you're collaboratively creating something. Presos and slide decks often feel very one-direction from a data flow perspective, which becomes problematic for remote-only roles.
how do you think Figma slides will play into this? (Big Figma/Jam fan here BTW, thanks for your work!)
Slack / IM often
Use video chat for meetings (encourage camera on but don't require it - management should lead by example)
Be kind. Reach out using other forms of communication (like snail mail) if you want to encourage each other with thank you notes, etc.
Use some kind of shared wiki for long term 'shared ownership' documentation. Don't be afraid to lead by example. Don't be obtuse. Give visual examples of processes, technical components, etc.
Lean into visual examples everywhere you can (screenshots, mock-ups, diagrams, etc).
In video chat, screen share and encourage use of annotations when discussing things. (Zoom has this feature and it's awesome)
Use an agile cadence. Encourage people to share questions / concerns at story grooming sessions (which should be regular). Also encourage feedback at retrospectives (which should also happen regularly). Managers should lead by example in blameless retrospectives and lean into positive feedback.
If you're a team of all dudes (or any one thing), you have a blindspot with perspective. You should rectify that.
I work from the USA with people only in Singapore and India.
I wrote "Writing style for Slack" a couple years ago if you're interested:
https://www.kcoleman.me/writing/slack/2023/03/11/writing-sty...
Regular group discussions (not standup) are important. My team meets 30-60 minutes four days a week to discuss technical details and long term strategy.
It plays two important roles
1. establish rapport between team members
2. gives known space for issues. Leads to Better balance of focus time and group convo
This is the most important meeting of the day. Create doc to people can add things to the agenda. Managers job is to keep the meeting relevant, efficient.
Outside of that. Devs encouraged to pair together separately for troubleshooting.
1:1s are critical early on. DO NOT CANCEL THEM. And keep them relevant
On the softer side, I found remote work to be painfully dry the past few years so created a small Slack extension to add color / life / levity to internal communication. Collect team quotes & images, make memes. It's added a lot of joy to teams, especially eng teams.
https://www.usecubby.com
The most important thing to me about remote communication is making time for "coffee catchup" to chat about non-work things.
We literally sit down with a fresh coffee for 5mins just as we might when crossing paths in the office. Find common topics among colleagues to shoot the breeze - football, video games, cars, etc.
Soon you'll have cross-team relationships with people who might never work directly together.
Distributed startup founder here. We love Figma, keep in touch with Gather.town, and have been very happy with Flat.app for keeping us from Asana/Slack hell.
+1 for Gather.town we've been using it for years
1. gather.town 2. Zulip (nuances of design much better than other chat systems for remote work specifically) 3. the 'latent energy' is going to be lower when people aren't eating lunch together and rubbing shoulders. you have to bring the energy to an empty room all the time when working remote. this also has to be exemplified by founders. doesn't mean loudness but instilling a sense of urgency etc.
+1 for Zulip.
Still some warts, truthfully, but the core of it is just better for finding information and structuring things.
Integrations are also easier.
Definitely one of my more controversial additions to my company, but the pure volume and quality of conversations would he impossible otherwise. You would be required to wade through a lot of irrelevant dialogues otherwise.
We have been using Zulip as well now for a few years. Especially enforcing topics is a big win.
If you find yourself constantly trying to explain stuff visually, invest on a graphics tablet. Even a "cheap" <100 EUR goes a long way.
As for the "whiteboard", just opening Excalidraw when you need it is very low friction in my experience. Google Jamboard and Miro were okay-ish, I guess, but for me the simplicity and responsiveness of Excalidraw is still better.
I've integrated draw.io into our Confluence. We can now create inline diagrams right in the page being edited. Resulted in higher quality documentation, with a lot more diagrams for even mundane things. I generally work in pictures, so it's great for me.
But I do agree, excalidraw is great. I recon its an importan skill to be able to confidently and quickly whip up a diagram while in a call. I worked with an engineer who preferred MS Paint, but he was really good at it, and it resulted in him explaining tricky concepts really elegantly.
Stripe's Increment had an entire issue devoted to remote work: https://increment.com/remote/
https://cdn.zapier.com/storage/learn_ebooks/e4fbeb81f76c0c13...
https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/remote-culture-at-hashic...
https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/the-remote-developer-s-p...
Slack, notion, and a meeting every Monday to talk about what we're doing and priorities.
Dailies (we have 3 in a week) for synchronization helps a lot. It’s also help’s with new stuff onboarding.
Dumb idea: play some game together.
First off learn to relax. breathe. Just because people aren’t constantly communicating doesn’t mean nothing is happening.
Learn to embrace long pauses in video calls. Learn to accept that a response to a message sometimes takes several minutes or even an hour to come through.
You said everything is going well. Okay, so what’s the problem then? The amount of communication currently happening clearly must be sufficient, otherwise things would not be going well. Right?
Just chill.
A few things help me:
Get used to the idea that someone isn’t necessarily there when you message. Try to predict when you’ll need to talk to someone and send the message with the info you need.
Document. Everything. Confluence needs to become your best friend. You and your colleagues rely on this information to keep up on things they might miss.
When you’re planning work, especially with lots of uncertainty, optimise to be inefficient. It’s better to start with 20-person calls at the start of a big project and cut them down later than to have 3-person calls and realise you missed critical people 2 weeks before your target date.
On the flip side, once you know what you’re doing, keep your status checks lean. Invite only the leads you need and write down the outcomes to share with the wider team.
Be willing to change your communication habits as you grow. A weekly all-hands is fine for a 10-person startup. It’s a monumental waste of time when you have 200 people across 5 departments.
Tickets. Email. Signal (emergencies and sensitive info only).
Async all the things.
Keep devs out of meetings.
Don't track work hours.
Never do Slack/Teams unless a client pays a lot to suck you into that or if they pay a very large number to have your devs in it as well.
Like an MMORPG guild. which in 2024 means Discord.
(No “professional” solution is even close to gamer tech for remote communication)