Do they use things like OKR, slack,etc ? What works and what doesn't - is there a cognitive disconnect between remote teams and people who work in office .
Is there an expectation of minimum screen time expected from remote employees?
We're working constantly on improving the integration of peers throughout the company. Something Stripe Atlas does, for example, is schedule time for the team to low-key socialize without an explicit agenda, in part because by default some decisions get made in a hallway and some information travels at the speed of coffee, and we've learned we should go out of our way to be inclusive of employees who don't passively benefit from those factors.
I cannot conceive of a reason we'd track screen time for employees, remote or otherwise. I can model why a company which had an adversarial relationship with employees might want to do that (to discourage shirking). We do not have an adversarial relationship with our employees, and (hopefully) have more interesting utility functions than that.
I expect we'll continue publishing what we learn on this in Increment, our engineering blog, and other places. It seems unlikely to me that five years from now instituting this policy will be very contentious at well-run tech companies; that implies we, as an industry, have to get much better at this very quickly. We're always happy to share what we've learned.
> I cannot conceive of a reason we'd track screen time for employees, remote or otherwise. I can model why a company which had an adversarial relationship with employees might want to do that (to discourage shirking). We do not have an adversarial relationship with our employees, and (hopefully) have more interesting utility functions than that.
its not about the company. See you guys are in a unique position - you have an in-office team and you have a remote team. So it is a A versus B for those people - people who are having to commute for hours to work, mandatorily sit at their computer screens . Versus others who wake up late (because no commute) and can walk about the house in their pyjamas.
How do you deal with the perceived imbalance in quality of life between these two teams ? I asked about mandatory screen time from that perspective. Because there is a set of people who are working synchronously - is there no cognitive drop off between them and the remote team who may have chosen to take their dog walking at the same time when a team decides to ping on a code bug question ? this wouldnt be an issue if everyone was in office together.
An all remote team is a simpler setup. I'm not at all arguing for one or the other - i do understand some people are very social and need people around them (like me) and others work best at their homes. However, after having run large orgs, I do know if you have both kinds simultaneously together - there is a massive grass-is-greener issue. The remote workers think that the in-house employees have more management "ear time" and the in-house employees grumble at the remote workers taking it easy. I have massive respect for you guys, if you have built a cultural practice that neutralises this issue.
>Something Stripe Atlas does, for example, is schedule time for the team to low-key socialize without an explicit agenda
How do you do this ? any learnings here? this is something i have wondered a LOT about.
It's a false dichotomy. It's not commute + "mandatory" screen time vs. sleeping in and wearing PJs.
When I worked in offices, I enjoyed commuting, it gave me time to listen to podcasts and transition between home and work. Working in an office with other people brought many opportunities to socialize, get pulled into impromptu conversations, take long lunches, and leave really early (to beat the commuters) if I needed to get home for some kid's after-school activity.
I work remotely now, and I still have to wake up on time, get dressed (hello video chat!), and be accountable. If I step away for a measurable amount of time, then I let people know in chat. It's far easier for a remote person to engage in overwork because there's not a clear boundary for when you're "at work" vs. "at home" (unless you create one). For better or worse, I "work more" as a remote employee than I ever did in an office.
The office folks who commute sometimes get to work late (traffic, train/bus issues, etc.), are pulled into random conversations and are unexpectedly unavailable just as much as any remote person. Are they contributing more by being in the office, or is the value just in their "presence", that you could literally tap them on the shoulder?
IMO, It all comes down to communication and empathy. If you're experiencing a major issue because you have to wait 10 minutes for someone to finish walking their dog, then imagine that person were in the office but in the bathroom. Would you still sneer at them because they were holding you up? Very few conversations are _SO_ urgent that you absolutely need an answer immediately. Having remote coworkers allows us to engage more thoughtfully with each other, and often pushes us to write more (and more useful) documentation so that we _aren't_ expecting immediate answers from any specific human.
this is very interesting - is this emergent behavior or have you guys figured out some todos that makes this an effective tool ? for example, do you consciously allocate more time for documentation by developers, than you did before remote workers ? is there a particular way you do this that makes it better, etc ?
There hasn't necessarily been a need to allocate more time for documentation, except for everyone getting in the habit of default communication modes being easily accessible documentation (common wiki/docs that all decisions, specs, and proposals go into) ... so it's not a "more time" thing, as much as it's a "don't send an email, but instead update the docs"
* Use the tools - ticket tracking, chat rooms, wikis or other documentation repositories
* Own it - engage in the conversation, do the work, help the whole team get better, accept responsibility, acknowledge your own mistakes, and acknowledge others' wins and contributions
* Do it in public - @mention people in tickets, etc., use PUBLIC chat spaces, use org-wide sharing of documents
A company I worked for in the past, which had a SF office and a smaller number of remote engineers, did not embrace the value of thoughtful written communication, and ultimately didn't see the value of remote engineers. It fostered a culture of "need-to-know" conversations where they felt if you couldn't be "in the room" then you simply weren't going to have the information you needed. They didn't value recording (video, text, etc.) the agenda, discussion, or outcomes of these discussions, so it only lived on in the individuals involved. This artificially stunted the remote engineers, and in turn it backfired on the entire team's productivity.
I work at Stripe and I'm not sure the answer to the question, largely because it hasn't come up that I know of; most folks enjoy working in our SF office (even many who usually decry open seating plans).
I often work from home (or will WFH until ~11am, and commute in after traffic). I also know some SFBA Stripes who work from home more often than in the office. To an ancestor's point, I am not remote and often do code in my PJ's.
I think there may be at least one Tahoe/Truckee-based remote, but I may be misremembering...
Edit: I'm not saying remote is bad - just that in my experience I'm definitely less productive.
One thing that has really helped me I’d having a non-work group of online friends who also all work remote. We can commiserate and trade tips.
I work half of the time remote and sometimes feel very unmotivated due to lack of human contact. Having someone to just chat with would be awesome. Neat idea I wonder if there is a discord chat for that.
I've worked remotely for about 5 years now. Without the water cooler talk, chit chat, and misc distractions, I can easily fit a 8+ hour day into less than 6 hours when I work from home.
I’ve worked with new hires that literally take entire days off and give excuses why they were unreachable. Sadly they are just shuffled around the company instead of disciplined but that’s another topic. But I figure in that case, they were probably not so great workers in-office either.
But I can't really imagine how I would have done well working remotely towards the beginning of my career. It was a different time with far fewer communication tools but, even taking that out, it would have been very difficult both socially and in terms of work discipline.
I suppose that could be one measure of productivity. Another view would be an increase in the number of backlog items closed in the 8hour.
As an example, I'm currently working on a proof of concept using Rust to replace some existing C++ that coordinates some Gstreamer pipelines. This sounds like the perfect task for remote: self contained task, redoing existing code, fairly small scope. But remote (or more specifically the time difference) makes it pretty difficult. I don't know Gstreamer that well, and I don't know the existing code that well. I'll often run into a problem that I KNOW someone on my team could answer in 2minutes, and unblock me. Instead I need to push through wasting valuable time trying to figure it out myself, or wait till they are online. Perhaps this is the time difference not the remote aspect at fault. If they were on the same timezone, it'd be a quick Slack message away
Now, I am reduced to writing code that slots in around my team. As for actual empirical metrics, I don't have many. We tend to track achievements as a team (OKR's etc), and my team has been hitting there goals mostly. I do feel we could achieve more though if I was onsite. A probably non valuable one might be Github commit count, which dropped from ~ 3500 for the 2018 year to ~ 300 for the last 6 mo. So at least on code alone, I am churning substantially less of it out.
I'm not poo-pooing remote btw. I think my story would be totally different in a 100% remote company, or a company with substantial remote presence. I think for me though, in this situation, I prefer on site.
Not to say that your issue might not be remote in general, but for me I definitely think that having much more than the 3 hour difference I currently have with my team would be tricky: just too much time where someone is waiting for someone else.
I remember when I was a recruiter it was a life of KPIs handed on down from on high. Management would pat you on the shoulder as they walked by if you were on a call, expressing approval of your activity. We'd crack jokes only somewhat ironically like "any time is a good time for a client call!" If you were still in the office at 7, you could expect a heartfelt appreciative email from management. If you hadn't been on the phone for an hour, a boss may shout across the room "bit quiet over there, someone check if komali_2's napping!"
Then on the days that all of management was at an off-site, things got a lot "looser." Less calls, less grandstanding, more hanging out in the kitchen, longer lunch etc. I don't know if productivity was actually lower ( it probably wasn't ) but it felt that way, because of the culture of our work place.
To that business, the idea of working from home would be laughable. Never mind that there were independent recruiters working out of their house and pulling in literally millions in revenue. How could you be as productive as an office of hardcore recruiters with their managers setting excellent KPIs and tracking goals and establishing milestones and shouting "a bit quiet over there!" occasionally?
Of course now that I'm an engineer I'm easily more productive on my own at home or at a cafe than I am in my office for a multitude of reasons. My purpose is to explore and explain why some people, particular management, believe remote to be less efficient.
This sort of thing is horrible. Stop normalizing this. It's OK not to work all day.
My kid goes to bed at 7:30 and I hate that my colleagues are so willing to work late, normalizing the idea that 6-7PM calls are OK. I mean, I get it - it's not their fault I had a kid, but hell, when IS it OK to stop working?
This is a failure of management and should not be rewarded. Staying late is not a badge of honor. It's a reification of failure. Period.
How could you be as productive as an office of hardcore recruiters with their managers setting excellent KPIs and tracking goals and establishing milestones and shouting "a bit quiet over there!" occasionally?
Not everyone does well with remote work. For those that do, I wouldn't be surprised at all if they were nearly universally more productive...so long as the company is being serious about supporting it.
People who "can't adapt to it" usually is resistant to using technology to communicate efficiently. They're usually the ones who think it's just fine to do a quick loud meeting with a colleague (next to someone else's desk who has nothing to do with the conversation and is deeply annoyed by it)
Of course, talking in person is important, but it is absolutely not necessary to discuss 90% of mundane stuff.
"How do you remote work?" The answer is "Always work as remote, even if your colleague is next to you"
Sure, the latter can be replaced with other forms of communications, but it's not a 1:1 replacement and I totally get why a lot of people wouldn't want to work remotely, at least not full-time.
Hmmm... you get done what you promised to get done during the sprint.
If a team member isn't doing what they promise to do, it doesn't matter if they're remote or not, you figure out a way to get them productive or help them pursue other interests. A remote employee isn't inherently less productive.