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Comment by aeternum | Hacker News Reader

My company has made the hybrid model work. We've had a mix of fully remote along with two physical offices. It's really not all that complex, conference rooms have to have a video conference system that is added by default to all meetings. Ad-hoc meetings can start video with a single button press and a short code/url sent over slack.

We strongly encourage employees to keep discussions in 'public' slack rooms rather than private messages. This can be noisy but allows for inclusivity. Team members are free to choose which channels to join and are encouraged configure alerting to manage the noise. Only takes a few minutes to set up.

Performance needs to be measured by work output rather than time in the office, but companies should be doing that regardless.

Face-to-face on-boarding and intros to the team are preferable so we would fly in new-hires wherever possible for the first couple weeks. Beneficial but not required.

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Meetings where some/most of the people are in a room and some are dialing in suck for those dialing in. We started requiring everyone to dial in, even if one person was, and it levels the communication playing field immensely.

Why does it suck? We try to ensure that everyone's voice is heard plus remote members have some advantage in that people in the room can see them unmute as an indicator that they have something to say. Some also use the text chat attached to the meeting allowing them to raise a point without verbally interrupting the person speaking (although this is more rare).

Seems pretty extreme to require everyone to dial-in even if they are present in the office.

The dynamic is just different for those dialling in. People are simply not on the same level than those on site who have a clear advantage. I saw this working relatively well when the person remote is some senior person coming with a lot of experience to insert himself in the conversation. It's maybe even better because others may now have the chance to say something (lol) Generally speaking, this works well, when the main persons of the meeting are not all on site so that the videoconference becomes the primary communication. Otherwise, it's just that those who don't say that much will say even less (or nothing).

Btw, I'm also a big fan of remote working, but no matter how good your communication skills are, you're left behind on the longer term within an hybrid team. You just can't build all these relationships with smalltalk etc. that's another problem

I guess it also depends on the company and the style of the employees you work with - in my old organisation we made it work because it was embedded, but also everyone was just genuinely nice and not trying to score little political points here and there.

Even with over 500 employees, the lack of a career ladder as such meant there's little to gain by being the loudest in the room or trying to work the room. Perhaps that's also an ingredient - it might be easier to minimise others' egos when you're also in the room?

People in a room communicate via gestures and body language. Leveling that is tough.

That's also one reason why many people on autistic spectrum prefer video conferences over physical meeting - responses have to be given more explicit.

"Suck" is maybe too strong a term--though it can be the case if most of the team is co-located and there's one person who always has to dial in. A number of teams I work with also have an "everyone dials in" rule even though they're pretty distributed anyway.

As someone who is mostly remote, I never had too much of a problem with hybrid meetings. People in a conference room are pretty respectful that there are people on the phone in my experience. That said, the current situation where everyone is dialing in individually is something of a meeting upgrade overall. People have also gotten better at collaboratively edited agendas etc. not that they were bad to start with.

And what is the breakdown of executives, managers, etc between on-prem and remote?

Ar my company, which is (normally) a mixture of on-prem (at many different offices) and remote/WFH, I'm sure all of the senior leadership team have offices somewhere. But many/most of their reports and other people they coordinate with are in different offices/remote and most of them are traveling most of the time anyway.

In think the opinions of a lot of people here are shaped by small companies where everyone is on a floor or two of a building. At global companies, the reality is that people are pretty distributed and you have late night and early morning phone calls.

West Coast to Europe is tough for day-to-day synchronous communications. We don't have many people on the West Coast and are pretty much East Coast-centric (and Europe to a lesser degree). And that coordination works fairly well.

Are you one of those working fully remote or in the physical office?

I worked fully remote for a couple years, then spent a year or so in the physical office, and now back to remote due to covid.

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