Show HN: Emergency Remote – Actions to win remote work

The content sounds aspirational “wouldn’t it be nice if” and not grounded in lived experience. You should definitely put some information in your intro about who you are and where you’ve seen these ideas work, and from what viewpoint you are coming from. This would add more credibility.

For example, it is not self evident to me that async is inherently better for decision making or assigning tasks. It is better for decision communicating and task tracking, but either in chat or a voice call it is so much faster to communicate the nuances of a complicated assignment or ask. You also may want the persons input on the issue at hand. You also may need a _quick_ decision.

So many issues come from having more than one source of truth. Have a single source of documentation and you stop so many issues before they start.

Potentially there are software solutions that help solve these issues?

Also some comments. I have managed remote workers, and am current a new remote worker myself.

As a manager (of managers), I think the one on one meetings are the meetings not to skip. Certain not more than once. These are times to check in and get a sense of how people feel. To listen and to support often people just want to complain, or want to hear some praise. I insist on video for these meetings.

As a manager I am interuptable, if my teams needs me I want to be available.

As a manager I try not to interrupt my teams. Just because a question popped into my head, asking in chat will interrupt others, possibly many other, because I have role power and influence.

I like the concept of evergreen comms, but that's a hard reality to realise. Probably easier in small organisation, but in a big enterprise you will still have email, people create price chat rooms, people call each other and are not going to capture the content. Vendors and partners will use different tools. Personally I have WebEx, Zoom, Teams and Google something. I don't have much choice.

Anyway, good job.

a) Consistent timings - the employee choose their hours but they should try to keep it consistent through the week. This is a variation on the idea of fully flexible timings where people can work each day whenever they want.

b) We do pairing exercises (~1 hour spread over a week) to increase the 'socialize' component. The pairing can be as simple as two people (A,B) get together at the start of their day and update each other on their progress. End of the week, during the sprint call A gives B's update and vice versa. This helps break the ice because many of my engineers (and me) do not socialize unless there is work happening in the background.

c) Managers should understand that most people (in my experience) begin liking remote work and then start hating it somewhere between their 3rd and 6th month. People feel depressed and miss the environment of an office. I feel like managers should keep an eye out for this dip and assist early.

In a remote environment those organic interactions do not happen and teams tend to be more siloed. So managers have to make more of an effort for employees to understand how their actions contribute to another team's success.

Without that holistic view it's not possible for workers to act independently.

There are tools like vlokit [0] which is a video-first chat platform. By letting people express ideas and give feedback through video/audio, it makes it easier to connect with the group. Without the constant need to get into a meeting for it.

It's also great to discuss off-work topics your team might be interested in.

[0] https://vlokit.com

This seems like the hardest thing to get right. I would rather walk barefoot downtown rather than asynchronously resolve something in Google Docs/Jira comments over the slow course of two days, versus grabbing the relevant people into a quick video call to discuss and come to a conclusion in 15 minutes.

Hallelujah!

To extend upon that, I think companies should pick one medium for internal communication and stick to it. Doesn't have to be Slack, but it can be Slack. Keep email for external communication, of course.

At every company I've worked some people would start threads in Slack and others would start them through email. This is a pain in the ass because now I've got to pay attention to 2 programs and email is just generally inferior for group communication.