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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

> Either you can’t get any work done from the constant Slack pings, excessive emails and agenda-less Zoom meetings, or...

So the premise upon which your business is based is that many organizations have a bad remote work culture. To be fair, many (most) do. But I'm curious what you envision as more organizations learn how to properly work in a remote environment? Because this feels like it is adding meetings around my work, not even with my co-workers, and with a time limit on when I need to stop flow. It all feels quite odd to be honest.

But the problem you are trying to solve is real. It seems like it would be effective to push this more towards a coaching service for organizations struggling to define their remote culture vs. ongoing flow meetings.

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Thinking that the majority of organizations will ever have a decent remote culture is, in my opinion, nothing but wishful thinking.

Of course, a huge number of companies will append "work from home" to their job descriptions, but for non other reason than to avoid to lag behind others.

Yes, that's a bit harsh and the reality may be that in fact, most companies will think they have a remote culture for one reason or the other, but will lack the... well... culture, to support it.

If you think I'm being pessimistic, think about agile. Certainly you can name companies that do agile properly (good for you, please share names :), but most companies claim to be agile only because anything else is a blocker to hire these days.

Working in limited timed sprints could feel odd if you're not used to pomodoro, and it could be difficult for certain tasks. David shared his experiment in the other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28222665

We have worked with several employers to bring Flow Club to their employees to help create opportunities for deep work, but the problem is bigger than that. From Cal Newport's New Yorker article last year (https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-rise...): "The knowledge sector’s insistence that productivity is a personal issue seems to have created a so-called “tragedy of the commons” scenario, in which individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves insure a negative group outcome. An office worker’s life is dramatically easier, in the moment, if she can send messages that demand immediate responses from her colleagues, or disseminate requests and tasks to others in an ad-hoc manner. But the cumulative effect of such constant, unstructured communication is cognitively harmful: on the receiving end, the deluge of information and demands makes work unmanageable. There’s little that any one individual can do to fix the problem."

I've found that individuals absolutely can change organizational behavior. Setting teams norms is a simple first step that establishes what the expectations on response times truly are for various communication channels. It takes 15 minutes in a team meeting, and almost instantly improves team culture. All it takes is one leader to put that discussion on an agenda, and the entire team can relax and let message piles up while they get work done, because everyone has a shared understanding of how the team has chosen to operate.

This isn't just theory - My company was downright sad when the pandemic started when it came to remote culture. But a handful of us stepped up, made suggestions and recommendations, and things have improved greatly. At this point, we have established communication guidelines that are shared with the company, and mostly followed.

The tragedy comes when everybody believes that one person cannot make a difference, so nobody tries.

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