Hacker News Reader

Comment by cassonmars | Hacker News Reader

The loss of cognitive overhead of dealing with a physical workspace with distractions abound has to be countered with a new cognitive overhead – putting initiative forward in reaching out to coworkers, setting up regular 1:1s to just chat. While the conversations may initially feel forced (because they are indeed artificial), once camaraderie is built, it feels as natural as an office chat.

View on HN

Man, this might be my most favorite comment so far as I am reading through everything.

I love the way you put it. We are trying to do exactly that, build camaraderie from day 1 without the leg work. If I join a new team, instantly knowing who else is a Cricket fan is a sure fire way for me to get close to them and fit into the team faster.

Could you please check out www.getparallel.io ? I would love to get your thoughts on it.

Video calls are miserable already, and there are way too many hours of them just to get through necessary work business. Video calls to just chat are a special hell.

Setting up regular 1:1s just to chat sounds good. Though if I were new at a company, I'd feel forced to have a work-related/productive reasons to schedule these meetings...

What do you title these 1:1s so that your coworkers will accept them, and so that your manager won't lift and eyebrow?

Not the person you're replying to, but as a manager: a manager who dislikes employees reaching out for 1:1's with other coworkers for any reason is a bad one, imo. I encourage my folks to be proactive in learning from other teams and to be adults who don't need hand-holding. As long as they hold up their bargain of a reasonable amount of work done in a time frame, what they do with their time isn't my business.

(caveat that it's for normal water cooler talk and not a top-of-the-iceberg issue of a very big iceberg of issues.)

I would love to get a manager's POV on what we are doing. Because I agree with you. A manager is a crucial part in culture.

Could you please check out www.getparallel.io ? I would love to get your thoughts on it.

We completely take out the leg work initially needed to build and establish relationships in a work env. We are here to make WFH better. Some of the best work is done when people bond over things that aren't even work.

Literally just "Name/Name 1:1" so it's indistinguishable from other 1:1s, but if you're in a remote org and they aren't okay with and encouraging these kinds of recurring meetings, it's probably a toxic environment. They don't dominate a calendar, maybe a grand total of 2.5 hrs a week at most.

Coffee/tea/donut chats. There are chat apps like Donut but you can also set these up manually. Everybody who is interested joins a chat channel then an admin generates random pairings each week.

I like that I can just opt out of really knowing my co-workers remotely. No need to ever chat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com