Biggest challenge(s) working remotely? What needs improved?
What are your biggest challenge(s) working remotely? (Specifically interested in hearing about communication and culture related challenges)
What needs improved?
What needs improved?
The biggest problems I've seen have been cultural / social more that technical. For example - micromanagement over slack is just as bad as micromanagement over the cube farm wall. Many managers are not adept at trust and communicating to their team, and being remote forces this even more than in-person. Frankly, I've always seen this as a positive. When you see each other every day in person, it is easy to be complacent in communication. When it is happening often more async, perhaps with greater linguistic or cultural barriers, it is even more important that your communication is succinct and effective.
The other side of this is that many workers are not good at controlling their own tasks and schedule. Again, I've always seen remote work ("asynchronous work") as a catalyst for better personal time management.
Trying to break decades of Taylorism and similar flawed American management concepts is hard. Remote work necessitates a degree of trust and autonomy that most companies can't handle.
So is zoom if you turn on original audio mode and /all/ participants have a headset so it does full duplex.
Pair programming many hours a day as standard process can fill in these gaps but it's not a culture that's common in companies, other than for solving specific hard or tricky tasks.
Is there great whiteboard software for tablets or touch screen laptops/PCs? Or even webcam software that can capture physical whiteboard use.
* communication between the team, managers, customers, etc.
* Avoid distractions and interruptions.
* Misunderstood communication.
* Data security
* Maintaining a sense of teamwork
etc.
It would be great to know more on the issues with communicating with colleagues and sense of culture/community.
What does that look like now, and what would you improve?
Working from home and working in an office have very different environments. So finding a solution that feels like the technology doesn't feel like it's present would go a long way to creating an improvement in remote work.
Another key issue, is being able to completely disconnect so that - by design - you can be separated from the constant barrage of communication without feeling worried about FOMO.
Reference for concrete examples and anecdotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31710673
In the beginning of 2019, I pushed for remote work at the company for several reasons:
- Commute was killing the team. Four hours daily and uncertainty about transportation for some.
- Dogfooding the product: many on the team came to the office to train machine learning models. I had proposed to build an internal machine learning platform, which became our product. We needed to test it.
- Increase the pool: good people elsewhere who could not relocate.
- Murphy's law: at one point or another, we'd have to work remotely, so we had better learn the lessons and learn how to do it before we were forced to do so.
We started experimenting with one day remotely, noticing what breaks, fixing it, iterating. Different days of the week. Then several days at a time. Then a week at a time. Always talking about what went wrong, what got in the way, and fixing it.
I pulled the plug on office work around 5 March 2020 and asked the team to work exclusively remotely. After a couple of weeks, I told the team we're in for at least 18 months of madness. Some didn't renew their lease and moved to their hometown.
Simple things we had improved had a huge impact and allowed us not to miss a beat: reducing information asymmetry, discuss priorities and the rationale behind decisions so that people could derive and make intermediate decisions when there are gaps (everyone knows where we're going and why, and they know what to do when it's explicit and can guess what to do when it's not specified given the fact they know what we're optimizing for as a team), improving our writing even if it doesn't show in this reply, reducing the variance in issue quality by adding issue templates so everyone could write useful issues, first for bugs, then for improvements/features, then for incidents. Making sure we had a clear agenda for meetings in the form of a collaborative document that everyone could write to asynchronously. It contained the topics they considered most pressing/blocking/requiring a decision. We went through them systematically but we'd also take a bit of time to chat about other ideas.
What required a particular attention was morale. Knowing how people were holding up, what they were up to, letting them blow some steam off, having a semblant of normality during that time of lockdowns and curfews. I had created a Jitsi channel named "Balcony", a reference to our office balcony where we used to chat and let our imagination free, just so we could say "I'm on the balcony".
To recap. Keeping morale: helping each other, sometimes just chatting helps people. Guardrails to keep us aligned and on the road even in the event we didn't talk: defined priorities and the rationale behind the decisions, little templates, tiny improvements in writing, application monitoring, better incident management, whatever reduced toil. Better meetings: systematically recording our meetings for later reference, removing noise, etc. For our consulting: refining our workflow, from qualifying clients to deciding not to proceed with projects to how we actually executed projects. Finally, keeping a cadence and keeping on the move.
We also generated more revenue during that period than the company did cumulatively since creation, with the fewest people it ever had and the fewest people ever to do "consulting client work".