What strategies, tools, or practices have you found to be effective to make remote work better?
I'm particularly interested in;
* Sense of feeling together * Ability to talk to the team outside meetings * Natural & spontaneous conversations * Team culture
Let me know your thoughts.
Disclaimer: I've started working on this problem, as I couldn't feel satisfied with what we have. I want to hear what others think.
When they began in 2019, they reached out to interview me because I had been working remotely for five years. I tried to tell them that the lack of a "sense of feeling together" wasn't the problem they thought it was, and I tried to steer them into taking a look at ways of doing better telepresence with VR/AR, with a focus on pair programming and the like. They didn't listen, and I'm sad to say I was right.
If you want to solve real problems with remote work, you need to focus on how to get work done inside a VR or AR environment, and offer things like easy two-way screen sharing, as CoScreen (recently acquired by DataDog) and ScreenHero (swallowed up and destroyed by Slack).
A workplace is fundamentally about getting things done. Trying to build a virtual office in 2D is just window dressing that will get in my way and has no hope of getting used. You have competition in the most obvious space, which is already handled well through IRC, Slack and Teams.
If you want to facilitate spontaneous conversations and team culture, your client cannot be the company the employees work for. Those things happen on back channels like text messages, Signal, Discord servers, etc.
I'd be interested in glancing at what you've come up with, especially if it's not just yet another web or Electron app.
When a company is just starting up and on the smaller end, all-hands type meetings once a year or once every two years are also nice.
The important bit is that it's a location remote to everyone so people are likely to spend time together after work too. This also makes it easier to look for cheaper locations.
And I'm wondering this; is it a problem worth to focus on? What if we build a new video communication product that works without meetings, it has rooms where individuals can be present, and we can just talk to eachother.
Eg. once we felt at ease with each other, it was never an issue to jump into a Google Hangout/Meet and talk work, switch to lighter themes and back.
FWIW, I remember seeing tools like you mention (my company at the time used them during the pandemic), but I could never really connect to people that way.
(Just a heads up – I’m a part of the team. If you have any questions I can answer them or find the right person.)
- Dan