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Comment by mydriasis | Hacker News Reader

> Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently, because asynchronous communication involves less frequent, but richer communication, meaning there is less time talking about the work and more time doing it, allowing the system to optimize for throughput and flow.

This whole thing seems to be what people struggle with about remote work. Communication is way, way more important, and being an effective communicator doubly so. There's nobody's desk to go stop by, so noting things down and making sure we understand each-other is vital to accomplishing anything.

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There's a bit of a challenge today with chat, though. I work 4 timezones away from most of my team and we all prefer to swap e-mails, but chat seems to have stripped away some folks' ability to methodically go through topics, explain options and summarise next steps, leading to the usual "let's set up a call [to actually discuss everything in the e-mail thread]".

Reading through old mailing-lists (and even older e-mails from the same company, but from seven years ago) shows a markedly different communication style - you could pretty much take the last two e-mails in a thread and paste them into a memo that would neatly encompass all of the scope.

Not so today--there's a constant chattering of people who just can't prioritise or discuss more than a couple of topics in tow.

Email is the victim of its own success. Because it had/has such dominance in the business world everyone had to live in their inbox, marketers appreciated that and lots of people grew to hate that. There have always been bad practices surrounding emails but I think it reached a point a long time ago where email itself was considered bad. Thus "email free Fridays" and internal comms plans which say email should be a last resort. People felt empowered to refuse to read many emails, especially if they were over 3-4 paragraphs.

I too have colleagues who reflexively ask for a meeting in response to any email longer than a few lines, even though the issue is clearly communicated and obviously requires someone to read it and build a proper response. The ease with which we can all "jump on a call" has contributed to this. Yes, of course we've all seen email chains which go back and forth without progress but that's not a reason to assume every message will end up there.

We could jump on calls well over seven years ago (I actually worked in ISDN video calling in the 1990s, and spent a decade or so working in a multinational telco, with plenty of conference calling involved).

The loss of focus definitely accelerated with the rise of chat.

> I too have colleagues who reflexively ask for a meeting in response to any email longer than a few lines, even though the issue is clearly communicated and obviously requires someone to read it and build a proper response.

Oh, yes. So much this. Except, I think it's fair to say it's managers and bosses who have this tendency, not so much colleagues.

>The ease with which we can all "jump on a call" has contributed to this.

I hate that term and concept "jump on a call". I often find that people don't prepare enough before the call, which defeats the purpose of the call.

I have spent many of these calls effectively just reading what I wrote in the email in the first place. Complete waste of my time.

> leading to the usual "let's set up a call [to actually discuss everything in the e-mail thread]"

You forgot the part where the call is scheduled for next week even though today is Wednesday. And any attempt to discuss further in text is met with "let's leave that for the call".

Solid point.

If you want to do this really well, title the meeting something generic like "catch up", don't attach an agenda or any kind of description and invite a bunch of people who weren't in the original discussion.

Smaller attention spans, information overload, and consequent lack of attention to detail, are some of the reasons, IMO.

And the first two of those are largely due to the uncontrolled effects of the Internet, i.e. the web and social media, on people, of course.

Edit: wording

Additionally, they refuse to answer the question that’s put to them. I am very careful with my words. I say exactly what I mean in as few words as necessary, but I find myself copying and pasting the same sentences into the chat box because the person or people reading seem to want to answer a completely different question.

Yes, this is the worst. I assume some people glance at the question and answer their misunderstanding.

I too long for the days of mailing lists and neatly structured email threads where you could reply to each point in order using >> markers for context and so on.

In my view, it was GMail with its top-posting proportional-font-only interface that killed email and mailing lists.

Both email and chat are ephemeral and make things really difficult to find. Who said what when about what in what thread?

People use the same thread to speak about unrelated to the thread topics which makes those communications impossible to find.

I’ve introduced and use basecamp with my team. It’s genius is in collecting things into projects, and in intentionally resisting complexity. Frictionless flowing focused communication - with everything in its right place, providing just enough information in activity feeds etc.

It’s for high trust teams who are trying to find all needed info to get their work done, and delivers.

Truly signal over noise.

I am a total fanboy after trying a bunch of systems trying to be too clever, track time, create Gantt charts etc.

I had the opposite experience because of a single point I think: a Confluence/Notion centric team.

Chat/email is solely for semi-live discussions ("is this a bug ? how do you do X ? where's the doc ?") and decision making ("can we release this feature this friday ?")

Anything else that requires bullet points, graphs and/or more than 5 min of thinking goes into a Notion page where the team comments and argues the topic. Sometimes the Notion page will even start with Slack snippets for context, as the topic just happened to require a more constructed discussion. The magic of it is that people switch mode and write complete, coherent arguments if they're on a page, vs small the chatty style they have on Slack.

Funnily, studies have shown that people spend more time on chat and less time in face-to-face communication when working from an openspace office than when they work from home.

Hopping on a quick 5min zoom is frictionless at home. Walking aaaaalll the way over to someone’s desk and disrupting the entire office with your conversation, or god forbid finding a free conference room, is way harder. So you smear the meeting on slack across a 1 hour back-and-forth pingpong instead of doing a quick 5min sync.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180718-open-offices-m...

Private offices solve this problem of course. Wfh is the easiest way to get that.

I've never been more productive than when I have an office with a door -- home or otherwise. That also makes it much easier to have quick chats without disturbing the rest of the floor.

Even well done, this kind of communication doesn't substitute for more free-form 1:1s that in-person allows. The latter are key to building trust.

I'm finding this to be one of the key drawbacks of remote work - some decisions require cross team trust and I've yet to see anything besides more frequent ad-hoc conversations that builds it. The problem is that the most trust building conversations tend to be "off-topic" conversations that just don't happen organically in a remote environment. I as an individual can try and make these happen but I can't force the org to do so.

If anyone feels like they have a solution I'd love to hear it (we're already doing quarterly off-sites, it's not enough)

Maybe part of the problem is a lot of orgs are watching(and logging) your remote conversations with an all seeing eye. But they're not necessarily bugging your in person office?

Not sure if this would work for you, but I tend to have ad-hoc, 1on1 video calls with people.

If you are not doing deep work, it's no biggie.

I also would schedule 1on1 meetings to 'catch-up' (not too many of them, but ...)

Don't get me wrong, meeting some of these people in person is great, but I have several great relationships at work where we've never met in person

Not discounting this, but i Free-form 1:1's always have an aura of being more "improvisational" and in the moment. Good 1:1's are supposed to be semi-structured (ie not 'free form'). A shared journal, a retro exercise, etc. I have not had the experience that these build trust. Good team work, and delivering high quality work towards a common goal do that. You popping by for a 3 minute conversation in ear shot of 5 other people trying to do their work doesn't.

It may FEEL like it because those people chatting get energy from it. But it doesn't. If you need energy from people like this it's 100% a good idea. Go nuts. Personally I think people over index on this because they have no idea how to structure async team comms.

– Videos – Longform content – Team agreements to respond to things async without x-hours – Team collaboration spaces – Good sprint ceremonies like refinement – Team QA-type exercises

Ad hoc conversations also contribute immensely to what I call "comms debt". The jolt of energy you get from water cooler talk last 3 minutes, and excluded anyone not in direct proximity. If the best idea was in the head of somebody 3 rooms away you have no way of knowing it. Add dozens of these micro-interactions throughout the day and it's a recipe for comms breakdown and kliqish behaviour.

I see this a lot in User Research. Let's "get out of the building" and talk to people. A good idea in practice, but without actual goals or hypothesis product leaders mistake the first 5 opinions they collected as fact — often cherry picking sound bytes that fit right in with their own biases (and I've seen this A LOT in older leaders). This is mistaken as research. But they love it because it has that face to face energy. The feeling makes it right, regardless of the evidence.

Trust in a team is based on good communication — and an agreement on what you expect from it. If someone posts a video to Slack do people respond? Do you have ceremonies to build togetherness and understanding? All of these things are somewhat easier when you just have to deal with Zoom logistics.

Anyone who has to clean up and index the deluge of Design Sprint whiteboard stickies knows what I'm talking about. Put that shit in Miro, thanks.

I think I've been unclear on the problem. Trust inside a single team is not something I've found to be a major problem, but between teams. Let's be more concrete:

I need to build trust between between 6 EMs spread over three different directors and 2 vps + some very senior engineers. I need to do this so that we can solve one of the larger problems the business is facing. Most of these people have no good reason to talk to each other (or me) regularly. Without trust, one or more of these people will likely torpedo the proposal in order to avoid tying themselves to other teams and people they don't know.

Pre-covid the solution to this problem was (mostly) chatting over lunch. You'd get the right people talking, seed the idea, and build up to a proposal that everyone could agree to drive forward. IME this whole style of consensus building is dead in a remote world because async communication is too low bandwidth for trust building.

This makes it really hard to take good organizational bets, you have to wait till you have a mountain of data and customer feedback before you can sell big projects. The quality of the company's output really noticeably declines from this.

> Pre-covid the solution to this problem was (mostly) chatting over lunch.

Except that Pre-Covid, those [6 EMs spread over three different directors and 2 vps + some very senior engineers] were already probably not at the same office.

They were spread across three states, two countries, and one was a consultant from India.

This was my experience with any company bigger than about 40 people, anyways.

I like the concept of water-cooler -- an always on zoom meeting that you can choose to join... Or not. It's up to you whether you hop in.

Your reward for being willing is exactly this spontaneity that is missing from remote work. I have seen it work again and again...!

I don’t think there is a good solution here. I realized that I must have a 90th-95th percentile memory when compared to my coworkers, but it frankly doesn’t matter if I write things in chat or a long form document, it’s often lost to much of my team.

I have come to realize the best path forward is likely pair programming/working meetings (remotely) because writing things down and repeatedly referencing them doesn’t stick

I had this issue when I had a larger team to manage. I'm also one of those who remembers an email that was sent 3 years ago by some random guy listing all these useful things. However,it doesn't work for most people. The communication needs some guidance too 1) anything quick and simple- chat 2) something more complex - email 3) something complex and likely to stay relevant long in the future - knowledge base, documentation, etc 4) major announcement- medium matters less but they need to be stored somewhere for people to refer to later.

Communication requires enforcement too: I had people in my team that kept saying that they weren't told about x,y,and z. If those are repeated behaviours( they usually are), they need to be managed accordingly so people would start take it seriously.

It's not a memory issue- it's an attention issue. I'm on the other spectrum from you- I have clinically diagnosed terrible memory. I write and read a lot to compensate. If you are writing something down- things are getting lost to your team because they are not taking the time to read and process what you wrote.

I'm also finding that the best path forward is to pair frequently- because a lot of people just don't read. Also, it's important to note that with writing things down for people, referencing is just as important as the content. If something is written in a slack conversation- they are unlikely to go searching back months for it- when they could just ask you again! When something is documented in a structured and easily memorable manner however...

I have a decent memory but my attention span has been decimated. I find myself tuning out on calls and looking at anything else. Then I come back to reality and realize I have missed something important. Recently I have started closing my eyes while on zoom (camera off). It has really helped me focus and pay attention. this breaks down of course when someone is sharing their screen. I find that a solution to this is to turn my camera on as it forces me to pay attention or people will see me with my head turned to the side. Incidentally it also forces me to shower and shave most days, something that has really fallen off since going remote and covid. I almost never leave the house so my presentation suffered. Only time I cleaned up is if I was going to the gym. So I was somehow in the best shape of my life while also looking like a homeless person when forced on camera.

Both have helped, still not perfect but its better.

Few people mention the difficulties of the other paradigm, though. I've had lot of hallway conversations where, if I don't write down some notes, it's gone. Plus, if you don't have any control over it, having someone stop by your desk is a significant interruption.

Ever been in a situation where you asked someone for something you need done, they said yes verbally, it didn't get done, and now everyone is looking at you for the reason why it isn't done?

Ya I'd probably consider switching careers before returning to the tyranny of my manager just being able to pop up behind me. Fuck that.

How do you communicate the "right things" tho? That's the part i find difficult. I feel like most consumers just want cliff-notes. Which are difficult to write for a wide variety of audiences.

This is tough, yes. I'm a programmer -- so for me, knowing what's _vital_ to a task is what I'm always searching for. Nailing down requirements is challenging...!

I think the most frustrating part of remote work are people who expect synchronous communication. Conversations that go like “good morning, how are you?” and then wait until you reply to say “so I was wondering about x”

It’s annoying, wastes a lot of time and people keep doing it because they’re still stuck in office mode when they should be following IRC rules (don’t ask to ask)

Yes exactly. I worked with folks located in India and I had to tell them it’s OK to get straight to the point without having to wait for me to say hello back etc. I had to explain it’s not rude if they leave out the hellos and how are yous. Probably a cultural thing.

Communication is important and does require more communication - but more frequently I don"t think so. You don't pop into somon elses space and interrupt them unless you have a reason and don't do that often. IRC or other chats happened a lot more often as the receiver can just ignore it.

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