We schedule a 2x a week 15-30 minute no-project-talk socialization meeting for our fully distributed team.
It helps a LOT.
We also have dedicated rambling channels in slack, active much of the day.
As a team lead within a small, fully remote company I’m struggling to find the right dynamics as I can see people really like to socialize (I have 3 1on1’s with each of them every week, and a lot of times we just talk about personal hobbies, what they did last weekend, etc), but it seems like in groups people end up being too shy to socialize.
The in-person group will go into the conference room and naturally start multiple rambling side conversations.
But the remote people just have to sit there and watch. Usually they can’t really hear each of these conversations and you can’t casually join a room-based side conversation from the remote because any audio that comes out of the teleconferencing screen automatically commandeers the whole rooms attention
The the in-person group tends to be resentful that they've commuted into the office just to spend a good chunk of their day at their desks on Zoom calls.
It's always a tradeoff. Even pre-COVID and hybrid work at large companies, you were dealing with groups at different locations, often in vastly different timezones. But certainly current hybrid work makes the dynamics even trickier.
But practically though, how does this work in an office setting? I work in an exorbitantly nice office, and we still don't have near enough conference rooms/enclosed spaces for everyone to individually book a room
And in another sense, this is just defaulting to the lowest common denominator. People in-person go to side chats because its beneficial to do so.
1. I will not work at in office job.
2. I won’t work for a company that is not “remote only”.
Remote people from India/Afrika will be happy to work for a fraction of western salary.
A recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about a position as an SDE. It would have paid $75K - $80K more than I was making. But would have required me to relocate to Seattle at some underdetermined time in the future. There was no way in hell I was going to relocate to Seattle and sell my big house in the burbs that I paid $340K to have built in Atlanta in 2016 to work at Amazon.
She kept talking and suggested I apply to a “permanently remote” [sic] role at AWS ProServe. The position paid about 20% less but still around $60K more than I was making. I said sure why not?
I got the job and two years later we ended up selling the house anyway and moving to cheaper, no state tax Florida and downsized to a condo (and sold our house for twice what we paid for it a year later).
I currently make the same as a staff consultant working permanently at another company as I did as an L5 working at Amazon - still remote (not much by BigTech comp standards. But comfortable by every other metric) - and that’s after turning down an offer for a permanently remote role for a large non tech company where the director who was a former coworker was going to create a position for me to oversea the cloud architecture and migration. It would have paid around L6 level at Amazon - all cash.
I just didn’t want the headache of working for BigCorp anymore.
I do wonder if there are any technical solutions to be found to this. Now that high-speed fibre is pretty widespread, what if we transmitted every participants audio feed to every other participant, and merged them on the client, instead of the server?
(don't get me wrong, I like a VR headset, but it's not something I've managed to work into my coding and docs writing setup just yet).
EDIT: Even MS Teams implemented it!
The single speaker is a design decision, not a technical issue. Only one "presenter" is allowed is allowed in business, or in school.
Same experience on full time remote gig. Didn't help that my colleagues were mostly speaking about topics that I had zero interest in. So I just muted myself and practiced some guitar. You pay me for this time, you organized this meeting, so be it.
If you did this at my company, I would turn up with a smile every time, and then get hours less practical work done that day, because I would be drained and also because I know I would be shut down if I tried to say that these social meetings don’t work well for me, so you wouldn’t even know.
Just remember, just because nobody has complained doesn’t mean something doesn’t impact people.