
Show HN: Emergency Remote – Actions to win remote work - oDot
https://www.emergencyremote.com/emergencyremote
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brd529
Thanks for putting this up for feedback. I read with some interest. For me the
biggest piece that was missing was evidence that the ideas work.

The content sounds aspirational “wouldn’t it be nice if” and not grounded in
lived experience. You should definitely put some information in your intro
about who you are and where you’ve seen these ideas work, and from what
viewpoint you are coming from. This would add more credibility.

For example, it is not self evident to me that async is inherently better for
decision making or assigning tasks. It is better for decision communicating
and task tracking, but either in chat or a voice call it is so much faster to
communicate the nuances of a complicated assignment or ask. You also may want
the persons input on the issue at hand. You also may need a _quick_ decision.

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oDot
Thank you for responding with valuable feedback! Will definitely fix this.

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sparrish
Been working remote for 12 years now. The BIG one listed is "Single Source of
Truth".

So many issues come from having more than one source of truth. Have a single
source of documentation and you stop so many issues before they start.

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maztaim
Did you get my copy of draft-propsal-final-
joe(bob3)-2020-05-01.2020-01-05(5).PDF.final.txt.zip in the last email thread?
You know. The one that has a different subject than this email.

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melenaos
Company anxiety hit me hard reading this comment. I am glad i work alone now
and i can confuse my own self now

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aaisola
This is great. One of the biggest challenges I find with WFH is the lack of
serendipitous communication/idea flow and the sense of loneliness that comes
with being by yourself all day. While remote work has many benefits and the
principles make sense, it would be great if some of the positive's of office
work could be recreated in remote work

Potentially there are software solutions that help solve these issues?

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hwillmott
Hey, our team builds and uses Remotion
([https://www.remotion.com/](https://www.remotion.com/)), which is really
great at enabling those spontaneous conversations that you might be missing
from a traditional office. You might call a coworker to ask a quick question
(e.g. "where was that file we were talking about last week?") and because it
feels so frictionless to get into a call, you're more likely to have more
social, casual chats. It's more 1-1 chats and fewer entire-team meetings where
it's too awkward to ask someone about their weekend. Try it out!

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DEADBEEFC0FFEE
I'm saving this to reread again later. Thank you.

Also some comments. I have managed remote workers, and am current a new remote
worker myself.

As a manager (of managers), I think the one on one meetings are the meetings
not to skip. Certain not more than once. These are times to check in and get a
sense of how people feel. To listen and to support often people just want to
complain, or want to hear some praise. I insist on video for these meetings.

As a manager I am interuptable, if my teams needs me I want to be available.

As a manager I try not to interrupt my teams. Just because a question popped
into my head, asking in chat will interrupt others, possibly many other,
because I have role power and influence.

I like the concept of evergreen comms, but that's a hard reality to realise.
Probably easier in small organisation, but in a big enterprise you will still
have email, people create price chat rooms, people call each other and are not
going to capture the content. Vendors and partners will use different tools.
Personally I have WebEx, Zoom, Teams and Google something. I don't have much
choice.

Anyway, good job.

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oDot
I agree about the Evergreen Communication being hard to realize. It's more of
an ideal, something to aspire to even if never reached

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qxf2
I have been running a fully remote company for more than 5 years now. Some
thoughts that have worked for me that are related to this guide:

a) Consistent timings - the employee choose their hours but they should try to
keep it consistent through the week. This is a variation on the idea of fully
flexible timings where people can work each day whenever they want.

b) We do pairing exercises (~1 hour spread over a week) to increase the
'socialize' component. The pairing can be as simple as two people (A,B) get
together at the start of their day and update each other on their progress.
End of the week, during the sprint call A gives B's update and vice versa.
This helps break the ice because many of my engineers (and me) do not
socialize unless there is work happening in the background.

c) Managers should understand that most people (in my experience) begin liking
remote work and then start hating it somewhere between their 3rd and 6th
month. People feel depressed and miss the environment of an office. I feel
like managers should keep an eye out for this dip and assist early.

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simonbarker87
How have you guys dealt with C? It’s definitely something I have felt and am
currently pretty keen on getting back to the office even though it probably
isn’t the best thing long or short term.

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qxf2
I don't have a general solution. We warn all new hires about this problem when
they start. Just knowing you will go through this phase is often useful in
catching the problem early. We rely on the support structure of everyone who
has gone through the pain recognizing the symptoms in others early. We try to
infuse some change to the working pattern of the person - like increase the
1:1 communication or have them help someone else or make them present
something at a virtual brownbag or teach something to the rest of the group.
These tasks help to a certain extent because new people seem to feel good when
they contribute to a group. But I don't think there is any easy way other than
just accepting this is going to happen and that you need to experiment your
way through this problem.

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simonbarker87
Interesting, thanks

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krm01
We need more HTML books. Content could become so much richer by linking to
relevant external resources, much better accessible.

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thinkmassive
Most ebook formats support hyperlinks. EPUB is basically an enhanced version
of HTML. I read a fair amount of ebooks, and DRM-free EPUB is my preferred
format.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB)

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shahinrostami
Nice - I've done the same with Data Analysis with Rust Notebooks here:
[https://shahinrostami.com/posts/programming/rust-
notebooks/p...](https://shahinrostami.com/posts/programming/rust-
notebooks/preface/)

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wefarrell
One thing that's worth adding is for individuals to see the impact of their
individual tasks on the company's overall goals. When everyone's working in an
office you're going to interact with other parts of the company and you'll
organically connect with the person who uses that report you're building.

In a remote environment those organic interactions do not happen and teams
tend to be more siloed. So managers have to make more of an effort for
employees to understand how their actions contribute to another team's
success.

Without that holistic view it's not possible for workers to act independently.

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remotelyyours
The concept around evergreen communication is interesting. However, I do think
chat gets impersonal fast. And it's hard to make the team feel connected.

There are tools like vlokit [0] which is a video-first chat platform. By
letting people express ideas and give feedback through video/audio, it makes
it easier to connect with the group. Without the constant need to get into a
meeting for it.

It's also great to discuss off-work topics your team might be interested in.

[0] [https://vlokit.com](https://vlokit.com)

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pavel_lishin
> * Employees: Do not create new meetings. Move all meetings to discussions in
> your task manager, track output in the source of truth. Although some
> meetings are needed, it's better to cancel them and add as necessary, than
> to keep them and taper off.*

This seems like the hardest thing to get right. I would rather walk barefoot
downtown rather than asynchronously resolve something in Google Docs/Jira
comments over the slow course of two days, versus grabbing the relevant people
into a quick video call to discuss and come to a conclusion in 15 minutes.

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ravenstine
> Avoid email or WhatsApp as much as you can. They are private by nature and
> make it harder for people to jump in if needed.

Hallelujah!

To extend upon that, I think companies should pick one medium for internal
communication and stick to it. Doesn't have to be Slack, but it can be Slack.
Keep email for external communication, of course.

At every company I've worked some people would start threads in Slack and
others would start them through email. This is a pain in the ass because now
I've got to pay attention to 2 programs and email is just generally inferior
for group communication.

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culopatin
Not sure if OP is the writer but in the section where it says “you need good
aerodynamics and no breaks” I think it meant to say “Brakes” instead.

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oDot
Fixed, thanks!

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tdeck
Nice. Good luck with history preservation if you work at a big company,
though. At many places chat messages are set to be deleted within a few days.
I expect law firms would be pretty strict with their data retention as well.

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oDot
This sure is a real challenge in some places, I hope tools will come out to
support it as more businesses work remotely

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tdeck
Tooling isn't the problem - it's litigation discovery. Companies don't want to
keep records around that could be subject to discovery, so they set up
retention policies to delete emails older than X months, and chats older than
X days. It seems to me that any company over ~1k employees gets to the point
where they start worrying about these things.

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indymike
BTW, I really like the book. Will be sharing it with a few managers that are
struggling to get remote work because they don't get the fundamental tools.

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oDot
Thanks!

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moralestapia
Nice and thanks for sharing. I have a question, did you use a framework or did
you code that from scratch?

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oDot
I have actually tried doing everything in markdown when I initially released
the book, but then I figured that for it to look the way I want the quickest
way is to Google Docs & export as PDF.

Then I figured I can export as HTML and this is how this version was born
(manual tweaking was and still needed)

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moralestapia
Thanks, I asked you as I was writing something (in Notes) and would like to
make it somehow into a formatted HTML like yours.

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jacksonpollock
thanks for sharing. this is great!

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oDot
Thank you for reading

