

Remote-First Communication for Project Teams - englishm
http://spin.atomicobject.com/2015/01/30/remote-first-communication/

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jhund
Based on my 10+ years experience of working remotely, I agree 100% with this
article. My observation has been that distributed teams work well when the
majority of the team is remote. It makes written communication inevitable.
However when I was the only remote person in a team of 4 or more people, I
felt left out. Conference calls with everybody else on one side and me on the
other were quite frustrating. I missed out on the informal watercooler talk
and conversations in the team office. I never felt that remote work works well
in an asymmetric situation.

On the other hand, I think every team benefits from clear written
communications. Having a remote team enforces this best practice where having
a co-located team lets communication practices slip and become sloppy.

~~~
sanderjd
As someone with far more experience with this than me, I'm interested in your
perspective on a couple things that I've noticed: It seems to be more
difficult to come to consensus in purely written communication, and more
awkward for decision-makers to assert themselves. I'm not sure why this is
true, or if it is only my anecdotal experience and outside the experience of
most, but I've been in many long github/irc/whatever threads where parties
seem to only grow increasingly intransigent, and many phone and in-person
meetings where the same topic is dispensed with in less than 10 minutes of
actual discussion. Is this phenomenon real in your experience? If so, have you
found any good techniques for controlling it?

~~~
jhund
> It seems to be more difficult to come to consensus in purely written
> communication

I agree that some conflicts are much better handled via synchronous voice
conversation. And I think that's acceptable, if not desirable. However, I make
sure that after the call we write down some notes what decision we made, and
why we decided the way we did. This makes sure that parties not present at the
meeting (i.e. other developers, and our future selves) can pick up the context
quickly and save us the pain of working through the decision process again.

And then there is always the issue of dysfunctional team communications where
the channel doesn't matter. In asynch conversations poor/obstinate
communicators don't need everybody in the room to keep adding to a
controversial conversation. So you just can't stop them..

And I just learned a new word: 'in·tran·si·gent': unwilling or refusing to
change one's views or to agree about something. Thanks.

> more awkward for decision-makers to assert themselves

That has probably more to do with team culture than the communication channel
used. I'd think that a capable and respected decision maker can assert
themselves easily via written word.

~~~
mason55
> _However, I make sure that after the call we write down some notes what
> decision we made, and why we decided the way we did. This makes sure that
> parties not present at the meeting (i.e. other developers, and our future
> selves) can pick up the context quickly and save us the pain of working
> through the decision process again._

In the same way that you should comment your code with the "why" and not just
the "what" you also should comment your non-code decisions with the "why" and
not just the "what". Otherwise someone in the future will try to overhaul a
process without knowing about some of the previous pitfalls that were
discovered.

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rattray
The biggest nugget from this piece seems to be this:

> Remote-first communication that clearly documents problems encountered,
> ideas proposed, and decisions reached works best in organizations with
> strong no-blame cultures.

I like the idea that remote-first encourages a number of best practices,
including a no-blame culture.

~~~
evgen
It does not encourage such a culture, this post is just suggesting that no-
blame is a requirement to sustain a remote-first policy. You can more easily
have a no-blame culture without artificial conditions like remote-first.

~~~
rattray
Actually, you're totally right. Thanks for the correction!

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JoshTriplett
I worked on a team in IBM's Linux Technology Center that worked like this. We
had people in several sites, and even those in the same site were spread
across half a floor, not sitting anywhere near each other. So, in general,
conversations occurred via IRC or mailing list, _not_ in person, even between
people at the same site. If a problem-solving session occurred in-person
(often with a whiteboard), a specific person in that session (identified
before the end of the session) would be responsible for writing up the result
for the mailing list.

The only thing we'd ever handle primarily in person was going out to lunch as
a group, which for obvious reasons only mattered to one site. And we almost
never talked about work at those lunches.

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ryusage
I like the idea; it makes a lot of sense. In practice though, there are a LOT
of times that it's much, much faster to communicate verbally. I feel like
trying to really stick to this remote-first style might be more
difficult/frustrating than it sounds.

~~~
smackfu
Yes, it may make sense to talk on the phone, but I don't find that's a good
strategy for first contact. Especially if people don't answer their phone or
like to small talk.

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anarchitect
I work for a company that has two locations and a number of workers (including
the CEO, who is quite hands-on) who work remotely the majority of time.

When I joined and introduced Basecamp which managed to de-siloed a whole lot
of information, but required breaking old habits. The key change was ensuring
the discussions and decisions which were being made offline either happened
inside Basecamp, or were at least minuted there.

Recently this has had an interesting side-effect where some rebels are
intentionally making decisions "off piste" for the avoidance of prolonged
discussions.

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jdawg77
Fantastic article and in the past seven months, we've been a basecamp user,
then former basecamp user, as we switched to Trello. Ironically that was for
cost, like switching from 3rd party to (finally) a home grown php tool to
replace the Saas $200 fee.

Essentially, what we're seeing from my team's perspective are the culmination
of a few trends that started being bigger back in 2003, when I first worked
from home full time for about six months, prior to joining Yahoo at giving up
the lifestyle for a few years. With nearly ~6.5 years in WFH experience; I've
done it nearly half my professional career.

Those who can make it work, do it the way in the article, there's no option,
only pain, to that process. It broke up a 12 year business partnership I had,
in the end, written goals were broken, therefore, I ejected. Simple,
straightforward and asynchronous. There's a movement, tempo to when a team is
producing. My CTO and I are incredible partners this way, and we spend less
than twenty minutes per session "Talking," because he's even more introvert
than me, it seems.

At the end of the day, team's ship something. Marketers should be shipping
business models, spreadsheets, powerpoints, Adwords copy, Blog Posts, Social
Posts, Images, Videos and more. Engineers ship code, so, they rock and should
have it a bit more straightforward.

Designers ship design. If the "Business monkey," isn't playing secretary,
documenting things and helping others ship, OR shipping something with their
fingerprints all over it, something is broken. For a production oriented
individual, remote, WFH work is the most empowering kind.

Freedom. Run at your own pace, if the team gets slow, develop new skills, a
new hobby and explore. The digital world is a vast place; for example, I'm
building free, open source SaaS, running two blogs, a team, built two visual
novels this month, learned Daz3d, Carrara, Gimp for animation & more.

I ship what and how I want, when I want & where. The team does the same, as a
group, we have aligned objectives. So the business moves at one pace, and as
an individual, I carve my own lane. Run ahead, scout, explore, learn and grow.
Then perhaps, those skills in animation & 3d become useful to the business. Or
not. Time will tell.

Great article, and thanks for posting your experiences. I love learning.

