
How to Make Remote a Success - cfabianski
https://www.bearer.sh/blog/how-to-make-remote-a-success
======
jpincheira
I'm totally convinced that video & voice communication –not only chat/text
personas– is what will allow any remote organization to be successful, by
bringing their teams together, improving culture, team spirit, their sense of
belonging and ultimately having more productive and happier teams.

Sync/real-time communication is not needed for all the processes in a remote
team, and you should go async by default and only use sync for cases where you
_really_ have to get together. This is how companies Gitlab [1] have really
become successful in doing remote work.

A remote team can be successful by using async/non-real-time communication,
especially when you're pairing it with an async platform like Standups which
is built from the ground up to support the async comm style. I wrote a blog
article about how async is determinant to make remote work "work" within your
team/org [2].

[1]
[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/)

[2] [https://standups.io/blog/how-async-communication-can-help-
yo...](https://standups.io/blog/how-async-communication-can-help-your-team/)

~~~
ghaff
And a lot of people probably undervalue video specifically. I was probably one
of them but I've had a manager who insisted on camera-on for both group and
1:1 calls unless you were in some environment where you couldn't for bandwidth
or other reasons. It really does make people more engaged.

~~~
k__
I'm a remote dev for 5 years now and I have to say, most of the time
synchronous communication didn't help much in terms of engagement. Good
projects helped, a reason to do stuff (besides getting paid) helped, nice co-
workers and managers helped.

Often synchronous communication is applied by managers because they lost
control of their team and now try to monitor them closer so they don't step
out of line.

It's like working overtime to compensate for bad planning or dropping home-
office work all together because the company does bad.

I'm not saying 1:1 video isn't needed for some situations, but every day and
even every week is often overkill. The best projects I had only required 1:1
videos every few months, most of them even only at the beginning.

~~~
eagsalazar2
This seems like a personality thing and reflects the type of culture company
leaders want to create. Every other comment in this thread is "I don't like
video, not conducive to how I think/work" or "I like video, makes me feel
engaged and part of a team". My bet is this is not a better/worse thing but
more of a mars/venus thing (I'm definitely, as someone on a remote team
myself, in the video camp).

The other strange thing you hear a lot is that any attempt to get people to be
on-site or on-video (basically anything other than fully async, text only) is
attributed to control-freak tendencies by terrible managers. Again going back
to my above point and the fact that so many people here agree that video is
better for them, I wish we could dispense with speculatively attributing
motives so negatively and give people the benefit of the doubt that, right or
wrong, they hold their POV because it is what they actually believe is best.

~~~
k__
Yes, probably.

Guess, I'm seeing it like that, because I worked with control freaks.

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sparrish
Good points but I think you missed one of the biggest ones. Hire people who
want and can work remotely.

Some folks aren't wired for the self-discipline or don't enjoy the isolation
of remote work. They thrive in an office where they can interact face to face
with their co-workers and have their manager looking over their shoulder. And
that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But don't hire them for your
remote-only business and expect them to be happy and productive.

~~~
sytse
At GitLab we translated this this requirement to 'manager of one'. It is a
term introduced by Basecamp that means every person has to be able to manage
themselves.

~~~
Ididntdothis
I can identify with that. The more autonomy I have the more I get done. I am
happy to collaborate with others but I don't need nor want a manager to tell
me what to do.

At my current job there is a trend to more and more planning, prioritizing and
scheduling. I understand there is a need for that but personally I perform
best if I get a big goal and can figure it out for myself.

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PragmaticPulp
Most of these bullet points are just as important for in-office teams.
Enforcing good meeting discipline, sending out weekly updates, defining
process for RFCs, and documenting process and culture in a shared location are
all very important regardless of where employees are located. Remote work only
works if the team's foundation is solid in the first place.

The point about forcing everyone to be remote is great if you can make it
work, but it will eliminate a lot of employees who can't work remotely. I know
remote work is a hot topic, but in my experience only a small fraction of
employees can be very effective in remote-only roles.

If your company can't be all-remote, it's critical to invest in proper
processes and culture to keep everyone included. Quashing in-office politics,
breaking knowledge silos, and mandating centralized documentation of decisions
is key.

~~~
ghaff
>The point about forcing everyone to be remote is great if you can make it
work, but it will eliminate a lot of employees who can't work remotely. I know
remote work is a hot topic, but in my experience only a small fraction of
employees can be very effective in remote-only roles.

It's both effectiveness and preferences. I was just having this conversation a
couple of days ago with someone whose company location is basically out of
space. I asked why more people don't just work remotely. (Many already do; the
company is generally remote friendly.)

His response was basically that there are a lot of employees, especially
younger ones, who would probably up and quit if they were told they had to
work out of their homes. Most of the people who haven't already gone remote
either have to be in the same office or want to for whatever reason; this is
in an area where housing is fairly reasonable and commutes are fairly modest.

Leaving aside that I started work at a time when communication tools were much
more limiting than today, I still can't really imagine working from my
apartment during the early years of my career.

~~~
stakhanov
It's been my experience that mixed remote/onsite doesn't work. Either go all-
remote or all-onsite. I've even been in an org once that was mixed
remote/onsite and very friendly towards remote and decided to end that policy,
which resulted in all remote staff walking away from the company. That's a
very tough and painful thing to have happen.

Among the remote-only companies that I've been in, I've never seen the remote-
culture as being in any way problematic. (Quite the contrary. They were
usually better at communicating).

~~~
ghaff
>Either go all-remote or all-onsite.

The thing is that, in many cases, there is no "all-onsite" especially for
larger organizations.

Your field people (sales, system engineers, etc.) are going to be wherever
your customers are.

Acquire a company in a different city? If you force everyone to move, you're
probably going to lose a lot of the value of that company?

Work with open source software? Many of the upstream developers are going to
be scattered all over the world in any case.

And as soon as you're in multiple locations even within a given city, you're
really not much different from being in two separate cities at that point.

Certainly, there are challenges. But I'm in a very mixed environment, which I
think generally works pretty well.

~~~
stakhanov
...well the scope of each team for which this "all-on-site or all-remote"
principle holds is debatable (i.e. if we're speaking of a project team,
department, set of people working on a given product or module within a
system, etc). But the principle, I think, is still a valid one.

~~~
ghaff
The real problem tends to be when you have a few outliers. Say, a 10+ person
team where everyone is next to each other and are all in the office most days
except for one or two who are fully remote. That can be a problem. It can also
be made to work. But everyone needs to work at it and be committed to it.

To be honest, the situations where I have personal experience are mostly more
senior teams where everyone is doing a lot of travel anyway, a decent
percentage are fully remote and the rest are often only in the office a few
days a week. And everyone is doing as much communication (if not more) with
other teams and people outside the organization as they are internally anyway.

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woutr_be
Just a personal story; but I think remote work can only work if the entire
team (or at least the majority of the team) is remote. I'm currently the only
remote person in the team, and it's so frustrating. For them, getting me
involved in anything is an extra step, as to them I'm the only remote person.
But for me, everyone is remote, and I have a lot more expectations about
communication and meetings.

Just to name one thing; meetings that start 5-10 minutes late. For them it's
normal, because they're in the room, or walking to the room, or at least aware
as to why a meeting is starting late. To me, it's 15 minutes wasted, and
there's no communication what's going on.

We're getting better at it tho; or at least, I've lowered my expectations of
them. I know that I will be left out of meetings frequently, I know that every
meeting will start 5-10 minutes late.

That said, I love working remotely, although I would prefer to find a team
that's used to it.

~~~
lewaldman
I'm not getting the problem with the meetings...

Why you don't just... log on Zoom on the correct time and leave it running
while you do actual work on another screen/monitor/window?

Eventually they will get to their senses and stop being late.

~~~
woutr_be
Most of it is just being in the unknown, it’s incredibly frustrating to just
having to sit there and wait not knowing what’s going on. Obviously I can
continue to do work, but the frustration is still there.

Like I said, for them it’s natural, they know what’s going on, if they don’t
communicate that, I don’t know.

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krm01
We rely mostly on email. Probably 90%. The best part about remote, I believe,
is asynchronous communication. Email forces people think harder about what to
say, vs trying to fill gaps of silence with nonsense during video calls. This
makes for a more effective and efficient exchange of ideas.

~~~
jpincheira
Completely on point. I've heard this from our users at Standups, that async
lets them have the time to think and note down what to say, and don't come
unprepared to a live/sync daily update meeting, for example.

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jjcm
Another thing I will add to this is to use creation tools that show your
presence to others. Figma has been huge for our design team because you can
see the other person’s mouse cursor moving around and making changes - it
makes it feel like the person has a presence in the same room with you.
Likewise with google docs or confluence, just the presence of a line cursor
with a name next to it goes a huge ways. Mural is another one that does this
well. It really helps make the remoteness feel less isolating.

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joncp
He mentions keeping a knowledge base up to date. That's a great idea, but I've
never found good low-friction methods/tools for getting knowledge from
peoples' heads into a knowledge base. Any suggestions?

~~~
jameslk
One suggestion I've heard is to encourage your team to write blog posts. The
blog posts serve as an open source knowledge base for the organization. This
also provides the individual a way to become more well known in and out of the
organization (personal branding) and provides the organization a bit of
content marketing.

~~~
jpincheira
Totally agreed! I've seen this at other startups, and it works great.

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llovan
I'm convinced that some of the downsides to remote work will be solved through
technological means; probably some kind of VR or AR solution, where you can be
inside a shared virtual space and glance over to see what your coworkers are
up to, and perhaps give them a virtual tap on the shoulder.

This kind of virtual office would not help as much, of course, in cases of
highly distributed teams split across continents. Even then though, it would
be cool to drop into someone's virtual office and leave a note on virtual post
it or whiteboard.

~~~
sytse
In general I'm sceptical of skeuomorphism tools that try to simulate offices
in applications. But I do believe VR can help creating the feeling of presence
that is still lacking with traditional tools.

~~~
fsiefken
Sense of presence is a real added value of VR, I've been experimenting with
virtual presence since 1995 making Unreal level with Wicked3D glasses and a
huge monitor, later a z800 and OpenSim. Nowadays I watch Star Trek with a
friend in Bigscreen, sitting next to each other, catching up - Bigscreen also
works for pair programming.

A friend of mine lived in Boulder for a long time so I asked her to take me on
a tour through the area's where she lived (Wander), basically you morph
through a series of 360 photos like in streetview and you don't have full body
tracking, but "you are there with someone, 'cycling' around". It beats
narrating pictures.

I made a VR app so I can practice my vajra dance, a spiritual practice, on a
huge mandala and meditate and doing tai-chi on a mountain top. I work solo or
together with a cooperative game contained in Tabletop Simulator (Robinson
Crusoe, Spirit Island, Codenames Duet), manipulating the various tiles with my
Oculus Touch controllers. Experimenting with memory palaces in relation to
internal psychological concepts and states as well as tuning into a virtual
dance floor while DJ-ing are next on my 'play' list.

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taigeair
As a PM, I don't think remote can work for me. Any PMs who work remotely?
Curious to your thoughts.

~~~
PragmaticPulp
Yes, I've held this role at an internationally distributed company. It's even
harder across time zones, but it's doable.

As a first step, work on weaning yourself off of synchronous communication
wherever possible. Limit your synchronous communication to only the minimum
necessary to operate efficiently.

Create a routine of sending of ultra-concise weekly updates to the team. Your
goal should be to produce reports that the teams actually enjoy reading.
People should walk away from the reports feeling like they know what they need
to know, what's expected of them for the week, when it's expected, and who to
contact if any exceptions come up. The goal is no surprises, no hidden
expectations, and visibility into the team goals. If people have to
synchronously talk to you or wait for a specific meeting, work on improving
the weekly update.

Fill in the gaps with daily updates for any relevant changes. Work on
collecting updates, summarizing, and sharing them at the same time every day
for predictability. Don't get in the habit of pinging everyone every time you
have a question. People will hate the constant distractions.

Finally, carve out time for predictable, synchronous weekly meetings. Make it
predictable, at the same time every week. Resist the urge to schedule
spontaneous phone calls every time something comes up. Practice excellent
meeting discipline, with an agenda shared ahead of time, careful attention on
managing off-topic discussions, and so on.

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gmontard
Couldn’t find a better time to post this article than in the middle of France
biggest strike!

~~~
twistiti
Good point. This will probably force more companies to experiment remote work.

