
Our company’s remote work system failed - janeboo
https://medium.com/startup-grind/why-our-companys-remote-work-system-failed-c68ce8ccfc9c
======
sebringj
I ran 5 teams remotely spread out at different times in my life so far. The
outcome of my success or failure seemed to hang on my due diligence. The more
flaky and relaxed I became, the more my employees became less productive and
eventually less confident of my ability to lead. The more I checked in with
people and made sure everyone was on point and constantly provided clear
thought out plans / tasks, assigning to the appropriate people, things went
really well. I did learn this the very stupid way by ruining some projects by
my laziness and didn't know how to weed people out either but it really comes
down to the person in charge IMO, not much having to do with remote work as in
either case with the office or remote, you need to hire the right people for
your requirement which does include your working environment.

~~~
donw
In my experience, most problems boil down to "management".

If management is clear, supportive, and attentive, then things are good.

As a leader, doing this is not easy.

There is often a thin line between being attentive, and being overbearing.

The same can be said for being supportive: helping employees through a rough
patch is usually a wise move from a business perspective, but at the same
time, you need to know when it's time to cut your losses.

That kind of decision is never easy to make.

And being clear and unambiguous requires placing some tough bets on direction
and strategy: you are going to have to say "no" to a lot of tempting
possibilities, because the alternative is to try and chase everything that
comes your way (a pattern I like to call "Chaos Driven Development").

~~~
lostboys67
Main q is does a remote team need more management time - which is a limited
resource If I am a manger I want to make best use of my time.

Organising the structure and location of the team to reduce overhead.

~~~
sebringj
Its a trade off. You have to be more organized and use the right tools if you
are remote. You have to pick the right kinds of personalities to work with you
to be remote. If you don't do that, then you will have a harder time than
being in the office. It completely depends on YOU.

------
laurentdc
Some points are valid, but some others show a lack of proper tools.

For example:

> Assumptions and lack of documentation became obvious. [..] people reinvent
> wheel because they are unaware another team member has taken action already.

I can't see how this is related to working from home or not. If your employees
aren't documenting what they do and relying on "face to face meetings" to
check in on what they did, well, good luck with that, especially when teams
start growing in size.

> People who didn’t come to the office missed out on things like ad hoc team
> lunches and dinners, discussions on the latest tech when a delivery arrives,
> tastings (wine, whisky, coffee, snacks, and a lot more).

Again: lunches and dinners aren't documentation tools. Missing out on snacks,
wine, whisky? Really?

> Efficiency suffers. [...] there can be lags in responses that wouldn’t
> happen in the office.

"Lags in responses" are productive, imho. I'd rather keep on doing what I'm
focused on doing _right now_ , then answer to your question in HipChat, than
be interrupted to address "whatever's on your mind".

~~~
throwawaydbfif
I don't see how working remotely can ever replace the human interaction of
working in one place. People forget, humans are not machines. They are
biologically wired to work better in groups than alone, and our biology
includes the ability to signal others using our face, body, voice, and even
the way we perform an action. Voice is still a faster way of communicating
than anything else despite our 60's sci-fi level technology.

Remote work will never replace face to face contact for jobs where high
amounts of collaboration are needed, too many parts of the signal are lost.

Take for example a few jobs ago when our servers went down because of a local
internet outage. The IT guy literally stood up from his desk and said "holy
shit anyone that knows our infrastructure get in the meeting room now." We
could hear the warning bleeps from the server room merging into an
incomprehensible chorus, the death rattle of a company hours from implosion.
The seriousness was obvious just from his actions and the sound of his voice.
The response time was a few seconds.

How long would this take if we were spread across timezones with different
hours and variable lag time between communication? If the internet is down is
there any backup? How much would it cost to give every single employee a
backup method of communicating? How does an employee separate a desperate
please for help from the endless stream of BS emails and messages that aren't
terribly important?

Working in one place gives you a very powerful and natural means of
communication that's nearly instant and can't be stopped by any hardware or
software failure, save multiple employees dying simulatanously.

~~~
e40
_I don 't see how working remotely can ever replace the human interaction of
working in one place._

For things that require physical presence, like IT, sure. Most people don't
work on stuff like that. For those people, video meetings, slack, etc., can be
fine for keeping in touch and having the entire team feel connected.

And, yes, having a working internet is the single point of failure for remote
work. It's reasonable for the office to have redundant connections, but not
for people. For the 16 years I've lived in my current place, I've probably not
had a connection for no more than 24-48 hours.

~~~
briandear
And during those outages, the telephone generally works.

Everyone running to a conference room -- feels very Michael Scott to me -- and
almost always just as unnecessary.

I wonder about those who claim face-to-face is best explain how Github and
Basecamp seem to do just fine. Others point to how Yahoo eliminated remote as
some kind of argument supporting same, yet I'd hardly consider Yahoo to be a
good example of anything. If "good enough for Yahoo" is an argument, then
count me out.

Unless you physically have to touch something, remote can always work (and
even be better.) It's a question of establishing processes that work. The
'genre' of remote isn't the problem -- it's always the implementation.

------
aashishkoirala
Somehow I was expecting a longer account of things with more instances than
"we hired this guy in Taipei, and he didn't like working remotely" \- did I
miss something?

~~~
jessep
Yeah, he starts of saying they have over 40 people, then says one of them
tried working remotely and didn't keep it up. Seems misleading.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
And they also still have two people working remotely. I guess "Our company's
remote work system worked for some people but not for others" doesn't make for
a very good headline.

------
gravyboat
This read like a poorly research article where the people running the company
didn't even see what makes remote work feasible before allowing it. The goal
seems to be to get a lot of page views via controversy so you would scroll to
the bottom and see the ad for this person's company.

------
nottorp
I stopped at "Face-to-face meetings are most efficient (examples include
Reddit & Yahoo banning remote work)".

If you're giving Yahoo under Marissa Mayer as an example of good management,
your company was doomed from the start.

~~~
bradgalina4eva
I doubt Marissa Mayer sits in on every meeting...

~~~
nottorp
If you research her you'll notice that all the stuff about burnout being a
myth and being able to do great work by sleeping at work under your desk
somehow stopped applying to her when she got to be management :)

------
parenthephobia
> _After three days at coffee shops, your neck starts to hurt._

Don't work from coffee shops. That's just a bad idea anyway, as your CSO will
tell you.

> _Three days at home and you feel like a loner._

Nope. I work from home 4 days out of 5, and I'm constantly in communication
with my workmates. I also have friends outside of work. Even then, I like
being alone. Don't hire autophobes to work remotely!

> _Face-to-face meetings are most efficient_

I hear people say this, but rarely do I see evidence. Informal face-to-face
meetings often end faster, but they often leave important issues unexamined.
Face-to-face meetings also prevent everyone from working when they're
happening. With email and even instant messaging, I can participate in a
conversation even if I'm not available when somebody else wants to start it.

> _Technology is always iffy. In meetings, it boils down to Wi-Fi speeds,
> audio quality, and lags_

Learn to use text to communicate. IRC/Slack works fine over slow connections.
Plus, the minutes write themselves!

> _Remote work doesn’t allow for quick adaptation or response to ad hoc
> issues._

Your remote workers should have phones. Reserve them for when you actually
_need_ to contact them urgently and they won't just ignore them.

> _Some PMs are understanding of time zone differences and ad hoc travel
> reschedules while others prefer fixing meeting times and office hours._

This is a problem with your PMs. You can't have remote working whilst allowing
PMs to run projects in a way that's not compatible with it.

> _Balls are dropped or people reinvent the wheel because they are unaware
> another team member has taken action already._

Anyone who's worked in an office will know that also happens in an office.
It's important to have a method of tracking what work is being done, or not
being done, whether or not everyone is in the same office, unless your company
is 3 people sitting around the same desk.

------
kordless
I made a statement not too long ago to someone that "in a business
transaction, it's totally fair to blame".

I think it may be the business model that is to blame here, not the policy to
allow remote workers or schedule time for in person visits. Some models
probably work with remote workers. Some probably don't.

I'm willing to put my money on the one's that do work with remote workers are
non-viral models, enjoy a healthy holistic growth, and encourage focus on
quality of life vs. access to unique skills in the workforce.

The reverse is true of highly viral models. Those models enjoy rapid growth,
large cash injections, highly competitive workforce, optimizations for infra,
sales approaches, etc.

This article has good information, given it's taken in context.

~~~
gm-conspiracy
Shooting from the hip here, but I am starting to see that ADD style management
is not compatible w/ remote work of teams greater than a handful of humans.

Does that company have documented procedures that are followed and kept up-to-
date, or are new hires trained via lore?

------
Apocryphon
"Our team members prefer just walking over to a colleague’s desk to address
whatever is on their mind."

Not to quibble too much, but as with everywhere, this depends on the office
culture. It's depressing but there are many places where people prefer to use
Hipchat and Slack to ping a nearby coworker rather than bother to take off
headphones to talk to the person several feet away.

~~~
stormbrew
I would almost always very much rather someone asynchronously get my attention
than interrupt me. There's literally no way to do the former by "walking
over". Hovering doesn't count.

~~~
MaulingMonkey
This. I'll message or email people _right in front of me_. It also gives me
the time to collect my thoughts and think things over in a way that real time
conversations simply do not.

Sometimes the message will be "Lunch?" and we'll flap our meat to make noise
on the walk over to said lunch, during said lunch, and back from said lunch.
Or the carpool to/from work.

Nothing depressing about it.

~~~
Apocryphon
It's practical, sure, but there's also something alienating about disappearing
into the digital space when the physical one is right there. Supplanting
social interactions and all that.

~~~
csydas
I don't think it's meant to supplant interactions as much as it is to respect
mental space. My coworkers are very much so about the social interaction and
their breaks are sacrosanct. (Stopping Russians when they decide it's time for
tea is near impossible). But sometimes people are just deep in thought during
their work time and sometimes you just need to have an hour or two of
uninterrupted thinking time to get stuff done. This goes doubly so for open
shared offices; none of us have so much as dividers much less our own rooms,
so learning to respect personal space is really important.

Everyone is still big on the social part - most people all you need to do is
ping then when you want coffee or tea and you'll get a message back or have
someone at your desk ready to go in a moments notice. Once in awhile though,
you get nothing until hours later, which is just a "busy" signal. (no one
bothers with statuses since they either forget or no one pays attention
anyways).

------
bokglobule
With respect to the OP, I think remote work is the wave of the future. We've
been doing it in my large company (financial software co) in a large US city
for over a decade. As communication technology has improved (video chat, SaaS
apps like Slack, Github) distance has become no barrier... with some caveats.

We've found it works best when:

Near timezone- Remote people are in the same or near timezone as the home
office. This makes it easy to align the work day, schedule meetings, etc.

Remote shared location- making sure a group of people who work remotely have
access to a shared location where they can work together has worked far better
than people working from home, coffee shop, etc.

Culture- as I write this I'm in a large open floor plan style office. All of
the lead devs are chatting away with their team members located in Canada and
S.America. We love the ability to pull people in easily and work as though we
are all here. Frankly, we talk to the "remote" people in video chats more
often than many of the people in other departments. When the day's over we
head home to families, sports, etc.

It doesn't work if..

-Your culture stresses in-person interactions during and after work.

-You don't have a culture of trust.

-Your company won't pay for great communication apps & technology including lots of monitors.

-Your team works at home and is distracted by kids, spouses, etc, etc.

Frankly as tech gets better I think that one day the idea of moving to a large
city like SF, Austin, NYC, etc for work purposes will be seen as ridiculous,
outdated and needlessly costly. Likely there will be shared office hubs in
small-to-medium sized cities around the world where people can work with other
people in similar remote hubs.

------
didgeoridoo
Remote work:

\- requires more management, not less

\- requires more documentation and communication, not less

\- can be equally as expensive (all-in) as colocating.

If you're going remote because you think you don't need to manage people,
don't care about documentation or process, and want to save money, you are
throwing your company away.

~~~
JimRoepcke
More documentation and more communication is a good thing.

How much management does it take to run an office? "Office Managers" are a
thing. They aren't even managing projects.

I don't yet understand how remote work can be as expensive as colocating -
perhaps in an extreme circumstance? Surely not in general. Perhaps if you're
having your remote people travel several times a year to meet up, but that's
optional and depending on the area of the world the office would be, it could
still be cheaper than the travel.

Of course you still need to manage people, but in my experience it doesn't
take more management, just more discipline. If your people aren't disciplined
enough to care about documentation or process or communication, you are
throwing your company away.

------
ArtDev
Skimming the article, it doesn't look like they had any system at all (or its
just not mentioned).

Daily Scrum, Jira/ticket tracking, Hipchat/slack are are essential tools
whether you are remote or in the same physical office.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Agreed. There didn't seem to be any processes, tool, and/or adjustments to
make a non-centralized network work. I got the impression "assume" is a
popular word there.

------
mcguire
" _We still value giving our team members flexibility to work efficiently.
Currently, two team members are remote working while traveling / living in
different countries. Within the framework of self-management and flexibility,
these “exceptional” situations aren’t seen as unfair by colleagues, but a
different lifestyle choice._"

Prediction: those working remotely will leave or stop working remotely. If
everyone else is local and the major form of communication is to drop by their
desk, anyone remote will be out of the loop most of the time. That sucks.

------
codingdave
They set themselves up to fail when they all lived each near other and set up
an office. At that point, they were not a remote company, they were just
people who worked from home a lot.

Working remotely is a totally different mindset, with different tools,
different ways of communicating. When you have NO options to get together in
person, you must develop the tools and techniques to make your communications
work. These guys gave themselves an out, so they never had to do that.

~~~
mtnygard
I sometimes describe that as the difference between being "remote" and being
"distributed." When you're remote, it means you are distant from _some_
central location. A distributed company has no central location.

You're totally right that being distributed forces a company to develop
different skills. Electronic communication becomes primary. You have to work
hard to eliminate "privileged" information channels (because they de-privilege
everyone else.)

I wasn't too impressed with the level of introspection in the article. It
seems to be one of those "CEO's Medium article as marketing" bits.

~~~
webmaven
_> I sometimes describe that as the difference between being "remote" and
being "distributed."_

I've seen it described as the difference between "remote friendly" and "remote
first".

------
nl
(Disclaimer (?): worked from home for 2 years. Don't in my current role)

It's interesting.

Many proponents of remote work point out how much more effective it makes
them.

The thing is that really doesn't matter. The thing that matters is how well
the team works.

I'm a big proponent of asynchronous messaging when things aren't needed
immediately. BUT there are times when immediate answers are needed, and the
fact that this breaks someone's concentration is less important than keeping
the team working smoothly.

~~~
nottorp
However, those times are _rare_ and 98% of a remote team's communication needs
are best done in text only asynchronous mode.

Incidentally, this is a good way for people to actually take phone/voice calls
seriously - when they're rare, it really means it's important.

~~~
nl
_However, those times are rare and 98% of a remote team 's communication needs
are best done in text only asynchronous mode._

I'm unconvinced.

I'm far from an advocate for pair-programming, but nevertheless I have seen
how well it can work. It seems to me that that "shared brain" deep and rapid
communication is extremely synchronous.

I wouldn't argue that it is _required_ 98% of the time, but I also think that
it being unnecessary 98% of the time is a exaggeration (if we measure based on
the _team 's_ overall output somehow. Measuring it is of course impossible,
but as a though experiment..)

------
JimRoepcke
As they say in the analytics world: "sample size".

One person's experience is not a compelling argument against remote work.
Thanks for sharing though!

------
tboyd47
I would love to see some research on just how much effect "water-cooler
conversations" really have. In my entire career, I have never witnessed a
casual conversation about ideas in the office turn into actual requirements
with stakeholders and a deadline.

~~~
nottorp
Water cooler conversations are for getting raises/promotions.

That's why if you want to work remotely, it's best to do it in an all remote
setup that's fair to everyone.

------
therealmarv
You don't live the remote work system therefore it fails for you. I also think
that when you mix remote and office work there is always something which some
people will miss out in conversation and people will start reinventing the
wheel. Look e.g. at GitLab and especially GitLab's Handbook... they work
remotely and tend to write everything down. Nothing against office work but
I've seen way to often that mixed remote and office workers situation fails.

------
blacksmythe

      >> less than 10% annual turnover for people who pass probation
    

I would love to see companies willing to give this data in their post on the
'Who is Hiring' thread. That alone tells me this is probably a pretty good
place to work.

~~~
onion2k
"10% annual turnover" without knowing the size of the company is meaningless.
If there's 3000 employees that's a pretty bad sign. If there's 5 employees,
that's actually worse because someone has been cut in half.

~~~
flukus
I'd also prefer a team/department size. I don't really care if all the sales
staff are happy, I do care if the developers have high turnover.

~~~
onion2k
As someone whose first startup failed due to a complete lack of sales, I don't
agree. It's easy to dismiss any particular business function you're not
interested in, but entirely wrong too. Everyone has a role to play - even the
happyiedt engineering team won't keep a business going if you're building
something that needs people to sell the product.

------
pbreit
I think part of the answer is going into the office, just not necessarily your
company's. You can still get the dedicated desk, large monitor, coffee &
snacks and adult interaction but without all the distracting co-workers.

------
snarf21
There has been a flurry of remote work pros/cons posts and discussions
recently. In the end, it is what works best for the team. There is no one size
fits all.

A lot of people prefer the distraction free work environment, but I would
argue that LOC/hour or developer velocity but not be what is best for the
_entire_ team. If everything is isolated and everything has deep domain
knowledge, heads down can work fine. When that is not the case, it requires a
lot of active investment in over communicating between local/remote people and
explicit use of lots of tools.

If the business prefers everyone local, they have to also acknowledge that
along with the ad hoc sharing and other benefits, there are also downsides.
I've worked at top 5 internet properties where you ended up being in 6 hours
of meetings a day. A lot of developers also find it hard to concentrate in a
fully open space. The business needs to recognize this and provide smaller,
team based areas that are separate from everyone else. They also likely need
smaller isolated rooms for people who work best in a quiet and distraction
free environment.

I think the thing that I've seen missing in all of these discussions recently
is that it has been very _I_ centric. "I hate open floor plan." or "I tried
remote workers at my business". This narrative needs to acknowledge that a
project/product team is a group of people and compromises will be needed by
_everyone_ if the team is to be its most successful at adding value for the
business. Well, at least I think so...

------
INTPenis
Imho with a good foundation of processes remote work can be managed by anyone.

The key is that you must work in documented process flows like ITIL, change
management, service requests, incidents.

If everyone does that then it's trivial for any manager to get oversight.
Problem is that a lot of very smart and driven people hate being penned up
like that.

------
jondubois
Remote work can be good if the managers have really strong communication (and
psychology) skills and technical ability.

My experience of remote work is that a lot of managers are naturally
distrustful and have a tendency to set very short (unrealistic) deadlines (to
make sure that they get all of the employee's hours) - This forces remote
workers to either work crazy hours or rush things and produce lower quality
work.

Over time, the managers become acclimatized to the lower quality code and
their expectations for development speed go up. The number of bugs in the
system increase and developers spend more and more time fixing other people's
bugs.

The ironic thing is that fast developers tend to get all the new features
while the cautious ones are the ones who end up having to fix the bugs
(produced in a large part by the fast developers).

~~~
gm-conspiracy
I am not trying to be an ass, nor twist your words.

Would you say that local team dev work does not require a manager, or local
team dev work can be achieved with a manager that lacks communication,
psychology, and technical skills?

------
cableshaft
So the title of the article is technically true, but they had 4 people in
their company that tried doing remote work and decided they didn't like it.
Not everyone will prefer remote work, and those 4 people apparently did not.

It doesn't seem too notable to me that, for a grand total of four people, they
ended up preferring not working remotely. Meanwhile the article suggests that
it's at least a decent sized company that tried this and something
catastrophic happened as a result of it, which is what I was expecting going
in.

------
webmaven
_> Our team members prefer just walking over to a colleague’s desk to address
whatever is on their mind._

Of course. Nearly everyone prefers just walking up to a colleague.

However, nearly everyone _also_ prefers that colleagues _not_ just walk up to
_them_.

~~~
raverbashing
Solution for this is twofold:

1 - Do ask questions through Slack, etc

2 - _Do make sure you 're responsive_ and if you're not don't complain people
come and ask you directly

~~~
titraprutr
I don't think this will necessarily help. In my experience some people who use
Slack consider responsiveness as getting an answer right away. This isn't that
different from coming and asking directly - it still interrupts your current
thinking process.

More important is to understand how async communication works. Otherwise, you
have to create a physical boundary (remote work) to enforce this.

~~~
dasmoth
_In my experience some people who use Slack consider responsiveness as getting
an answer right away._

That's why I still fundamentally prefer e-mail (with a sensible set of mailing
lists and an easily browsable archive) for serious decision making. IRC or
Slack are great for building a community atmosphere but best reserved for more
ephemeral things.

~~~
briandear
I fundamentally prefer Slack. I don't have threads of various conversations
spread across multiple emails and replies, I also don't have to remember to
add someone to a email thread, for example.

Also anyone that needs to be in a conversation is in the Slack already. File
sharing, code sharing -- all that is much easier than email. With Threads --
conservations are more focused and organized. In-chat images are also super
simple (as opposed to sharing actual images or links to images that require
clicking as in email.)

I despise email and hate phone calls even more.

I think the 'problem' with Slack is how some people use it. The 'expectation'
of a quick answer isn't Slack's fault.

------
hharnisch
Depends on the person, team, and company. I've yet to see a company do local
offices and remote work successfully at the same time. While there are plenty
of examples of remote first companies having success. Seems like a
communication issue.

~~~
macinjosh
I work for a SaaS company that started with an office in Indianapolis. We
still have that office where many of our people work. However, a large portion
of us work remotely. We are spread across Europe, North America, and South
America.

We've been growing like crazy and things have been going well. The important
thing is to make an effort to level the playing field between remote and local
workers. It also helps that parts of our leadership team are also remote.

I believe success with remote work requires having the right kind of company
culture. Everyone has to be aware of the pitfalls of remote work and have the
tools, knowledge, and gumption to avoid them.

Some people end up not being able to swing it and others thrive. The biggest
advantage we have had is being able to hire from a much larger talent pool.

------
hashkb
This is "I had a bad experience with X so here's why X is bad"

------
jordache
lol he referred to team dinners as a good thing you miss out on.

