The more I read about others' experiences with remote work, the more it seems that it depends heavily on whether the company embraces remote work, accepts it, or merely tolerates it. The resulting experiences really need context. Unless a company is truly committed to remote work, it's going to be an uphill battle.
Much of this advice is true in every context, but much of it reads like it's coming from a place of fear and having to prove your worth and presence. I imagine that if you're one of very few remote employees of a primarily centrally located team that makes sense, but it feels really unhealthy.
Half of our team at Wildbit is remote and across many time zones that make meetings difficult at times, but it doesn't feel anything like this. Even the half of the team that's based out of HQ spends a lot of time working from home.
We also activley promote disconnecting and not being constantly available to get focus work done. And everyone's encouraged to not be constantly available because that makes it nearly impossible to get the most important types of focus work done. So in many cases, team members are explicitly unavailable. We even promote email as one of the best ways to communicate because it's less disruptive and let's people stay focused until they're ready to come up for air and respond.
Another thing that makes a difference is that we strive to incorporate the remote team into the daily life around the office. We have team retreats once a year. Everyone regularly spends some time in Philadelphia at HQ. And we have someone who spends a lot of time dreaming up ways to incorporate the remote team so we're not so disconnected. It's a constant effort on everyone's part to ensure we're supporting and fully embracing remote work as a single team.
> We even promote email as one of the best ways to communicate because it's less disruptive and let's people stay focused until they're ready to come up for air and respond.
Those are some of the advantages of email. It also has virtues of being searchable, transactional, naturally organizeable, recorded, and shared.
But how do you respond to the issues of its much higher latency and lower bandwidth? A 5-minute in-person conversation can communicate a whole lot more than 5 minutes writing an email. And while documentation and detail are great, a long, thorough, technical email can cost a lot of money. How do you control for these problems?
Does the loss from writing long emails offset the loss of productivity from disruptive and focus-breaking in-person communication?
Not OP, but the first 3 months of my current job were remote. It was mostly on our backend and frontend teams to realize that meaning/nuance might be lost in an email or slack message and to hop over on google hangouts (what we personally used, but replace that with phone, skype, &c.). Maybe if there's immaculate documentation and tests, then fully asynchronous communications can be achieved, but, from my experience, there's hiccups where synchronous communications need to be taken to overcome something that's blocking.
We don't hesitate to use chat or video if it makes sense. In fact, we use it frequently. We all trust each other to think about what medium makes sense for a given discussion. That way, people don't just reach for what's in front of them. It makes everything much more deliberate, and it helps reduce interruptions.
Much of this advice is true in every context, but much of it reads like it's coming from a place of fear and having to prove your worth and presence. I imagine that if you're one of very few remote employees of a primarily centrally located team that makes sense, but it feels really unhealthy.
Half of our team at Wildbit is remote and across many time zones that make meetings difficult at times, but it doesn't feel anything like this. Even the half of the team that's based out of HQ spends a lot of time working from home.
We also activley promote disconnecting and not being constantly available to get focus work done. And everyone's encouraged to not be constantly available because that makes it nearly impossible to get the most important types of focus work done. So in many cases, team members are explicitly unavailable. We even promote email as one of the best ways to communicate because it's less disruptive and let's people stay focused until they're ready to come up for air and respond.
Another thing that makes a difference is that we strive to incorporate the remote team into the daily life around the office. We have team retreats once a year. Everyone regularly spends some time in Philadelphia at HQ. And we have someone who spends a lot of time dreaming up ways to incorporate the remote team so we're not so disconnected. It's a constant effort on everyone's part to ensure we're supporting and fully embracing remote work as a single team.