Ask HN: Do you have inspiring spontaneous conversations while remote working?

In my example I wasn't talking about formal meetings in conference rooms, but exchanges between people in the same office space. There's always a tendency for people to ask what's been decided in the meeting right after it ends when they weren't present. This could be reproduced in a remote environment. Indeed, I think the minutes from the meeting should be published, even in an in-person office.

> Culture has to adapt to the environment. There’s nothing special about it being remote.

I totally agree with you. The only issue is that this adaptation may take some time. In my client's example, this was considered a temporary thing. Most people were switched to part-time, etc. I think they merely considered the remote thing as a bump in the road, and this situation may be pretty common among companies affected by shelter in place directives.

I think people may be surprised by the sudden change, and they are looking for ways to adapt. In the beginning, they will try to reproduce what they were doing before, which, of course, may not work as well. Which contributes to their frustration. I don't think that if they were forced to stay remote for a long time (some six months to a year at least) they would continue trying to fit the square peg in a hole that's become round. Maybe some would, but I'm hopeful that a sufficient number of people would try to adapt so as the change the surrounding culture.

Exactly this. You can not "force" these sessions, they happen to happen, or not. It takes (a lot of open mic) time to get these things rolling.

It is a number game: more contact, more bouncing.

For about 5 years I ran a worldwide (FPS) tournament with a couple of friends. We never met AFK. It had to work online, or it would not work at all.

This is one reason I always ask potential employees if they encage in online communities. I find it a tremendous plus if people are able to collaborate with "strangers" and without financial dependencies.

1. No, I don't miss them. Quite the opposite: Having to handle people who constantly felt the need to provide "feedback" and "input" used to be a big distraction, which is now more manageable due to the slightly higher threshold for initiating communication. The ones who seem to miss these "spontaneous conversations" the most is management, who seem to have been told that we should be made to have them. As for the more enjoyable conversations, they may be less spontaneous now, but remote collaboration tools ensure that they're still possible.

At the office, we usually had such spontaneous conversations around lunchtime, and they were sometimes work-related and sometimes not.

2. From time to time. When I want to talk to someone, I use one of our remote communication tools to have a text chat with them. Some prefer to use a voice chat or telephone call instead. Either way works fine.

I hope the “social side” of working remotely is kept to a minimum. Work socialization in the office led to some rich real-world friendships, but if the endgame of getting to know someone on a video call is just to have more video calls... gross. Remote meetings are such revolting experiences, it’s important that they be used as rarely as possible and with ironclad justification of business necessity for every second they drag on.

Most of the good spontaneous conversations I've had at work were previously on Slack anyway, for a couple of reasons:

- You're not interrupting someone / taking up their whole time. If you have a thought, they can wait until they're free to reply, and if you're both free at the same time you can have a good conversation. But you were still able to write out and communicate the thought.

- More people can join and provide input. I can always talk about things with a couple folks on my team, but it's super valuable to have someone from another part of the company pipe up and say "Hey, what about this" without having to consciously think of inviting them (and interrupting them, see the above point - the way to do this in person is to have extremely large "user group" meetings that are low value for their opportunity cost for most of the attendees).

- I can easily find people in other parts of the company / work across teams because teams tend to be in physically separate locations. It's super easy for me to run something past someone who works in the other building; it would take about 10 minutes of my time total to go there and back, and then I'd have to hope they're at their desk.

- This is something of a mixed blessing, but conversations are logged, so you can reference them later. To the example you give about chatting about things after a conference, I tend to write up what I've learned or ideas I've followed on and put them into Slack pretty quickly, with the expectation that we'll have a conversation about them at some later point but not immediately.

What I've been trying to do is to expand all of this and drive even more conversations to Slack. (To be clear: have the conversations in existing public channels, not in DMs, and avoid tagging people in. Also, do not expect people to read any particular conversation. Slack has a pretty good search feature, so if they ask about something later, link them to the previous discussion. I'm not at all advocating that you take up people's time with pings on Slack.) We do also have occasional video calls for higher-bandwidth conversations, but I've found they work best when they're structured as accelerators to an async written conversation and not as discussion forums in their own right.