Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

Me personally:

- do my best to avoid chat stuff like Slack, yes even to ping someone before calling, it's more disturbing than useful. Mails are the way to go, much more structured so well searchable and reconstructable as needed, when needed. Doing so force people to communicate a bit more properly in written form instead of wasting time;

- a home office, meaning a room, with relevant environment (low noise, etc) to been able to talk out loud not having to wear headsets and alike, I do not care much if it's a VoIP phone classic call or something else, simply the point is being hands-free all the time, with good enough mic I can move a bit keep talking issueless;

- trying to keep a wiki, which is a VERY HARD task because when you start it's empty so there is no point in going there and after some times many pages became a bit or totally outdated and there is no easy way to bind them to what they document so to get "automatic alerts of not anymore current pages"... It's still useful because it's the sole document culture vs oral tradition enabler that most people know enough to casually use.

Aside an INTERNAL CRM-alike might be of help to being able to get some infos about a contact calling you every time he/she call (including personal stuff like birthdays who help socially).

Doing more often does not work. Most non-tech people still refuse the idea of tickets and tasks to be established/picked, assignments and reassignments rules etc try to push them outside very specific technical landscape in general is worse than giving up on them. Seriously.

That last paragraph is the biggest issue IMVHO: most tools we have are simply rigid and annoying, so most people use them badly nullifying any potentially positive outcome. To be short: more free text, more comms, less rules works regularly better, if you still manage to avoid exaggerations.

Onboarding is the hardest part: if normally docs are bad in general those to "get start with us" are the worse, essentially nonexistent or if present totally useless. In the end even in IT most people do not know how to work with IT tools and paradigm, and tend to be unwilling to learn.

I have found that the key to running remote teams is cadence, communication, and connection. This is more difficult with a remote team, so you need to be much more intentional. Remote teams that are not connecting tend to focus solely on work and miss the purpose behind everything you do.

Here is a simple cadence: hold all-team group meetings to share core values, mission, and to keep the vision in front of the team. Next, create smaller groups if you are managing a larger team, and encourage introverts to participate alongside extroverts to build relationships within the team. By doing so, the team will work harder and even help each other as a cohesive unit. While it takes effort to build, it is worth it.

The final step is communication, which we all know is vital. With a remote team, you sometimes have to over communicate since there are no casual water cooler chats or coffee breaks to connect informally. This requires a time investment to develop, but the return is a longer-lasting team with minimal turnover. It's worth the effort to build a great remote team.

I'm afraid we speak of different things completely. I'm referring to personality differences and how to allow each personality to be part of the team. You speak of dealing with bad past experiences or maybe even trauma.

My point was that you should not and can not change other people's personality. You should make sure understand reasons of why others might not embrace same methods. And some advice in this thread ignores that. It's actually a source of frustration for many, not being understood on such basic level, while nothing is wrong with you.

i know what you mean. my argument is that a personality difference that is so strong that it prevents you from participating in a group discussion must be caused by trauma.

group discussions are a requirement in our industry. if not wanting to talk to people is a mere choice then you should be looking for a job where you don't have to talk to people.

in my understanding, having difficulty or even just discomfort to talk in a group implies trauma. and they deserve any help we can offer. but if there is no trauma and they simply can't be bothered to make an effort to accommodate the group, then why should i make an effort to accommodate them?

Basecamp is incredible for this.

Encourages grouping people by projects, with all communication on a project being public.

All activity on a project listed in one place.

Catching up with work takes minimal effort, including when someone goes on vacation or leaves the team. All it takes is skimming through the project.

Slack is built around chat with high has its limitations when applied to the context of a longer term project.