My friend and I were working on a tool for this when the pandemic started and our jobs went remote. It was a fun exercise and we learned a lot about webrtc and audio/video APIs. But we noticed there was a new startup every other week raising some funds to do the same thing and working much harder than us on the problem. Finally, Slack announced “huddles” and we gave in to the fatigue we had with some peer negotiation issue & dropped the project. Now, 2 years later, none of those tools have blown up. I feel pretty confident that tools aren’t the solution to the missing pop-in; culture is. Teams that want this capability have been figuring it out one way or another just like this example. Even myself: a decade ago I would work one-on-one on something and we’d sit in a Skype call, both muted doing our own things, music playing, but able to poke the other with extremely low friction. It was great. Nowadays with hybrid work and the momentum of in-person culture, I think a lot of people are unable to appreciate remote work as much as possible. IMO the pop-in can be an important part of the remote puzzle.
The Remote Pop-In (2021)
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Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)
#12In my workplace we use zoom breakout rooms as an alternative. When we have a meeting we move to the main room and have it there. Otherwise each member is in a breakout room.
oh, that's kind of clever. So when not otherwise in a zoom, each of you hang out in your own breakout room so others can "drop in"?
Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)
#13> There's really no remote equivalent to the pop-in. There is one equivalent, and everyone is going to hate me suggesting it: call me. Pick up the phone and call me. Yeah, Gen Zers, I said it. Use your telephone to send me an alert that says you want to speak to me with your voice. If I have time to chat, I'll answer. If not, leave me a store-and-forward recorded offline message, aka voicemail. If I have time I'll li…
Why would you ever leave a voicemail when you can leave a text message?
I think I disagree with all the advice in your comment, but this part has me particularly baffled.
Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)
#14Is it just me or are purple using a lot of goofy-ass fonts these days? What the fuck is the lowercase “f” in this post?
Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)
#15> If you're going to the restroom and will be AFK, you can join the restroom channel. You're in, but away. No one is actually wearing a headset on the toilet, it's just a fun way to feel like a real office.
Interesting, I would never have expected anyone to feel the need of recreating this particular piece of office life in a remote setting.
Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)
#16One related technique that I think works well is to hold "Office Hours" at least once a week.
Just schedule a regular meeting, and attend it - then advertise widely that you are available at that time and that anyone is welcome.
It's a great way to foster skip-level interactions, give help to someone who needs it, and just chat. It's really fun when a few people come in at once. Sometimes nobody shows up, and that's fine, too.
Give it a try!
Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)
#17The thing that remote “pop in” doesn’t do is let me assess how interruptible someone is. When I pop in on someone in an office, I do it when I’m not interrupting their deep work — it’s extremely easy to tell when this is. Remotely, it’s much harder.
Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)
#18> There's really no remote equivalent to the pop-in. There is one equivalent, and everyone is going to hate me suggesting it: call me. Pick up the phone and call me. Yeah, Gen Zers, I said it. Use your telephone to send me an alert that says you want to speak to me with your voice. If I have time to chat, I'll answer. If not, leave me a store-and-forward recorded offline message, aka voicemail. If I have time I'll li…
Voicemail is the worst possible form of communication.
Consider a plot of fidelity vs latency. You want to talk to somebody - high-fidelity back-and-forth communications instantly. It's up in one corner of our plot.
Now consider voicemail. One-way, lots of "um, uh" wasted time, tedious menus to fetch and wade thru it, maybe tomorrow. It's down in the other corner of our plot.
Literally any other form of communication beats that. Text. Email. Hell, send a letter. But you try to leave me a voicemail, you're saying "Here, you type this email".
I never even set up my voicemail.
Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)
#19> There's really no remote equivalent to the pop-in. There is one equivalent, and everyone is going to hate me suggesting it: call me. Pick up the phone and call me. Yeah, Gen Zers, I said it. Use your telephone to send me an alert that says you want to speak to me with your voice. If I have time to chat, I'll answer. If not, leave me a store-and-forward recorded offline message, aka voicemail. If I have time I'll li…
The problem with this is it doesn’t scale unless you have voice mail transcription.
If you get one call a day, it’s fine.
Getting one slack message a day is also fine.
Getting 50 a day makes it impossible, because unless the messages are transcribed, you have to listen to each one to decide if you want to return the call.
…and if they are transcribed, well… now you’re using slack.
There’s definitely something to be said for a call that you can’t do over chat (for whatever reason; some people just don’t “text” they only talk).
…but, calling arbitrarily when you want something flat out doesn’t work.
Personal experience: people call for trivial reasons, you don’t answer and they don’t leave a message.
3 missed calls from your boss, no message left.
Just leave it because they didn’t leave a message? Probably not.
…but, the reality is, most people cbf leaving a message saying what they wanted. They want to talk now, or not at all. …and, I don’t think it’s ok to just ignore your missed calls.
So then the pressure is on you to track down each of those people and see what they wanted.
It’s a nightmare. (My solution: choose a different place to work. /shrug. Can’t change the culture in some places)
Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)
#20No post body was provided.