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Ask HN: How do remote first businesses maintain cultural cohesion?

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Re: Ask HN: How do remote first businesses maintain cultural cohesion?

#71

Post by compacct27 »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #40
compacct27 wrote: post #18

We’re getting there, I’ve been in your spot and have some tips after fighting for a better remote culture for months: 1. In-person events must happen. Best case scenario, once per quarter. Even once per year is phenomenal though. This will put out a lot of remote culture failure fires. 2. Team-only social hour with games, works much better after an in person event. 3. My newest experiment win: opening up a casual zoo…

Only a fraction of your employees enjoys your mandatory fun, but no one is going to feel comfortable telling you that. It will simply add to their pile of silent grievances that eventually cause them to leave.

None of these are mandatory.

Re: Ask HN: How do remote first businesses maintain cultural cohesion?

#72

Post by david38 »

Bosses like office culture because it targets them. Everyone is nice to them because they’re the boss. If they have a gathering at a bar, many will attend because of his status.

Try this - have the lowest ranking engineer announce they’re going to go have drinks and see who follows. Track that number for ten announcements.

The many rest of the people are so socially aware of power dynamics they go because they like being near Big Boss, or feel pressured.

Re: Ask HN: How do remote first businesses maintain cultural cohesion?

#73

Post by herval »

helij wrote: post #22

Work/company culture is overrated in my opinion. That's why I don't do anything special apart from regular catchups and being nice along with trying to get better paycheck and titles for people reporting to me. For everything else I let grownups (employees) decide if they want to mingle with others on and off work, either in person or over Zoom.

Culture isn’t about “mingling” - it’s about scaling a group of humans that’ll propagate a set of norms, rewarded behaviors and discouraged habits. If you just leave it to everyone to do whatever they please, you _might_ succeed, the same way you _might_ succeed by slinging code at the wall. You’re just ignoring the biggest leverage a group can use to achieve better results

Re: Ask HN: How do remote first businesses maintain cultural cohesion?

#74

Post by herval »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #11

Honestly just don’t think you can in any way that will be meaningful like IRL is. Video chat and the delays and how only one person can talk at once it just isn’t possible to have proper conversation and connections. Before the pandemic I would have believed it’s possible but now I just don’t care about remote workers anymore because I have been burned multiple times by them in ways that would never happen with IRL t…

We actually stopped doing video calls and do exclusively audio, with or without sharing screens or apps like miro/figma, and I feel like stress dropped meaningfully. Video calls are awful, they add noise and delayed visual cues that just confuse the brain.

Re: Ask HN: How do remote first businesses maintain cultural cohesion?

#75

Post by jasonboyd »

david38 wrote: post #72

Bosses like office culture because it targets them. Everyone is nice to them because they’re the boss. If they have a gathering at a bar, many will attend because of his status. Try this - have the lowest ranking engineer announce they’re going to go have drinks and see who follows. Track that number for ten announcements. The many rest of the people are so socially aware of power dynamics they go because they like b…

> Try this - have the lowest ranking engineer announce they’re going to go have drinks and see who follows. Track that number for ten announcements.

Out of curiosity, what outcome do you expect? This thought seems incomplete, I think, maybe, because the outcome seems obvious to you, but it is not obvious to me.

Re: Ask HN: How do remote first businesses maintain cultural cohesion?

#76

Post by androng »

bognition wrote: post #14
androng wrote: post #8

I worked at a remote first health hardware company with 35 employees for 1 year. From my perspective, there was no culture whatsoever. There was one zoom party where the company sent everyone snacks and playing cards. But aside from that, nothing. Only work talk. No side conversations, therefore no friendships. I think step one is to have the zoom call on for much longer than just the scheduled meeting time, which we…

Did people enjoy this?

I don’t know. I never talked to other employees about the company.

Re: Ask HN: How do remote first businesses maintain cultural cohesion?

#77

Post by pokstad »

speakfreely wrote: post #70
angrais wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's that a negative aspect? For many, that seems fair as it means you get paid the local rate and so can live anywhere in the world comfortably. Remote first does not necessarily mean bay area pay while living in a low cost of living country.

> How's that a negative aspect? Well, it reinforces a system where predominantly rich, white men who won the passport/work-permission lottery at birth are destined to continue receiving more money for doing the same work than the predominantly brown people of Asia and South America. It's difficult to understand why anyone who values equality would support this. > you get paid the local rate and so can live anywhere i…

Technically, both parties have to agree on a local rate that is comfortable. No one is putting a gun to your head to accept an offer. If you accept an offer, it is because you consider it advantageous to accept rather than reject.

Re: Ask HN: How do remote first businesses maintain cultural cohesion?

#78

Post by keiferski »

I’ve worked remotely for almost a decade and have taken some notes on this topic. My three big suggestions are:

- Have in-person meet-ups as often as possible. It can be at an industry conference or just having everyone visit the same city for a weekend. Working with someone online is very different from meeting them in real life.

- Add more “fun channels” to Slack, but don’t mandate participation. It should be easy for people to share details about their everyday life without feeling awkward about it. This is what my street looks like, this is what I ate for dinner, here’s what I did last weekend, etc. However, don’t force people to do this or it will quickly build resentment.

- Over-communicate what the company’s plans are, what the founders’ opinions are, the future roadmap, your values, etc. This stuff is mostly obvious when working in-person but can be completely unknown if you’ve only worked with people remotely.

Re: Ask HN: How do remote first businesses maintain cultural cohesion?

#79

Post by BerislavLopac »

In my experience, the key thing is to have a "layered" culture. Yes, you start with a general "culture", which ideally boils down to "don't be a jerk", "respect others", and probably "we're all in the same boat"; but then you give the managers and team leads the authority to adapt that to their respective departments and individual teams.

You have people who enjoy meetings and talking directly? Great, have some meetings and calls with them as necessary. You have others that - as a sibling comment stated it - don't want cultural cohesion and don't want to be "friends" with their coworkers? You implement techniques that allow them to be productive without constant interruptions and required interactions.

On one hand, implement async working practices; but on the other, offer people a chance to meet their local colleagues (not necessarily on the same team) in a coworking space (e.g. using Hubble [0]) or on regular "offsites".

For some reason, managers keep trying to find a "perfect" methodology they will just implement and things will keep running smoothly on their own; but that's an illusion. Management is all about constant adjustment and adapting to specific people and circumstances.

[0] https://hubblehq.com/

Re: Ask HN: How do remote first businesses maintain cultural cohesion?

#80

Post by whywhywhywhy »

herval wrote: post #74
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #11

Honestly just don’t think you can in any way that will be meaningful like IRL is. Video chat and the delays and how only one person can talk at once it just isn’t possible to have proper conversation and connections. Before the pandemic I would have believed it’s possible but now I just don’t care about remote workers anymore because I have been burned multiple times by them in ways that would never happen with IRL t…

We actually stopped doing video calls and do exclusively audio, with or without sharing screens or apps like miro/figma, and I feel like stress dropped meaningfully. Video calls are awful, they add noise and delayed visual cues that just confuse the brain.

Will agree the high framerate of talking over a Figma document is good for communicating that doc way better than screenshare.

But we moved all design ideation and strategy to IRL because something about the delay, audio quality and only one person talking at once kills the ability to think and problem solve. It’s like because your brain is so focused in deciphering the meeting that it can’t get into connection building mode that drives new ideas.

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