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Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

ben.balter.com

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Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#261

Post by lol768 »

DharmaPolice wrote: post #64
rcarmo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bit of a challenge today with chat, though. I work 4 timezones away from most of my team and we all prefer to swap e-mails, but chat seems to have stripped away some folks' ability to methodically go through topics, explain options and summarise next steps, leading to the usual "let's set up a call [to actually discuss everything in the e-mail thread]". Reading through old mailing-lists (and even older e-ma…

Email is the victim of its own success. Because it had/has such dominance in the business world everyone had to live in their inbox, marketers appreciated that and lots of people grew to hate that. There have always been bad practices surrounding emails but I think it reached a point a long time ago where email itself was considered bad. Thus "email free Fridays" and internal comms plans which say email should be a l…

> I too have colleagues who reflexively ask for a meeting in response to any email longer than a few lines, even though the issue is clearly communicated and obviously requires someone to read it and build a proper response.

I have spent many of these calls effectively just reading what I wrote in the email in the first place. Complete waste of my time.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#262

Post by paulcole »

spookthesunset wrote: post #255
paulcole wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a mistake. People who are pro-WFH are so dogmatic about it (and so protective of their “right” to WFH) that they intentionally reduce anyone who prefers working in an office to somebody with no social life.

Many of them bought homes way out in the boondocks assuming this covid remote crap would never end…

Yeah, and? That gives them the right to put down anyone who likes working in an office by calling them an anti-social loser?

Every decision has consequences.

Anybody who thought “covid remote crap would never end” is either way more optimistic or way more pessimistic than I am.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#263

Post by lukeschlather »

whateverman23 wrote: post #44
x86x87 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh.. The poor juniors. Instead of properly adapting the onboarding and mentoring to the remote setting let's romanticize the good old ways that imho sucked. Let's cherrypick and pretend everything is fine. We went from offices to cubicles to open space and nobody stopped to think if it was a good idea. Wr transformed the office from a place where work actually is done to a placr where we "socialize". Work? Do that on…

> Instead of properly adapting the onboarding and mentoring But... how? Remote check-ins with juniors every 30-60 minutes? That's crazy. But that's basically the only way to replicate the in person experience. The best mentoring results for me as the mentee and for me as a mentor have been when we're sitting next to each other. The mentor can visually tell when the mentee is stuck, and mentee can tell when the mentor…

Effective use of group chat works well. The most effective remote teams, there are little conversations happening in the team Slack, often more than once per hour that can go for 5-10 minutes. Some people are bad at communicating over text but some people are also bad at communicating in person and in-person just biases for the latter, it's not inherently better. It can be helpful to hop on video but there's a ton of ways to communicate, often more effectively and less disruptively.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#264

Post by spookthesunset »

esafak wrote: post #156
throwawayfear wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a description of your lack of discipline. Since the pandemic, I lost a significant amount of weight and increased my fitness across all other parameters as well. This is because remote work facilitated that. If you need to work in an office in order to get up to make a coffee or to ask for help or to "make consensus" then that's a you problem.

A lot of people don't know how to cook. Maybe the company offered access to a gym too. The "you problem" could be doing a lot of lifting here. I can cook but I appreciated not having to think about it, and the food was great.

If you don’t like remote work, it’s always “your problem” somehow. Everybody has to like remote work, I guess. And if they don’t it means they are flawed somehow.

It’s kinda nuts the lengths people to go put down those who simply hate working at home 40 hours a week.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#266

Post by NotSuspicious »

hypeit wrote: post #150
sussexby wrote: post #6

Currently in crisis because I simply can't handle communication in remote work. For something I do for the majority of my working day, I feel devoid of human interaction to such an extent that it's massively affecting my mental health. I regularly find myself clock-watching until the next time I can talk to someone because everyone is always busy - there are no water coolers or coffee breaks to stitch in between. Eve…

I have to admit as someone who enjoys WFH and would never work in an office again, that having co-workers like you is one of the main reasons. You should work on not relying so much on others. You may be benefiting from all that social "charging up", but you're taking that from the person on the other side of the conversation. I work to make money, not to fill someone's social void. You'll be happier if you explore t…

Yet another case where capitalism incentivizes pathologizing natural human behavior. It is absolutely normal to want to talk to people, to chitchat, to be social for some portion of the half of your waking hours that you are getting stuff done. At least on assembly lines you can have some of that. WFH can be demonic.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#267

Post by sussexby »

hypeit wrote: post #150
sussexby wrote: post #6

Currently in crisis because I simply can't handle communication in remote work. For something I do for the majority of my working day, I feel devoid of human interaction to such an extent that it's massively affecting my mental health. I regularly find myself clock-watching until the next time I can talk to someone because everyone is always busy - there are no water coolers or coffee breaks to stitch in between. Eve…

I have to admit as someone who enjoys WFH and would never work in an office again, that having co-workers like you is one of the main reasons. You should work on not relying so much on others. You may be benefiting from all that social "charging up", but you're taking that from the person on the other side of the conversation. I work to make money, not to fill someone's social void. You'll be happier if you explore t…

The root cause of my “issue” is I’m human and I’ve evolved to work with people face-to-face, not through a computer.

I’m not yearning for social interaction because I need a friend. I’ve got friends and they’re not at my job.

I’m yearning for the variety of different communication methods I have in a physical domain with the added bonus that I can change the environment I’m in to accommodate different tasks.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#268

Post by spookthesunset »

paulcole wrote: post #262
spookthesunset wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of them bought homes way out in the boondocks assuming this covid remote crap would never end…

Yeah, and? That gives them the right to put down anyone who likes working in an office by calling them an anti-social loser? Every decision has consequences. Anybody who thought “covid remote crap would never end” is either way more optimistic or way more pessimistic than I am.

Totally agree. I really hate how so many people paint those who want 2019 normal office interaction back are somehow deeply flawed and just need to straighten up and fly right somehow.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#269

Post by broast »

tenacious_tuna wrote: post #153
dinvlad wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work != socializing. Quality work requires deep concentration over long stretches of time, not tapping on a shoulder at random intervals. Both IRL and virtually.

I keep seeing people say this, but I always sympathize with others who lament the lack of socialization that comes with remote work. I have several engineering friends, and myself, who all have gone full remote and are starting to go a little insane from feeling lonely all the time. "Just socialize outside of work!" seems to be everyone's go-to response, totally missing how much time is taken up by the 8+ hours of th…

My team does collaborative sessions twice a week with the whole team, and has a game session once a month. Between all the rest of the meetings, and between the important work we get done through chat, I feel that we do get to know each other and enjoy the time we spend together online. Plus we have public and private social chats full of devs of relatively the same level or age groups where coworkers feel comfortable chatting about sensitive topics. I feel socially fulfilled by this but I can't know if everyone else does.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#270

Post by Hermitian909 »

spandrew wrote: post #246
Hermitian909 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even well done, this kind of communication doesn't substitute for more free-form 1:1s that in-person allows. The latter are key to building trust. I'm finding this to be one of the key drawbacks of remote work - some decisions require cross team trust and I've yet to see anything besides more frequent ad-hoc conversations that builds it. The problem is that the most trust building conversations tend to be "off-topic"…

Not discounting this, but i Free-form 1:1's always have an aura of being more "improvisational" and in the moment. Good 1:1's are supposed to be semi-structured (ie not 'free form'). A shared journal, a retro exercise, etc. I have not had the experience that these build trust. Good team work, and delivering high quality work towards a common goal do that. You popping by for a 3 minute conversation in ear shot of 5 ot…

I think I've been unclear on the problem. Trust inside a single team is not something I've found to be a major problem, but between teams. Let's be more concrete:

I need to build trust between between 6 EMs spread over three different directors and 2 vps + some very senior engineers. I need to do this so that we can solve one of the larger problems the business is facing. Most of these people have no good reason to talk to each other (or me) regularly. Without trust, one or more of these people will likely torpedo the proposal in order to avoid tying themselves to other teams and people they don't know.

Pre-covid the solution to this problem was (mostly) chatting over lunch. You'd get the right people talking, seed the idea, and build up to a proposal that everyone could agree to drive forward. IME this whole style of consensus building is dead in a remote world because async communication is too low bandwidth for trust building.

This makes it really hard to take good organizational bets, you have to wait till you have a mountain of data and customer feedback before you can sell big projects. The quality of the company's output really noticeably declines from this.

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