Hey Lincoln and Ben, thanks so much for taking the time to share your knowledge. I am on my phone so this is going to be a short question/post.
Based on your interest in remote work I wanted to ask if you have any suggestions for optimising the performance of organisations and teams who are all remote/hybrid workers?
Two reasons:
1- This will probably be more common post covid19.
2- It is already common in EA related collaborations and organisations.
Judging from some of the comments below there may be blog posts from Ben that I missed. If so, I’d be happy with a quick response and links to anything deeper! Thanks!
Yes, we’ve been doing remote work in some form since 2014.
Ben mentioned meeting cadence, but I would add to that, designing meetings to build relationships. With remote, voice communication is much more deliberate and only happens when people make it happen. And human relationships aren’t really built over Slack, they are built via voice. So we’re thinking a lot about how to make more of the right sort of relationships happen. Some examples of this would be:
focusing 1:1s on relationship building with your lead (mostly by being careful to avoid the 1:1 being a “status update” meeting)
having weekly team meetings which are small enough (<10, preferably closer to 6), with time designated for everyone to contribute and share something about themselves. we’ve done this by going around and asking each person to answer a question, e.g. “how are you doing really?” to “what fictional place would you most like to visit?”
randomized 1:1 cross team chat events—we use https://icebreaker.video/ (if this looks lame, don’t write it off, it was surprisingly fun)
Beyond that, simpler stuff we do around communications transparency seems to help: nudge people strongly to put their message in a public Slack channel in almost all cases they intend to communicate with someone else. If you have a call to clarify something with someone, post the summary in slack. @-mention people when & only when you need them to read the thing you are writing. (If you have some tough feedback it’s fine to keep it private, but even tough feedback can often be phrased in a way which is easy to share with others). We chose these defaults of communication transparency for the remote team because we wanted Slack to feel as much like a collaborative office as possible, in the sense that “stuff is happening, people are here and you can listen if you want to learn, and contribute if you have relevant knowledge.” Many Slack teams default to “locking things behind DMs” in a way which makes that feeling a lot harder.
I’ll let Lincoln add his as well, but here are a few things we do that I think are really helpful for this:
We’ve found our bimonthly in-person “offsites” to be extremely important. For new hires, I often see their happiness and productivity increase a lot after their first retreat because it becomes easier and more fun for them to work with their coworkers.
Having the right cadence of standing meetings (1-on-1s, team meetings, retrospectives, etc.) becomes much more important since issues are less likely to surface in “hallway” conversations.
We try to make it really easy for people to upgrade conversations to video calls, both by frequently encouraging them to do so, and by making sure that every new hire has a “get to know you” call with as many coworkers as possible in their first few weeks.
(Your mileage may vary with these, of course! In particular, one relevant difference between Wave and other remote organizations is that I think Wave leans more heavily on “synchronous” calls relative to “asynchronous” Slack/email messages. This is important for us since 80%+ of us speak English as a third-plus language—it’s easier to clear up misunderstandings on a call!)
Hey Lincoln and Ben, thanks so much for taking the time to share your knowledge. I am on my phone so this is going to be a short question/post.
Based on your interest in remote work I wanted to ask if you have any suggestions for optimising the performance of organisations and teams who are all remote/hybrid workers?
Two reasons: 1- This will probably be more common post covid19. 2- It is already common in EA related collaborations and organisations.
Judging from some of the comments below there may be blog posts from Ben that I missed. If so, I’d be happy with a quick response and links to anything deeper! Thanks!
Yes, we’ve been doing remote work in some form since 2014.
Ben mentioned meeting cadence, but I would add to that, designing meetings to build relationships. With remote, voice communication is much more deliberate and only happens when people make it happen. And human relationships aren’t really built over Slack, they are built via voice. So we’re thinking a lot about how to make more of the right sort of relationships happen. Some examples of this would be:
focusing 1:1s on relationship building with your lead (mostly by being careful to avoid the 1:1 being a “status update” meeting)
having weekly team meetings which are small enough (<10, preferably closer to 6), with time designated for everyone to contribute and share something about themselves. we’ve done this by going around and asking each person to answer a question, e.g. “how are you doing really?” to “what fictional place would you most like to visit?”
randomized 1:1 cross team chat events—we use https://icebreaker.video/ (if this looks lame, don’t write it off, it was surprisingly fun)
Beyond that, simpler stuff we do around communications transparency seems to help: nudge people strongly to put their message in a public Slack channel in almost all cases they intend to communicate with someone else. If you have a call to clarify something with someone, post the summary in slack. @-mention people when & only when you need them to read the thing you are writing. (If you have some tough feedback it’s fine to keep it private, but even tough feedback can often be phrased in a way which is easy to share with others). We chose these defaults of communication transparency for the remote team because we wanted Slack to feel as much like a collaborative office as possible, in the sense that “stuff is happening, people are here and you can listen if you want to learn, and contribute if you have relevant knowledge.” Many Slack teams default to “locking things behind DMs” in a way which makes that feeling a lot harder.
I’ll let Lincoln add his as well, but here are a few things we do that I think are really helpful for this:
We’ve found our bimonthly in-person “offsites” to be extremely important. For new hires, I often see their happiness and productivity increase a lot after their first retreat because it becomes easier and more fun for them to work with their coworkers.
Having the right cadence of standing meetings (1-on-1s, team meetings, retrospectives, etc.) becomes much more important since issues are less likely to surface in “hallway” conversations.
We try to make it really easy for people to upgrade conversations to video calls, both by frequently encouraging them to do so, and by making sure that every new hire has a “get to know you” call with as many coworkers as possible in their first few weeks.
(Your mileage may vary with these, of course! In particular, one relevant difference between Wave and other remote organizations is that I think Wave leans more heavily on “synchronous” calls relative to “asynchronous” Slack/email messages. This is important for us since 80%+ of us speak English as a third-plus language—it’s easier to clear up misunderstandings on a call!)