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.
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.