Justyna Ilczuk and Maxwell Davis would love to hear your thoughts on this. Who else is fully remote? <@U02U9TESZ6U>, WBE User
writen by Tiago Ferreira
I don’t think there’s an easy straight answer. There are a lot of caveats to this.
http://Remote.com|Remote.com handbook should also have some material to this https://www.notion.so/Remote-Handbook-a3439c6ccaac4d5f8c7515c357345c11 http://Todoist.com|Todoist.com has been talking about this for as long as I remember, especially async communication.
writen by WBE User
In short and very much simplified: the key is
- Remote first (meaning everything is remote, even in-house Meetings if there’s an office)
- Especially for global teams: async first.
writen by Benedikt
When I was working on weekend, most of the peeps were in the office but for every meeting we would still jump into our own devices. That made things much more inclusive for the people wroking remotely
writen by Tiago Ferreira
It starts with the people. You need employees with intrinsic motivation and willingness to work remotely. You can’t really make an office person go for remote always. So setting expectations here.
Then you should praise them regularly and make calls with them once a month or so. Be sure not to do this for performance reviews (only) but to get to know each other and get to know about possible issues. Encourage meetings online as well as offline but don’t enforce this (people have families and stuff).
writen by Benedikt
So a company that decides to work with remote employees needs to make sure all of the current and future employees are ok with it right? What about the hybrid mode? Does that work?
writen by Tiago Ferreira
Abhishek Taneja and Matthias Endler would love to hear your thoughts on this too
writen by Tiago Ferreira
Yes, you need to make sure the (current future) employees are ok with it (at best really want this), and have the capabilities to either work from home or a co-working space. Which the company should support then. You will lose all of the people not ok with this kind of work, eventually.
As well as with full remote, the hybrid mode does only work if you’re using the remote and async first approach as well. The thing is: When you have people working in the office and they do their stuff there physically, like meetings and whatnot the remote employees are kind of cut out. Adding to the above: Async first should also mean that your write down everything. You document what you’re about to do for the day (standup), you document what you did and learned and so on. The company’s leaders have to make sure they document every decision as well and define (multiple) channels to deliver the news. You might have processes for those steps but in the end, it just has to be as easy as possible for everyone to read things up.
As you mentioned, everyone should hop to their own computer (headsets) at best for meetings and collaborations. Even using a meeting room’s communication set for one half of the team and the computers for the remote part of the team is less effective and might drive the remote people mad in the long run.
writen by Benedikt
Documentation is a great point too Benedikt. How do we make sure people read stuff? Is it better to announce those big decisions in meetings?
writen by Tiago Ferreira
You can’t make sure they do until you do tests. What would most people go mad again. So just mention it whenever you can, point ppl to rtfm (friendly ) and make sure things get updated when they change.
Imho you don’t need meetings for announcing decisions. You could do this via different channels (i.e. video Sharing in all communication channels). Unless you want a discussion about it. Then a meeting might be useful.
writen by Benedikt
What Benedikt said is pretty much spot on. It helps me meet the team at least once in the first few weeks. Makes onboarding so much easier. Also: if you go fully remote, make sure you got a private space (with a door) that you only use for working. At least for me it’s necessary to stay focused. Invest in good gear: a good chair, good headphones, etc. It will pay off quickly. Timezones are a bitch. It’s easier if you have a team that is used to work async. If not, establish availability time ranges, ask for a summary of the problem before jumping on a call etc.
writen by Matthias Endler
Indeed Shameless plug: https://bgrande.de/blog/useful-remote-setup-equipment/|https://bgrande.de/blog/useful-remote-setup-equipment/ And https://bgrande.de/blog/12-things-you-should-know-when-working-from-home/|https://bgrande.de/blog/12-things-you-should-know-when-working-from-home/
writen by Benedikt
I once had the idea of creating a nice, clean website about gears specifically targeted towards remote devs. Focus on remote and dev.
writen by Matthias Endler
Reviews would come from Reddit and probably interviews with other devs. Affiliate-marketing revenue model.
writen by Matthias Endler
That’s interesting Matthias Endler. I had a pretty similar idea in the past. Especially the interviews and tips and gear. 😊
writen by Benedikt
Pretty much anytime. https://cal.com/matthias-endler We can also meet at the office.
writen by Matthias Endler
https://remote.co/ looks like a manager built a job-board once 10 years ago.
writen by Matthias Endler
I’m talking about a modern version of https://usesthis.com/ with a clean layout and proper recommendations for the best gear.
writen by Matthias Endler
actually one could start to seed the page by scraping usethis for gear and then sorting them by number of occurences.
writen by Matthias Endler
And I thought you would share this: https://endler.dev/2022/zerocal/|https://endler.dev/2022/zerocal/ Will try to make an appointment :wink:
writen by Benedikt
Yeah that one went completely though the roof yesterday! The Paas provider (http://shuttle.rs|shuttle.rs) crashed twice under the load. It’s down again right now.
writen by Matthias Endler
Nice! Although I should have said stateless and not serverless. The HN community was really undecided on the definition of serverless.
writen by Matthias Endler
