/distributed-work-notes

The Five Levels of Distrubuted Teams by Steve Glaveski

  • Level 1: Non-Deliberate Action
    • No specific action taken to accomodate remote work
  • Level 2: Recreating the Office Online
    • Videoconferencing, messaging software
    • 9-5 still expected
    • Recreating the office online rather than redesigning work to take advantage of the new medium
  • Level 3: Adapting to the Medium
    • Updating shared documents in real-time during a conversation (reduce risk of lost in translation errors and time wasted thereafter)
    • Investment in tooling (better microphones, video cameras)
    • Higher preference for async communication, AND higher standard for written communications
    • Hiring becomes more async and text driven (to filter based on communication abilities)
    • Shorter meetings (e.g. 15 min defaults) with clear agendas shared beforehand
    • Clear action items with assigned DRIs (directly responsible individuals) with due dates arrived at by end of meeting
  • Level 4: Asynchronous Communication
    • All of the above is fully embraced
    • Slightly slower but better decisions
    • More opportunity for flow state and creative, deep thinking between responses
    • "If you want to cut emotion out of the equation, increase your response time"
    • Accomodates all "chronotypes" (sleep patterns)
  • Level 5: Nirvana
    • This is where a distributed team is an order of magnitude more productive than any 9-5 team of its size
    • Mullenweg (Automattic CEO) equates this level with having more emphasis on ‘environment design’, insofar as the organisation’s culture, and the physical environment people work in is concerned.

A Guide to Distributed Teams by Juan Pablo Buriticá and Katie Womersley

  • All teams are distributed to some extent past a certain size
  • Re-estbalish context frequently, ensure everyone is one the same page
  • "Making written communication channels the default makes information distribution clear and reliable"
  • Managing time-zone spread within teams is critical to reducing negative scheduling impacts
  • Real-world face time still important at least every six months.
  • Hiring: " When you’re hiring remotely, hire remotely: Have your process mirror how you’ll work. Interview folks over video call, rather than in person. Pay attention to the clarity of written communication during hiring emails and how responsive your candidate is. Do they arrive to the video call on time? Do they send back your take-home on time? If not, are they communicative about needing more time? A candidate who’s hard to connect with during hiring isn’t likely to be a great remote worker."

Managing Remote Teams - A Crash Course by Andreas Klinger

  • Main benefits:
    • Being able to hire, the best possible people independent of where they (or you) are
    • Optimizing for the quality of life and tuning personal performance
    • Long(er)-term team retention
  • Meetings: All process is more important: timeliness (starting/end), notes, sharing agenda beforehand, etc
  • Innovation vs Iteration
    • Iteration easier remote (individual performance)
    • Innovation easier in person (creativity)
  • Overcommunication is often necessary
  • Useful questions: How can you or someone in your team… … troubleshoot alone when it’s in the middle of the night for everyone else? … enable new developers to be able to learn by themselves? … guide coding best practices? … avoid making pull requests a slow process? … prevent meetings that don’t create value? … enable developers to make product decisions on their own? … avoid worst case scenarios? … increase confidence? (speed comes through confidence!)
  • Common approaches
    • Clear strategy and high-level goals
    • Strong onboarding documents and employee handbooks
    • Clear policies around decisions/changes requiring multiple eyes or other people’s feedback (e.g., stack changes, security concerns, etc.)
    • Recorded videos instead of live-conversations or demos

How to operate your startup under lock-down by Andreas Klinger

OMG I’m working remotely, now what?! by Benedikt Lehnert

  • When in doubt, over-communicate
  • Example week flow
    • Monday zoom 1:1s
    • Monday async virtual standup
    • Throughout the week - adhoc meetings
    • Fridays - sync as a team
  • Meetings
    • Replace as many meetings as possible with: async chats/email, shared documents
    • Capture notes
    • Appoint a moderator if needed to keep track of time
  • Encourage a culture of sharing frequent updates
    • Use a scrum or team channel
    • "Pro-tip: Do a screen recording with you talking over your design / prototype / slides and share that with your team mates. That way they get your full train of thought and can listen to you as well for an added personal touch and connection."

There's No One Right Way to Work Remotely

  • "HashiCorp employees have a few things in common in approaching remote work — they look inwards to understand what's important to them, they shape their work environment and calendar to reflect those priorities, and they thoughtfully communicate and connect with colleagues."
  • Integrating vs separating work and personal life is an individual choice (includes many anecdotes)
  • "Work the room" when hosting team calls: "Ask for peoples' opinions, make sure you spread the time around so one or two people don’t dominate"
  • "Distributed companies don't provide a social network "for free" like co-located companies, so it's important for employees to be more intentional about creating both their work community and their local community."
  • "Remote relationships take more effort because you are not forced to interact with people...you have to be intentional and brave. When you are meeting a remote colleague for the first time, take a moment to learn about them, their story. Ask them what their interests are outside of work. It can seem odd when you are there to talk about a project that is behind schedule, but it may do a lot to build trust and empathy in the long run."
  • Emojis can help communicate body language and friendliness