What strategies, tools, or practices have you found to be effective to make remote work better?

I'm particularly interested in;

* Sense of feeling together * Ability to talk to the team outside meetings * Natural & spontaneous conversations * Team culture

Let me know your thoughts.

Disclaimer: I've started working on this problem, as I couldn't feel satisfied with what we have. I want to hear what others think.

* Use the tools - ticket tracking, chat rooms, wikis or other documentation repositories

* Own it - engage in the conversation, do the work, help the whole team get better, accept responsibility, acknowledge your own mistakes, and acknowledge others' wins and contributions

* Do it in public - @mention people in tickets, etc., use PUBLIC chat spaces, use org-wide sharing of documents

A company I worked for in the past, which had a SF office and a smaller number of remote engineers, did not embrace the value of thoughtful written communication, and ultimately didn't see the value of remote engineers. It fostered a culture of "need-to-know" conversations where they felt if you couldn't be "in the room" then you simply weren't going to have the information you needed. They didn't value recording (video, text, etc.) the agenda, discussion, or outcomes of these discussions, so it only lived on in the individuals involved. This artificially stunted the remote engineers, and in turn it backfired on the entire team's productivity.

People seem to be a lot more open to sharing ideas. We tend to chat back and forward all day. If you really need to, kill notifications and mark yourself as busy or focusing and review the chat when you are available.

The only down side I've found is that workgroup chats, being somewhat private, can tend to become a bit of an echo chamber if there is any dispute or controversy in the workplace. Dealing with this tend has required everybody to step back and examine their behaviour. I would assume that if you had a team in a different location you could have a similar problem.

It's actually the biggest reason why we have a chef prepared lunch. We found that it forces everyone out of their desks at one time to hang out as a team. We usually don't even talk about work, which is the way it should be.

The other assumption is that the break out rooms will become longer term project team rooms. So if a couple of people are working on a feature for a few weeks they can take over a room to focus together.

I can say for sure that being a remote team enabled us to work around a lot of these concerns. It's easy to feel isolated when you are remote, so we work hard to make sure all communication happens asynchronously or in chat, even if we are in the same room. We also use video a lot, and my hope is that we can use it even more in the new office with remote team members.

On the days I go to my office, all I observe is people wearing headphones to be able to focus. Team lunches are nice, but we never talk about work. As I've already developed personal connections with my coworkers, I could go months without seeing them in person (as a matter of fact, that's what happens with my coworkers who live across the country).

The famous "whiteboarding sessions where ideas are born" can be easily done remotely, or in one off events in the office if people who believe in office work insist. I found shared docs and basic digital whiteboards allowing me to draw rectangles, arrows and labels as efficient than physical chalk/marker boards. Why? Because the hard work is on the ideas and conversations, not the drawing.

Also anecdotally, in 10+ years of office work, I've never observed a single "watercooler conversation" leading to a particularly interesting idea. I generally hear sports, weather chat and complaints about the food by the watercooler. Oh, have you seen that? I'll counter that with the dozens of non-watercooler conversations that led to interesting ideas.

We go into the office once a week, and i've found that on those days, just being in the office lets me overhear conversations about things that I can offer a solution to, or having a few people in the same area shooting shit often leads to a conversation about work and about a problem someone is trying to solve and often a solution is offered.

The biggest concept is that it's hard to "split" conversations while working remote. Either everyone is involved in the conversation (via phone or video meeting), or it's one-on-one. Getting the organic "handful of people in a group, and one conversation kind of breaks off to talk about something, then re-joins the group where someone else needed to leave for a call" kind of thing just doesn't happen. And that's where I find the most benefit from being in an office.

You can still have those when you work remotely. There just needs to be a mechanism set up to actively share things - where I work at the moment we have a weekly "web engineers" huddle to share ideas, tools, and articles we've found. We have Slack and stuff as well obviously, and we talk to each other, but there needs to be something slightly more formal when you're remote.

FWIW I've also worked in companies that had no "water-cooler chat" despite being physically present. You have to consciously want to talk to people, and some companies are full of people who just don't.

Recently joined a new company that is remote first with a fair amount of juniors in it. It's rather difficult since they often lack guidance and start rabbit-holing in the wrong direction before eventually failing or producing a very non-ideal solution.

For us a pure asynchronous comms workflow simply doesn't work well yet, this may change w/ more seniority.

I found that having weekly (or even bi-weekly) 1:1's with my colleagues and pair/cowork dramatically lowers communication barriers and boosts productivity through the roof (albeit at the expense of 2 people working on the same project).

Major issues can surface when colleagues don't communicate at all other than just pull requests / issues / standups / design docs (whatever you call them). It can cause people to perceive others are 'faceless entities'. This can range from building completely misaligned solutions to even sparking interpersonal conflict.

Management needs to make a conscious, methodological and deliberated effort to stimulate communication.

Dialog channels must be pried open in the remote era. There is a proper workplace culture for remote work. An organization doesn't just wander into remote with the same practices and culture of office work. My suggestions:

* rules for asynchronous communication. This includes a development methodology with full support on CI/CD techniques, issues tracking, code reviews, clear documentation, etc.

* people should be available on Slack/Dischord on pre defined times. You know the "my doors are open", "cubicles are meant to stimulate cooperation" slogans? In remote work these informal channels must be explicit

* There should be overlapping timezones in the team.

* stimulate frequent meetings with a maximum of five people, where people should talk not only about work but also personal subjects of their choice. This stimulates camaraderie and personal trust.

Most of the other pieces increase time spent on communication. That is not necessarily the same thing.

Having worked remote-first for a long time and at several different places I would say the #1 thing you need to be effective is a different style of communication. You don't want to rely on large group meetings much. In fact ideally you don't want to force much real-time interaction at all. Save that for either genuinely urgent issues - which shouldn't happen often - or casual collaboration that your people set up whenever it suits everyone involved.

One big win from having people WFH - assuming they have a sensible working environment at home of course - is that they can actually do deep work for long periods of time. You don't have the constant "background noise" and casual interruptions that come with working in a crowded, open plan office. But if you want to take advantage of that then you need two things.

Firstly you need some other way of getting the useful incidental information sharing around the team. You'll be missing the casual aside when someone at the office overhears two other people on the team discussing something they used to work on that ends up saving those two people an entire day of investigation. You need ways for people to keep aware of what's generally happening that might relate to them and to make open requests for help or advice without it becoming a hassle for anyone.

Secondly you need to not keep interrupting the person trying to do deep work in new and different ways just because they're at home now. Tools like Slack and Teams might be great for giving the appearance of everyone keeping busy but they can be terrible for everyone actually being productive. Usually that happens if there is a culture of expecting everyone to be permanently online, replying instantly to messages, and updating their status whenever their response time might be more than ten seconds. Same goes for having multiple group video calls per day and insisting that tasks in a project management tool only take a few hours to do yet still require real-time status updates throughout the day so Monty Manager can "report on the team's progress" or whatever else he does to feel useful.

> If you're in a remote team you know how difficult is to "connect" with other colleagues. Everybody is always in a hurry so there's no deeper synchronization.

I'm not sure I agree with this premise. I don't think it's difficult as much as it just requires some explicit effort and habits. For example:

- We have video standups over Zoom and ask people to turn on video as often as possible. This helps a ton IMO. It's tempting to just do async Slack standups (and we do on occasion) but it shouldn't be the norm.

- Our broader group uses Tinypulse to send out weekly questions. Answers are anonymous. If the questions are good (ours are), you'll gain a lot of insight into how your team is feeling. I might learn, for example, that I'm not spending enough time with ICs discussing their career path or that people overall are pretty happy.

- Weekly one-on-one's with my team. Again, over Zoom with video on. This is the best way I connect with my team and get at their emotional state.

- Code reviews. We do them traditionally in GitHub (every PR requires 2 approvals) but we also have synchronous code review sessions 3x/week in Zoom. These are just 90min blocks on the calendar and attendance is optional. During these sessions, anyone can present a PR, walk us through the code and demonstrate the feature. We don't do pair programming but I think this approach is even more valuable. It has increased our velocity, reduced bus factor, and provided another form of "connection" for our team.

- Every quarter we either do a team visit to the office or an offsite for our broader group.

> In my team, we're doing a "check-in/out" inside each meeting where we take turns by answering "With what emotion you're entering/exiting this meeting?".

To echo what others have said, this feels like a weird thing to do in a meeting. People already don't like being in meetings, so making them longer with this won't help. That's my 2¢.

Again, maybe I'm just spoiled with a great team, but I would start with some of the basic things I've outlined above. YMMV.

If your company stubbornly insists on synchronous video calls for every decision, of course you'll hate remote work. But if your company embraces the async nature of remote work, I think it's possible to be much more productive.

#1. Feeling disconnected from the team. Communicating async has a considerable amount of friction. Sometimes I don’t get early responses, then it feels like I might be disrupting others. Or maybe no one has checked their messages yet?

#2. Everybody seems to hate meetings, so we talk less. It’s hard to stay synchronized if there’s little to no talking. Check-ins might seem like a chore but I’m continually amazed at the insights during team huddles and ideas/queries bounce around.

#3. Social moments build bonds. At times I get confused about how to address my teammates because I don’t really know what communication style they respond best to. When we eat together, small talk and maintain close proximity, it becomes easier for me to “get” you. And the bonds grow stronger when we learn more about each other’s inner drive and purpose beyond clocking in and out of work.

At my previous job, I would bond with my teammates over lunch talking about random things, bouncing ideas, and I feel like we really were a team. We trusted each other. At my new, 100% remote job, sometimes my colleagues are just tuned out, and I have no idea why. I can ask them over our weekly videochat, but it's just not the same. We don't have the same level of trust. I can't read their body language. We can't just have a random 5 minute chat over coffee. Brainstorming online has also proven to be really ineffective. It works really well over lunch, with no stress and no expectations, but planning a brainstorming meeting really can't offer that.

IMO remote work is very weird and dehumanizing. You might feel differently. I know it works for some people, but I really feel like the cohesion in my team is nowhere near as good. Yet I feel like if we were in the same office in person we'd be doing much better.

My ideal balance is 4 days of in-person work and one remote day per week, with flexible working hours.

I'm now leading a team which is about 50% remote, with the remaining people working from home a few days a week, and it makes a huge difference. Discussions naturally occur on Slack, often spinning out into a few people jumping into a Hangouts call. For people in the office we've got the meeting room set up for video conferencing which makes it practical to have mixed local/remote meetings without the half hour of trying to get things set up.

Overall I'm a big fan, and hopeful that we can make people working remote even smoother as time goes on.

That said, I've come to the conclusion that for a virtual team to really work the company culture really has to be on board with the idea. Particularly I think it works best when the whole team or a majority is working remotely or semi-remotely.

The two firms that I've been with so far had only one or two remote workers on an otherwise in-house team that was managed very much in the 9-5 butt-in-seat tradition. They reluctantly went with remote workers out of necessity and with management that isn't too hot on communicating other than in person and firing up a webcam is considering something worthy of planning out days in advance and reserving a conference room.

Needless to say, I'm looking for a more remote-friendly team these days, but I do think it's a good warning to anyone looking into remote work. Find out what proportion of the team is working remote, really try to access the team culture for supporting those remote workers, and do concern yourself with how much buy-in management has to the idea.

The importance of understanding how people work (and what mood they are in that day) can not be underestimated if you want a team to be productive.

Some of my team leave an open video link on between each other as they do their work so they can grab a coffee together or chat about their plans for the weekend.