Like muaddirac, I, too, think there's a lack of tools for solving the problem. I've been a remote worker for ten years or so. A couple of years ago, a colleague and I decided to just run a continuous all-day video conferencing session with dedicated screens and speakers. It was really great for hashing out random ideas as we thought of them, getting in some "water cooler" talk, joking about who's doorbell is ringing, and even having some beers together after a long day at work. It wasn't perfect (Google Hangouts kept wanting to kick us out every two hours, for instance), but gave me optimism that good tools could go a long way towards solving the problem. (One of these days, maybe I'll get around to putting together my own WebRTC telepresence solution.)
In any case, let me be the first to welcome you to Denver! There's no other place that I'd rather work non-remote. ;)
From my experience working with remote workers, problems tend to be bucketed under "loss of context". The remote worker misses so many ad-hoc (e.g. lunch with a colleague) workplace conversations that they end up knowing less about what is going on.
Time zone differences further complicate thing (misalignment of working hours).
Secondly, and something perhaps tech could solve, is difficulty of working on problems together. I haven't seen a good video conferencing solution that comes close to two people in a room drawing on a whiteboard.
I work remotely, as does pretty much my entire company. Some of the biggest issues we have due to remote work is communication tools. I haven't found a tool that can replace the ease of communicating with a large number of people in the same room when having a collaborative discussion. I think the issue is largely due to latency. It's take a lot of practice to understand how to communicate effectively using video conferencing software.
Another issue is team building / comradery. I don't know my current coworkers nearly as well as I've been able to know coworkers from previous companies I've worked with. When remote you don't get to go to lunch, grab coffee or a beer with your coworkers. We do travel a lot to meet up, but I still only see people I work with closely when doing so. As the company grows it's much more difficult to even begin to meet everyone in the company which is much easier when in and office because everyday you can bump into someone different.
We've tried to solve this to some extent through randomly pairing two people every two weeks to schedule a short 15 minute meeting. However the scheduling itself is not automated and it's not always easy to schedule time due to lack of proper calendaring software and distributed share calendars. This is definitely something that could be solved but it's just another challenge of working remotely.
This fits my experience pretty well. The available communication tools suck so much, people are for the most part not used to communicate effectively / frequently enough in remote setting.
I think it's solvable with better technology (something like Facebook's Horizon Workrooms), but at the same it seems very far.
So, uh, we usually just hop on video chat for this. They should have been on video chat when you were talking about the problem. The issue with your company is not that remote working is less collaborative, it's that you're not doing the basic, minimum effort required to make remote working even possible.
Somehow, and I don't know how this is still possible in 2013, but I don't consider remote collaboration tools to be a "solved" problem. I say this because at our shop, we have blocking issues with remote conferencing on a pretty regular basis. The most common problem is when one person turns on their speaker and creates feedback/echo, and then we have to spend an annoying 5 minutes just tracking it down. Maybe we're on the wrong tech (we use WebEx and Lync), or maybe it's a training problem. But I suspect we're not alone..
If there actually was a seamless audio/video conferencing technology that still worked perfectly even when subjected to the dumbness of office people, then I think I would have a different opinion of remote work.
But as it is, I think the productivity tax is significant enough to be worth worrying about. Especially since the tax is not just inflicted on the people working remotely, but also on everyone in the office that interacts with them.
None of these are big problems. The biggest problem we have is communicating effectively with people in various time zones, and making them feel apart of the team. Video conferencing is still an area that is lacking in this area. I've yet to find a service that meets all our needs. Right now we are using LifeSize because it's the best we've found, and still fairly annoying.
The problem really isn't on the "hiring" end. It's how to work as effectively with remote people as you would with people in the same office. When you introduce friction with remote, it causes problems. That being said, I think it's a worthwhile problem to solve.
Not sure this helps, but this is our biggest struggle right now.
This seems like it would be taken care of fine by formalizing some remote training, mentorship, and pair programming activities. Something that better work environments already think about, remote or not. Not sure why this would be some sort of unsolvable problem.
Edit: also a remote culture of hopping onto a one-on-one voice, vid, and/or screenshare helps too.
Seriously, videoconfering (hangouts, webex, zoom.us, appear.in, etc...) solves this. As a matter of fact I can get a face to face meeting faster with remote worker than on-site workers.
No remote working solution comes close to in-person collaboration, in my opinion. I can explain someone something in probably less than half the time in person than over some electronic link-up.
I'm not sure what it is (lack of body language? Lack of shared physical presence and tools?) or if it can be remedied by better technical solutions (it's possible), but it's the reality right now.
> Real time, remote communication through tools like zoom, slack, and lucidchart (in my humble opinion) has been solved.
Unfortunately, that's not the case.
Remote meetings can be far more frustrating and inefficient because of latency, total lack of turn-taking cues, inability to read emotional expressions of concern or worry on one person or to "read the room", emotional fatigue from lack of cues, and so on. And that's all assuming best-case scenario that your equipment and internet are working well. People pay attention less, speak up less, and so on.
Now, this isn't to say that remote communication isn't useful -- it's obviously far better than not having it at all. And even when you're in the office, many teams are distributed anyways across offices.
But remote communication and meetings have in no way been "solved". They still present elementary problems like when someone asks "who has thoughts?", there's 10 seconds of excruciating silence followed by four people speaking simultaneously, then another 20 seconds trying to figure out which one person will actually speak, where nobody wants to seem like the aggressive bully OR never get to speak.
With regards to remote work technology , we've done pretty poorly:
1. Normal video chat is awful. We can't create eye to eye contact. We can't see body language. It's not very useful to build trust or bonding that way , and this is critical. There might be solutions but they're only availble to very expensive telepresence suits.
2. We haven't managed to create an informal environment via video chat , say like lunch or the water cooler.
3. Working from home requires a lot of self-discipline which is hard . Social face-to-face pressure works better as a motivator for people in general(see battle units) , and it rarely translate well into electrons.
4. Working from home is isolating, and it might be due to limits of the technology.
All the tech might exist, but it's going to take a lot more than a change in mentality. My organization has tons of cool toys that are designed to enable remote meetings. Every time we try to use them something goes wrong and even the people who attended multi-day formal training on the system can't get it to work. So instead we just use plain old telecons with moderate audio quality and no visual feedback at all.
Why were you not able to accomplish that with a Zoom video call or voice call?
Why was that not possible with a common Slack chat channel? Or a Trello or something?
A lot of times these problems boil down to people not being willing or able to dedicate the time every day to work on a project or communicate properly online. Often a combination for underfunded projects. And lack of written communication ability can contribute strongly.
I don't think that we should really blame remote for all of that.
That's a very real pain when only one or two people are remote. I spent the last five years in that environment and definitely missed out on a lot of relevant discussions.
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.
I hope remote teams will start to invest more heavily in keeping up to date knowledge bases to help with exactly these kinds of issues. Tools like Confluence/Notion/whatever should really be solving this problem.
Video calls really grind productivity down to a halt. It's a strange phenomenon - when I have a call scheduled, it's really hard to get work done in a half hour neighborhood of the call.
I know some teams that just sit in a video call all day with each other while they code. For these guys, it's like having everyone in the same room. People just haven't been imaginative enough about how to make remote feel like in person when desired.
Finding the equivalent of a face-to-face conversation is, in my opinion, one of the main communication problems (for the record, I don't think putting on a VR headset is the solution).
Working from home and working in an office have very different environments. So finding a solution that feels like the technology doesn't feel like it's present would go a long way to creating an improvement in remote work.
Another key issue, is being able to completely disconnect so that - by design - you can be separated from the constant barrage of communication without feeling worried about FOMO.
Many people end up doing remote work in person anyways at sufficiently large companies where in order to get things done they have to get on video call or phone.
The best solution I've found so far is to provide both as options, do meetings in a remote friendly way, and then have in person meetings for everyone a few times a year.
In any case, let me be the first to welcome you to Denver! There's no other place that I'd rather work non-remote. ;)
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