The benefits of using email for discussions are pretty self-evident: The ticket communication flow was very similar to email, since the two forms are pretty similar, and I will treat them as interchangeable here. Unfortunately, their choice of loud mechanical keyboards usually makes remote workers social pariahs.Īny discussion that required more than one person would take place over email, with the exception of tickets/PR discussions that happened on our bug tracker (Gitlab). It also helps team members to bond and get to know each other at a more personal level. The on-site meet is crucial for getting to know the people you don’t normally get a chance to talk to (e.g. In my opinion, these behaviours improved the company’s products and kept morale higher, as well.Īn important topic that might go without saying is that we all flew to the head office to meet in person once or twice a year. The increased socialization gave people opportunities to help each other, it increased how well people worked together and broke down silos. Usually, this was an easy fix for me, but support didn’t know enough to ask for the fix, they just thought that’s the way things were. This made it much more likely to discover what was going on in what they were working on too.įor example, my friend who worked on support would chat about the increased workload lately, I’d ask why that was and he’d say that people had problems with feature X. Since we’d chat to each other privately in the course of work, we quickly became friends with each other and would chat to each other outside business contexts too. On-site team members must not be allowed to talk to each other. We had physical desk phones that we configured to very high audio quality.Email was used almost exclusively for any sort of decision or any discussion that required more than two people.The biggest differentiators I can identify between that culture and others are three: If you have any feedback or if other things worked for you, please leave a comment below. My impressions for what works are based on the way things worked at Silent Circle, so that’s what I’m going to detail. What usually tends to happen is that the on-site people communicate (and gossip) with each other much more easily, so the communication channels remote people have access to become second-tier. In my experience, having some engineers be on-site and some remote never works (that’s right, I said never, I’ll never become a pundit if I equivocate). The company had a central office, but engineering was entirely remote, which worked very well. Improving communicationįrom 2012 to 2019 I worked at Silent Circle, where we (rather inadvertently) created one of the best remote cultures I’ve worked in. Instead, I’ll assume you are interested in improving your existing remote culture and I’ll detail what has worked well for me. I’m not going to go into the pros and cons of remote working, I assume they’ve been beaten into you by the myriad of other posts, since it’s a trendy topic. Many of my friends have to be at their home office or a coworking space to get work done, but I can focus anywhere, which allows me to travel to another country for a week or two and work from there. Personally, I enjoy the freedom that comes with being able to work from anywhere, and I’m lucky enough to be one of the people who can. I did that for three years, and then I got a remote job and never looked back. It’s just a recounting of my experience working remote for fifteen years now and observations on what works and what doesn’t, but it doesn’t matter, because the amazing title has piqued your interest.įor a bit of background, my first job was working in an office, as IT support for a construction company. This article doesn’t contain seven tips because I hate listicles.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |