Connected But Isolated: The Real Problem with Working Remotely

http://blog.screenhero.com/post/60401526813/connected-but-isolated-the-real-problem-with-working?

by jsherwani • 13 years ago

61 39 13 years ago

blog.screenhero.com

seiji2• 13 years ago

A conversation with a remote worker begins asynchronously (usually in an email)

That's your problem there.

With your team (and cooperating teams), you should be using real time chat for group communication and IM for personal communication.

Now, HR and Finance and Marketing and Social Influence departments will probably be in annoying "can barely write competent sentences" email territory, but those aren't your immediate concerns.

If everybody is sitting in an open office plan, it's common to start talking to someone over IM, then turn to them and continue the conversation in person, then jump back to IM (especially if you're talking about design or architectural decisions someone else nearby has a strong negative opinion about and you don't want to get them "started").

These days everybody goes into work, jumps into chat, signs on to their local presence system, then exists as "at work." It doesn't have to be at work though. With our erratic work schedules, you don't even know if someone is in the office when you're talking with them ("Oh, you're in China this week? Guess we're not getting lunch then.").

ams61102• 13 years ago

Except, when I'm working and want to focus, I sign out of IM (or turn off notifications) and don't check email. Email is best because you can answer it when you're ready to think about it, rather than giving some half-coherent answer on IM while you desperately try to keep your mind focused on what you were doing before the interruption.

seiji2• 13 years ago

Part of existing in a company is not always being able to shut out the world. The power of the corporation is also its poison.

secstate3• 13 years ago

I think fog is a great metaphor for the communication disparities in a remote work environment.

That said, I don't think screenhero is the answer.

I telecommute, and here's a story that I believe is a much better solution than screensharing (how often in a real meeting do we grab each others spreadsheets or open docs?):

I was working on a project with a PM and he wanted to just sit on a call and work through a handful of smaller bugs to prioritize work and maybe knock some things out quickly. We ended up sitting on a Skype call for 3 hours working through things. That's a fair chunk of my day. Do you know what it was? Awesome! As long as both parties don't feel compelled to say something, you can just leave that channel open and it's surprisingly similar to sharing an office.

So here's my proposed solution, but it's not really in my domain to create it:

Spatial VoiP. Everyone in the company dials in each morning and sits online while they're working. Of course, you can drop out, or you could set yourself to busy. But the crux of it is this, instead of a list of callers, you could lay out a digital office complete with walls and doors where you can sequester yourself or a handful of employees for a meeting. And the volume of a person would be relative to how close you are to them in the "digital" office (I know, I know, Skype's volume management wouldn't suffice for this project).

Again, the technical aspects are beyond my abilities, but I imagine you could let the lines run really cold while there isn't a lot of communication so you're not chewing up bandwidth. If you're closed in an office, it could really just close your VoiP connection and poll the server as to the state of your door and dial you back in when it opens.

Anyway, that's a start.

jsherwani3• 13 years ago

Sococo does exactly this — have you tried it out?

secstate3• 13 years ago

Oh my, that's fabulous! Thanks so much. I knew something like that must exist, but didn't know how to search for it.

erik14th• 13 years ago

I'd use Ventrilo, you have rooms and you can mute or change the volume of people separately, if you're admin you can drag people to rooms, there's no video in it tho.

jtreminio• 13 years ago

At my last job working for Kaplan Professional, the bulk of the team was stationed in-office at La Crosse, WI, while the rest were scattered across USA and Canada.

The solution we had to the problem of asynchronous communication was making everyone log on to a TeamSpeak server. As soon as one person talks (you can mute your mic) everyone hears and can respond immediately, as a team.

I thought it was a very good tool for bringing us closer together, regardless of distance.

jc4p• 13 years ago

This seems like a great idea, but only if you also enjoy working in shared co-working spaces. I think doing the context switches of getting thrown out of what I'm doing and hearing someone else talk constantly would drive me insane (or force me to just mute the chat).

paulhodge• 13 years ago

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.

jsherwani3• 13 years ago

We've faced this issue ourselves when doing videoconferencing — with more than 1 person in any location, no solution works effectively. We've wondered about getting into this, since it would definitely solve our issue, and most likely solve similar issues for teams all over the world.

I agree it's surprising that this still isn't a solved problem in 2013.

GuiA• 13 years ago

Isn't that problem solved by having everyone wear headphones?

jaredsohn• 13 years ago

It seems like you just need to know who is currently speaking and mute them if you aren't actually hearing their voice.

Perhaps Uberconference (http://www.uberconference.com) solves this issue? (No personal experience with it and there may be other products that also help with this.)

ams61102• 13 years ago

Ugh. The conference call, web meeting, google hangout, whatever technology you want to use, you spend 15 minutes on "can everybody see me" "can everybody hear me" "I can't hear you" "can everyone please mute their phone" "I can't see the slides" I mean it's almost always a fiasco. I can't stand it.

timedoctor• 13 years ago

This is a lot more of a problem for teams that are not used to working remotely. Our entire team of 38 people are remote in 9 different countries and we have voice meetings on Skype every day. It's not an issue.

However I do notice exactly what you are talking about every time we conduct a meeting with a new person who is not in the practice of constant remote communication.

JoeAltmaier2• 13 years ago

Again, there are integrated 'virtual office' products that attack exactly this issue.

I do a daily standup with 10-15 people, all remote. Those issues are totally absent. We get started within 60 seconds of the desired time. We finish on time. The entire time is spent on issues.

The product we use is the one we build - Sococo Teamspace. We're a small startup made up of mostly Engineers who felt the pain you mention. We're eat our own dogfood, so issues like that are the top of our list.

http://www.sococo.com

bad_user• 13 years ago

collaborating with a co-worker in the same office is a matter of going over to their desk or grabbing an open conference room

Oh, how much I hate when this happens. Biggest problem is of course that people don't even realize the ensuing context switching is a problem, because it still feels like useful progress is being done, when in fact in most cases no progress is made.

The most common case for interrupting a coworker is when you don't know how to do something. As a general rule of thumb, all companies should have internal wikis for all questions that can be answered with documentation. If the answer is missing, then my answer is to write a wiki document for it. There are of course technical questions on the technologies used, which are a Google search away and I have a rule to not answer questions that can be easily searched (teach a man to fish, yada, yada).

Other reasons for interrupting a coworker are for design decisions or for discussing/prioritizing bugs, but those meetings need to be scheduled, preferably in the morning, not whenever anybody feels being chatty.

The real downside of working remotely is the lack of interhuman relationships that happen in a regular workplace, a problem that really can't be solved by technology.

pasbesoin• 13 years ago

a problem that really can't be solved by technology.

But that isn't necessarily heightened by technology, either. I got along just fine with several of my remote colleagues; I actually preferred emailing, IM-ing, or chatting on the phone with them to interacting with many of my colleagues in the office.

Some of them were remote because they needed to be elsewhere in the world, yet were so valuable to the company that they continued to be employed in any fashion that could be managed.

That was part of the pleasure of interacting with them: They were both sharp and down to earth. The jokes were pithy, and the work got done.

beambot• 13 years ago

Other competent technologists will understand the negative impacts of context switching... but Googling and structured meetings fail to capture all of the chance encounters that can be so pivotal to a project. Perhaps it's just me... but I've never found a way to schedule the free-wheeling ideation that can be achieved through chance, brief interpersonal encounters.

zimbatm• 13 years ago

Do you hate it because it's inefficient or because it's cutting you from a pleasure source ?

Some times I feel like the efficiency argument is a bit of an excuse that we use because being in the zone feels so good. Especially if you're the geeky type that doesn't derive much pleasure from social interaction it feels like someone just pulled the plug from your morphine drops and put some Tabasco instead. On the other side, working in the after-glow of the zone is inefficient but nobody seems to mind too much about that.

chc• 13 years ago

At least in my own experience, I'm pretty sure the efficiency argument is not an excuse. There are some days when I really don't enjoy what I'm doing all that much (e.g. "One customer says that form with the thing doesn't work — fix that"), but I still hate getting pulled away multiple times when I'm being productive because I can't just immediately go back to being productive, and now I'm doing something tedious and taking even longer at it.

wmat• 13 years ago

In the immortal word of Steve Wozniak:

“Artists work best alone. Work alone.”

Here's the longer version:

"Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me — they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone — best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee… I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

nilkn• 13 years ago

The office I work in functions almost as if we were remote. We communicate through real-time IM, a few IRC channels, our bug tracker, as well as email, of course, and some custom tools for monitoring the git activity of each team member. We also get daily email reports of all git activity, and there are weekly status emails from the CEO and/or CTO wherein they effectively brag about the accomplishments of the employees that week.

There are frequent days, in fact, when I have no communication at all with other team members about development topics except over the computer. If we need to talk in person about a design decision, it's frequent to schedule the meeting even if it's just going to be 10 minutes.

rusabd• 13 years ago

``This fog of work is exactly why, in her now famous memo...'' should it be ``infamous memo''?

dools• 13 years ago

The real issue here is the conflation of collaboration with communication. Communication is not necessary between collaborators and collaborative decision making destroys collaboration. I wrote about this recently so I won't reproduce the article in full here but I would love to hear what others think: http://iaindooley.com/post/52425576154/collaborative-decisio...

OldSchool• 13 years ago

These articles, especially with such a loaded title, are starting to feel like propaganda.

There are those who are miserable in an office, and those who would be miserable working remotely. I don't think any article is going to change an individual's preference though collectively enough of these could sway an industry's management attitude. The fact that we see mostly articles opposing remote work tells me that they aren't written objectively.

I'm with the Woz quote. My preference has always been to be completely async other than perhaps one pre-scheduled meeting per day if necessary. It's not always practical but it's an ideal.

MoosePlissken• 13 years ago

Did you read to the end of the article? ScreenHero is a company that makes software for remote collaboration. They started by acknowledging the downsides of remote work, but ended by stating that they believe these disadvantages can be overcome.

JoeAltmaier2• 13 years ago

They certainly can. the article presupposes an ignorance of all the advances in virtual office software out there.

<shameless plug> I work at Sococo. Our users are evangelists and total converts. In fact new 'local' workers prefer to attend meetings using Teamspace - they can identify who's speaking, learn what they look like, and come up to speed faster.

http://www.sococo.com

SomeCallMeTim• 13 years ago

This doesn't contradict the above poster's statement that it's propaganda. It's just propaganda with a (possibly) different goal than the above commenter thought (i.e., marketing).

ryanSrich• 13 years ago

Speaking of remote work. Does anyone have good resources for researching companies that offer remote positions? The only one I found to be relevant was wfh.io and that doesn't seem to get many posts.

nooron• 13 years ago

I just started working at Mobileworks. I know we are sometimes are in need of remote developers to fulfill our client's needs. Drop me an email (it's in my profile).

No guarantee doc, but I'll ask tomorrow!

imechura• 13 years ago

At what point do we accept that HN has become little more than an advertising channel dominated by thinly veiled sales pitches that pretend to be informative or opinionated?

This particular blog post feels like a bait and switch because I clicked the link hoping to learn something new about this real problem that we are facing and it was not until that last few paragraphs until it was confirmed that I was being sold too. Is this really the type of content that we want to promote to the top page of HN, the very same place where so many critical and important issues have been discussed over the last several years?

I hate to be "that guy" but the over last year, nearly every article or opinion piece I think I am reading is someone's blog post promoting their new product. I do realize that products and start-ups are THE culture here but there used to be a lot more actual opinions posted and many less blatant sales pitches.

Sorry for the rant, but I personally find myself visiting the site much less frequently because of this.

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

It's been that way for a while now. The ones that really get my goat are the absolutely shameless plugs in the comments that have only a shadow of relevancy to the article.

You know the ones.

Article: Great mathematician has passed

Comment: This reminds me of the iPhone calculator app I'm making, because it does math. You should check it out

noonespecial• 13 years ago

I'd be ok with it on two conditions.

1) The company in question is sufficiently "startup-y". (I know this is objective, but honestly, we know it when we see it.)

2) The title is more along the lines of "Here's how our startup's new product solves your problem."

For everything else, its called spam. There's a button for that. Flag.

nijiko• 13 years ago

Time to start a new underground and un-sold out place.

jvh23• 13 years ago

Coming from a 25-member tech team where all local members are very close (we get along well), I think that a big part of what makes us operate well as a team is our closeness. We get less stressed during crises, communicate better, etc. because we are connected.

That type of connection is difficult to establish with our remote members. Because they aren't sitting right next to us, we can't joke around or come over to chat with them in order to get some mental relief from the daily grind.

Essentially, our work environment is enhanced by personal contact with fellow employees, something that isn't easily established with remote workers.

kayoone• 13 years ago

I believe the biggest problem of working remotely is not solvable by technology. Yes you can share you screens in multiple ways, communicate using im, voice, email etc. but you still dont have real human interactions. You sit alone at home behind your machine (probably in underwear) only connected to the world through a wire. This can be dangerous in the long term so my advice is to get into a co-working space or get your human interactions elsewhere. For example by switching the places from where you work from time to time or use your breaks for a bit more social activities (workouts!).

This oatmeal comic summed up the good and bad pretty good imo http://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home

Connected But Isolated: The Real Problem with Working Remotely

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