Remote-First Communication for Project Teams

http://spin.atomicobject.com/2015/01/30/remote-first-communication/

by englishm • 11 years ago

58 14 11 years ago

spin.atomicobject.com

rattray2• 11 years ago

The biggest nugget from this piece seems to be this:

Remote-first communication that clearly documents problems encountered, ideas proposed, and decisions reached works best in organizations with strong no-blame cultures.

I like the idea that remote-first encourages a number of best practices, including a no-blame culture.

evgen• 11 years ago

It does not encourage such a culture, this post is just suggesting that no-blame is a requirement to sustain a remote-first policy. You can more easily have a no-blame culture without artificial conditions like remote-first.

rattray2• 11 years ago

Actually, you're totally right. Thanks for the correction!

ryusage• 11 years ago

I like the idea; it makes a lot of sense. In practice though, there are a LOT of times that it's much, much faster to communicate verbally. I feel like trying to really stick to this remote-first style might be more difficult/frustrating than it sounds.

smackfu• 11 years ago

Yes, it may make sense to talk on the phone, but I don't find that's a good strategy for first contact. Especially if people don't answer their phone or like to small talk.

engendered• 11 years ago

there are a LOT of times that it's much, much faster to communicate verbally

If I want an answer now (if it's something that has an easy answer), and selfishly don't care about the flow of the other party, this may be true: You can prioritize a request by forcing it through synchronous voice mediums.

But even if we exclude that possible friction, it has been my experience that the belief that voice is more productive is often based upon superficial results (much as with meetings). People say some vague, uncertain things and both leave with a great feeling of accomplishment. Written communications, on the other hand, often requires more precision (if we wrote the way we spoke in such calls, the result would often be meaningless) -- you need to actually think about what you're asking, and give specifics. Not least because the medium demands it, but because this is a written, referenced, liable record, versus a call where each party can just vaguely claim miscommunication.

It's incredibly hard to study something like this, but my gut feeling (with the caveat that it's biased) is that the belief in the efficiency of voice communications is often based upon superficial results.

jhund2• 11 years ago

Based on my 10+ years experience of working remotely, I agree 100% with this article. My observation has been that distributed teams work well when the majority of the team is remote. It makes written communication inevitable. However when I was the only remote person in a team of 4 or more people, I felt left out. Conference calls with everybody else on one side and me on the other were quite frustrating. I missed out on the informal watercooler talk and conversations in the team office. I never felt that remote work works well in an asymmetric situation.

On the other hand, I think every team benefits from clear written communications. Having a remote team enforces this best practice where having a co-located team lets communication practices slip and become sloppy.

sanderjd2• 11 years ago

As someone with far more experience with this than me, I'm interested in your perspective on a couple things that I've noticed: It seems to be more difficult to come to consensus in purely written communication, and more awkward for decision-makers to assert themselves. I'm not sure why this is true, or if it is only my anecdotal experience and outside the experience of most, but I've been in many long github/irc/whatever threads where parties seem to only grow increasingly intransigent, and many phone and in-person meetings where the same topic is dispensed with in less than 10 minutes of actual discussion. Is this phenomenon real in your experience? If so, have you found any good techniques for controlling it?

jhund2• 11 years ago

It seems to be more difficult to come to consensus in purely written communication

I agree that some conflicts are much better handled via synchronous voice conversation. And I think that's acceptable, if not desirable. However, I make sure that after the call we write down some notes what decision we made, and why we decided the way we did. This makes sure that parties not present at the meeting (i.e. other developers, and our future selves) can pick up the context quickly and save us the pain of working through the decision process again.

And then there is always the issue of dysfunctional team communications where the channel doesn't matter. In asynch conversations poor/obstinate communicators don't need everybody in the room to keep adding to a controversial conversation. So you just can't stop them..

And I just learned a new word: 'in·tran·si·gent': unwilling or refusing to change one's views or to agree about something. Thanks.

more awkward for decision-makers to assert themselves

That has probably more to do with team culture than the communication channel used. I'd think that a capable and respected decision maker can assert themselves easily via written word.

JoshTriplett• 11 years ago

I worked on a team in IBM's Linux Technology Center that worked like this. We had people in several sites, and even those in the same site were spread across half a floor, not sitting anywhere near each other. So, in general, conversations occurred via IRC or mailing list, not in person, even between people at the same site. If a problem-solving session occurred in-person (often with a whiteboard), a specific person in that session (identified before the end of the session) would be responsible for writing up the result for the mailing list.

The only thing we'd ever handle primarily in person was going out to lunch as a group, which for obvious reasons only mattered to one site. And we almost never talked about work at those lunches.

jdawg77• 11 years ago

Fantastic article and in the past seven months, we've been a basecamp user, then former basecamp user, as we switched to Trello. Ironically that was for cost, like switching from 3rd party to (finally) a home grown php tool to replace the Saas $200 fee.

Essentially, what we're seeing from my team's perspective are the culmination of a few trends that started being bigger back in 2003, when I first worked from home full time for about six months, prior to joining Yahoo at giving up the lifestyle for a few years. With nearly ~6.5 years in WFH experience; I've done it nearly half my professional career.

Those who can make it work, do it the way in the article, there's no option, only pain, to that process. It broke up a 12 year business partnership I had, in the end, written goals were broken, therefore, I ejected. Simple, straightforward and asynchronous. There's a movement, tempo to when a team is producing. My CTO and I are incredible partners this way, and we spend less than twenty minutes per session "Talking," because he's even more introvert than me, it seems.

At the end of the day, team's ship something. Marketers should be shipping business models, spreadsheets, powerpoints, Adwords copy, Blog Posts, Social Posts, Images, Videos and more. Engineers ship code, so, they rock and should have it a bit more straightforward.

Designers ship design. If the "Business monkey," isn't playing secretary, documenting things and helping others ship, OR shipping something with their fingerprints all over it, something is broken. For a production oriented individual, remote, WFH work is the most empowering kind.

Freedom. Run at your own pace, if the team gets slow, develop new skills, a new hobby and explore. The digital world is a vast place; for example, I'm building free, open source SaaS, running two blogs, a team, built two visual novels this month, learned Daz3d, Carrara, Gimp for animation & more.

I ship what and how I want, when I want & where. The team does the same, as a group, we have aligned objectives. So the business moves at one pace, and as an individual, I carve my own lane. Run ahead, scout, explore, learn and grow. Then perhaps, those skills in animation & 3d become useful to the business. Or not. Time will tell.

Great article, and thanks for posting your experiences. I love learning.

anarchitect• 11 years ago

I work for a company that has two locations and a number of workers (including the CEO, who is quite hands-on) who work remotely the majority of time.

When I joined and introduced Basecamp which managed to de-siloed a whole lot of information, but required breaking old habits. The key change was ensuring the discussions and decisions which were being made offline either happened inside Basecamp, or were at least minuted there.

Recently this has had an interesting side-effect where some rebels are intentionally making decisions "off piste" for the avoidance of prolonged discussions.

Remote-First Communication for Project Teams

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