questions and answers today from the Fun
Fun forum OC Mitchell Mitch
OC Mitchell hi OC what are your thoughts
on remote working can you still have a
cohesive engaged team that never meets
face-to-face any tips or tricks to
making it work for you if I ever built a
software development company from
scratch I would not do it remote there
is because there is an enormous amount
of communication that gets lost in the
communication tools that we have today
even when you have fancy things like
google hangout which works pretty well
it’s still very very far from the
enormous amount of bandwidth of
communication that you have when you are
an on-site team in in theater school we
were hammered with a bit of research
that about 80% of human communication
like all the data that we get while
interacting with other people is through
body language so there’s only a very
small bit that comes from from the
actual words and like a ton of
information very important information
comes from tonality your voice and the
way you you move and look an example
would be a person that let’s say you’re
on phone with a person and that person
seems seems cheery and they seem engaged
and everything but if you had been room
you would have noticed that person does
not look you in the eye they turned
their body around you could kind of pick
up that they were not onboard with you
they were they just didn’t you just
didn’t like you or perhaps they were
having a bad day they were slumping or
whatever there’s a lot of that kind of
stuff that you pick up while you while
you’re looking at someone I mean
kind of works in a hangout but the
problem with a hangout is that the
camera is often like either it’s
pointing at a one person and other
people are out of you or it’s pointing
at the entire room and you don’t get a
lot of detail you cannot pick up on
little subtle things that you
intuitively do as a human and text
communication that’s just bullshit
because you can you can use it to convey
very simple things or you can also use
it to do pretty complex things if you
are communicating if you are very good
at written communication and you’re also
communicating with another person that
is also good at written communication
and you are very familiar with how that
person works then text communication
kind of works but otherwise it’s just
horrible I mean a person can write
something and you have no idea what the
tonality or context or anything is
behind that that sentence if somebody
says a random sentence over phone you
can kind of pick up on at least their
technology your voice or how much they
stutter when they say it and like
there’s tons of little things but when
you have a piece of text you just oh you
can’t read anything out of that we have
emojis but they are very very far from
having actual access to technology or
voice in addition you have things like
just sitting around in the office like
picking up but somebody is talking
asking somebody about something and you
you just overhear it and you are able to
offer a solution or even if you’re not
able to offer a solution at least you
kind of get the vibe the pace the an
idea about what is happening in the
office you can also see how many people
are in the office for instance that
there’s if you see that a lot of people
aren’t oh they aren’t working they
aren’t very productive
or there seems to be like a weird vibe
going on here today like is how are
people feeling you can you can judge
that and there’s also the matter of that
humans need to eat so you go to lunch –
and often eat together because we are
sociable people and we like company even
introverts and that is like often an
hour of communication with your
colleagues that is completely lost when
you’re doing remote work which is just
like an insane loss so I’m not saying
that remote work cannot work there are
definitely companies doing it so like
37signals seems to be doing fine and
also know that lookback uses remote work
for like to a great extent us has
written a lot of interesting articles
and how they pull that off but it’s very
important to notice that those companies
they do only remote work they are
focused on remote work their offices are
like these barren things that people
never go to like they hire people
exclusively that are good for remote
working they are excellent written
communicators they are all probably most
of them are introverts because and like
I am an extrovert so I can’t function in
a remote working environment I just I
break down I’ve become the same I need
silence silence but but I think it can
work if you just exclusively hire the
right kind of right kind of people and
you create a process specifically around
that what absolutely does not work is to
have a mixed set like have and and an
on-site team that where people like some
people or remote workers that yes that
just works really really badly I’ve
never seen it work even closely even if
the person is very used to remote work
like it the team yes doesn’t evolve
processes the most basic example I can
think of is that the team needs to
the owns items needs to constantly
remember to call into the remote hangout
so that people that are off-site might
might join the hangout if they can and
yes just having that routine of doing it
and also that the remote worker has an
easy way of doing it for example like
that there’s always a hangout link in
the meeting so that you don’t have to
remember which hangout link goes to
which meeting that kind of stuff it
becomes weird because the the on-site
team will have informal meetings like
they’d say that you have this discussion
we need to talk all we need to talk
about this and it becomes a very low
barrier for them to just go talk but if
you don’t have a team that is trained in
just remoting they will probably exclude
the offsite people more than they should
they would just go go and have their
meeting by the white board because white
boards are awesome and figure things out
but if say 37signals who look back had
their meeting they would they were
probably all call into hangouts and they
would instead of opening here are white
more they would open open a Google Doc
and they would do that discussion
because they’re they have a collective
limitation but for the on-site team
using a whiteboard and using this direct
communication with a colleague will make
them so much more efficient that it will
make it feel for them like walking in
mud by bringing in another person it
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