Lessons Learned from the Book “Effective Remote Work”

If you work in a team in any capacity then you need to have a strong baseline of trust in order to work effectively.

Trust is the building block that all effective team performance stacks on top of (see 5 dysfunctions of a team).

You don't just get trust for free, you have to build it by creating moments like this where people can demonstrate vulnerability around each other.

Less glib: I've always found the technical part of work to be by far the easiest part of my job. The computers do what they're told and when they argue with me, it's deterministic, unambiguous and consistent (at least from its perspective anyway).

People are a lot more complicated, and they seldom know what they want, what to build, whether they know enough to recognize what to build, whether they know they know enough to recognize what to build, etc. they have feelings that can be hurt, friends who they want to defend, opponents they want to see suppressed. I could go on.

Maybe I've somehow only worked in dreadful, dramatic hellscapes, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you? But also I think politics is what happens when more than 3 people want to work together, and so it's an inherent aspect of work.

Sorry, this has been a bit rambling. My point is that, while sure you don't need to do bowling night every week, I do find that a zoom call with your teammates every other week with no agenda other than to chat is ridiculously effective.

And sometimes your best work can happen after you both accidentally give and receive therapy while at work. Everyone is the main character of their own story and knowing how even the work part of all those individual main stories connect can be really useful insight.

My guess is that management pushes this for loyalty. If all you do is work and get paid you're likely to exit the first year they don't give you a competitive raise. If you're part of a family then you'll stay and even trust the ceo when he says that no layoffs are coming.

I also don't like forced socialization but like the possibility of socialization being there, as a way to build team cohesion, disengage from work, etc.

That's so much of you life that you may as well try to make it fun. How you make it fun depends from person to person, but socializing with coworkers is definitely on the list for many people (especially extroverts). Introverts may have other ideas, like learning new exciting stuff, but IMHO, if all you think of work is "get it done quickly so I can do something else", I think you are missing something. It doesn't mean you should live for work, but if it takes, say, 20% of your "good time off" to improve 80% of your time at work, I think it is definitely worth it.

Beyond the occasional stop-through if I'm in the area, I don't derive much value from being there in person. I submit that sharing your desktop and talking into someone's headset is actually more intimate than sitting around the conference table or viewing a screen in a cubicle.

Where I work currently there's 99.9% emphasis on output, and .1% on conversation. As a result, I have zero sense of team, zero sense of trust.

That's fine when working on small things by yourself, but it doesn't scale. Teams are necessary to solve larger more complex problems. I suppose it all depends on your career aspirations.

Most of the team just don’t want the hassle of leaving the house.

My conclusion is that people don't want to engage with retrospective items that aren't first-order helpful. "Doing X solves problem Y for person ME right now" type things. Office hours smooth communication, but that in and of itself doesn't fix a problem -- it paves the road to fix other problems.

"during core working hours".

See other point about establishing boundaries between work and personal life.

It is helpful to establish expected contact/response timings, such as:

  - email - async. checked a few times/day. turn off notifications
  - slack/chat - async. notify of direct messages & high priority channels, other items checked periodically
  - phone/voice/video calls - synchronous. only for things that justify immediate interruption. Will respond with at least a "What's up?/In a meeting/etc." unless completely unavailable.

As a result, our in-person work situations have never been so quiet (outside of lockdowns). The value of in-person is thereby seemingly perceptibly lessened. Are we losing or recouping the value of that serendipitous spark of collaboration that executives wax poetic over? (Was it ever a thing?)

I'm pretty sure that by default remote work with a low level of face time leads to lower levels of psychological safety.

When you schedule a meeting, you create a wiki page named like "2023-01-02 Fooproj UX Meeting with Marketing", and include the URL in the calendar invite.

If there's a written agenda, it goes into the wiki page, in whatever state it's in. If someone is typing notes during the meeting, it goes into the wiki page, in whatever state it's in. Someone might screenshare the wiki page during all or part of the meeting. If there's a meeting video recording or videoconf/calendar SaaS page, the URL gets put in the wiki page. Anything bout that meeting that does get captured somewhere, can be gotten to from that one wiki page, so info not lost.

If no info at all ends up being captured around the meeting, then the wiki page might only ever be a title. But even then, it's still something to wikilink to (like `[2023-01-02 Fooproj UX Meeting with Marketing]`), when referring to the meeting, such as citations in design documents and project plans.

(Note: This works if you have a policy of "everything goes into the code repo or the wiki". But if you're thinking of the wiki as yet another of countless SaaSes where people are dumping write-only stuff that no one will ever find, then adding to that mess won't seem useful.)

I might be a huge cynic, but that seems to me to be the #1 reason to create a post-mortem document to explore how to avoid another meeting that was a waste of time like that.

If the meeting was useless because the participants weren't prepared, make a note to hand out preparatory notes beforehand. If the meeting was useless because everybody shouted over each other, make a note for more moderation. If the meeting was useless because no one had political power to follow up on any decisions, cancel the meeting altogether.

Having a meeting that goes nowhere and then taking no time to publicly settle on actions as a consequence seems incredibly neglectful to me.

edit: I don't think every meeting needs its own document though. If there's a meeting, it needs to be associated with some document(s) in some way which will change as a result. If it isn't, it should be cancelled, imo.

But if you have a meeting and nothing about it was written down, who knows what was decided if it's not written down?

1) Every meeting must have an agenda and any material linked must be read before attending. You're wasting everyone's time by reading the material during the meeting.

2) Every meeting must create an artefact, otherwise you're just chatting with coworkers.

For non-sensitive meetings, we record to otter and then edit the transcript using highlights, marking to dos, etc. We’ve got an otter folder structure that mimics our other folder structures. We most commonly do this for document review meetings (I work for an NGO. We write a lot of grants.) This takes time but it creates good notes, allows everyone to be a participant in the meeting.

We have other meetings — like weekly target review meetings — that use Asana as the basis for capturing notes. This works well for things that are really tactical.