The hard part about remote is collaboration outside of meetings is hard. Chat is soul-less and leads to a lot of misunderstandings with tone. Video is too formal. Phone is interrupt. For the past 6 months we've been using a walkie-talkie app that transcribes and it's pretty magical. It feels like it's solved some of the issues with unstructured collaboration. Plus the bonus is you can add anyone to a discussion and they can catch up by listening to previous messages at 1.5X
> Chat is soul-less and leads to a lot of misunderstandings with tone.
Chat isn't soulless.
Chat being async has benefits over conference calls.
> Video is too formal. Phone is interrupt.
Work lacks cheap interrupts, which is not a remote-only problem.
In my most recent position, when working from home, I've made a habit of writing to people on chat if I can bother them for 5-20 minutes. It works great. I have typically interacted with at least one customer and 2-3 colleagues during a day at home.
But I can only interrupt certain people. Having sat in the office with them before, we have built a relationship.
The interrupt is where walkie talkie really shines. Instead of asking to bother someone, where they now may feel obliged to engage, you just walkie talkie them with what you want to discuss. They can listen in real time or they can ignore and then listen ore read when they're available. Perhaps it's because our team is global that this works as timezones are hard. The expectation is you manage your notifications, so the sender never has to worry that the message they're sending is bugging you at 1 AM.
Can you elaborate on the difference between DM'ing someone with "Hey can I call you about problem X/Y/Z?" I'm not sure I understand the benefit of the walkie talkie solution. To me this sounds as or more annoying as a landline.
Sure. So if you say can I call you about X/Y/Z, you're asking them to stop what they are doing and listen to your monologue in real time. With the walkie talkie, you hit talk and send them your monologue. They can listen in real time (one-way) if they are available or can listen to your audio + read the transcription (later). This puts them in control of when and how they consume and respond. The added benefit is they can relisten or re-read before responding. I find it puts me in control of context switching
Two things differentiate it from regular chat for us. One is it's mobile. They have a web product, but we don't use it, we just use the mobile, so we talk into it as opposed to type. I personally get up and walk around to talk into it. The second is the audio. Listening is just different than reading. Re-listening is awesome.
I still dont get it. That's just precisely the same as sending a instant message but it has an audio option?
I've tried doing audio messages before but i find it unbearable - both to listen to them and record them. I just love async text; i want nothing more than email/github
I haven't done walkie talkies, but one thing at a previous job that worked great was an "office hour" meeting. There wasn't necessarily anything urgent, but for an hour a day there'd be a low-priority period to come in and talk about anything from a persistent issue that needs a lead's eye, to watercooler talk.
It feels like a simple gesture, but it solved many issues at once:
- unless something urgent was scheduled over it, it was a period where you'd be sure you wouldn't be interrupting the lead, and are free to ask questions. You never felt like you were wasting their time, it's already baked into the schedule.
- There's a lot less friction just unmuting a mic and talking to a group than pinging a channel or sending a DM, but also a larger guaranteed of a prompt reply.
- it was an informal meeting half the time, so it was a good way to semi-organically team bond compared to leaving a huge paper trail of sports discussion in a team channel. It also means it's very easy to invite others in if their help is needed. A few times, it'd be a "talk" period where we'd invite another team and they use the time to share knowledge of what they are working on.
- even if you had nothing to help or help out with, it was a great way to shadow the work of others and get a feel for how the team overall is doing. The most underrated aspect of an office space is hearing all this tribal knowledge in the background as you work, or during a break. This helped a bit to bring that back.
- Breakout rooms. If there was 2-3 parallel discussions forming, we can simply divide the meeting up instead of going through that weird song and dance of prioritizing discussions (hopefully not dropping it entierly) or booking another room.
Some companies went the complete opposite extreme and more or less made it an obligation to stay on such a "meeting".
Text can solve some of these issues, but if the walky-talky was anything similar to our office hours, I can see the appeal. It could be a generational issue, but you just don't get much "idle chatter" in formal chatrooms in my experience. Some people absolutely love that and lets them work more focused. Others can start to feel isolated from the team and the mission, so that socialization can help break the ice.
We tried the office hours. It was my most dreaded meeting of the week. Others on the team shared the sentiment. The biggest issue is, it was at an inconvenient time for everyone. No one wants to "hang out" at 8 AM or 11 PM or 4 PM. If too many people showed up we all just sat there awkwardly. If not enough people showed up, we sat there awkwardly. We tried music, or doing some activity together. It always felt forced. I cringe just recalling it.
Sorry to hear that, I can definitely and easily see it going wrong, so it was important on my team to emphasize
1. this was completely optional. it was a daily timeslot but we didn't go every day. We were more than free to schedule other meetings over it as it was the lowest priority.
2. Timezones will always be weird, but fwiw ours was at 3pm and slotted for an hour. Usually we could go over if there was a particularly thorny task but we respected everyone's time. Towards the end of the day but not quite around the point where we started to check out for the day.
3. The time should hopefully feel productive in some way. We never did any kind of "team bonding exercise" that'd fit more into some party icebreaker. we were professionals, and outside of some very specific hobbies members shared (e.g. half the team loved music production and would occasionally talk about sound design topics) I'd say 80% of the "active" hours were focused more on getting unblocked from some tasks. I think that's why it was important to frame it as "office hours" and not "social time".
4. It was absolutely okay to have quieter days. There was no pressure to speak out or pretend to be engaged or whatnot. After the first few weeks we'd normally just start with no video on and it'd be a small voice chat. There were days where 1 or more members just cut out early (and since it was a 4-6 person team, if half or more weren't engaged and the rest weren't stuck, we'd just not do it). There were others where it was just maybe 5 minutes of small talk and people just stayed in the ambience. It was common for at least one person at any time to be muted, so again: no pressure to engage. It was time for us to utilize.
Maybe it simply doesn't work for you, but I wouldn't cast off the entire idea just yet.
No doubt there is a learning/awk hump like any tool. At first it was like why do I have to listen to this 4 minute voicemail. Yikes. But now it's like ok, listening to this 4 min monologue at 1.5X is better than a phone call that I may get stuck on for 20 minutes or worse a 30 minute meeting scheduled in 2 days that's free on my cal right now, but will totally kill my flow state on that day...
I have a ton of chats in game groups, but I've never had it feel active in a formal setting. If you're not in a specific feature channel talking with veterans about issues they can at least start poking at, it's pretty dead. There are times I want to help but am clearly out of my wheelhouse. And then when things do get deeper it usually turns into a DM and that channel goes quiet again.
"noise" on such a chat is much more persistant than in an office, so people tend to not make small talk on such channels, except in off-topic channels. But if I'm being honest I don't wanna browse an off-topic channel at work. I got work to do. That's where the soul starts to leave. The way a company slack works is just very different from some informal (or even formal, non-company) discords.
>Chat being async has benefits over conference calls.
Sure. a paper trail and seachability on slack has saved me many an problem that I couldn't just google. Sometimes without pinging anyone. Sometimes by pinging someone I'd never otherwise meet to say "hey I hit the same issue, is there any progress/workarounds on this issue?" Threads are really nifty ways compartmentalize tangential discussons. Some people (especially tech workers) much prefer to think and write up their suggestion than try and speak it out on the fly.
But I also get that these async benefits ultimately cost more time. A quick 1:1 will always be faster through speech than text, even for someone that can type 200+ WPM (I'm maybe 100, albiet very inaccurate). larger groups is where chats devolve into chaos and noise, and that's when a proctor for a call/live meeting helps coordinate/drive discussion. And as mentioned, tone/body language is absent. They are both just tools, no better than each other as a fork is better than a spoon.
>Work lacks cheap interrupts
Lot to break down here that I won't go into, but yes I fundamentally agree. There is no such thing as a "cheap interrupt" for a creative worker (and yes, tech is a creative process in many ways). You always need to understand that an unplanned interruption is likely costing an hour of creative thinking and consider that before doing so. Many people don't. This is more or less (should be) built into a lead's time when assigning their workload.
With all that said: there are sometimes truly urgent matters where a prompt response is needed. That is definitely where office works shines unless the worker is out for lunch. you never know if a worker who "ignores" a message didn't see it, had their phone die, has chat off/muted, etc. But that's probably a factor a lot of director+ levels face regularly, so it's a mentality passed down to the workers who rarely need to be called on a dime
Back in the days of face-to-face conversations, I don't ever recall a _spontaneous_ conversation that wasn't just a random complain-fest that nothing useful ever came out of.
Yeah. There is a lot of that. My faves were someone coming by with a random thought that they needed to think through with someone. Almost nothing ever came of it, but the rabbit hole of exploration was fun
Video chat also has enough of a delay it short circuits a lot of collaboration thought forming. Creative discussions go from free flowing back and forth to queued up saying of pieces with little interjection.
I find screen sharing easy rather than hard. Someone wants input, they share their screen and we work it through together. When it's done or on track again we have a social chat before shutting down the meeting software and get back to lone work.
I've noticed teens using snapchat to just send quick videos. Just one sentence and then send. Is there anything like this for work, maybe where I can do a really fast screen recording?
