A meaningful fraction of the problems remote workers face are related to the organization, communication habits, and workplace culture of the organization for which the worker works remotely.
For example, some great tool for video chat is only applicable if it is adopted as a default means of communication within the company. The remote worker typically cannot drive adoption. To the extent that they can, if it is only used to communicate with remote workers and not within the workplace the remote workers are less integrated into the ordinary flow of the company.
I'll echo this and also say that you should target companies where remote work is the norm, not companies were remote work is allowed but not actually feasible.
I've worked at 3 employers that allowed some degree of remote work.
At two of them, everybody worked at home at least 1 day a week and some people were 100% remote. Everybody understood that somebody was going to be remote for any given meeting, so web conferences were standard in every meeting. People also called/chatted with each other when needed. Focus on companies like this for a weekend project. These are the places which are open to remote work and are open to addressing the issues with it.
I worked at another company where HR encouraged work from home, but there was no enforced standards and the company had a strong history of butt-in-seat time. The end result was that any work from home (even for a day) was perceived as slacking off and adding a web conference to a meeting was seen as an massive inconvenience for the people who were willing to attend meeting face to face. This company did not need a tool to help them with remote work, they needed an organizational change.
better video chat with screen share abilities and decent noise cancellation. We tried Skype, Zoom.us, Slack video, Google Hangouts and WebEx … they all have issues and none of them work reliable enough even with decent internet connections across all three major operating systems. If we would need custom hardware for that: we'd even buy it, a good high quality webcam and headset would go a long way.
I honestly can't believe that's the biggest problem we've had so far, other than that it has actually been a smooth ride.
Zoom has been incredible for an online class I'm doing - some kind of screen sharing for peer programming/code reviews would be amazing - maybe instead of screen sharing google docs-like sharing with markup like genius.com on github?
call breaks -if you can implement a better way to recover broken calls/connections. Especially with VPN things go mad.
Joining calls when onsite team is in conference room - this sucks big time when you are on speaker and you don't get a word of what is going on. Especially when some folks are away from speaker. This requires a bit of DSP background but interesting problem i think.
De-noising- this is something i am already working on. Background noise from your house can really be annoying or embarrassing. I am trying to use DL for source separation.
Remote workers also lack view of everything thats happening. An automated way of sharing updates with remote team will be helpful. It could be meeting notes, an ability to for team members to scribble and share.
Conference room calls and background noise are the two biggest problems I face as a remote worker. I have hard floors at my house and two dogs, so I've actually taken some very important calls in my car to isolate the sound. I wish my bluetooth headset could do that though.
And people holding side conversations in conference rooms, or even people actually trying to talk directly into the microphone on a speakerphone, is always terrible. I always cringe when clients take my calls on a conference speakerphone.
Phones in general are awful. Just awful. They have one purpose: to transmit human voice. And they fail at that spectacularly and constantly. It might not be noticeable when you rarely make calls or if you've had extraordinarily good luck, but if you're on the phone all day with different people who have different phones and are in different environments and natively speak different languages, it's just the worst thing. The fact that it hasn't been solved yet is unacceptable.
How about a presence tester. Ie a Bluetooth receiver that activates when your phone is near it. It also texts or calls that number once an hour to prove you’re near your phone.
I’m aware this is a huge breech of privacy but you shouldn’t expect privacy in your workplace. I’m also assuming it’s only on for your assigned work hours.
Automatic green screen background so when on a video call, the remote worker does not have to masquerade where they are. Additionally this adds privacy for remote workers working from home who dont want their colleagues to see what their "home office" looks like.
If you can solve the "help, I'm addicted to the internet" problem that this person posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15431208 you could do a whole lot of good. The existing apps out there don't work for a lot of people, but something new might.
How about a tool to help keep junior employees engaged, motivated, and confident that they are not incompetent?
IME, remote work is a situation where people need to have a lot of self discipline and be okay with guiding themselves. With senior employees, they typically have a good framework (from past experience) to guide themselves in the right direction.
Junior employees typically don't have the experience to know the direction they need to take, and they need feedback. They also don't want to look like fools so they are reluctant to ask for help/guidance.
In an office environment a good manager can notice this and provide help without the junior level employee needing to ask explicitly. In remote work, it's easy to have a junior employee basically feel like they are drowning (figuratively) and nobody will notice until it's too late (e.g. person quits, their part of the project has clearly gone off the rails, etc). I think somebody that would allow for greater mentorship between remote employees would be useful to helping juniors get over that initial stage in jobs.
Staying connected with the work place. Missing out on all the social conversations that happen when you're in the office but balancing it out so that it's not overly distracting.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 72.8 ms ] thread2. Read it for a while, looking out for problems.
3. Implement.
For example, some great tool for video chat is only applicable if it is adopted as a default means of communication within the company. The remote worker typically cannot drive adoption. To the extent that they can, if it is only used to communicate with remote workers and not within the workplace the remote workers are less integrated into the ordinary flow of the company.
I've worked at 3 employers that allowed some degree of remote work.
At two of them, everybody worked at home at least 1 day a week and some people were 100% remote. Everybody understood that somebody was going to be remote for any given meeting, so web conferences were standard in every meeting. People also called/chatted with each other when needed. Focus on companies like this for a weekend project. These are the places which are open to remote work and are open to addressing the issues with it.
I worked at another company where HR encouraged work from home, but there was no enforced standards and the company had a strong history of butt-in-seat time. The end result was that any work from home (even for a day) was perceived as slacking off and adding a web conference to a meeting was seen as an massive inconvenience for the people who were willing to attend meeting face to face. This company did not need a tool to help them with remote work, they needed an organizational change.
I honestly can't believe that's the biggest problem we've had so far, other than that it has actually been a smooth ride.
Joining calls when onsite team is in conference room - this sucks big time when you are on speaker and you don't get a word of what is going on. Especially when some folks are away from speaker. This requires a bit of DSP background but interesting problem i think.
De-noising- this is something i am already working on. Background noise from your house can really be annoying or embarrassing. I am trying to use DL for source separation.
Remote workers also lack view of everything thats happening. An automated way of sharing updates with remote team will be helpful. It could be meeting notes, an ability to for team members to scribble and share.
And people holding side conversations in conference rooms, or even people actually trying to talk directly into the microphone on a speakerphone, is always terrible. I always cringe when clients take my calls on a conference speakerphone.
Phones in general are awful. Just awful. They have one purpose: to transmit human voice. And they fail at that spectacularly and constantly. It might not be noticeable when you rarely make calls or if you've had extraordinarily good luck, but if you're on the phone all day with different people who have different phones and are in different environments and natively speak different languages, it's just the worst thing. The fact that it hasn't been solved yet is unacceptable.
I’m aware this is a huge breech of privacy but you shouldn’t expect privacy in your workplace. I’m also assuming it’s only on for your assigned work hours.
btt, there’s a nice product for that, a screen that goes in your chair adding a white background.
I've been working remote for 4 years now and one of the biggest pain points is not being able to just white board a solution or ideas.
IME, remote work is a situation where people need to have a lot of self discipline and be okay with guiding themselves. With senior employees, they typically have a good framework (from past experience) to guide themselves in the right direction.
Junior employees typically don't have the experience to know the direction they need to take, and they need feedback. They also don't want to look like fools so they are reluctant to ask for help/guidance.
In an office environment a good manager can notice this and provide help without the junior level employee needing to ask explicitly. In remote work, it's easy to have a junior employee basically feel like they are drowning (figuratively) and nobody will notice until it's too late (e.g. person quits, their part of the project has clearly gone off the rails, etc). I think somebody that would allow for greater mentorship between remote employees would be useful to helping juniors get over that initial stage in jobs.