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Ask HN: How can we improve remote work?

1 points by elephantshadow ↗ HN
Hey everyone,

What strategies, tools, or practices have you found to be effective to make remote work better?

I'm particularly interested in;

* Sense of feeling together * Ability to talk to the team outside meetings * Natural & spontaneous conversations * Team culture

Let me know your thoughts.

Disclaimer: I've started working on this problem, as I couldn't feel satisfied with what we have. I want to hear what others think.

5 comments

[ 9.2 ms ] story [ 60.9 ms ] thread
necovek
Having started remote work in 2006, I always found the biggest benefit from actually meeting in person for a week at the time away from everyone's home, 2-4 times a year.

When a company is just starting up and on the smaller end, all-hands type meetings once a year or once every two years are also nice.

The important bit is that it's a location remote to everyone so people are likely to spend time together after work too. This also makes it easier to look for cheaper locations.

elephantshadow
Thanks for answering. What are some tools do you use for communicating? The problem I see is; we're stuck with meetings and can't just talk to eachother in a natural way.

And I'm wondering this; is it a problem worth to focus on? What if we build a new video communication product that works without meetings, it has rooms where individuals can be present, and we can just talk to eachother.

tupleapp
https://tuple.app is set up so that you can click once and be on a call with up to 6 people in a few seconds, with screen sharing and remote control if you need it.

(Just a heads up – I’m a part of the team. If you have any questions I can answer them or find the right person.)

- Dan

necovek
I am sure tools might help, but I personally found that tools matter less once you build up that familial rapport.

Eg. once we felt at ease with each other, it was never an issue to jump into a Google Hangout/Meet and talk work, switch to lighter themes and back.

FWIW, I remember seeing tools like you mention (my company at the time used them during the pandemic), but I could never really connect to people that way.

taraharris
The current focus you have sounds an awful lot like what the founders of Pragli (later renamed to Pesto) were trying to address. It just shut down recently. https://twitter.com/PestoHQ

When they began in 2019, they reached out to interview me because I had been working remotely for five years. I tried to tell them that the lack of a "sense of feeling together" wasn't the problem they thought it was, and I tried to steer them into taking a look at ways of doing better telepresence with VR/AR, with a focus on pair programming and the like. They didn't listen, and I'm sad to say I was right.

If you want to solve real problems with remote work, you need to focus on how to get work done inside a VR or AR environment, and offer things like easy two-way screen sharing, as CoScreen (recently acquired by DataDog) and ScreenHero (swallowed up and destroyed by Slack).

A workplace is fundamentally about getting things done. Trying to build a virtual office in 2D is just window dressing that will get in my way and has no hope of getting used. You have competition in the most obvious space, which is already handled well through IRC, Slack and Teams.

If you want to facilitate spontaneous conversations and team culture, your client cannot be the company the employees work for. Those things happen on back channels like text messages, Signal, Discord servers, etc.

I'd be interested in glancing at what you've come up with, especially if it's not just yet another web or Electron app.