I've been thinking a lot about this lately, and it might be prudent to take a 'human factors' (Woods, Cook, Dekker, et al) approach to this.

When talking about how it's perhaps more important to investigate the conditions of success over failure, and how the situations contain multiple contributing factors to the way a complex system behaves, one thing that gets highlighted is common ground breakdown between practitioners.

With regard to communication, we are worried about assumptions made, communication fidelity, and the repair process. When we talk about IRC or Slack or Conference calls or email or whatever, those are really just adding another channel of communication and are not necessarily making communication more resilient. Repair processes to communication are a paradigmatic function of good teams.

What makes humans really good at succeeding in high tempo emergency situations is the ability of adaptive capacity.

I think the distinction with regard to remote working can fit into this, albeit with a little bit of corruption and maneuvering of the language.

To speak to this article, the takeaway should be that it's about organizations commiting to a remote-first approach. This goes so far beyond the dicussions we usually think about when wondering wtf people are doing while working from home. It actually also includes the resiliency of working with remote offices globally -- which makes it a culture problem. And the more a change tries to change the culture, the more likely it is that change is going to fail. So remote-first has to be taken by companies on principle or they're just making accomodations and the people who are working remotely are going to suffer. "A bad system will beat a good person every time" for the obligatory Deming quotation. The worst thing a bad process can do is tarnish the repuation of individuals.

Folks whose HQ is in another state/country: do you feel like part of the team or is your influence diminished among the outer rim?

If a team is only simply making accommodations for people to work from home ocasionally or whatever (not truly "remote-first"), then hallway conversations are inexorably changed from a convenience into a liability where people get left out of the loop to develop their own misconceptions about the way things work, the "why's" of what we're doing, and what sort of goals are important.

A remote-first approach can force the organizational infrastructure necessary to make work visible and provide feedback on milestones with distributed, empowered decision making. It is one of the ways (just like TDD, pair programming, etc all attempt to address) to help distribute knowledge across all teams wherever they are to help decrease the heroics needed daily and add ways to address changing demands. Increasing adaptive capacity has to be a fundamental ideal of an organization (aside: the trick here is avoiding building on human misery/heroics, and resulting in burnout).

It also helps improve the onboading process. If it takes 6-12 months for a new teammate to significantly contribute, then that is a risk. An organization with a remote-first approach who can cope with asynchronous workers will have the right kind of documentation, tooling, and relationships between teams to make this robust.

I would highly recommend watching this talk about 'common ground': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgC_N9glqMs

edit:

Let me clarify by that 'remote first' i don't mean force/recommend that everyone work remotely. By remote first, I mean taking the approach that all things should be considering the remote workers in the organization as first class citizens and creating processes that are unable to ignore the aspect of remote working. Pretend that all work could not be done if it wasn't addressing remote working.

In this way, remote working is actually a ...