How to Make Remote a Success

I&#x27;m totally convinced that video &amp; voice communication –not only chat&#x2F;text personas– is what will allow any remote organization to be successful, by bringing their teams together, improving culture, team spirit, their sense of belonging and ultimately having more productive and happier teams.<p>Sync&#x2F;real-time communication is not needed for all the processes in a remote team, and you should go async by default and only use sync for cases where you _really_ have to get together. This is how companies Gitlab [1] have really become successful in doing remote work.<p>A remote team can be successful by using async&#x2F;non-real-time communication, especially when you&#x27;re pairing it with an async platform like Standups which is built from the ground up to support the async comm style. I wrote a blog article about how async is determinant to make remote work &quot;work&quot; within your team&#x2F;org [2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;handbook&#x2F;communication&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;handbook&#x2F;communication&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;standups.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-async-communication-can-help-your-team&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;standups.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-async-communication-can-help-yo...</a>

Good points but I think you missed one of the biggest ones. Hire people who want and can work remotely.<p>Some folks aren&#x27;t wired for the self-discipline or don&#x27;t enjoy the isolation of remote work. They thrive in an office where they can interact face to face with their co-workers and have their manager looking over their shoulder. And that&#x27;s fine. There&#x27;s nothing wrong with that. But don&#x27;t hire them for your remote-only business and expect them to be happy and productive.

Most of these bullet points are just as important for in-office teams. Enforcing good meeting discipline, sending out weekly updates, defining process for RFCs, and documenting process and culture in a shared location are all very important regardless of where employees are located. Remote work only works if the team&#x27;s foundation is solid in the first place.<p>The point about forcing everyone to be remote is great if you can make it work, but it will eliminate a lot of employees who can&#x27;t work remotely. I know remote work is a hot topic, but in my experience only a small fraction of employees can be very effective in remote-only roles.<p>If your company can&#x27;t be all-remote, it&#x27;s critical to invest in proper processes and culture to keep everyone included. Quashing in-office politics, breaking knowledge silos, and mandating centralized documentation of decisions is key.

Just a personal story; but I think remote work can only work if the entire team (or at least the majority of the team) is remote. I&#x27;m currently the only remote person in the team, and it&#x27;s so frustrating. For them, getting me involved in anything is an extra step, as to them I&#x27;m the only remote person. But for me, everyone is remote, and I have a lot more expectations about communication and meetings.<p>Just to name one thing; meetings that start 5-10 minutes late. For them it&#x27;s normal, because they&#x27;re in the room, or walking to the room, or at least aware as to why a meeting is starting late. To me, it&#x27;s 15 minutes wasted, and there&#x27;s no communication what&#x27;s going on.<p>We&#x27;re getting better at it tho; or at least, I&#x27;ve lowered my expectations of them. I know that I will be left out of meetings frequently, I know that every meeting will start 5-10 minutes late.<p>That said, I love working remotely, although I would prefer to find a team that&#x27;s used to it.

We rely mostly on email. Probably 90%. The best part about remote, I believe, is asynchronous communication. Email forces people think harder about what to say, vs trying to fill gaps of silence with nonsense during video calls. This makes for a more effective and efficient exchange of ideas.

Another thing I will add to this is to use creation tools that show your presence to others. Figma has been huge for our design team because you can see the other person’s mouse cursor moving around and making changes - it makes it feel like the person has a presence in the same room with you. Likewise with google docs or confluence, just the presence of a line cursor with a name next to it goes a huge ways. Mural is another one that does this well. It really helps make the remoteness feel less isolating.

He mentions keeping a knowledge base up to date. That&#x27;s a great idea, but I&#x27;ve never found good low-friction methods&#x2F;tools for getting knowledge from peoples&#x27; heads into a knowledge base. Any suggestions?

I&#x27;m convinced that some of the downsides to remote work will be solved through technological means; probably some kind of VR or AR solution, where you can be inside a shared virtual space and glance over to see what your coworkers are up to, and perhaps give them a virtual tap on the shoulder.<p>This kind of virtual office would not help as much, of course, in cases of highly distributed teams split across continents. Even then though, it would be cool to drop into someone&#x27;s virtual office and leave a note on virtual post it or whiteboard.

As a PM, I don&#x27;t think remote can work for me. Any PMs who work remotely? Curious to your thoughts.

Couldn’t find a better time to post this article than in the middle of France biggest strike!