Be More Remote-Friendly

[ashfurrow]

The Artsy mobile team is pretty good with remote workers, but we could definitely be better. There are some recent improvements to things in the office space – which are awesome – but need to be matched with corresponding changes with team culture.

Talking with the Squarespace team today, they had some really cool ideas. Things like:

• Having an open Skype call between team members (with themselves muted) to lower the barrier to communicating and feeling connected
• Having regular demo meetings. These are hour-long meetings for the mobile team where someone talks for 30 minutes about something they're doing and then a 30 minute discussion. Ideas for us could be @katarinabatina talking about the design language she's using in some new designs, @alloy's work on local server response caching, or @1aurabrown's work on CI issues.

I asked about the biggest problem they faced, and unsurprisingly it was information dissemination. How can we make it easier to relay the sort of in-person conversations that happen in the elevator to remote workers? How can we simulate those types of interactions with remote peeps? Not only are they missing out on that stuff, but we're missing out on more meaningful connections with them.

So: anyone have ideas? Suggestions?

[orta]

Having regular demo meetings. [..]

I like this, they could also be open?

[alloy]

Having an open Skype call between team members (with themselves muted) to lower the barrier to communicating and feeling connected

I like this. And what about an open Skype call with the office floor, so that we (remote) can see who’s actually in?

[ashfurrow]

@orta I assumed they would be :)

@alloy could have something more general, like an open webcam of the floor?

[alloy]

@ashfurrow Yeah yeah, like that. It would be different from a team Skype call, I guess?

[ashfurrow]

Yeah, we can do both, though.