Here are my notes for the sixth section, “Managing Remote Workers”.
- Start small and think of having a remote team as a low-risk experiment; try things out and keep what works.
- Unless you have good collaboration tools, working remotely will be frustrating.
- Not specific to remote… A good manager leads the work and should be less worried about when people come in and leave.
- Houston’s current boss nails the requirements for a good manager: know what needs to be done, understand what delays might happen, be creative with sticky problems, divide the work into manageable chunks, and put people on the right projects.
- We talked about it being costly to travel everyone to the same place for quarterly in-person gatherings. Unless you live close to an airport that does direct flights to your destination, you’ll likely pay more in airfare and lost time. Houston suggested bringing some of the teams together instead of everyone. Question: Wouldn’t the travel expenses be a tax write-off?
- Houston has found that working closely (in person) with your teammates builds a stronger team.
- A big part of a performing team is building rapport and getting out of the forming and storming phases. (See Tuckman’s stages of group development.)
- Geoff disagrees with the book’s argument that open source is successful because it’s remote/distributed. Much of its success is due to the people that are passionate about it and committed to it.
- An open-source project is not the same as a company. The aspects of success (intrinsic motivation, transparent, connection) aren’t wrong; however, open source is different than remote. The argument “I don’t need a pesky manager around” is weak. Big open source projects still have someone at the helm making sure work is prioritized and garbage doesn’t creep in. It’s easy not to need bureaucracy when you don’t have a company to worry about.
- Good general tip (not just remote)… Don’t treat any individual or group as second-class.
- For 1:1s, Jameson recommended having an agenda, otherwise you’ll get a vanilla response like, “Everything’s fine.”
- Regarding removing roadblocks (i.e., decision gates put up by managers), this has nothing to do with remote. Why hire people you don’t trust? Geoff found it sadly amusing that one exception is working for the military, as that’s his current gig.
- We talked about the problem of overwork: Because you can work anywhere and anytime, should you?
- The last section about making in-person time scarce so that it’s more valued when it happens… Geoff thought this was weird. If something is good, why would you intentionally abstain from it to make the valleys and peaks more distant from each other?
Not directly related to this chapter, we discussed a few other topics about meetings with some people remote:
- You need a remote-friendly person in the office to ensure people are getting heard and that they aren’t being accidentally excluded from discussions.
- Idea: Make the on-site people sit at their desk and join the meeting as if they were remote. This will help them experience what the remote folks do, thus raising empathy. Having a good headset helps to cut out background noise.