Tag: working remotely

The single most important thing about remove 1:1 meetings

The COVID-19 lockdown forced many organizations to a remote work mode. Recently, I spoke with three managers from three “conventional” companies and all the three told me how surprisingly efficient their 1:1 meetings became. This is how one of them described the situation “I prepare the agenda, we log in, boom, boom, boom, and we are done”.

The effectiveness of distributed work doesn’t surprise me, after all, I have been working in a distributed mode for about six years now. However, this super-efficiency has its own problems that one needs to know. Here’s the thing. We, humans, are social creatures. We depend on social interactions for our mental and physical well being. When people share the same physical office, they have enough social interactions “in-between” — in the hallway, next to the watercooler and in the parking lot. However, working in a distributed team creates isolation. That is why it is very important to start and end every meeting with a personal conversation. It is also important to make sure that the meeting feels as personal as possible. To do so, place the chat window below the camera, so that the person feels as if you are looking at them. During the conversation, resist the urge to check emails, read your Facebook feed or check my blog. Make the personal meeting personal, even if it’s remote.

I have been working in distributed teams for about six years. If you need advice on how to make the transition easier for your organization, I’ll be glad to give one (or two).

Working in a distributed company. Communication styles

I work at Automattic, one of the largest distributed companies in the world. Working in a distributed company means that everybody in this company works remotely. There are currently about one thousand people working in this company from about seventy countries. As you might expect, the international nature of the company poses a communication challenge. Recently, I had a fun experience that demonstrates how different people are.

Remote work means that we use text as our primary communication tool. Moreover, since the company spans over all the time zones in the world, we mostly use asynchronous communication, which takes the form of posts in internal blogs. A couple of weeks ago, I completed a lengthy analysis and summarized it in a post that was meant to be read by the majority of the company. Being a responsible professional, I asked several people to review the draft of my report.

To my embarrassment, I discovered that I made a typo in the report title, and not just a typo: I misspelled the company name :-(. A couple of minutes after asking for a review, two of my coworkers pinged me on Slack and told me about the typo. One message was, “There is a typo in the title.” Short, simple, and concise.

The second message was much longer.

Do you want to guess what the difference between the two coworkers is?
.
.
.
.
.
Here’s the answer
.
.
.
.
The author of the first (short) message grew up and lives in Germany. The author of the second message is American. Germany, United States, and Israel (where I am from) have very different cultural codes. Being an Israeli, I tend to communicate in a more direct and less “sweetened” way. For me, the American communication style sounds a little bit “artificial,” even though I don’t doubt the sincerity of this particular American coworker. I think that the opposite situation is even more problematic. It happened several times: I made a remark that, in my opinion, was neutral and well-intended, and later I heard comments about how I sounded too aggressive. Interestingly, all the commenters were Americans.

To sum up. People from different cultural backgrounds have different communication styles. In theory, we all know that these differences exist. In practice, we usually are unaware of them.

Featured photo by Stock Photography on Unsplash

Curated list of established remote tech companies

Someone asked me about distributed companies or companies that offer remote positions. Of course, my first response was Automattic but that person didn’t think that Automattic was a good fit for them. So I googled and was surprised to discover that my colleague, Yanir Seroussi, maintains a list of companies that offer remote jobs.

I work at Automattic, one of the biggest distributed-only companies in the world (if not the biggest one). Recently, Automattic founder and CEO, Matt Mullenweg started a new podcast called (surprise) Distributed.

An interesting way to beat procrastination when working from home

Working from home (or a coffee shop, or a library) is great. However, there is one tiny problem: the temptation not to work is sometimes much bigger than the temptation in a traditional office. In the traditional office you are expected to look busy which is the first step to do an actual work. When you work from home, nobody cares if you get up to have a cup of coffee or water the plants. This is GREAT but sometimes this freedom is too much. Sometimes, you wish someone would give you that look to encourage you to keep working.

This is the exact problem that Taylor Jacobson, the founder of https://focusmate.com is trying to solve. Here’s how Focusmate works. You schedule a fifty-minutes appointment with a random partner. During the session, you and your partner have exactly sixty seconds to tell each other what you want to achieve during the next fifty minutes and then start working, keeping the camera on. At the end of t the session, you and your partner tell each other how was your session. That’s it.

I signed up for this service and participated in two such session. I really liked the result. During that hour, I had the urge to get up for a coffee, to make phone calls, etc. But the fact that I saw someone on my screen, and the fact that they saw me stopped me. The result — 50 minutes of uninterrupted work. I even didn’t check Twitter, despite the fact that my buddy couldn’t see my screen.

I heard about this service in a podcast episode that was recommended to me by my coworker Ian Dunn. Focusmate is absolutely free for now. In that podcast show, Taylor (the founder) talks about the possible business models. Interestingly, when Taylor tried to crowd-fund this project he managed to get almost five time more money than he eventually planned to ([ref]).

One more thing. This podcast show, https://productivitycast.net, looks like an interesting podcast to follow if you are interested in productivity and procrastination.