Come Together
TL;DR: I recommend you to put effort in meeting your remote coworkers in person every once in a while.
Virtual Relationships
One of those things that makes me realize I’m from a past generation is the fact that I don’t have (and I almost never had) online friends. It’s not that I don’t use social networks, online forums or messaging apps. It’s just that all the friends I connect with virtually, I met them first in person. Even if I we first met each other through an online forum, we weren’t actually friends until we met in real-life.
Meeting people in real-life and especially talking to them helps you reduce a bias that’s super endemic to online communication. I always have a hard time finding its name or a proper link to share, but let me just describe it for now and you can point me to the proper info about it in the comments. Decades ago, in the times of ICQ, MSN and IRC, my brother used to say “All you read in the Internet is a lie”. He was cryptically referring to the fact that whenever you read something online, what you understand from it is mostly shaped by your vision and not by the writer’s intent, so most of the message is lost and/or misinterpreted. To reiterate something that I’ve read/watched multiple times online: if, for a particular message, all you have is a text, it’s up to your brain to complete the rest of the context information you would’ve naturally gathered from the speaker’s voice, tone, gestures, history, etc… should this have been an in-person conversation.
Knowing people in real-life, at the very least, allows you to read their messages in your mind with their own voices and expressions.
Remote Workers
But I happen to work in two companies with lots of remote workers:
- InakaESI has multiple remote people working from different places (mostly Latin America, but also the US and even Spain)
- Erlang Solutions is a multinational company with offices in different parts of Europe and, being Inaka part of it, Buenos Aires as well. Not only that but all offices have remote workers in different parts of the world.
So, for the last couple of years, even when I still had no virtual friend outside work, I had (and I still have) several virtual coworkers around the world. We communicate constantly over Hipchat, Skype, Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting, Slack, even sometimes on the phone as well. But that communication never fully replaces the experience of meeting them face-to-face.
Messaging on Hipchat or Slack still has the same problems described above. It lacks context and our brains are not happy with the lack of context, so they fill it in with something. And that something almost never matches the actual context the writer had when he wrote the message. I’ll give you an example: We have a fellow coworker at Erlang Solutions called Karol (you might know him from this blog post). For some reason, Karol sounds like a female name to most of us working from Buenos Aires. It didn’t actually have much of an impact, but until the first time we got on a call with him we read all his messages with a female voice. Sorry about that, Karol.
Actually talking through Skype, Hangout, GoToMeeting is an improvement, but then again…
Besides, if you’re thinking that having an online meeting will allow you to see other people’s expressions, consider this: I’ve been having two to twenty of these kind of meetings every week for years and I’m still waiting for the day I don’t have to turn off my camera at some point to be able to have a successful voice conversation with my interlocutors. Streaming video from multiple sources at a time is still a network intensive task and even for 1:1 meetings, at least in South America, streaming video is an unpredictable matter. Even if you get past those technical limitations, these things are still meetings, with agendas, scheduling, etc. You don’t have an impromptu conversation on Skype, like you would have near a physical coffee machine, do you?
What to do?
OK, but for certain companies (like InakaESI and Erlang Solutions) having remote workers is not just inevitable, but also desirable. How do we deal with the problems mentioned above, then?
I can tell you what we do. Surely it’s not perfect, but I think it’s a good place to start. Of course, if you have better ideas, please share them in the comments!
A Trip to Buenos Aires
Most of Inaka’s workforce lives in Buenos Aires. Therefore, since we want our remote workers to meet the team, when possible and affordable we invite them to come down to BA for a week (or maybe more) once or twice a year and work here with the rest of the crew. During that time, we try to perform some particular activities with our remote coworker:
- Pair Programming sessions. We believe pair-programming is a great way to know your teammates. We don’t do 8-hour-long pair programming sessions, but we try to schedule a couple of short-lived sessions while the remote dev is with us. We do have remote pair-programming sessions as well, but we believe that in-person pair-programming is much more fruitful for everyone.
- Training. If the visitor is learning a new programming language or tools or if he wants to get familiar with some methodologies or techniques we use, it is much more productive for a trainer (usually, a just another developer who happens to know what the visitor wants to learn) to sit with him in the office and teach him than doing the same thing in a remote fashion.
- 1:1 meetings. I’ll write more about 1:1 meetings in a following article, but you can imagine why having a 1:1 in person is much more valuable than the same meeting over Skype/Hangout. We have monthly 1:1s and those are scheduled way beforehand, but when a remote dev is in our office, I do my best to conduct our meeting during that time, even if that doesn’t match the official schedule.
- Talks. Most Fridays we have someone at our office giving a lightning talk for the rest of us. Remote talks are accepted and encouraged, but in-person talks are a much more rewarding experience both for the speaker and the audience. So, whenever we have someone visiting us on a Friday, we try to get them to be the speakers at the corresponding lightning talk.
Get Togethers
Erlang Solutions, on the other hand, is a bigger company and the issues with remote devs are not the same. We don’t just have individual remote workers, we have multiple offices spread out around the globe. Then, we can’t just invite them all to a single office to work together there.
Wait a second! Actually… that’s almost exactly what we do. Once a year, in the vicinity of one of our offices, we organize a massive event called Get Together (G2G, for short). As a matter of fact, that happens twice a year: once on each side of the Atlantic Ocean.
During these events (and partially during the days before and after it), we do:
- Pair Programming, or more than that ;)
- Longer versions of our regular meetings, without all the can you hear me now? hassle we can spend more time actually discussing important matters on our standups, tech lead conversations and other meetings that usually happen over Skype, Hangout or GoToMeeting.
- Talk sessions. While we’re all together, everybody gets a chance to show the rest of the company what their offices and teams have been up to in the last year or what the plans are for the future. It’s enlightening.
- Indoor activities like dancing, BeamOlympics, etc…
- Outdoor activities like rafting, scavenger hunts, team competitions, city tours, yoga, paintball, etc…
But the most important part is that we have lots of time and opportunities to get to know each other and put faces to online avatars. After these events, communication through Hipchat/Slack is forever improved.
Organizing these activities, including trips and hotels and all, is not a simple job, but it’s certainly worth the investment.
