Making Remote Work Work: An Adventure in Time and Space | MongoHQ Blog - 0 views
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Working well remotely takes practice
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What they don’t always think about, though, is the inherent firewall a commute creates between “work” and “personal life”. Working out of a home office opens up an entire world of surprisingly difficult-to-handle distractions, particularly for those of us with families. It’s easy to avoid a guitar wielding toddler when the office is 5 miles away and he has no driver’s license. It’s harder when the wall between the living room and the office makes a delightful banging noise when struck with a guitar.
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Having centralized offices can wreck a budding remote friendly culture. Working in a way that’s inclusive of people who aren’t physically (or even temporally) present is not entirely natural, and excluding remote employees from important interactions is a quick path to agony.
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very explicit about the “work as if you’re not here” standard. We expect everyone to work with the remote collaboration tools, be available via the same channels, and produce written artifacts of interactions that are important to share.
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A person’s default behavior when they go into a funk is to avoid seeking out interactions, which is effectively the same as actively withdrawing in a remote work environment.
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blog post by Kurt Mackey at MongoHQ, a distributed company, on working remotely and how hard it is to come up with an effective system for engaging workers. It is a work in progress. Need firewalls between personal life and work life--sound has to be managed for one thing. Mentions the blending of in-office staff and remote staff and a 'standard' for everyone to use the same collaboration tools, be available via the same channels, and produce documentation of interactions that are important to share. Has a whole section on the practical (and the tools they use to communicate) prefer async communications! Have a central work tool (Compose to record what is being produced each day); day to day communication in Hipchat, use pre-reads to meetings on a Wiki that get updated on Hackpad during the meeting, open mailing lists, Sqwiggle for face time, and Google Hangouts, too. Final recommendation is to "keep iterating" to build a remote friendly culture.