A New Lens for Remote Work
Changing the way we think about distributed teams
Hey there 👋
My name is Conor. I’m helping shape how teams work together at Hugo, centralized meeting notes that connect with your favorite tools.
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When I joined Hugo, it was my first time working as a full-time remote employee. Initially, it was hard, but over time I found that my working relationships had actually become more effective because of the distance.
This seems counterintuitive, but it made more sense as I gave it more thought. The distance forced our team to be smarter about interactions. We were more stringent with planning ahead of time.
We communicated better overall because we couldn’t rely on taps on the shoulder and waving for attention.
🔉 Multimodal communication
Consider high-bandwidth versus low-bandwidth communication. Face-to-face communication is the highest possible bandwidth. Asynchronous text (e.g., email) is the lowest.
When working remotely, it’s easy to default to low-bandwidth modes of communication. It can feel intrusive to ask for face time with someone who works 2,000 miles away. But the most effective remote teams develop good habits around multimodal communication, optimizing their communication modes for the right bandwidth and type of discussion needed.
Embracing a multimodal approach allows you to balance the overall bandwidth of information transfer with people’s preferences, calibrating your organization to excel. Full-spectrum communication is critical to having a capable remote team.
Another benefit of using the most appropriate type of communication is that it helps you have the right amount of interaction. Remote teams need to be aligned to be productive, but too many interruptions break productivity. A fifteen-minute phone call can save you an hour of back and forth on Slack.
🥇 New models of accountability
In the old way of doing business, job performance was measured by how much time you spent behind a desk. If you were the first to arrive and last to leave, you were a superstar.
Remote work flips that entire notion on its head. Teams measure performance by results and impact, not time in the seat. Successful remote teams embrace this disruption, rather than fight against it.
All remote workers have much greater ownership over how they are going to approach their tasks. For many, that is what enables them to be so successful.
So rather than measuring time-at-desk with a stopwatch, set clear guidelines and expectations. At Hugo, we use task management software and collaborative documents to organize our plans. Action items, due dates, and work are easy to access and update, no matter where you are located.
Approaching work in this way gives you the freedom to allow more flexibility. For example, one engineer on our team uses a polyphasic sleep cycle. While he sleeps fewer hours than most people overall, he’s sometimes not awake in the middle of the day — and sometimes he’s hard at work in the middle of the night.
By remaining flexible with the arrangements that can help remote workers thrive, you can provide an even higher value in the remote opportunity. Every worker is unique — and that uniqueness can be either stifled, to the company’s detriment, or it can be leveraged, to the company’s benefit. It’s a win-win.
🗣 Embrace casual communication
The widespread adoption of new communication modes over the last few decades has changed both the mode and the form in which we communicate using the Internet. The neutral, objective, stuffy patterns of professional communication from the past have gradually given way to a more intimate, human, and casual tone for most businesses.
These new patterns of communication have not just been a shift in tone. Emojis are now part of mainstream culture. They provide a necessary additional layer of information in text-based communication, where we don’t have body language and facial expressions as cues.
GIFs and memes abound, providing people at work with ways to describe feelings and ideas that are instant and visual. Acronyms like “smh” (shaking my head) and the ubiquitous “lol” (laughing out loud) provides a quick shorthand to these otherwise-physical interactions.
For some, adopting these trends might not come easily; it may be a struggle to embrace them. But when you do, it will allow you to communicate more effectively with people every day. And because we’re often interacting remotely, all these fist bumps (👊) and thank you's (🙏) are essential. They stand in for in-person high fives or the smile and nod you give when saying “thank you,” when you genuinely mean it.
When receiving emojis and GIFs, remain open-minded. Remote communication, even when done well, can still be plagued with misunderstandings. You often don’t have the full context. In an office, you might be able to figure out that Darren barely got any sleep because of his new baby pretty quickly. However, if you’re trading emails and Slack messages with him, the puffy eyes and fourth cup of coffee aren’t going to be as noticeable.
Always assume good intentions. For example, there are multiple ways to interpret an emoji. It can indicate sarcasm. It can also suggest silliness. If you find yourself interpreting communication negatively, stop and consider whether you are reading the situation correctly, and with a mind that is open to good intentions.
🚀 Remote workers want career growth too
Often unintentionally, remote workers are not given access to the same career opportunities that their office-based coworkers are. Being out of sight can make it hard for a remote worker to level up. Even people who consistently put out good work can be overlooked in favor of people who are seen showing up to the office every day.
It’s crucial to offer continued training, development, and growth opportunities for remote workers. Even if no promotion is likely to occur, people must not feel stagnant in their position. If you supervise remote teammates, schedule time periodically to think about their career growth, or make it a recurring agenda item for your regular one-on-ones.
🏝 Treat everyone as remote
There’s an easy way to ensure you don’t end up with an “us versus them” culture of in-office versus remote workers: treat everyone as remote, regardless of their location. That means that if a remote worker is on-camera in a meeting, ideally everyone else is too, whether that be on one large group cam, or a few individual ones — provided your Internet bandwidth can handle such excess.
Treating all work as remote work is a helpful way to lead by example. Don’t expect remote workers to embody the best practices of communication if no one in the proper office is doing it. When you share freely and communicate often, regardless of your location, that will become the norm for your team.
📚 Reads of the Week
Managing Remotely
We're all scrambling to learn and adapt. In that vein, Julie Zhou, former VP of Design at Facebook and author of The Making of a Manager shares some tips for how to manage working remotely during this crazy period.
How Superhuman Uses Slack
This tweet from Gaurav Vohra, Head of Growth Superhuman covers how and when to use Slack vs. other mediums like email. One thing that I’ve seen work well: If you’re asking someone to do something that will take >30 seconds, move to email.
Why Marketing Is Eating the World
I thought this take from Elizabeth Yin was interesting. One of several provocative quotes: “the U.S. software industry, for the most part, is no longer about technology.”
Thanks for reading Future of Teamwork this week! Did anything stand out? I’d love to hear about it. Reply to this email or tweet at me and let’s chat 😁
Until next time,
Conor