Remote Work Debate

Maybe you need to work on your communication skills? I realize that's a snarky sounding answer, so let me expand on that. Face to face communication is nice and has benefits. But there are tradeoffs. It's clear that your company has decided that when making a decision between having certain team members be remotely part of the team or not at all, the choice is clear. So maybe the appropriate course of action is to accept the benefit of continuing to have access to those individuals and

Sounds like everyone just kept on going like they were in person. Remote work takes a different cadence and communication patterns. I work at a 100% remote company and we have none of those problems (AFAIK).- We use email extensively, both person-to-person and with various internal mailing lists we can subscribe to.- Slack is very asynchronous and it is common for people to silence it when busy.- All meetings are recorded and optional if you aren't an active participant.- We wri

Not everyone is suited to remote work. It sounds like you are better suited to working in an office. I can tell you from experience that the periodic get together events (whatever they are called) are really crucial to building a stronger team bond and to working efficiently together.

My experience has been the opposite of yours.I worked on a remote team for several years and recently migrated to an in the office job in a similar line of employment and was surprised how often such things occur. In your case it may either be that your work does not lend itself to such activities or you are potentially unaware that they are occurring.Slack is poor replacement for face to face. It is good for communication for many types of projects and teams, but it cannot convey a pers

Remote first is key. If your team isn't remote, there is assymmetry in communication. This will lead to problems long term.

It sounds like you do a great job communicating regularly in your typical in-person environment.I previously worked at an "old-school" company where everyone on the team would work remote 2-3 times a week. We'd also collaborate closely.One thing that we naturally did was pair off on projects, so on a given week (or month), two people on the team were working on closely related things. On days when we'd work remote, it was easy to switch to talking to your partner on vid

> I don't have all my juniors around me, so I can't overhear their conversations, so I can't jump in when they talk themselves into trouble. I can't help people debug problems I'm not aware of, and frustrated grumbling often comes a few steps before actively asking for help. I don't have people from other teams around me, so I can't grab them for coffee/lunch and catch up on what they're doing. I used to have a couple of PMs from other teams who re

As a long time remote employee, this absolutely needs to be addressed as a company or at least team in order to work. I've been on a lot of teams. Some have constant one off meetings, whiteboard sessions, and lot of general back channel conversations. Those are not fun to work on, and you constantly feel behind, missing out, and frankly, forgotten. This itself makes me feel less productive, or perhaps be less productive, since nobody is paying attention anyways.Others design collabor

I don't understand. I work remotely and regularly debug issues and brainstorm solutions with my teammates. Their physical proximity is not relevant. Clearly I am missing something.

Because as soon as one person in the team is remote, the whole team needs to organise around that. Think of a 5 person team where 1 is remote and the others aren't. Your daily standup ? can't do that quickly at your desk, you need to find a room and setup visio. Going on lunch and discussing about your project ? Too bad. Got an idea you ran by a colleague at the coffee machine ? Now you need to setup a call or get everything in writing for the 4th dude. A state of the project on a whit