Comment by mattferderer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattferderer | Hacker News Reader

Working remote is great but still requires a quality company for it to be enjoyable.

Meetings should be treated like everyone is remote. If people attend from their desk, these tend to work out better & you avoid unintentional things that make it difficult for remote employees to attend.

Having the majority of conversations done via e-mail or a chat tool & properly documented in something like OneNote or Evernote or a project management tool goes a long way in keeping everyone on the same page as well. This is good for non-remote teams as well.

Allowing flexibility in time & location goes a long way in making happy employees in my experience. It shows you trust them to get the work done. Sure, some people will abuse it but those aren't people you want on your team anyways.

As stated by others, being a remote worker doesn't mean you need to be a hermit either. There are tons of ways to still go out & socialize with people. Even on remote teams, I still find a good chunk of my day is socializing via video chat meetings where someone is bound to go off topic. People also login early & chat about life.

Which “things that make it unintentionally difficult to attend” meetings for remote people are you referring to?

Tools/Tech:

Poor teleconference tool.

Low quality headphones/microphones.

Low quality or no web cams.

Process:

Failure to auto-mute attendees when they join meeting

Failure to actively manage mute during the meeting (some nitwit always starts eating potato chips).

Failure to ensure mics are well placed in conference rooms.

Do you have any sort of written out process for managing this? These are all spot on, and I think a literal manual for new remote employees would be helpful.

I don't. At one time, my employer had posters in most of the large conference rooms with pointers/rules.

And I've found remotes to be better at intuitively following those rules than local employees. Because locals are face-to-face, there's no audio/video quirks, and misc noise (chewing, paper rustling) tends to be way less distracting.

EDIT - remotes also have a serviceable webcam on their laptop. Meeting rooms need good wide-angle cameras installed so the entire room of people can be broadcast. Employer issues decent Jabra headsets to all employees, so audio is covered - so again, it's a matter of installed good A/V in the conference rooms (particularly number and placement of mics).

Our current teleconferencing solution is "Zoom" and so far, it's been far better than previous software (primarily WebEx and odd combinations of 800 numbers). It allows default meeting settings (by corporate account and by user) and "mute incoming attendees" is checked on mine.

Another common (but not universal) rule is "cameras are ON". We want to see each other's faces while chatting remotely.

EDIT2 - good AV equipment isn't cheap. I asked about adding a Polycom system to one of our small "huddle" rooms and it was many thousands of dollars - not deal-breaking for a mid-size enterprise operation, but also not something any of us could fund on the spot. IT is slowly adding them to the smaller rooms as funds become available (all rooms that seat >4 were done when we moved into the space).

I won't presume to answer for the OP, but my (remote conference attendance) pet peeves include: I have printed out important information (but forgotten to email it); let me use the whiteboard that is mounted on the same wall as the camera to illustrate a concept; I will speak exactly loud enough so that only people in the room can here me; I will use the free tier of some conferencing service, and start the call fifteen minutes early so that the connection drops halfway through the meeting.

A few years ago, I was on a green-field project and one of the senior developers was remote. The rest of us were co-located in a "lab" (converted conference room). While our teleconferencing tools were mostly adequate, white-boarding was problematic. "Smart boards" aren't usually. We ended up with an extra webcam pointed at the board and just had to remember to plug it into whoever's laptop was leading the meeting. Not ideal, but worked ok.

Well said. The biggest offenders are usually companies & not the remote employees. I am in a great spot where I don't experience these today but the most frequent I've seen are:

Poor microphones set up around the conference room that make it hard to hear everyone.

No webcam at all or a bad webcam setup that doesn't allow the remote attendees to see the gestures people make.

Multiple people talking at the same time, but having very quiet conversations.

Using a whiteboard, a projector or showing a screen by turning your computer around but not making it visible to remote attendees.

* Basically doing things that the remote people can't participate in.

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