Yes, I imagine the ad-hoc creative process does get thrown off when transitioning from in-office to remote. As a remote worker for the past 3 years, that’s been involved in creative engineering discussions, it’s on the individuals and the company as a whole to be intentional about the creative process.
My company was ~50% remote across the US and adjoining countries before, and now we’re 100% remote and the transition has been relatively seamless.
Some things that help:
1) Over-communicate. Don’t be afraid to sound stupid or think that your ideas have to be fully baked. Share early and often. Whether that’s a message, a doc, an idea, anything. Blast it out and organic conversations will usually flow from there.
2) Foster a culture of popping open a video chat when there seems to be a misunderstanding after two back-and-forths. This comes from Gitlab’s principles, I forget the actual wording, but the spirit of the principle has helped me numerous times from having long, dragged out conversations through text when a simple 3min video chat will resolve the issue. Integrating your video conference solution with your chat client works wonders here. We have Slack+Zoom so a video chat is a simple text command away.
3) Establish some loose SLAs for communication like “will respond to comments within X period of time.” (Be as detailed as you like.) But let people know when they can expect a response from you generally based upon the medium.
4) With the above, embrace a RFC (request-for-comments) culture where people can give feedback and have organic conversations on anything WIP. And then follow-up with a scheduled 30min meeting to resolve any outstanding ambiguities.
There are probably a few other things I’m forgetting, but the above has served myself and our company so well that I honestly feel more productive working remotely than in an office. The meetings are shorter and more focused, there’s more documentation, and there’s less shoot-the-breeze interruptions.
All the above isn’t to say there isn’t merit to working in an office. There absolutely is! Just that I think it’s normal to have some growing pains when transitioning to remote work, and I hope that people won’t write it off entirely before giving some amount of intentional thought to learning, adapting, and building an equally productive remote workflow.