We Actually Built a Remote Team, and It Rocks

There are a few points that stand out and ring true to me. As someone who has thrived as a remote worker and made a career of being a generalist, I was similarly surprised to hear from StatusPage that these qualities aren't compatible. My team members and myself especially picked up new languages, tools, roles, and responsibilities and ran with them.

As far as communication, weekly phone meetings (no video needed) coupled with in-person meetings maybe once or twice a year served to keep us all on the same page. The main method of day-to-day communication was via persistent chat rooms and direct chats between people as needed.

After years of great progress, we had a successful exit in 2014. When I find my next team, it will definitely be in a remote role, as the benefits to me are so great that I've essentially ruled out working in an office in the future. If you've convinced yourself that your organization can't operate with remote workers, then good luck and I hope you find the team members you need.

I'm absolutely over the rhetoric about how you need to be in the same office to have any sort of culture. There are online communities every where, they all have their own culture, their inside jokes, their group think, etc etc.

Maybe I'm just a bit bitter about the topic but I grew up online, I find online social connections to be equally as strong as offline ones. I guess I just feel the whole counter argument is baseless and unproven and not held up by anything more than survivor bias, industry norms and what people say investors hate to hear.

The pros easily outweigh the con's. Some teams it will absolutely not work. Some teams its the best way forward.

It doesn't need to be the whole team at the same time, but I believed it was my job as manager to make sure my team could go to conferences (dev, UX, IA, design) in groups.

Those situations have an uncanny ability to blend excitement, thought-provoking questions, a bit of insecurity, and plans of action.

When folks returned, both remote and in-house, it lead to better camaraderie and better output. Experiences are things people share and hold onto.

Alternatives to Ventrilo (just my personal preference, really), includes Mumble and Teamspeak. Everyone is required to have a push-to-talk key, too. We give everyone their own office (a la dedicated channel for them), and have some scripts built into that allow us to page another user and tell them we need their attention.

1) Good communication (as many others have mentioned) - team members were always on chat (campfire->slack) while working. We also had semi-regular weekly video chats where we talked about what was going on. Video was nice because it helped to put faces to the people you were working with.

2) Don't focus on work 100% of the time - just like non-remote offices, people need time where they can chat about non-work related things, like games, home life, funny cat pictures, etc. Talking about these things helps create bonds beyond work, and improves the team imo.

3) Meet in person occasionally - the team all met once a year in person. Yes it can be a little awkward initially, but it also helps to further cement that there is a real person behind the chat.

If you add in the fact that I'm basically in rural Appalachia (Eastern Kentucky) and there aren't that many DevOps/Linux SysAdmin jobs for guys out here -- I'm almost forced to be a complete remote resource for most companies. I've been doing a fair amount of interviewing recently -- I've had companies tell me that their engineering staff is completely remote but their DevOps team is an extension of corporate IT and that they need to be in the office for that (um, what?), that I'd be their first remote employee (scary), or that they have a cloud environment and they want a distributed team, but, everyone's in an office somewhere because they don't have enough internal support for a remote workforce.

From a manager's perspective, letting go control of your team is scary: you lose the ability to check in on your employees by walking to their desk, you lose the 'butt in seat' visibility of your team, and you lose the 'over the cubical' conversations. What they don't immediately see is that those same things still exist, and still happen, but in different mediums. Employees will still chat amongst themselves in IRC, managers will still message people or note who is or isn't here based on activity. Giving up that control resulted in a productivity boost for my team -- almost everyone (there was one employee who had an interesting home situation and we had to get him office space to work) was twice as productive at home than they were in the office. We still had our team dynamic -- we'd meet up once a week for dinner and work from a shared working space one afternoon a week -- but we felt closer to one another and understood our goals and targets more.

Its especially important to have regular team online meetings e.g. Scrum. This is both for communication and for socialization. Its easy to forget that other remote workers are people; its easy to quit talking to them. Seeing and hearing them daily makes them people again, instead of just an avatar.

David, if you're here, are you guys using SaaS for your VoIP provider, or are you using FreePBX or something? Or just direct phone-to-phone voip with the port forwarding that entails?