Building remote culture
This week, we talk about how to facilitate building and strengthening relationships between coworkers at a remote company
There were a variety of different ideas thrown around in this episode. Here are some of the takeaways:
- Ideally, a healthy remote culture won't just mimic an in-person culture, it will actually take advantage of the unique characteristics remote has to offer.
- After companies start going back to in-person work, we shouldn't just go back to business as usual. We should try to maintain the things that are better about remote.
- There are a number of subtle elements of in-person conversations that break down over video chat because of the lag and worse audio quality. This makes it difficult to have more than 5-6 people in the same conversation remotely.
- One solution to this is to break into smaller groups.
- Another solution is to add structure to the conversation (e.g. everyone goes in a circle taking turns at doing something) so that people know who's turn it is to talk.
- Many relationship-building moments are based around sharing experiences. Consider what experiences can be shared online (playing games, watching the same video, etc.)
- There's not currently a tool for high-fidelity, asynchronous communication at a business. This is an opportunity to explore.
