[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
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Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
We are a remote company. Everything is going well. No plans to be
in person, but I'd say we can do a better job at communicating. Any
tips or articles to read?
Author : aml183
Score : 58 points
Date : 2024-11-15 19:17 UTC (3 hours ago)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://cdn.zapier.com/storage/learn_ebooks/e4fbeb81f76c0c13...
|
| https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/remote-culture-at-hashic...
|
| https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/the-remote-developer-s-p...
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| Slack / IM often, don't demand a response instantly though, async
| & remote go hand in hand.
|
| Put important stuff in email not slack/IM
|
| Have a company wiki
|
| Prefer video calls for alignment
|
| Write to each other often, spend time crafting written
| narratives, 1-pagers, amazon 6-pagers etc. to share ideas, make
| people read them, use google docs or ms word online and get
| comments inline in the document using those tools, follow up on
| video calls to confirm alignment.
|
| Gitlab has a handbook for this stuff, they are a 100% remote
| business and very open about their practices:
| https://handbook.gitlab.com/
|
| consider personal readme's if your team is a bit larger
| (example): https://gitlab.com/swiskow/swiskow
| travisb wrote:
| Video calls. If you aren't having at least one video call a day
| something is probably wrong. Configure it such that starting a
| video call takes no more than 4 clicks.
|
| Have a company-wide General/Coffee chat where people talk about
| arbitrary things. It's better if this chat has history which
| expires in 24 hours.
|
| Write lots of short documents -- especially for designs. Review
| them much like you would review code. This can be as simple as
| Markdown documents in your repository using your normal code
| review tool. Ensure all documents are listed in a single easy-to-
| find index of some sort.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Agree with the occasional relaxed "coffee chat", and having a
| repository full of good documentation, but...
|
| > _If you aren 't having at least one video call a day
| something is probably wrong._
|
| That seems excessive to me, especially if everyone is also
| staying connected via chat, emails, etc. Weekly meetings are
| about my limit, considering I also have work to do, meetings
| with external stakeholders, ad-hoc meetings, etc.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| > It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24
| hours.
|
| Probably wise to run that by counsel.
| alexchantavy wrote:
| > It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24
| hours.
|
| This sounds fun to have a b.s./watercooler chat channel. It'd
| be cool if Slack had that feature but I wonder if that's a non-
| starter for corporate reasons.
| esses wrote:
| Workspace Owners and Org Owners can adjust retention settings
| for public channels. Private Channels and DMs can also be set
| by members if allowed by admins.
| toast0 wrote:
| > If you aren't having at least one video call a day something
| is probably wrong.
|
| Depends on how you work? A video call every day would be too
| much for me, but two a week seems alright. I'm also not a fan
| of daily meetings in person either, though.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| > It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24
| hours.
|
| Your legal and HR departments will be much less enthusiastic
| about this idea if your org is big enough to have either.
| bengale wrote:
| One thing I've found useful is to have deliberate google meet
| calls when having planning discussions or firming up decisions.
|
| I set up the recording and transcription and then up front we
| define the problem and what we want the outcome to be. Afterwards
| I give the transcription to ChatGPT and get it to summarise the
| content, decisions, etc and add that to our documentation with a
| link to the recording.
|
| This helps you stay on the same page and also gives context to
| people who werent present about what has been discussed and
| decided.
| dijit wrote:
| Gemini is actually good for audio transcriptions, I tried other
| AI tools that were much worse.
|
| I didn't find another good use of Gemini, but the audio
| transcription combined with the summaries were great. Best I've
| seen.
| jjcm wrote:
| Huge bias here as I work for Figma, but multiplayer collaborative
| editors like Figma do wonders.
|
| We run nearly everything out of a figma or figjam file. Retros,
| planning, etc. There's something really nice about being able to
| see everyones cursors at once, and feeling like you're
| collaboratively creating something. Presos and slide decks often
| feel very one-direction from a data flow perspective, which
| becomes problematic for remote-only roles.
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| how do you think Figma slides will play into this? (Big
| Figma/Jam fan here BTW, thanks for your work!)
| deadbabe wrote:
| First off learn to relax. breathe. Just because people aren't
| constantly communicating doesn't mean nothing is happening.
|
| Learn to embrace long pauses in video calls. Learn to accept that
| a response to a message sometimes takes several minutes or even
| an hour to come through.
|
| You said everything is going well. Okay, so what's the problem
| then? The amount of communication currently happening clearly
| must be sufficient, otherwise things would not be going well.
| Right?
|
| Just chill.
| screye wrote:
| If you're in similar time zones, try https://www.gather.town/ ?
|
| I've used it for remote conferences, and I like its 2D UI. Real
| sense of space there.
| betamike wrote:
| This is what my last, 6 person, startup used, and it was really
| helpful. It lowered the barrier to having a quick discussion,
| since you could see if someone was at their "desk" or busy in a
| meeting.
|
| Also you can see if other teammates are having a discussion or
| co-working in a common area, which made for some ad-hoc co-
| working sessions.
| Atotalnoob wrote:
| This would be insanely disruptive to me and I think most of my
| team.
|
| There are much better ways to handle this like using gitlabs
| handbook.
|
| To me this is the equivalent of having to be on camera all day.
| Am I idle if my avatar hasn't moved or interacted with
| something in game?
| mh- wrote:
| _> Oh god, please kill it with fire._
|
| _> This is horrible._
|
| _> This would be insanely disruptive to me and I think most
| of my team._
|
| _> There are much better ways to handle this._
|
| Hi! You could probably turn this from a low-effort rant into
| a productive comment by removing the first 2 lines of your
| comment and expanding the last one into something
| informative.
| extr wrote:
| Gather is great. I think it lowers the barrier to chats just
| enough to make it more organic. In particular I find it's
| really great if you're having a 2-3 person conversation and
| realize someone else would be really valuable to add. You can
| just glance at their desk and see if they're available, "wave"
| to them, etc.
| morkalork wrote:
| I'm surprised at all the positive mentions of gather town. It
| just looked like a childish gimmick to me? I was tempted to log
| in and make some jokes about the pool being closed but I didn't
| want to out myself like that at work.
| cole_ wrote:
| When we tried it, gather.town set an awkward expectation that
| team members had to stand at their virtual desk, otherwise they
| weren't _actually_ online / working.
| swatcoder wrote:
| What becomes apparent very quickly outside the imposed rigidity
| of a physical office is that different individuals and different
| roles all have different optimal communication patterns. And
| people can get really fussy if they aren't getting the
| structure/tools/freedoms/whatever that they feel they need.
|
| And so the answer to your question is ultimately much more
| idiosyncratic than you're hoping it to be. Whatever answers you
| find here, take them as inspiration for things to try out rather
| than specific things to do.
|
| With that said, effective communication patterns tend to
| naturally snowball, so if you can start getting people feeling
| connected and collaborative, you'll find that they'll naturally
| keep that up and build on it.
|
| But you are going to need to throw some spaghetti at the wall to
| see what your team needs in order to get that process started.
| great_wubwub wrote:
| One thing people miss about remote work is that it's inherently
| transactional. Show up to a meeting, get or give what's needed,
| then go back in your hole. This is nice but for many people the
| lack of genuine social interaction is a killer.
|
| A few jobs ago we set up Donut (donut.com) to set up a couple 15-
| or 30-minute 1:1s per week and tried to stick to the rule that we
| weren't supposed to talk about work, just chat about whatever. A
| replacement for break room chatter, not Yet Another Meeting. It
| didn't always work very well but when it did, it was great.
|
| Some of the best conversations I had were with an autistic SRE
| who spent his first month telling everyone how autistic he was in
| case we needed to know. He did better virtually than he would
| have in person - lack of eye contact due to camera angles, maybe?
| So yeah, this has value even for you neuro-atypical, "I don't
| need chatter, just code" types.
| zb1plus wrote:
| All work (in-office or remote) is inherently transactional. If
| I am in an office, I have to pretend to have genuine social
| interactions with people. Social bonds made between colleagues
| have will happen organically. No in-office mandatory fun.
| hackernewds wrote:
| I never pretend that co-workers are my friends. I just
| understand they are co-workers and treat them as such. so
| then if I was forced to have mandatory socialization and fun
| I would quite despise it. if I wanted to interact with them,
| I would reach out and schedule one-on-ones as would happen
| IRL
| dmitrygr wrote:
| _ALL_ work is transactional. I solve your problems, you pay me
| money.
|
| I have family and friends for "social interaction" and
| "meaning". I do not seek that from a job, nor do I want a job
| that _claims_ to provide it.
|
| Any recruiter that tells me "our company is like a family" gets
| a reply that says "so i can cry on your shoulder in case of a
| bad breakup, and you'll help me move furniture?" and then gets
| blocked.
| extr wrote:
| This is such a simplistic take. There is a huge gulf between
| "We are a family" saccharine corporate BS and "I am a cog in
| the machine. I am forced to make conversation. Hello Coworker
| How Do You Do" robo-employee mnemonic.
|
| Personally I prefer to work with people who have a sense of
| humor, self-awareness about the importance (or lack of) of
| our work, have some interesting things to talk about it, can
| be surprising, etc. They don't have to be my best friend ever
| but I don't want to be bored.
| semitones wrote:
| 100%
| gwbas1c wrote:
| The "we're like family" phrase can mean many different
| things in the work environment, so don't read too deeply
| into it.
|
| That being said, it's often a sign of poor management;
| managers will use "we're like family" instead of addressing
| problems that they need to address. It can create a very
| stressful situation if you're a high performer, because the
| expectations and handholding quickly get unreasonable.
|
| (The song "Surface Pressure" from Encanto explains the
| situation exactly.)
|
| For example, I once worked with a manager who used the
| "we're like family" excuse when incoming tickets were
| incomprehensible and missing critical information. He was
| just copping out of his job, which was to set processes and
| make sure new employees knew the processes. Instead, his
| expectation was that I would handhold the organization
| through the ticketing system.
| dartos wrote:
| I think you can read between the lines of the OC.
|
| They obviously meant social interactions in remote
| environments are inherently transactional.
|
| You never make a zoom call just to say hi to your coworker
| when your mouse moves past the icon, but you might say hi if
| you walk past their desk.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > but you might say hi if you walk past their desk
|
| No. I would never interrupt someone's flow for a "hi". What
| an insane take. Those like you, interrupting us for a "hi"
| and throwing us off a good thought process when you "walk
| by", is one of the main things which make us all want to
| work remotely, far from you, protected by a need to have a
| purpose for your "hi".
| extr wrote:
| Donuts are okay, I've used it at 2 different companies now, but
| I inevitably find myself disabling it after 2-3 months on the
| job, usually when I start getting repeats. Maybe it would be
| okay if you could silently veto who you got paired with. No
| offense to some of my coworkers but I groan when paired with
| someone who isn't very conversational where I know I'm going to
| have to shoulder the burden of finding something to talk about.
| quectophoton wrote:
| > This is nice but for many people the lack of _genuine_ social
| interaction is a killer.
|
| Emphasis mine.
|
| This difference of what people consider genuine or not, some
| people even including the medium itself in their definition of
| "genuine", sounds like another possible cultural difference
| that must be kept in mind when communicating with others.
| karpovv-boris wrote:
| Dailies (we have 3 in a week) for synchronization helps a lot.
| It's also help's with new stuff onboarding.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Like an MMORPG guild. which in 2024 means Discord.
|
| (No "professional" solution is even close to gamer tech for
| remote communication)
| itake wrote:
| I work from the USA with people only in Singapore and India.
|
| I wrote "Writing style for Slack" a couple years ago if you're
| interested:
|
| https://www.kcoleman.me/writing/slack/2023/03/11/writing-sty...
| mushufasa wrote:
| 1. gather.town 2. Zulip (nuances of design much better than other
| chat systems for remote work specifically) 3. the 'latent energy'
| is going to be lower when people aren't eating lunch together and
| rubbing shoulders. you have to bring the energy to an empty room
| all the time when working remote. this also has to be exemplified
| by founders. doesn't mean loudness but instilling a sense of
| urgency etc.
| dijit wrote:
| +1 for Zulip.
|
| Still some warts, truthfully, but the core of it is just better
| for finding information and structuring things.
|
| Integrations are also easier.
|
| Definitely one of my more controversial additions to my
| company, but the pure volume and quality of conversations would
| he impossible otherwise. You would be required to wade through
| a lot of irrelevant dialogues otherwise.
| jlundberg wrote:
| We have been using Zulip as well now for a few years.
| Especially enforcing topics is a big win.
| paxys wrote:
| Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team
| channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all
| public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really
| necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change
| will have an immense impact on overall company culture.
| viewhub wrote:
| Massively agree with this. It can be difficult to create a
| culture where everyone talks in the open but it can save so
| many little and big mistakes!
| szszrk wrote:
| How to find comfort for and include characters that don't like
| the spotlight? At least not during early phase/brainstorming.
|
| I've worked with many great people that hate to handle things
| without their usual group first, and will stall until a
| reasonable approach can be presented. Which means creating
| shadow communication process - the more you push for
| "discouraging 1:1" the more they will hide.
|
| What your organisation did with such "incompatible" people,
| relate them until the team left likes how they work, or were
| there better ideas?
| brudgers wrote:
| Core values are core values, and for better and worse,
| everything is not for everyone.
|
| If all-communications-are-public is the company culture, then
| the company culture is also not to accommodate that
| alternative communication style.
|
| Because any out of channel communications require multiple
| people to participate, not just the person who prefers it.
| paxys wrote:
| No one is inherently "incompatible". It's mostly the
| environment influencing their behavior. There needs to be a
| culture where everyone feels comfortable speaking up and
| working outside silos, and that is always driven by
| management and senior eng leaders. For example do junior
| engineers get constructive criticism on a bad idea or design
| or are they yelled at and penalized? If the latter, of course
| everyone will think twice about being open.
|
| And even then you can only do so much. If someone _really_
| doesn 't want to participate then, well, it's on you to
| decide how to deal with that.
| underwater wrote:
| In my experience, most of the time this can be solved by
| resetting expectations.
|
| After all, a culture on 1:1 communication has a lot of
| downsides. The same question gets asked repeatedly, replies
| don't become searchable, the same people (usually the most
| experienced) end up being constantly tapped for answers
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| 100% this. The fact that teams does not have an easy voice
| channel is a disgrace.
| oc_elder wrote:
| I can appreciate the thinking here, but it not ideal. Different
| details are relevant to different people. And async is
| inefficient for many situations. Yes publish findings/results,
| but overcommunicating has a cost.
|
| Better to create different channels (sync, async, 1:1,
| broadcast), provide guidance and trust workers.
| rsingel wrote:
| Tickets. Email. Signal (emergencies and sensitive info only).
|
| Async all the things.
|
| Keep devs out of meetings.
|
| Don't track work hours.
|
| Never do Slack/Teams unless a client pays a lot to suck you into
| that or if they pay a very large number to have your devs in it
| as well.
| piotrkaminski wrote:
| We do three things:
|
| First, we use Missive to integrate email and chat. This way
| everything's in one place, properly threaded, and we can easily
| discuss emails internally in context. Much much better than GMail
| + Slack.
|
| Second, I run video chat office hours twice a week
| (Tuesday/Thursday). Anybody can drop in to discuss anything -- or
| not, if there's no need. This lowers the activation energy for
| "in person" discussions that otherwise might not get scheduled
| and promotes async work the rest of the time.
|
| Third, regular company offsites! Even a few days a year is good.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > I run video chat office hours twice a week
|
| I used to do that with a large remote team. It was extremely
| helpful with onboarding, and keeping a dedicated space for
| technical discussions.
| bjclark wrote:
| Distributed startup founder here. We love Figma, keep in touch
| with Gather.town, and have been very happy with Flat.app for
| keeping us from Asana/Slack hell.
| sethpurcell wrote:
| +1 for Gather.town we've been using it for years
| danesparza wrote:
| Slack / IM often
|
| Use video chat for meetings (encourage camera on but don't
| require it - management should lead by example)
|
| Be kind. Reach out using other forms of communication (like snail
| mail) if you want to encourage each other with thank you notes,
| etc.
|
| Use some kind of shared wiki for long term 'shared ownership'
| documentation. Don't be afraid to lead by example. Don't be
| obtuse. Give visual examples of processes, technical components,
| etc.
|
| Lean into visual examples everywhere you can (screenshots, mock-
| ups, diagrams, etc).
|
| In video chat, screen share and encourage use of annotations when
| discussing things. (Zoom has this feature and it's awesome)
|
| Use an agile cadence. Encourage people to share questions /
| concerns at story grooming sessions (which should be regular).
| Also encourage feedback at retrospectives (which should also
| happen regularly). Managers should lead by example in blameless
| retrospectives and lean into positive feedback.
|
| If you're a team of all dudes (or any one thing), you have a
| blindspot with perspective. You should rectify that.
| scott_w wrote:
| A few things help me:
|
| Get used to the idea that someone isn't necessarily there when
| you message. Try to predict when you'll need to talk to someone
| and send the message with the info you need.
|
| Document. Everything. Confluence needs to become your best
| friend. You and your colleagues rely on this information to keep
| up on things they might miss.
|
| When you're planning work, especially with lots of uncertainty,
| optimise to be inefficient. It's better to start with 20-person
| calls at the start of a big project and cut them down later than
| to have 3-person calls and realise you missed critical people 2
| weeks before your target date.
|
| On the flip side, once you know what you're doing, keep your
| status checks lean. Invite only the leads you need and write down
| the outcomes to share with the wider team.
|
| Be willing to change your communication habits as you grow. A
| weekly all-hands is fine for a 10-person startup. It's a
| monumental waste of time when you have 200 people across 5
| departments.
| viewhub wrote:
| Try to reduce the number of required sync meetings in favor of
| async alternatives. For the required sync meetings, make sure
| there is a rock solid agenda and EVERYONE knows what is expected
| from them going in. Make sure the meetings cover meaningful
| material and helpful to all attendees. Encourage everyone to
| speak up and contribute. If you find certain individuals not
| contributing or not prepared, proactively have a conversation
| with them outside the meeting to reset expectations.
|
| For async communication, it can still be helpful to set specific
| windows of time for things to get discussed. Example, Mondays
| 9am-Noon ET we review/discuss sprint goals. I like to record
| short videos with Loom to kick off discussions like this. Make
| sure to center these types of communication around specific
| tools, e.g. JIRA, Confluence, Google Docs, etc. Make sure the
| discussions convert to traceable decisions in your tooling.
| theendisney wrote:
| Dumb idea: play some game together.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > No plans to be in person
|
| Figure out how to have _some kind of face-to-face relationship._
| This could be an annual all-hands trip, or otherwise take a week
| to fly out and spend time with the person you work with.
|
| You learn A LOT about each other when you interact face-to-face.
| I once worked with two developers in India, and assumed that the
| shy one was just so-so, and the talkative one was brilliant.
|
| After some deep day-long conversations, and a few day trips, I
| realized my assumptions were completely wrong: The shy one was
| shy, and the talkative one spoke before thinking.
|
| ---
|
| More recently, I started work with a hybrid team. I live 60 miles
| from the office, but it's brutal commute. I go in once a week.
| quectophoton wrote:
| If you find yourself constantly trying to explain stuff visually,
| invest on a graphics tablet. Even a "cheap" <100 EUR goes a long
| way.
|
| As for the "whiteboard", just opening Excalidraw when you need it
| is very low friction in my experience. Google Jamboard and Miro
| were okay-ish, I guess, but for me the simplicity and
| responsiveness of Excalidraw is still better.
| beAbU wrote:
| I've integrated draw.io into our Confluence. We can now create
| inline diagrams right in the page being edited. Resulted in
| higher quality documentation, with a lot more diagrams for even
| mundane things. I generally work in pictures, so it's great for
| me.
|
| But I do agree, excalidraw is great. I recon its an importan
| skill to be able to confidently and quickly whip up a diagram
| while in a call. I worked with an engineer who preferred MS
| Paint, but he was really good at it, and it resulted in him
| explaining tricky concepts really elegantly.
| comprev wrote:
| The most important thing to me about remote communication is
| making time for "coffee catchup" to chat about non-work things.
|
| We literally sit down with a fresh coffee for 5mins just as we
| might when crossing paths in the office. Find common topics among
| colleagues to shoot the breeze - football, video games, cars,
| etc.
|
| Soon you'll have cross-team relationships with people who might
| never work directly together.
| oc_elder wrote:
| Regular group discussions (not standup) are important. My team
| meets 30-60 minutes four days a week to discuss technical details
| and long term strategy.
|
| It plays two important roles
|
| 1. establish rapport between team members
|
| 2. gives known space for issues. Leads to Better balance of focus
| time and group convo
|
| This is the most important meeting of the day. Create doc to
| people can add things to the agenda. Managers job is to keep the
| meeting relevant, efficient.
|
| Outside of that. Devs encouraged to pair together separately for
| troubleshooting.
|
| 1:1s are critical early on. DO NOT CANCEL THEM. And keep them
| relevant
| vpai wrote:
| Love a lot of the answers so far. On the softer side, I found
| remote work to be quite dry the past few years so created Cubby
| as a small way to add life/levity to internal communication.
| Collect team quotes & images, make memes! It's added a lot of joy
| to teams, especially eng teams.
|
| https://www.usecubby.com
| mannyv wrote:
| Slack, notion, and a meeting every Monday to talk about what
| we're doing and priorities.
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