Create space for serendipity

Steph Ango says If you’re remote, ramble:

A tip for remote teams of 2-10 people. Create a personal “ramblings” channel for each teammate in your team’s chat app of choice.

Ramblings channels let everyone share what’s on their mind without cluttering group channels. Think of them as personal journals or microblogs inside your team’s chat app, a lightweight way to add ambient social cohesion.

I love this idea! I genuinely think the more we write and share the better, and I’ve noticed the effect of similar things that grew out of working remotely with people.

Creating social calls twice a week (or, biweekly 😉): we did an async standup where we shared our updates in writing (more depth, allowed the top-level to be short and then detail in threads), and we got good at doing them as a team that the standup call rarely had anything to add. We kept it so we’d call in to answer questions, and we’d still go around the group reading out loud what we’d written, but it got repetitive from what we had just read and it felt pointless. It was rare that we had anything to say, so some (me included tbh) wanted to remove the call. We had some strong pushback on removing it, and as we dug into it, we realized that the want for a call really was about social connection, but they didn’t really get something social by how the call was structured. So we explicitly said that we’d be social after we had discussed anything standup related. The standup was short and snappy, and after we got to have a laugh and get to know our remote colleagues better. Smallish team, five people in total.

“Hallway conversations” to mimic bumping into a colleague you don’t see so often: in the principal chapter (where the most senior ICs come together) we mostly work independently or with a small group of other principals. So to try and mimic bumping into someone you don’t see very often and be intentional to get to know them better, we’d start each chapter meeting with a 10min breakout room of up to four people and ask them all to answer “What has surprised you recently?” Because things that has surprised one principal would likely surprise another, and may even turn out someone else knows something to save them time. We had a lot of follow-up conversations in our channel after we did that and I feel like we managed to make some good connections thanks to them.

The hallway conversations came out of reading this excerpt from Deep work by Cal Newport, because we wanted to find ways to connect the principals:

“Traveling the hall’s length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions and ideas was almost impossible. A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.” […] Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.

And just to connect it, some other thoughts/suggestions on remote work in Reasonable assumptions …and why they’re (nearly) impossible.

The rambling channel also makes me think about about the slacklog that Old School Burke recommends, but they’re often a bit more about what you did, creating a trail of breadcrumbs, and for the purpose of helping create the self-reviews required in large companies.