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Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

243 points aml183 | 1 comments | 15 Nov 24 19:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.255s | source

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?
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paxys ◴[15 Nov 24 20:51 UTC] No.42150868[source]▶
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.
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szszrk ◴[15 Nov 24 21:10 UTC] No.42151105[source]▶
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?

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1. paxys ◴[15 Nov 24 22:19 UTC] No.42151869[source]▶
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.