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243 points aml183 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | 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?
1. kkfx ◴[] No.42155995[source]
Me personally:

- do my best to avoid chat stuff like Slack, yes even to ping someone before calling, it's more disturbing than useful. Mails are the way to go, much more structured so well searchable and reconstructable as needed, when needed. Doing so force people to communicate a bit more properly in written form instead of wasting time;

- a home office, meaning a room, with relevant environment (low noise, etc) to been able to talk out loud not having to wear headsets and alike, I do not care much if it's a VoIP phone classic call or something else, simply the point is being hands-free all the time, with good enough mic I can move a bit keep talking issueless;

- trying to keep a wiki, which is a VERY HARD task because when you start it's empty so there is no point in going there and after some times many pages became a bit or totally outdated and there is no easy way to bind them to what they document so to get "automatic alerts of not anymore current pages"... It's still useful because it's the sole document culture vs oral tradition enabler that most people know enough to casually use.

Aside an INTERNAL CRM-alike might be of help to being able to get some infos about a contact calling you every time he/she call (including personal stuff like birthdays who help socially).

Doing more often does not work. Most non-tech people still refuse the idea of tickets and tasks to be established/picked, assignments and reassignments rules etc try to push them outside very specific technical landscape in general is worse than giving up on them. Seriously.

That last paragraph is the biggest issue IMVHO: most tools we have are simply rigid and annoying, so most people use them badly nullifying any potentially positive outcome. To be short: more free text, more comms, less rules works regularly better, if you still manage to avoid exaggerations.

Onboarding is the hardest part: if normally docs are bad in general those to "get start with us" are the worse, essentially nonexistent or if present totally useless. In the end even in IT most people do not know how to work with IT tools and paradigm, and tend to be unwilling to learn.