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

238 points aml183 | 1 comments | 15 Nov 24 19:17 UTC | 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?
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travisb ◴[15 Nov 24 20:04 UTC] No.42150361[source]▶
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.

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bigfatkitten ◴[15 Nov 24 20:23 UTC] No.42150532[source]▶
> 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.

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1. travisb ◴[17 Nov 24 18:54 UTC] No.42166067[source]▶
My vague understanding of the related laws is that as long as the company has a consistent retention policy and is under neither a court order to increase retention nor retaining records for specific incidents as part of policy, that a short retention period is fine.

I expect legal would actually be happy about shorter retention periods since it makes their job easier. HR of course wants infinite retention periods because it gives them a bigger stick, but universally longer retention is not the only way to address those desires.