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238 points aml183 | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.628s | 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 ◴[] 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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1. Jimmc414 ◴[] No.42185599[source]
This contributes to stress and notification fatigue, especially when bombarded with alerts from every channel. Some will turn off notifications entirely or disengage to maintain focus on their workload.
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2. reureu ◴[] No.42185755[source]
I'm struggling with this at my current job: nobody communicates about anything in asynchronous channels, doesn't want any form of daily synchronous meeting (e.g., standups), and won't agree to ad hoc meetings outside of our 1 hour once per week meeting. So lots of decisions and work get done in vacuums, which cause errors in various systems that would have been easily caught and addressed if someone just said "hey, I'm changing this column name from X to Y". So, just to say that the counterfactual here isn't "no stress because no notifications"-- it can be more stress from failed coordination.

There are in betweens here, with the major one being threads in slack. Everyone gets notified about a single message at the start of the thread, but does not get notified for any subsequent discussion. Any interested party can read more and participate as needed. For someone like me (a leader on paper but not really in practice), I'd read all the message and look for dependency or similar problems, but for others they may not need to.

3. Cthulhu_ ◴[] No.42186671[source]
And that's fine. You're not expected to stay online and respond at all times, that's the antithesis of asynchronous communication. Just reserve a block of time per day to catch up - like you would with emails - and go through things then. Only leave notifications on if they're addressed to you specifically.