If Remote Becomes the New Normal

Ever since the pandemic started, remote work is trending up. Whether or not this becomes the new normal or just a more common option, let’s look at some ways to succeed in distributed environments.

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SHOW NOTES:

• The Great Switch: distributed work first (Redmonk article)
• The Great Switch: distributed work first (Twitter thread)
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COVID HAS REDEFINED WHERE AND HOW PEOPLE WORK

James Governor at Redmonk makes a great case for how remote work reshaped Silicon Valley and many companies around the world. His article has spurred much debate about whether or not the trend will last. 

WHAT LESSONS CAN BE LEARNED TO BE MORE EFFECTIVE AS A REMOTE WORKER

1. Spend timing understanding how time zones AND cultural norms will affect your communications. 
2. Expect that different people will work different hours (length of day).
3. Establish some team norms (standards) about how you will communicate, track goals, share information, and notifications. 
4. Figure out ways to have complex or difficult conversations. Just using Green / Yellow / Red status updates often lead to problems down the road. 
5. Managers will need to spend time doing “quality control” between groups in different locations. It’s very easy to let the separation create gaps. 
6. Create mentorship or big-brother / big-sister programs, where people are paired together to help each other. 
7. Just like we design cloud failure domains, it might be useful to organize around failure domains that incorporate locations. 
8. Budget for f2f get togethers (quarterly, every 6 months)

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