What is true remote?

Going towards 2017 a lot of companies are thinking about improving remote working habits. We’ve been thinking about what makes a company truly-remote. We’ll share about the subject more later, but now just wanted to share the results of a little experiment we ran.

Whole company in one remote call

We decided to have an all-hands remote call to talk about remote meetings. Here are the pros, cons and improvements we came up with:

Good

• No need to travel
• You can save time
• Might be easier to think during the meeting
• Not as exhausting
• Easier to stay on schedule, since you are ending at the right time
• You can record the whole meeting

Bad

• Difficult the get a turn to speak
• You can easily get discracted, and you can easily work on other tasks
• Could be a good thing: You can mute a person
• People talk at the same time easily, since there is a small delay
• Affects the dynamic of the conversation
• Also can’t read body language as well as in person
• Technical difficulties are likely to come up. Customers might be missing a plugin or they’re not savvy enough to overcome installation.
• You can leave and noone will notice. This can also be considered a good thing.
• Drawing is hard online

Improvements

• It is especially important to have a leader in remote meetings
• Multiple people can share their screens at the same time, which might be useful for some use cases
• A platform to try out: https://appear.in/
• And hardware to consider: https://chromeforworkdevices.withgoogle.com/products/category/chrome-devices-for-meetings

Your turn

Where do you see remote work going, and what happens beyond just video calls?

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