Remote Workers Experiment Brainstorm

Pain Points

  • Whiteboarding! It's hard to have design conversations
    • HipChat doesn't allow for whiteboarding
      • We've had the Slack/HipChat discussion before
    • Not having a design meeting because someone is remote excludes remote people
  • Remote people have always been the minority. We've tried to be remote friendly, but we're not remote native.
    • Less emphasis on written things
    • Assumption that lots of things get hashed out in person
    • We don't want to be the tail wagging the dog
  • Sense that it's impossible to be fully remote and fully in the loop
    • At last place, prioritized room conversation
    • Platform team channel is huge, so it's a little awkward to talk in
  • It can be hard to track down a specific person to talk to them

Hypotheses

  • More conversations in chat rooms will result in remote people being more informed of edx goings on
  • Design conversations don't happen as often for remote engineers because of inadequate tooling
  • Being remote presents limitations that prevent engineers from contributing to design conversations
    • Meetings in VR?
  • If remote people had more conversations 1:1 over video or voice, then we could improve the feeling of inclusion. More rapid spread of information. Churn around tickets.
    • Meetings in VR
    • iPad robot things
  • Not being able to tap people on the shoulder wastes our time.
    • (technological limitations? hipchat)
    • (do we need a shoulder-tapper czar?)
    • iPad robot things


Experiment

Purpose

To improve communication between remote folks and people in the office

Benefits

  • Feelings of inclusion
  • Better, more effective communication
  • Empathy
  • Collaboration
  • Faster turnaround
  • No delaying meetings a week just so we have folks in the room

Hypothesis

If remote people had more conversations 1:1 over video or voice, then we could improve the feeling of inclusion. More rapid spread of information. Churn around tickets.

Roles and Responsibilities

  • Remote folks: consciously try to have more 1:1 conversations and alert team you're going to do this
  • Local teams: be more open to jumping on a call
  • Maybe: get headsets with mics for team members

Scope

Use a couple teams that use remote employees. Platform could work. We could all just alert our teams that we're just going to be calling them more. Purchase headsets and give them to teams to see if they'd be more willing to jump on calls.

buy a few headsets

Measure

  • Retrospective
  • Pre- and post-survey

Communication