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> But the onus of communication is on the remote worker, IMO. I may be misunderstanding you, but, if I'm not, I mostly disagree with this. Remote workers need to communicate well, but if all 12 local developers are in a shared office/working environment, then it's really easy to exclude the remote devs. If your remote devs are treated as second-class citizens (intentionally or otherwise), they'll never be integrated in your team. Lots of things you get "for free" with local teammates (as far as communication, camaraderie, etc.) you have to be more deliberate about with remote ones. Part of the benefit of being remote is the ability to be even more self-driven than you are when you're in an office. That shouldn't come at the cost of being left out of the loop and/or not being included in discussions that you could contribute to. This may not work for everyone, but the way we do things where I work is we use remote-focused communication (chat, video conferencing, Wikis, etc.) as our primary communication. We try to limit any in-office conversation to the relatively trivial or the extremely time-sensitive. However, the way our company is distributed, most of our team leads, internal stakeholders, etc. aren't local, which helps "enforce" that mindset. As far as specific tech solutions here's what we use: HipChat
Zoom (video conferencing)
GitHub
Confluence + Jira
Jell (distributed/asynchronous standups) At the end of the day, the tools make remote working possible, but the mindset we approach remote working with is what makes it viable. |