[hrktb]

Remote work doesn’t equate with being hands off or having no coaching.

This is not a pleasant scenario, but some companies will stick monitoring tools on their employees environment, and it becomes the equivalent of the boss sitting behind you but in remote form (then again it won’t mean much for productivity, but almost nobody understands optimizing for productivity anyway)

On the coaching part, being able to share screens is the most important part I think. From there, there is only a small handicap in doing it remotely. The real missing bit would be the white board IMO.

[Ididntdothis]

“On the coaching part, being able to share screens is the most important part I think. From there, there is only a small handicap in doing it remotely. ”

It’s not that simple with somebody new. If you sit next to them you can see much better whether they are just working through a problem or are stuck and frustrated. With remote people it’s much harder to tell. If my boss doesn’t hear much from me for a week he knows and trusts from my track record that I am working on something difficult but with new people you don’t know their personality and how they they deal with difficulty.

[hrktb]

You are totally right in that there needs to be some prior knowledge of the person to work better remotely. I think it can be done up to a point by a first one or two day of meeting physically and getting to know where and how the person will work, to get a frame of reference.

I also hear that full remote teams usualy do in person meetings at least once or twice a year to ”recalibrate”, on top of there daily or bi-weekly vidro team meetings.

Perhaps the message here would be that making remote work well is not trivial and takes time, money and people knowing how to manage these teams. It shouldn’t be seen as the “lazy” option.