[walrus01]

> People fall through the cracks in a remote company very easily. People don't seem to bond as well or as easily. Siloes happen.

I don't fully disagree with you but this is also something to put some long, hard thought into by the C-level whoever is running the company, if it's something new, how to put in place the communication methods, chat groups, information sharing SOPs and such to prevent isolation from happening in the first place. Deal with it as a structural/business operation and methodology issue first.

Get the SOPs set up before you start adding more than a couple of team members.

[moshun]

100% agree, just left a highly functioning, high performance org that I led at one of the big tech companies and strongly feel this “bonding problem” is a feature of piss poor management. It’s not as easy, and it’s not the same, but running remote teams well means that you really don’t have people defecting every 15 minutes, accountability is high and (assuming compensation is fair) so is employee satisfaction.

A lot of these leaders are trying legislate away the impact of their unwillingness to evolve and adapt to a market that has fundamentally changed. Two of the tech giants I was at during the pandemic saw at least a 20% jump across the board in key productivity metrics and in some orgs as high as 30%. Other than Zoom/meeting fatigue and work/life issues that are pretty easily solved, it’s a win-win.

*unless your company has heavily invested in commercial real estate and you need to force employees back into it, to avoid losing a ton of value.

[iamcasen]

I think in this case, an established company with an established product and a mature org would do just fine in a remote setting.

I'm talking more about seed-stage startups and starting 100% remote companies from scratch. It's a whole different ballgame.

[iamcasen]

After iterating on this process for years now we just haven't found a solution that works.

Some orgs can do this through meticulous documentation (Amazon comes to mind), but that hasn't worked here. People have a hard time digesting huge volumes of textual information from multiple parties.

I tried this for a while, but no one would engage with my docs or collaborate with me that way.

So far the only thing that's been reliable has been regular zoom pairing sessions. But this too can be very exhausting unless you are in an IC role that has very clear directives (this doesn't really exist at seed-stage).