 started with when I'm remote, you're remote by Brandon Voulache. Brandon, I believe we are going to be showing the pre-recorded video, right? Enable your audio video once we get to the Q&A part. Hi, I'm Brandon Voulache. I'm a software engineer at Red Hat on OpenShift, and I've been remote for about five years now. A lot of us have been shoved into remote work whether we want it to be or not because of the global pandemic. So today we're going to go over a few things that are going to help people as an individual and as an organization. We're going to start with some history, talk about some pitfalls, and how to even leverage those pitfalls, and we're going to end with a few tips. So let's get started. One thing we need to understand before we really go into anything else is the bus length principle. And this states that communication between people drops off radically as soon as their distance from each other exceeds the length of a school bus. It was initially coined by Alistair Copburn, one of the founders of the agile software movement, but we'll get back to him in a moment because this goes back a little bit further to research conducted by Professor Thomas Allen. Professor Allen's research resulted in what we know today as the Allen curve. This shows that there is a strong negative correlation between physical distance and frequency of communication. Now, of course, this research was found to hold true in the days before more advanced collaboration tools were available to us like Slack, Teams, Skype, Zoom, every other thing available today. But Professor Allen conducted this research again in the early 2010s and found almost exactly the same thing to hold true. So the result of all this research over the years is that as the probability of in-person face-to-face increased, so did alternative means of communications. That's your chat, email, phone, and also vice versa, as the probability of face-to-face decreased, so did alternative means. So this means there was almost no substitution of electronic communication for face-to-face communication. Therefore, electronic communication was a supplement and not a replacement. As you can imagine, a lot of people read and digested this research. So Allen's work had really strong influence in commercial architecture, project management, and people management. Now, I'm sure this looks familiar to a lot of you, and I'm also sure that probably none of you actually enjoy working in an environment like this, but this happened because all of Allen's research was taken at face value, and his research was used to rationalize these open-floor plans and unfortunately high-interrupt environments, because you know, closer is better, because that's what Allen said. So we'll get into a little bit more about why this is so bad in a little bit, but let's move on to why this might actually be a good thing. So outside of the gut reaction that less communication is bad, why is it really a problem? What if we're now all aware of the lack of communication that can happen and we work to more consciously and actively communicate? Well, the problem really comes into effect when we think about osmotic communication and how that affects our daily lives in an office. Osmotic communication is another term by Alistair Cockburn, and it says, information flows into the background hearing of members of the team so that they pick up relevant information as though by osmosis. So what this really means to you is questions and answers flow naturally and with surprisingly little disturbance among the team. For example, have you ever given an incorrect answer to a co-worker and then someone a roe over comes over and corrects you? That's osmotic communication. That person wasn't sitting there actively listening to your conversation. They just happened to process the conversation in the back of their minds while they were doing other things. The reason that electronic communication doesn't replace osmotic communication is because osmotic communication is passive. That is, the people in the same room don't necessarily have to concentrate on each other to reap the benefits. On things like Slack and every other form of electronic communication, that requires active attention. You're required to contact switch from what you're doing to participate or read a conversation. So while chat solutions help, nothing truly replaces osmotic communication. And because of this, domain knowledge does spread more slowly on remote teams. During his research, Cockburn did admit that he had some luck with teams utilizing always on video cameras and microphones, but it ended up being really disruptive and it didn't come close to really replicating osmotic communication. So now you might be thinking, all right, how do we solve this? And unfortunately, we kind of don't. All we can do is be more conscious about the hurdles of distributed teams like the lack of osmotic communication and move forward, build better repositories of information, keep conversations in public channels, not in DMs and take an active approach to keeping everyone involved and informed. On the positive side, once we start to realize all these hurdles, we can actually start to leverage them, such as the case with osmotic communication, because osmotic communication is noise. It is distracting even though it is passive. And when you're in an office with a lot of people, you're much more likely to have someone come up and bother you. So now we can start utilizing things like the bus length principle as tools. Being outside of the bus zone creates an effective cone of silence, keeping you and your team free from distractions, giving you time to really focus. Distractions, both passive and active, are one of the biggest unforeseen detriments to projects. Some of the best research for this topic was done for the book People Wear. And if you haven't read it, I really can't recommend it enough. Every year, the authors put together a coding challenge and they send this around to companies all over the world, both large and small. Those taking part in the challenge were asked to complete it in their normal work environments. And year after year, the authors found that one thing affected overall quality more than anything else. It wasn't the size of the company, the industry, is, or even the experience level of the participants. In fact, they found that those things had almost no overall effect on how well someone did on the challenge. Instead, what they found was that poor performance on the challenge was usually an indicator of a noisy office environment. These poor performers often had to deal with open floor plans, managers and coworkers constantly bothering them, or they were just sat in an awkward place like a call center. So for those of us that are going back to an office, this is something to keep in mind. And by knowing where communication begins to break down, you can arm yourself, allow you or your teammates more head downtime without being bothered and decide when that increased rate at which people interact and interrupt is necessary. So now we can talk about what it really means to be remote and why you should be promoting remote first principles, even if everyone on your team is sitting in an office. If you find yourself working with different people in regional offices, well, congratulations, you're remote. If you have coworkers in different buildings across town, yep, you're also remote, is your QA team further away than a school bus? Still remote. If you even have a single teammate that works from home now and then, you better believe you're a remote team. If you don't start thinking this way, it'll only serve to hurt performance and your ability to scale your team into the future. Keep the research we've talked about today in mind after we've wrapped up. So now that we've gotten some of the more philosophical stuff out of the way, let's take a look at some more concrete things that you can leave here with and start implementing right away. These are all things that I try to do myself that I've found have really helped over my career as a remote worker. So this one is pretty straightforward. As we mentioned earlier, you can't truly replicate osmotic communication, but that doesn't mean we should do our best to counter that. Keep conversations public. Now, first, I don't literally mean public. I mean as public as is appropriate. Typically it makes sense to have conversational rooms set up around teams, projects and organizations. You probably already do this, right? Maybe you have truly public channels for open source projects or as a general public forum, but usually I found that those team and project channels are where you want to keep most of your conversations. This way you're not creating noise in higher level organizational channels, but you're also not limiting visibility for those that would benefit from it. And then this way your teammates can catch up on their own time and make themselves aware of things that would have been left in the dark on otherwise. Important information can easily be lost to history in DMs, and this even touches back on what I said earlier about building better repositories of information. Those repositories don't have to be a wiki or anything like that. They can easily be pinned or searchable messages in a team channel. I can't really tell you how many times my team has ended up with pinned messages that we reference almost daily that simply came from conversations. Collaborating synchronously is usually one of the biggest issues people on teams have when implementing remote first practices. People talk over each other in meetings. They schedule meetings with half of the attendees sitting in office while the other half try and listen in out of sight, out of mind. And also remember that remote employees might work a different schedule, and you don't want someone scheduling a meeting when that remote person should be spending time with their family. Having been on the wrong end of those meetings multiple times, I have to tell you it really sucks. People lose motivation and feel uninvolved. There's really no quicker way to trash your remote first efforts than by ignoring the fact that you need to collaborate differently now. Nobody is saying to get rid of meetings. I think we all know that they're necessarily evil in most industries, but you do have to approach them differently. So one, if you want to pull the band-aid off, stop reserving offices for meetings. Trust me, you really don't need them. When one person is remote, everyone's remote. Let people call in from their desks at home or in the office. And this way, everyone is involved at the same level and nobody feels left out. Two, as we hinted at above, be aware of time zones. I don't schedule 4 p.m. meetings not only because nobody likes those, but also because it's 11 at night for my teammates in Tel Aviv. Everyone who's working remote on a global scale knows that schedules need to flex a little bit later or earlier sometimes, but just keep it reasonable. And three, use collaborative documents. I'm sure you've had to deal with people talking over each other in virtual meetings, even though they don't mean to. That's just the nature of virtual meetings. What you can do is make sure every meeting that's scheduled has a way for everyone to collaborate. My favorite way and the easiest way I've found is just use live documents. These are things like drive or whatever else your organization may be utilizing already. Not only does this let people get their thoughts out without interrupting, it also makes it easier for the less extroverted people to contribute. And as a bonus, you end up with a naturally occurring set of meeting minutes. So this might sound similar to our previous slide, but now we're going to focus on your day-to-day communication rather than meetings. The biggest habit you have to break is the naked ping. The naked ping is any message that conveys zero information. All the naked ping does is force attention. It makes that person stop what they're doing, contact switch, and respond simply to see what you needed in the first place. It's disruptive, and as we talked about earlier, unnecessary disruptions are a huge detriment to organizations, even with something small like this when multiplied over and over. The other reason you should avoid the naked ping is due to how easily contacts can just be lost or forgotten. If a person decides to ignore that naked ping, as they very well may because they're busy, the sender may forget why they even sent it in the first place. That person may not even be busy. They may be asleep, or it may be their weekend, meaning they won't see that message for a day or more. Our brains often forget what we wanted to ask someone seconds after just chatting them up. Fixing this is really as simple as just providing the smallest bit of context. So instead of, hey, are you around or ping, just say, hey, can you help me with ticket number 123? Or, hey, when you have a minute, let's meet about XYZ. For those familiar with Red Hat's company-wide mailing list, MemoList, this was brought up as an industry problem as far back as 2009. The original email has been published in a few places on the web since then, if you care to track it down. This practice holds true for anyone in office or otherwise, but we're talking about what being remote first means. The fact that you're probably remote and don't realize it, and so much of this just makes in-office life smoother as well. This one, people are either going to love or hate, but it's important or it wouldn't be here. Meet Like You Wouldn't Person is my fancy way of saying, just keep your cameras on. One of the biggest obvious differences between remote and non-remote work is the frequency that you interact with people face-to-face. We talked about this a lot earlier. So you should try to increase that face time whenever possible. Too much is lost in translation when we can't read each other, and the team will just naturally feel more engaged. Even if your teammates don't do it, just start doing it. People will often catch on, and if they don't, well, maybe suggest that they watch this talk. If you just have to book a conference room for something, it must have an audio video system. Don't force people out of sight and out of mind. We all have lives outside of work, and those often collide when we're in a home office. So don't worry if your kids walk in or if you have dogs running around in the background, which, if I had my video on right now, that's what you'd be seeing. Nobody cares. It's humanizing. And on a similar note, keep meeting like you would in person. Outside of our work face-to-face time, we also miss out on social events and just things like grabbing a coffee or running into a friend in the hallway. These otherwise natural touch points are completely non-existent in fully distributed teams. We may not even realize that we're missing out on these really important aspects of relationship building with our coworkers. The easiest thing to do, and it really does help, is schedule some social time with your team. Personally, I like one-on-ones. These aren't your typical manager report style one-on-ones. These are just with your peers. I like to keep these strictly social, either grab a coffee or even grab a beer and ask your teammate what they're doing this weekend. You can even complain about work. And of course, you can schedule team social hours too. I feel like these have become somewhat popular with everyone in quarantine. On the note of the quarantine, I do want to tell everyone new to remote work that this is not what remote work is usually like. Even if your company was really focused on remote first principles during the pandemic, a lot of us are now missing out on our out-of-work social activities, whether it's just meeting up at a friend's house, going to sporting events, or whatever it is you and your friends like to do in your free time. The pandemic has severely limited these activities for most of us, and it really does take its toll. I know your transition to remote work may have been a trial by fire. A lot of us didn't expect to be remote this entire year or even to next year and on if we weren't already. And I'm sure we've all had both good and not so good experiences with it along the way. I truly believe that remote is the future. More organizations around the world are realizing that it's possible to keep an effective workforce without having to maintain office space, among other things. So if you're not promoting a remote first culture right now, somebody else is, and they're going to be ahead of the curve when it comes to retention and hiring, every candidate from here on out is going to be asking, is this position remote? So get ready for that. Hopefully this session has given you some tools to start that transition or even help it along the way. If you want to chat about remote work or anything else, please get in touch at any of the links below. And thanks for coming to my session. Awesome. Thank you for that great talk, Brandon. So if there are any questions from Brandon, please put them in the chat and we can field them to him. Hey guys. Hello. Thank you for the claps. If you want, you can also enable your audio video if you just want to have a discussion as well. We have a lot of time. Oh, you guys can see me, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah, there is a YouTube link for this, which I think will be provided. Correct? Or the recording will be provided. Yeah, we did nothing that I'll put them in the chat right now. Great. I think there were some questions earlier on mostly about misinterpreting Allen's research and cost cutting. I'm, I can't pretend to know if that's exactly what was happening, but it sounds kind of obvious, right? I'm not a commercial architect, and I don't design offices, but I'm sure the whole osmotic communication studies had a lot to do with the excuses that were made for cost cutting measures. Do I notice the quality of my work and my team's work have improved since being remote? I don't know if this is a great question for me personally because my teams have always been remote. We didn't have a big switch at the beginning of the pandemic to make everyone remote, but I've talked to a lot of friends and colleagues that weren't remote before this. And I've mostly found that work has either stayed steady or improved. I haven't really heard anyone that found remote work, you know, as a detriment to their day-to-day work. There's a question by Tomas. Have you tried other conversation styles than sitting in front of the screen? Yep. I can't say I've really taken note of how those have changed the conversation for better or worse, but I'll often, you know, take my laptop down to my couch and, you know, especially when I'm doing one-on-ones with my coworkers, like the social one-on-ones, I'll almost always try and not sit at my desk. I'll go down into my kitchen or my living room or even outside and sit on my laptop usually. Yeah, I have tried that. I prefer that. It makes things a little more casual. I, for one, have sat on my couch multiple times. How do I set up the camera on the couch? So usually it's at an awkward angle on the couch. I have like a little couch table that kind of like pulls over your couch a little bit that kind of sits my laptop at a normal level instead of just on my lap. So that kind of brings your laptop's camera to a more natural level than, you know, shining up into your face, which no one really wants to see, right? Also, I've experimented with, you know, external webcams too. I'm using an external one right now because they're usually higher quality. You can always take those around and position them wherever you want. But I usually don't do that. So I'm trying to type and then I realize that I'm just going to run out of time and then go like, well, let's go. I'm just going to quickly ask. I've been remote for a long time and I mean, danger being one of those people who makes a comment instead of a question. So I'm going to not do that. And what I'm curious about is what you think about the things you're talking about now, you know, and also the pets going in the background, the things that are all, you know, when I started, I kept it secret so no one knew I was remote. So, you know, what do you think about the cultural shifts that are happening and how the acceptance is going on into other people? Because some of the chat that's going on is people talking about how they want to share this with people who are just not into it. They're not quite getting at their resistance. So that's my question. So my, your question is the experience with people who weren't quite ready for this, right? Like they just didn't understand remote work and now we're kind of forced into it, right? Yeah. And we think about the cultural shift and how that feels. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can only really comment on like the people I've talked to, you know, family members, coworkers, friends who have had this drastic shift to remote work that where they had no plans of doing so before. And I've heard varying stories of, you know, there's a success stories of people that like we're not super for remote work. And they saw that, oh, it was actually nicer to not have to commute into the office every day. And, you know, their work didn't really degrade too much. If at all, right, work may have improved, which is usually the case I've found. But unfortunately, there's, I think there's still cases of people trying to treat remote work a little too much like in office work, like they're expecting people to, you know, they're expecting their literal work environments to, you know, be clean and professional. And that's fine, right? If you can have whatever you want in your background. But I've heard some stories where people just probably won't get it. But hey, maybe you can sit on this talk. They'll know I'm talking about them. One more question. Any ideas on how to get a traditional manufacturer on board with some of these remote work ideas? We rely heavily on osmotic communication in meter rooms. The point of having coworkers in different buildings in different countries really hits home since our physical footprint is worldwide. I don't have experience working in traditional manufacturing. But I think you are driving the point home yourself, right? You are already working in a global environment. And I assume you are already communicating and working, you know, across the world with all these different teams when you can, right? I would start expanding that and maybe just taking that point to your managers, bosses, whoever needs to, you know, know those things and say, look, we're already a remote workforce. We know we are because we have people over the world that aren't sitting here in an office. And however you're interacting with those teams, you should probably try you know, implementing that with even your local teams. I wonder what the other half of that question is. Jenga was my dog. They're wondering where my dog is. Not in the room right now. Yeah, I said it was okay to have dogs running around, right? So now they're outside. Good questions though. Okay, Alex's question. Despite having an incredible successfully forced remote work experiment, I still hesitantly allow remote long term. What would you suggest to help get some of these managers over the barrier? Well, what I would suggest is just presenting your experience, co-workers experience during this time, right? Present data, right? They're hopefully making these decisions based on data. And if you're showing someone that work has stayed the same or improved while you're remote, I think it would be relatively hard for someone to say, oh, but we still have to get, you know, butts back in seats. I can't promise you that they're not going to say, no, we still have to all come back into the office, you know, in the middle of 2021. But I think the longer we stick with this, and I don't think I think a lot of people are probably not going to back to the office anytime soon. I think people are going to become more comfortable with it. I already know a lot of people that, even after the few months they've spent remote, don't ever want to go back into an office ever again. And, you know, I don't either, right? I don't blame them. Forgotten what it was like. Yeah. Yeah, it ain't too bad. Yeah, and we can open this up. If anyone wants to share audio video, just request, and I'll give you access. We can make this an open floor. The next stop is not till 4.20 p.m. Eastern. So we have a lot of time. Or even if anyone just wants to talk about their experiences. There we go. Another question. What are your favorite tools to make up for the lack of osmotic communication? So my favorite tool isn't necessarily a technical tool. It's more of a practice, right? And that was kind of what I hinted back at in a couple of my slides, in that just keep those conversations public. Stop DMing. People, stuff gets lost in DMs all the time, right? You'll never find that stuff. You'll forget who you asked the question about, or who you were talking about with this topic. And it gets even worse when you can have DMs with multiple people at once, right? So I would just recommend every single conversation you can just have it in your team's channels. I don't know if you have proper chat tools and stuff at your office. We use Slack, and I like that. It's just fine. But I would say the best tool is just keeping that conversation public. We've had really good luck with, like I mentioned in the talk too, with pinning messages. Again, that's up to the implementation of our chat tool. But we have a ton of information just stashed in different pins in our team room from common URLs and practices, all sorts of stuff. So hopefully they'll answer that question. I'll ask you a question. Is there one thing, though, that you meant about being in an office environment? I do. So before the pandemic, I actually had rented some coworking space, and I know a lot of remote workers rent coworking space, especially in larger cities where not everyone has a home office to work out of. And I found myself collaborating with people I don't work with for my day job, right? There was a lot of other developers there. If I had a technical issue or something, I might go talk to someone who I knew was using the same tech stack. And even though he didn't work for my company, but I could walk over and chat with him about problems. And I think that's one of the things I miss is talking with someone about solving a problem. That's what developers like doing, right? We like solving problems. And doing that with someone can even feel better, right? And just the camaraderie of the office is really what I miss, right? And that's one of the reasons I think it's important to continue talking with your coworkers, even if you're states away or however far away you are. Just video call one on one, just like this, right? You just get more of that social aspect back in your life. And I think that's really what an office is providing a lot of, right? It's forcing those, you know, those social touch points that you don't really have when you're sitting at home in an office. The one thing that I do miss is we would have happy hours. So that's when you get people in the office, even though you don't directly work with them, you get to talk with them and just, you know, it's a different environment. So that's one thing I definitely miss. And I guess for teams that are remote and worldwide, that's what conferences sort of do. You get in person and you get to meet these people that you've been talking to via screen for so much, for so many like years or months or however long you've been working with them and you get to have that face to face. Having to come in a while definitely is really nice. My current team at Red Hat, I've never met any of them in person, right? I've been working with them for over a year now. And because of the pandemic, which canceled the trip for us, we, I've never met them, right? I talk to them and work with them every day, but I've never actually met them. And, you know, I was looking forward to physically going to this conference too, but you know, this is also nice. It's better than no conference, I guess. Right, definitely better than no conference. Next question. Do you find audio video comms to be superior to text-based comms for your team? So I think they're different. The problem with audio and video comms is I think you personally get a lot more out of audio and video, but you're now losing that documentation that that conversation happened. If you're not writing notes, right? If you're not taking minutes, the nice part about the text-based comms is what we just talked about is you have this naturally occurring set of discussions in the team channel that you can always reference back, hopefully. But it's very common that, you know, if we can't work through a problem over text chat, we'll say, oh, let's hop on a video call and work through it. So I think they're different, not necessarily one is better than the other. I'm not seeing any more questions pop up. If you want, you can hang out here or you can also dip out. It's up to you. The next talk on this track is at 4.20 p.m. Eastern. I will send the name of the talk in the chat. Great. All right. I'll hang out here in text chat, but I'm going to hop off audio and video. Thanks, everyone. Thank you so much for the talk again. Yeah, thank you.