I haven’t reviewed the specific claims of the literature here, but I did live through a pandemic where a lot of these concerns came up directly, and I think I can comment directly on the experience.
Some LessWrong team members disagree with me on how bad remote-work is. I overall thought it was “Sort of fine, it made some things a bit harder, other things easier. It made it harder to fix some deeper team problems, but we also didn’t really succeed at fixing those team problems for in previous non-pandemic years.”
Epistemic Status, btw: I live the farthest away from all other LW team members, and it’s the biggest hassle for me to relocate back to Berkeley, so I have some motivation to think remote-ness isn’t as big a deal.
Initially I found it easier to get deep work done and I felt more productive. Over time I think that slid into “well, I work about as productively as I did before the pandemic.”
I think the biggest problems are “if anyone on a team develops any kind of aversion or ugh field, it’s way harder to fix the problem. You can’t casually chat about it over lunch, carefully feeling out their current mood. You have to send them an ominous slack message asking ‘hey, um, can we talk?’”.
Elizabeth mentioned this in the OP: “It’s easier for conflict to result in withdrawal among workers who aren’t co-located, amplifying the costs and making problem solving harder.”
Other team members have mentioned that it’s harder to keep track of what other people are doing, and notice if a teammate is going off in a wrong direction. (This seems to slot into the “information flow” section. Indeed, when we do work in an office we’re within the “within about one hallway” distance.
Retreats and Site Visits
We made sure to do at a retreat, putting a bunch of effort into covid quarantining beforehand. tried occasional “meet outdoors for meetings.”
This post highlights that doing “enmeshed site visits” is good in addition to retreats. Which, to be fair, I think people on the team did pitch, and mostly it was fairly costly to do it during a pandemic.
Making people very accessible
We tried out software called Tandem that made it easier to immediately voice-call with a person. We stopped using it primarily because it was hogging CPU. But some of us found it pretty disruptive to be always available.
Later we tried out working in the shared Gather Town space. I think this might have worked better if we weren’t also trying to make that Gather Town space a populous hub (Walled Garden). This was distracting (although during that period we did successfully stay more in touch with other orgs and friends, which was the explicit goal)
It sucked that everything other than Zoom had mediocre audio quality
Video/Audio Tech
We tried a huge variety of microphones, headphones, software, wired internet. We never really found a set of tools that didn’t randomly spazz out sometime. (Wired headphones and internet ran into a different set of problems than bluetooth)
Written Communication
We used Notion, a sort of Google Docs clone with all kinds of tools integrated into each other. It worked pretty well (easily searchable, has a sidebar where you can see all the documents in a nested hierarchy). It had some bugs.
I haven’t reviewed the specific claims of the literature here, but I did live through a pandemic where a lot of these concerns came up directly, and I think I can comment directly on the experience.
Some LessWrong team members disagree with me on how bad remote-work is. I overall thought it was “Sort of fine, it made some things a bit harder, other things easier. It made it harder to fix some deeper team problems, but we also didn’t really succeed at fixing those team problems for in previous non-pandemic years.”
Epistemic Status, btw: I live the farthest away from all other LW team members, and it’s the biggest hassle for me to relocate back to Berkeley, so I have some motivation to think remote-ness isn’t as big a deal.
Initially I found it easier to get deep work done and I felt more productive. Over time I think that slid into “well, I work about as productively as I did before the pandemic.”
I think the biggest problems are “if anyone on a team develops any kind of aversion or ugh field, it’s way harder to fix the problem. You can’t casually chat about it over lunch, carefully feeling out their current mood. You have to send them an ominous slack message asking ‘hey, um, can we talk?’”.
Elizabeth mentioned this in the OP: “It’s easier for conflict to result in withdrawal among workers who aren’t co-located, amplifying the costs and making problem solving harder.”
Other team members have mentioned that it’s harder to keep track of what other people are doing, and notice if a teammate is going off in a wrong direction. (This seems to slot into the “information flow” section. Indeed, when we do work in an office we’re within the “within about one hallway” distance.
Retreats and Site Visits
We made sure to do at a retreat, putting a bunch of effort into covid quarantining beforehand. tried occasional “meet outdoors for meetings.”
This post highlights that doing “enmeshed site visits” is good in addition to retreats. Which, to be fair, I think people on the team did pitch, and mostly it was fairly costly to do it during a pandemic.
Making people very accessible
We tried out software called Tandem that made it easier to immediately voice-call with a person. We stopped using it primarily because it was hogging CPU. But some of us found it pretty disruptive to be always available.
Later we tried out working in the shared Gather Town space. I think this might have worked better if we weren’t also trying to make that Gather Town space a populous hub (Walled Garden). This was distracting (although during that period we did successfully stay more in touch with other orgs and friends, which was the explicit goal)
It sucked that everything other than Zoom had mediocre audio quality
Video/Audio Tech
We tried a huge variety of microphones, headphones, software, wired internet. We never really found a set of tools that didn’t randomly spazz out sometime. (Wired headphones and internet ran into a different set of problems than bluetooth)
Written Communication
We used Notion, a sort of Google Docs clone with all kinds of tools integrated into each other. It worked pretty well (easily searchable, has a sidebar where you can see all the documents in a nested hierarchy). It had some bugs.