Making Remote Teams Work

Every development team is at least partially remote these days, which presents a unique set of challenges. How do you set up a collaboration workflow? How do you manage communication and maintain team cohesion without seeing each other in person? How do you deal with the lack of social interaction and serendipity? How do you accommodate people with wildly different work and communication styles, emotional needs, and ideas about work-life balance? And what about hiring and onboarding?

Having led a remote team in a small company for six years, I've experienced these challenges first-hand. In the talk, we’ll go through them (plus a few more), and I’ll describe solutions and guidelines we’ve come up with in our team (including a few that didn’t work). The goal is to provide useful advice you can apply in your work, both as a team leader and as a team member. I would also love to use the talk as an opportunity to start a discussion and learn how others solve similar problems.

Presented at PyCon CZ 23.

Details: https://cz.pycon.org/2023/program/talks/95/

Transcript

1. MAKING REMOTE TEAMS WORK DAVID MAJDA @dmajda PyCon CZ 23 • Prague • September 16, 2023
2. PART 1 PART 2 CHALLENGES TIPS
7. PART 1 CHALLENGES
9. ◦ COMMUNICATION ◦ COLLABORATION ◦ TEAM COHESION ◦ MOTIVATION ◦ SOCIAL INTERACTION ◦ EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING ◦ WORK-LIFE BALANCE ◦ HIRING & INTERVIEWING ◦ ONBOARDING
10. ◦ COMMUNICATION ◦ COLLABORATION ◦ TEAM COHESION ◦ MOTIVATION ◦ SOCIAL INTERACTION ◦ EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING ◦ WORK-LIFE BALANCE ◦ HIRING & INTERVIEWING ◦ ONBOARDING
12. ACTIVATION ENERGY
13. ACTIVATION ENERGY
14. ACTIVATION ENERGY BANDWIDTH
15. ACTIVATION ENERGY BANDWIDTH
16. ACTIVATION ENERGY BANDWIDTH LATENCY
17. PART 2 TIPS
18. HAVE FULLY REMOTE SETUP #1
19. ESTABLISH RHYTHM #2
20. EMBRACE ASYNC #3
21. ×
22. SET CLEAR COMM EXPECTATIONS #4 #4
23. FIND COMM MODES THAT WORK #5
24. EMBRACE REAL-WORLD MEETINGS #6
25. ×
26. TAKE CARE OF PEOPLE #7
27. SELECT FOR INDEPENDENCE #8
28. EMPLOY PEOPLE READERS #9 #9
29. ONBOARD THOROUGHLY #10
30. THE END DAVID MAJDA @dmajda