With 7 years experience of running a remote & distributed team (5+ countries) at Netsparker [1].
We have 4 platforms:
* Bug Tracking / Project Management
* Group Chat
* Skype / Voice
* Email
Since we grew organically, here is how I shaped the culture from 2 team members to 20 and quite happy with it at the moment:
Groupchat is for "2. Red Alerts" (via @everyone mentions), "3.Having Fun" and "4. Sense of belonging". Finally to share random stuff from funny moments to interesting articles. Stuff that's completely optional to consume. Very very rarely for "Hashing things out quickly" for that we use Skype. If you want to toss an idea back and forth, just talk. If you are not in the same timezone just wait for all to be in the same timezone (we don't have extreme timezone differences, max is about 10 hours)
Voice is for pretty much everything else. We don't type or discuss anything on chat if it's more than 3 message exchanges, when that happens someone just calls. It's just waste of time, we just get on a call and talk. We also have a routine of initiating skype calls to ensure it's normal to call people but it's also normal to ignore calls as well. So you have the option to quickly talk but also option to not be distracted.
We made it OK to be offline. Especially for devs it's OK to just be offline.
If something is really urgent, we'll call you or send you a text message. Which rarely happens.
If it's a task/bug put it into the bug tracking system. Then it'll be visible on the developer chat channel automatically.
So we found that voice chat is superior to pretty much anything else for many purposes. Another habit we are getting better at is taking notes in voice conversations and putting them on to the tasks.
These make text group chat a very minimal part of the flow. Another good example: I was away for 2 weeks and it took me about 10 minutes to catch up with all the group chat because we use it sparsely and discussions always use threads (this is something we teach during the orientation) so you can read the first line and just skip the whole thing.
Maybe it works because we have only 20 people, we're planning to continue to do this until it doesn't work anymore.
Comments
With 7 years experience of running a remote & distributed team (5+ countries) at Netsparker [1].
We have 4 platforms:
* Bug Tracking / Project Management
* Group Chat
* Skype / Voice
* Email
Since we grew organically, here is how I shaped the culture from 2 team members to 20 and quite happy with it at the moment:
Groupchat is for "2. Red Alerts" (via @everyone mentions), "3.Having Fun" and "4. Sense of belonging". Finally to share random stuff from funny moments to interesting articles. Stuff that's completely optional to consume. Very very rarely for "Hashing things out quickly" for that we use Skype. If you want to toss an idea back and forth, just talk. If you are not in the same timezone just wait for all to be in the same timezone (we don't have extreme timezone differences, max is about 10 hours)
Voice is for pretty much everything else. We don't type or discuss anything on chat if it's more than 3 message exchanges, when that happens someone just calls. It's just waste of time, we just get on a call and talk. We also have a routine of initiating skype calls to ensure it's normal to call people but it's also normal to ignore calls as well. So you have the option to quickly talk but also option to not be distracted.
We made it OK to be offline. Especially for devs it's OK to just be offline.
If something is really urgent, we'll call you or send you a text message. Which rarely happens.
If it's a task/bug put it into the bug tracking system. Then it'll be visible on the developer chat channel automatically.
So we found that voice chat is superior to pretty much anything else for many purposes. Another habit we are getting better at is taking notes in voice conversations and putting them on to the tasks.
These make text group chat a very minimal part of the flow. Another good example: I was away for 2 weeks and it took me about 10 minutes to catch up with all the group chat because we use it sparsely and discussions always use threads (this is something we teach during the orientation) so you can read the first line and just skip the whole thing.
Maybe it works because we have only 20 people, we're planning to continue to do this until it doesn't work anymore.
[1]: https://www.netsparker.com