[luch]

a videoconfering system that is reliable and easy to use is essential to remote management. You need to have as little friction as possible to propose a 1-1 or a 15 min roundtable to quickly brainstorm something orally.

Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in order to defuse sticky situations based on partial infos or misunderstandings. Such tools can be panopticon-y so you need to explicitly specify which convos "spaces" are private and which are subject to management interference.

[pie420]

You just described Teams, Slack, Skype, and Zoom. all ubiquitous and industry standard.

[throwaway2990]

All trash. A meeting in person is always shorter cos you don’t deal with audio issues a talking over each other and the mountain of other issues from remote calls. No amount of money in good hardware fixes this no matter what anyone claims.

[seanmcdirmid]

Erm, also Meet and the rest of the Google Suite (Chat).

[DiggyJohnson]

Are you proposing that my management should be able to see my chat messages and email ad hoc and without approval or assistance from IT, legal, or their management? That seems bonkers to me.

[luch]

That's not what I wanted to say. With remote teams, you need to establish a way to organize the work using written communications which are either mail/slack/sharepoint/whatever and within this framework management needs to have a "view" into what the team is doing.

It means for example being systematically in cc for mail exchanged and being in every teams discord channel. The new social contract when working remotely is "you (the manager) can't look over my shoulder to see if I'm working correctly so I (the employee) need to show proofs of communication instead".

I've seen too many juniors working remotely that just don't communicate on their day-to-day work, and completely blindside their manager/coworkers which understandably freaks out.

[zerkten]

I can't reply to the reply to this comment, but you raise a key point. While employers control the data, they don't use it like people seem to assume. Managers are not managing if they attempt to resolve conflicts by attempting to decipher private conversations.

There are many ways to resolve these problems without resorting to spying on messages. In an in-person situation with a conflict, there may be no record. We know methods to resolve these conflicts, so I don't understand why people go immediately to "employers control the data so they can just use it."

[sokoloff]

I think in all team and project rooms/channels/email d-lists, yes, those should be easily readable by managers because they're not contemplated as private. I think DMs and individual emails should not be accessible to managers (absent a very specific legal/compliance/HR concern).

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

Bonkers or no, that is a current legal reality if you're talking about chat or email messages which are sent and received using employer-provided means. If an email address ends in your employer's domain, it's not your email account unless you're self-employed.

[akkad33]

> Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in

So tools to spy on your employees?

[luch]

Obviously no what I mean that is ok if your superior and his boss are invited in your team's slack channel even if they only lurks, and you don't create a "shadow channel" with your teammates to talk on the project without being read by your hierarchy.

Same thing with corporate internet, you accept to use the corp proxy DNS and firewall (which all logs infos) to browse the internet instead of using a separate GSM endpoint to circumvent the company's surveillance.

[zerkten]

>> Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in order to defuse sticky situations based on partial infos or misunderstandings.

How is that specific to remote work? People in the same building have the same misunderstandings with the same tools. The way to fix it doesn't involve management spying on the communications and attempting to decipher them.

[hardware2win]

So, teams??

Basically industry standard

[auggierose]

Teams is not reliable. It's a steaming pile of dog shit.