Work remote and out loud

1. Management information
2. Working out loud ←
3. Collaboration opportunities
4. Activity feeds
5. Activity feed design
6. Information pages
7. Information page URLs

Oleg Laptev

When you reduce meetings by working asynchronously, you risk making work less visible. People who don’t know about each other’s work miss collaboration opportunities. Working fully remote increases this risk, because you won’t meet in person and ‘catch up’ on each other’s work. Fortunately, working fully remote makes the risk and its mitigation more obvious.

Quiet offices

Teams that work in offices struggle to find ‘quiet time’ for focused work. Work that requires extended periods of uninterrupted concentration, such as software development, suffers from noisy environments and open-plan offices. Productivity suffers especially badly in very noisy environments, such as open-plan offices with telephones.

In an office environment, you have two options for software development productivity.

1. Every team member has a private office with a desk big enough for two people to work in a pair, plus a meeting room for the whole team to get together
2. A quiet room for the whole team, plus a breakout area for conversation (with whiteboards and the coffee machine), and a team meeting room.

Software development teams stuck in anti-productivity office space, and whose managers have never read Peopleware, spend too much time trying to get a quiet office that they don’t have to worry about too much quiet.

Remote presence

Remote work can become too quiet, compared to a quiet office, which always has some ‘noise’. Even without talking, you get a lot of insight in team members’ current activities just by looking around the room. Remote teams don’t automatically experience this team presence.

Remote teams that identify this find fixing remote isolation a lot easier than fixing a noisy office. In many cases, office-based teams would need a whole new building to get a quiet office environment, while remote teams can create remote presence by introducing new habits.

Working out loud

Bryce Williams defined working out loud in 2010, as a combination of already visible work, and deliberately making work visible:

working out loud = observable work + narrating your work

Williams recognised that while team members can already observe some work, other work needs some help.

Observable work

Observable work means your team mates know about and can see your work. When you write, instead of writing in a local file on your laptop, write in an online collaboration space. Some of us find it uncomfortable to abandon the explicit step of publishing a previously-private draft. With observable work, your team could see the first letter you type in a new document.

Narrating your work

Narrating your work builds on observable work, with extras such as weekly team updates shared in a ‘public’ channel. People outside your team might need these updates to spotlight interesting work that routine work would otherwise bury. Narration adds a little effort to increase the impact of hidden work that lacks observability.

Similarly, people sometimes need additional explanation or context, to understand other people’s work. Narration tasks can make work observable by making it readable.

Tools

Some tools make working out loud easier than others, by creating new documents in a team ‘space’ by default, where team members can see them. Unfortunately, many tools only support active collaboration - sharing and comments. That seems like a shame, because tools could do so much more to enable working out loud.