Description
Hi @clef/employees! As we've heard more from people on the subject of office hours and remote work (see #59 for some awesome commentary by @sarahmei, @zspencer), I've had the sense that (a) we should change our policies around remote work; (2) if we change our policies, we'll need to figure out some ways to experiment and grow to match them.
I want to propose that we put in some structure to simulate more remote work, so we can get a better sense for how it feels as a team and how we can create systems that support it. The primary goal with these structures is to learn: this may mean that they cause issues in the short term, even as we're learning how we can improve in the long term.
The general gist of how we do this is that we all spend more time outside of the office working on a regular basis. This will test our ability to communicate & use tools like Slack, Trello, and Google Drive to operate efficiently even when we're not in the office.
I've thought of two ways to do this:
-
We pick one day a week and all work remotely (from home or from another location) for that day. This would be pretty easy to coordinate: we all just have to pick a day (say Tuesday) and then not show up.
-
We all commit to spending one day a week out of the office, but it's not predetermined to be the same day as everyone else or the same day every week. This would be a little harder to coordinate. To make this work, we could block out on a company calendar when we'll be out of the office and let everyone know with good lead time what day it will be. I also think it may be useful to block out days where explicitly everyone is in the office (maybe Monday and Friday), so we can have important all-hands meetings (like our product sync and all-hands).
I'm leaning towards (2) because I think it better simulates what remote work actually is, but I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on the matter (and any suggestions outside of 1, 2).
Thoughts?