Preserving Our Humanity in Remote Work
As software engineers and web developers, we find ourselves wading through an increasingly vast ocean of tools and technology that inherently distance us from our users and colleagues. For good reason, we automate everything we can — from bug reports and usage statistics, to project management and customer service — tasks that may once have involved conversation and dialogue have been converted into forms, interfaces, and spreadsheets. It becomes natural instinct to identify formulaic manual processes that can be augmented or replaced with code, since this is, after all, our function as developers.
Over time, surrounded by our network of sophisticated tooling, it can become all too easy to forget that everything we build will have a direct impact on another human being. Without conscious effort to remember the people we’re working for and the people we’re working with, we can lose touch with the joy that our work brings to others, as well as the misery our mistakes and failures can create. We can find ourselves in unnecessary conflict with our co-workers as our interactions become increasingly abstracted through a byzantine maze of workflow management software and communication platforms that we introduced with the noble intention of enhancing our speed, convenience, and accountability.
This cycle is exacerbated tenfold in a remote work environment, where we become totally reliant on these tools for everyday communication. There is no option to step away from the computer and visit your co-worker’s desk, where a simple smile can dissolve the tension built up from a day’s worth of accidents and misconstrued phrases. There is no chance to commiserate over common woes at happy hour, no lunch break to brainstorm a hard problem together.
How do we create opportunities to know each other as complete human beings, rather than just the sum of our commits and pull requests? How can we avoid the natural tendencies of text-based interactions to create passive-aggression and amplify miscommunication?
The truth is that nothing can replace the fidelity of communication when someone’s words are delivered without stutter or static or background noise, when their face is clearly visible without pixels or compression artifacts, when there is no lag in delivery time causing three people to speak simultaneously. Nothing compares to the sheer emotional bandwidth of communicating face-to-face.
But there are still ways to battle this problem. Over time, we’ve developed some ideas for preserving the humanity in our workplace in the day-to-day. It requires active energy and intent to do — but it’s possible.
Turn the webcams on!
We don’t enforce this as a rule, but we regularly encourage everyone on our tech calls to use their webcams. If a question can be answered with a nod or a shake of the head, that’s one less mic that needs to be turned on. It’s far more satisfying to tell a joke and see the ripple of laughter across the squares than to hear nothing but mute, blank boxes.
We don’t have cubicles or offices to decorate in the remote world — but we do have walls behind us on our webcams. Take a tip from video bloggers / streamers and put up some posters, pictures, or artwork in the background of your normal webcam spot. This is a nice, passive way to share a bit of life or personality.
As an alternative, ensuring everyone has a human face as their avatar can also help — if nothing else, just to remember what someone looks like. We don’t see each other in person very often, so it’s important to reminded!
Calls > lengthy chats
Slack conversations can be great for referencing back to at a later date, but whenever there is a fundamental disagreement and emotions start to run hot, it is rarely the case that continued discussion in chat will improve the situation. The rate of miscommunication in text is obscenely high, and it is far less likely that people will be able to stay upset when they see the other person’s face.
The challenge here is that we’re all busy people, and we can’t always jump on a call. Sometimes we’ve already been on calls all day and another one sounds like an awful proposition. This often means being willing to shelve a conversation for a day or two until there’s room in the schedule to discuss.
Learn about your biases in text communication
However much we want to favor video and voice chat, text will probably always form the majority of our interactions in the remote world. We can’t see each other’s facial reactions or body gestures when we write, making it that much harder to know when we’ve said something offensives or hurtful.
In the unfortunately male-dominated tech sector, our implicit biases in communication can silence other voices and lead to one-sided conversations that exclude others. The tone of our discourse is inseparable from its content; there is always time to be polite and courteous.
This also means knowing when conversations should occur in public or private spaces. Everyone needs to vent, but in public channels, complaining about someone else’s work or mistakes often feels like shaming or blaming. Working out these frustrations in direct messages or smaller groups makes it easier to be considerate in our language and choose our words in a way that is constructive.
Create and promote off-topic chat channels
In the remote world, it’s shockingly easy for all of the discussion to become focused on work. But at Doctor Evidence, everyone is living full lives outside of work. We are more than developers, testers, and managers — we are musicians, artists, parents, cosplayers, writers, dancers, pilots, skiers, and activists — people with unique hobbies and rich life stories that reveal aspects of our personalities that would never otherwise be shown through our work. But most of our interaction occurs through JIRA, Github, and Slack, and our Slack channels are organized entirely by development concern. Where is the room to express ourselves?
This means it’s necessary to intentionally create space to communicate on something besides work — otherwise it might not happen at all. Fostering off-topic communication is one of the few ways for our individuality to be brought to light. These channels are also an important opportunity for communication to occur across teams that otherwise would never interact, which can help us feel like a part of the company as a whole, rather than just a member of the tech team.
Make time in your calls for chatter
When you’re always jumping on calls to solve problems and address concerns, it’s easy for calls to become overly pragmatic. Spending a few minutes to catch up on life or yammer about a new TV show can feel like wasting time. This might be true in the case of larger conference calls or stand-ups — but in smaller groups, it’s okay to let things veer off-topic sometimes.
Emoji and gifs
This is less of a revelation than it used to be; the ubiquity of Slack has more or less normalized the use of emoji in the workplace, whereas a few years ago it was not nearly as common. Nevertheless, it bears mentioning that emoji and gifs are an easy way to add humor and humanity to the conversation.
But go beyond just the :+1: and :simple-smile:. Embrace the party parrot. Create custom emoji from your team’s inside jokes. Take screen captures from video calls and turn your manager into a meme. Have fun with it.
There is a caveat here — it’s easy for emoji to become passive-aggressive in their usage. Be considerate of other’s feelings if you use their face. A little friendly teasing can be great. Too much can become demeaning.
Gifs serve the same purpose. Install a few gif searching tools in your Slack. Alleviate the horror of a breaking bug on production with a well-timed clip from Monty Python.
We’re still learning how to make the remote life a more humane and fulfilling environment. If you have ideas or experiences to share as a remote developer, we’d love to hear them in the comments.
But for us, the benefits of remote work are immense. At Doctor Evidence, we’ve chosen this because it affords all of us something special — more time at home with our families and friends, the opportunity to travel and work from anywhere, flexibility in our daily routines, eliminating time spent commuting, the comfort of working in our own space with our own tools. It’s a trade-off, but one that we think has been worth it.
If working from home on the cutting edge of clinical research analysis sounds intriguing to you, take a look at our openings.
