Remote workers have become a mainstay, whether dealing with outsourced staff, work from home employees, or remote offices. These slides are from the Phoenix DevOps Meetup (07/27/2016) where I spoke about tips, tools, and techniques to enable better communication across remote teams.

1. Effective Telepresence & Remote Collaboration

3. Meetup Agenda
• Effective Meetings
• English is not English
• The “I don’t know” Culture
• Confirming Deliverables
• Hiring remote employees

4. Effective
Meetings

5. - Rule #1
“Unless the meeting organizer can fire you,
decline all meetings without an agenda.”

6. Requiring an agenda forces the
organizer to clarify the reason and
often results in not needing a
meeting at all.

7. Agenda Objectives
• Allow participants to prepare
• Can help reduce non-essential attendees
• Help the organizer forecast meeting length
• Still not going to happen, huh?

8. 0
300
600
900
1200
Number of Attendees
Estimate $100 per hour per attendee

9. - Rule #2
“All meetings should have a designated
recorder.”

10. A meeting summary serves
as a ‘receipt’ to justify the
use of company funds.

11. Recorder Responsibilities
• Attendees
• Topics discussed (hint: should be agenda)
• Action items assigned
• Who owns each item
• When the item is due

12. Effective Meetings Summary
• Decline undefined meetings
• Require an agenda
• Designated note taker
• Meeting summary documents
action items

13. Care to bring a
rubber and
bang me up at
6am?

14. Tips for Effective Communication
• Avoid slang terms
• Shorter sentences are better
• Ask for confirmation
• Get/Put it in Writing
• Establish short timelines (Agile, anyone?)

15. — Marjorie Brody, founder & CEO of BRODY Professional Development
“Communication is the message received, not
the message sent.”

16. 93% of all
communication
is non-verbal
Not really, but it’s still a lot.
Body Language
Tone
Facial Expression
Ambient Noise
are all lost.

18. You Company Culture
and the Land of Idontknow

19. A New Manifesto
• It’s ok to:
• say “I don’t know”
• ask for clarity
• say you don’t
understand
• ask what acronyms
stand for
• forget things
• depend on the team
• ask for help
• not know everything
• say “No”
• make mistakes
• offer feedback
• challenge things
• say “Yes”

20. Confirming Deliverables
• Ask for confirmation of your request
• Stated back to you in their own words
• Define a “show me where you’re at” checkpoint
• Stated in time, not progress
• Use shorter, clearly defined tasks until a good
working relationship is established

21. Standups
• Effective for dev work
• Less effective for ops
• Meeting does not persist
outside of standup

22. Shift Handoff
Status of current issues
Current impact
Who owns the follow up
Visibility outside of meeting

23. Hiring Remote
Employees
The Programming Task

25. Being a
Remote
Employee
http://www.donnfelker.com/
working-remote/

26. You’re already remote.

27. Four hours overlap

28. Have a dedicated
working area.

29. The company must
embrace a remote work
environment.

30. Use the tools.

31. Get together.

32. Recap:
• Effective Meetings
• English is not English
• The “I don’t know” Culture
• Confirming Deliverables
• Hiring remote employees
Will Button
@wfbutton