The importance of offtopic
The early days 🔗
I’ve been working remotely for over a decade – way before it was cool.
My first big job in the industry had me as one of two people in Warsaw, with the rest of the team in Oslo. I’ve never seen any of my Norwegian co-workers at that point, but one the first pieces of direct feedback I got from my manager was: “the teammembers like you; they feel like you’re part of the team.”
That was nice to hear, but not that surprising. There was an IRC channel after all, where we worked of course, but also chit-chatted about random bullshit – and where I learned enough about Star Trek to feel obliged to watch it to understand all the jokes. Opera facilitated – and encouraged – an online space where employees could just hang out, relax, and get to know each other. A place not unlike the kitchen in a physical space.
A place where people came in, said “good morning” and a natural “how’s it going” and “long time no see” ensued. The now-dying concept of being online was still alive and well then, but even those with persistent sessions still adhered to the hi-bye social ritual. And so natural human interactions happened.
This, for me, was the natural extension of the work I did in open-source communities. There’s an IRC channel where work happens, and one where people mingle when they’re not busy. Sometimes it’s the same channel, and social protocols ensure that no shenanigans go on while people actually need that space to work. It’s been working for years, and actually maps to physical spaces pretty well – so why should industry jobs be any different?
The pandemic panic 🔗
A few good years later Covid happened. I was working in a consultancy, a remote worker as usual, with the usual assortment of on- and off-topic channels (though we have switched to Matrix at some point) that ensured that I know the people I work with and I want to hang out with them. That company was all-remote, and we joked that the “apocalypse” that the wider industry was talking about was just the norm to us.
A few months into the pandemic, me and another colleague got assigned – remotely – to a foreign customer. The customer was not a remote company, so Covid caught them with their pants down completely. Their manager ordered a daily morning “standup”, and insisted that we all turn our cameras on. It’s very important for the Team Spirit, he said.
Me and the other consultant laughed, in text form of course. We’re not Twitch streamers, why the fuck should we have webcams? And how’s seeing someone’s blurry forehead supposed to build actual human connections?
We bought the webcams to appease the management dinosaurs.
This place didn’t have off-topic online spaces, of course. People knew each other as workers and nothing else. They lacked the comradery and sympathy that normally acts as a lubricant for professional interactions. You’re less likely to give someone shit in code review if you’re best buddies who play games in the evenings. You’re less likely to get frustrated at a colleague – even your superior – if you laugh at the same jokes and occasionally meet for beers off-work.
Take all the human element away from work and work degrades. On-site companies understand this, and the IT industry is almost infamous for all the “off-topic” infrastructure in the offices. Kitchen. Game room. Pool table. Table tennis, or whatever. In addition to being a blatant admission that a 40-hour week is complete bullshit because no IT professional works 8 hours a day, it shows an understanding that people need to unwind and interact, and work ultimately benefits. Funny how it’s such an alien concept the moment work moves online.
That foreign customer at least did the remote onboarding very right, unlike the last hero of our story.
Leading by example 🔗
A few years ago I joined a remote-first company, one that bragged about not even having an office to go to. I knew how hard that is to get right, so it was one of the things I brought up in an interview, in later stages, when talking to some CTO, EngMan or Chief Engineer or whatever they came up with. I was in fact specifically asked about my remote work experience and what, in my opinion, makes remote work work.
I went straight to the off-topic stuff, as you’d expect, and the guy was delighted. “I’m glad you understand this”, he said, “we have lots of things like this”. And they did – multiple off-topic Slack channels, some periodic off-topic events. Even a thing where a robot would randomly pick someone from the company to give you a one-on-one simulated Watercooler discussion, though frankly I do not think that worked very well in practice.
And yet, after I joined, it was a wasteland. Someone would post a youtube video with no context on #music one day, someone would post a pretty picture somewhere else on the other day, and that’s it. No chats, no memes, no “hanging out”. Odd.
I asked one of my teammembers – what’s up with that? “Oh, you know, there’s a release coming up soon, nobody wants to give an impression that they’re dilly-dallying around instead of working.” I see. “It’s been like that for the past few months.”
Months? Oh.
You can create as many Slack channels as you want, but all that is worthless if you don’t build the culture where it’s okay to use them. Companies I’ve worked at before always had the bosses and managers post as much memes and bullshit as everyone, if not more – which is a natural extension of higher-ups spending more time socializing in the kitchen than anyone else, and one could argue that that’s their job – to know what’s up in the ranks, how people feel, and making them productive.
If you get a random assortment of people online however and point them at a “playroom”, why should they go there and play? They’re new employees, they should be known from their work, their impact, first and foremost. They don’t want to be known as the Slack slackers, so they keep their nose down. Then they become the old guard, new people come in and they learn to avoid the offtopic wasteland just like everyone else. Congratulations, you’ve failed.
Epilogue 🔗
Remote work is not rocket science. Open-source communities have been doing it for decades, and they often manage to build communities in which people would willingly spend their own money to go to a conference and actually meet their friends in person.
Now that the outside is a bit safer than a few years ago, the “back to the office” push is in full swing. And maybe some of that is a conspiracy of all the real-estate owners who don’t want their city-center investments to lose value.
But when a company comes to me and says “we have hybrid work, we need people in the office for a few days per week”, all I see is a management failure. And I wonder what else you’re bad at.