Ask HN: Hybrid/Remote software team rituals
I&#x27;m a director-level, fwiw. Very little has changed for me with regards to going remote.<p>I do mostly weekly 1:1s with my reports. I say mostly because I really leave it up to the individual to decide how frequently we want to do it, with a floor of once a month. There doesn&#x27;t seem to be much of a rhyme or reason as to why some folks want weekly, others want bi-weekly, and the one wants monthly.<p>My 1:1s are my favorite parts of the week, but I&#x27;m keenly aware that not everyone likes them. I try to keep them as productive as possible, and if I think they aren&#x27;t going to be productive for whatever reason, I&#x27;ll cancel them ahead of time, or if I think there&#x27;s something that would make it really productive, I give a head&#x27;s up so they aren&#x27;t caught by surprise. Generally speaking, my team seems to enjoy talking with me. It&#x27;s a mix of small talk and business. The more senior the person, the more likely we are to be talking big ideas and how to solve big problems at a high level, and the less senior, the more likely I am to be helping with specific code problems. And I have folks that do both at different times.<p>We do have daily standups, although we mix up whether it has to be via Zoom or via Slack, and that usually depends on how autonomous the team can be for a given project or how much risk there is against an on-time delivery. I don&#x27;t believe in deadlines, but we do have target dates that we try to hit, and if we don&#x27;t think we&#x27;re going to hit them, then I want to know ahead of time so I can message that appropriately to the rest of the business. And if we&#x27;re behind, maybe we&#x27;ll sync up a bit more often &quot;in-person&quot; just to smooth out any blockers.<p>I will say that my teams at my current company have the smoothest and most pleasant standups that I&#x27;ve ever had before. I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s a little annoying for them, but our productivity has shot through the roof, and it&#x27;s allowing us to work on cooler stuff instead of being constantly behind all of the time. I hope they see that. Something to communicate more...<p>We never record video conferences. One of my core philosophies as a leader is that as far as the company is concerned, the smallest unit of organization is the Team, and that means everyone on the team needs to be able to do their best without fear of being targeted individually for whatever mistakes may happen. We document our work fairly well, but any extra-team communications explicitly do not mention engineers by name. This is mostly to protect their time by having all requests route through the EM&#x2F;PM, instead of the biz going directly to certain engineers and asking for requests. This process seems to be working fairly well. Individuals <i>do</i> get shout outs at all-hands meetings and at other team meetings, but when it comes to tickets and code, we try to get the rest of the org to think of it as a single Team and not a group of individuals.<p>As far as &quot;what did you do this weekend&quot; type things, I keep my work&#x2F;life pretty separate, but I am the kind of person who loves to learn more about people and share things that I&#x27;ve learned, so a lot of our conversations (especially on Fridays) tend to center around social stuff: what are you doing this weekend, what did you think of Squid Game, did you know the guy who sold all those sea monkeys was actually a Nazi, what languages do you speak, etc. We usually have these kinds of conversations after the business stuff is done, so anyone who doesn&#x27;t want to talk can just drop off. No judgments either way. But this tends to be a fairly interactive and fun experience for everyone, and participation rates are pretty high. Given that these teams are fully remote, I&#x27;m pretty happy with how these turned out.<p>As far as other rituals go, I think my company has too many all-hands meetings (4 per month with hundreds of employees at each), and I&#x27;ve been pushing for fewer of those, but so far I&#x27;m losing that argument.<p>What would I like to see more of in a remote work environment? I&#x27;d love to see some optional remote social activities. Games, trivia, Ted Talk-style events. I like seeing people do demos of their work -- especially if they&#x27;re super proud of it.<p>And I think perhaps the thing I&#x27;d like to see most of all is for the business to recognize that the world has changed, and that we don&#x27;t always have to be in the same place at the same time in order to be wildly successful. I love being in the office, but I don&#x27;t think I want to go back full-time. Hybrid or remote is the future, and we should embrace it.<p>My two cents.