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A comment on If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely you shouldn’t have hired them. Parent comment

Re:If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely you sh... by TallGuyShort on Monday January 23, 2017 @02:08PM (#13464929)
I had a manager for a while who would make a point of catching me up on watercooler talk once a week or whenever we met about something else. Somebody quit in a dramatic way a few days ago? New project everyone's talking about that has nothing to do with me? Only took about 3 minutes, but really helped me feel connected, be more aware of the big picture, what else was going on that might indirectly impact my projects. I understood when a team I communicated with might be stressed or distracted. I understood when resources were going to be harder to get. Really good practice.
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Re:If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely you sh... by voltagex_ on Monday January 23, 2017 @09:02PM (#13468229)
Sounds like there should be specialist training for people who manage remote teams. I wonder what GitHub does in comparison to Google (which seems to be sort of anti-remote).
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Re:If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely you sh... by TallGuyShort on Tuesday January 24, 2017 @09:36AM (#13471583)
Great idea. I think it's the same with many management scenarios. You could put someone in charge of a group of employees from a very different culture, and without any training or other investment into learning about how to make it work, they're likely to end up thinking, "I just can't get the team to perform - let's not hire people like that."
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Re:If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely you sh... by cs02rm0 on Monday January 23, 2017 @02:11PM (#13464953)
FWIW, while this is important, it happens in remote working environments too.
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Re:If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely you sh... by TallGuyShort on Monday January 23, 2017 @02:13PM (#13464976)
Not sure what you mean - I meant to say this is what my manager did for me as a remote employee. I've worked remotely for about 4 years, and this manager really made it work better than anyone else because of little things like this.
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Re:If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely you sh... by cs02rm0 on Monday January 23, 2017 @04:01PM (#13465982)
Apologies, I mistook watercooler as literal rather than a metaphor.

I agree the little things that mimic, or substitute for, the subtleties of working in an office are still vital when working remotely.

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Re:If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely you sh... by wott on Monday January 23, 2017 @03:42PM (#13465803)
I also read it erroneously as if you were working in an office. Maybe the wording "catching me up" and "watercooler" :-)
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Re:If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely you sh... by viraptor on Monday January 23, 2017 @04:44PM (#13466343)
I've done this as a weekly team conference call + hipchat for ad-hoc announcements (where announcements = anything from we're doing a new project to cat pics). It can still work pretty well.
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