If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely you shouldn’t have hired them

Re:If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely you sh... by sokoloff on Monday January 23, 2017 @06:54PM (#13467474)

I've never inadvertently run into the head of marketing in Slack. I have in an elevator on the way back from lunch.

I don't randomly run into colleagues while eating lunch on Slack. I do in the cafeteria.

If I need to casually run something by someone else without raising hackles, I can arrange to bump into them in person. I can't do that in email/Slack.

Text chat is a useful tool, but is not a full replacement for the human experience of walking around other people in 4D.

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Re:If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely you sh... by geoka9 on Monday January 23, 2017 @07:40PM (#13467799)

No it's not, but the point is, if the team is remote-first, you don't need to make that replacement. And you get all the benefits of not having to drag people to the office against their will (which are huge).

In your example, if your company were remote-first, the head of marketing would always be on slack and you wouldn't have to wait for the opportunity of inadvertently running into her just to have a conversation. And so would be your colleagues with whom you (apparently) can only interact when you happen to have lunch together. And so on.

You never "raise hackles" by asking something in Slack, because chat is unintrusive by definition (as opposed to walking up to a person uninvited).

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