In my experience (11 years fully remote/distributed growing from 90 to 2000 employees) my first impression is it sounds like you’re doing too much synchronous. Async is so efficient.
My team’s current systems:
- Most deep discussions happen on blog posts including project status. We use (and built) https://wordpress.com/p2/. We don’t use email.
- Start of week everyone prompted to post what they did last week and what they plan to do this week. Also have a kinda fun ice breaker question that is easy (e.g avoid asking about favorites) and sometimes generates discussion. Last week was “Pick an olympic sport to represent your life.”
- Daily Slack prompt to give folks a place to report on yesterday/today. The most important thing is how people feel though. “Pick a red/yellow/green emoji for your status” and “What feels risky or a blocker?”. Create space for feelings.
- weekly team meeting is then about discussions and never about status. How do we solve X? How do we feel about Y?
- debugging and such does occur in Slack but longer discussions are on blog posts/comments and so can be long.
- I do 1-1s weekly for new folks and bi-weekly for longer term folks. Encourage sync 1-1s between the team also.
A lot of the prompts can be automated. I dont consider them mandatory, if you get them right then folks will be happy to do them because they feel the utility of them.
Iterating is very important though (which you are doing yay!), I’ve tried lots of different cadences/systems but the above is the core of what my team has used for 3-4 years now and I’m pretty happy with it. I still try to make sure we reconsider if we want to experiment with something new every few months. Partly why I wrote this long comment is I’m thinking if there is anything to tweak.
My team’s current systems: - Most deep discussions happen on blog posts including project status. We use (and built) https://wordpress.com/p2/. We don’t use email. - Start of week everyone prompted to post what they did last week and what they plan to do this week. Also have a kinda fun ice breaker question that is easy (e.g avoid asking about favorites) and sometimes generates discussion. Last week was “Pick an olympic sport to represent your life.” - Daily Slack prompt to give folks a place to report on yesterday/today. The most important thing is how people feel though. “Pick a red/yellow/green emoji for your status” and “What feels risky or a blocker?”. Create space for feelings. - weekly team meeting is then about discussions and never about status. How do we solve X? How do we feel about Y? - debugging and such does occur in Slack but longer discussions are on blog posts/comments and so can be long. - I do 1-1s weekly for new folks and bi-weekly for longer term folks. Encourage sync 1-1s between the team also.
A lot of the prompts can be automated. I dont consider them mandatory, if you get them right then folks will be happy to do them because they feel the utility of them.
https://ma.tt/2020/04/five-levels-of-autonomy/ Is a good read too.
Iterating is very important though (which you are doing yay!), I’ve tried lots of different cadences/systems but the above is the core of what my team has used for 3-4 years now and I’m pretty happy with it. I still try to make sure we reconsider if we want to experiment with something new every few months. Partly why I wrote this long comment is I’m thinking if there is anything to tweak.