The Disconnectivity of Remote Working

Photo by trail on Unsplash

Throughout the 30+ years of running my own business, I have explored all aspects of teamwork.  From having my own in house team, to having a totally remote team, to a combined mix of the two.

Which do I prefer? Now THAT is an interesting question.

I would consider myself an introvert, and I do prefer working by myself in my own home office a lot of the time.  However, some of my best working memories have been when I have been in an office situation and working alongside others.

There is something about the human connection of being in the same space as others.  A myriad of non verbal cues and communication that goes on, most at a sub conscious level, which lends itself to a better sense of being part of a community which is pulling in the same direction.

Case in point - my current startup is a fully remote setup.  For the past two years, it was really only myself and another co-founder, who worked in a small town literally on the other side of the world.

Now, my co-founder and I had a great working relationship, and we produced a ton of stuff together.  All communication was mainly via Slack and email, and we used to talk on a daily basis PLUS have a weekly web video catch up.

My co-founder left the startup about 2 months ago.  The first week was really challenging, as I directly missed talking to someone while working away on new ideas.

But by the end of the first month, I started to get used to working by myself again.  After all, I had run the startup by myself for about a year before my co-founder joined me.  So it felt basically the same as it did before.

By the end of the second month, I was actually struggling to recall even working with my former co-founder.  This concerned me, as I always considered myself a sensitive person who liked to reminisce about happy memories.  So why was it suddenly so difficult for me to recall any of those good times we had had?  My co-founder's departure was amicable, so this wasn't as a result of any ill feelings.  Rather it just seemed that those experiences and memories were just floating out of reach, and without anything to anchor them too, they just seemed to waft away whenever I tried to recall them.

Even when I would go back through a Slack conversation to find an old screenshot or idea, I would re-read some of our conversations - but I struggled to actually remember the emotions or personality behind those chats.  Re-reading them seemed somehow cold and impersonal and I couldn't tell if I was tired, or angry, excited or happy while typing those paragraphs.

As a direct contrast to that, I can still clearly recall events that happened in my office over 20 years ago when I worked only feet away from the rest of my team.

Tiny things like a shared look, collapsing on the floor laughing at an 'in house' joke, or the casual punch on the shoulder as someone congratulated you while walking past your desk - all those things just added so much to my working experience that I, even as a self confessed 'lone wolf', missed them terribly.

There is something about being around people who are experiencing the highs and lows of their lives (even outside of work) that is strangely enriching and bonding.

To extend this even further - I was looking through my Facebook feed just this week, and I realised that I have become close friends with a vast majority of people that I have worked with face to face over the decades.  Remote workers much less so.  For some reason when a former remote staff member posts about their family or holiday or other life event, I find myself a lot less engaged with their thoughts and feelings.  There is still an element of them being an unknown 'stranger' so that any such intimate details of their lives instills a sense of guilt that I tend to deliberately avoid seeming too familiar or presumptuous when reading their posts.

While my recently departed co-founder and I had discussed an actual company meetup where we (and potential future staff) could meet face to face, it never happened during our working time together.  And now that my co-founder has moved on, I have accepted that we will probably never, ever meet in real life.

I am in the process of building up a whole new remote team now though, and am looking at strategies to try and counter this feeling of disconnection with those that I will figuratively work alongside for the coming years.

Regular company face to face meetups are definitely on the cards.  But I am also thinking that we might need to put something else in place outside of those times.

But what could take the virtual place of those little moments like tossing a paper plane across the office to see whose desk it would land on, or the understanding look that I would share with a colleague across from me after hanging up from a talking to a difficult client, or the good natured group ribbing that would happen when a co-worker brought a delicious smelling lunch into the office?  I have yet to see a web or mobile app that can replicate this sort of interaction.

Perhaps I have to go and invent it?
 

Getting heard on the internet

Picture courtesy of National Geographic

Someone once told me that the ideal size for a human community is something in the order of 500 people.  Apparently that was the average size of a village or community back in the day, and it meant that every person pretty much knew everyone else.  Neighbours would know each other and look out for one another when they were sick or in need.  Anyone who tried to misbehave or act out was generally known, and quickly brought back into line by the collective, because everyone had a stake in the wellbeing and survival of the community.

Yesterday I was introduced to a new 'game' online at paperplanes.world (Tip: Visit it on your mobile browser).  It is a beautifully designed, simple site which lets you make paper planes, stamp them with your location and 'launch' them out into the internet.  You can also 'catch' planes that others have launched, look at where they have been by the stamps on it, then stamp it with your own location and relaunch it back into the virtual skies again.

It is fascinating to see where some planes have been in their travels, and also exciting to see where you planes will end up.

A deceptively simple game, but it was all the more engrossing to me, as it took me back to my childhood loves of building, discovering and connecting with others.

When I first signed on to the game yesterday, there were around 100,000 planes flying around this virtual world.  I launched a few, and caught many.  Most of the ones I caught were filled with stamps, showing the number of people who had caught it in the past.

But today when I went back online, there were around 400,000 planes flying around.  Quadruple what it was yesterday.  I caught a few planes, but noted that nearly all of them had only one stamp - from the originator who built and launched the plane in the first place.

Somewhere along the line, the balance tipped.  When I started, I felt an instant connectedness to the others playing the game, because the planes I launched had a good chance of being caught, and the planes that I caught had been stamped by so many others.

But now, any planes I launched into the ether would likely just buzz endlessly around the world, lonely and ignored in the huge stream of lost and lonely paper planes.  That connectedness that I once experienced is now severely diluted in the increasing noise.

I can only imagine that the players who started in this game when there were only a few hundred planes flying around would have a different argument - that they were catching the same planes over and over again, and had little chance of seeing a plane from the other side of the world.

I feel exactly the same when it comes to social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram or Medium.

The early days of the platform means that what you say is easily visible to other early adopters, and the feedback and conversations you have will be meaningful and rich.  But over time, the increasing crowds initially is exciting, as you perceive your audience and reach growing, but there comes a time when your uniqueness and individuality (and sense of self importance) within that ecosystem is simply diluted away to something generic.

That is why, in my latest startup SaaS app, I am not going for large numbers of users, but rather a quality community.  We recently removed our free plans to further accomplish this goal.  I am proud when asked, to say that my users number in the hundreds, instead of six or seven figure mark.  At this stage I still know virtually all my users by name, and support tickets can still stay personalised and friendly.  My users are not statistics on a spreadsheet.  They are part of my village.

As for the paper planes game, I have changed my thinking there too.  I no longer make and launch planes into the already crowded skies.  Nowadays I am happy to simply capture other people planes, stamp them and send them on.  I now relish catching planes with only a single stamp on them, because I feel that when I stamp them and send them on, in effect I am saying "This lonely plane matters, and I hope it has a great journey".  Somewhere in the world, someone will check their stats on their launched planes, and I hope it gives them a brief spark of connection with a guy in remote Australia.

20 years of Blaze...

The 1st of September marks a major milestone in my life.  It will mean that I have been running my company, Blaze Business Software Pty Ltd for 20 years now.  Two decades.  It seems almost unbelievable to me at times.

Back in September 1996, I had only been married for a month, I was about to turn 30, and I decided to start a software consultancy business out of my bedroom.  Thus began the rollercoaster, including getting an office in the Cullen Bay area of Darwin, growing the team to at one stage around 16 people, and then now coming full circle to just my wife and I working from a home office again in a 'lifestyle' business.

So many changes in the IT industry at that time.  When I started Blaze, the internet was just hitting mainstream here in Australia, and everything was still dial up.  We were one of the first offices to get an ISDN line into our office, and I clearly remember setting up a small Windows 98 server in the back which was running some sort of DOS mail daemon so that we could have individual email addresses for every employee.  Something that was so rare back then.

We were also one of the first companies locally to upgrade to Microsoft Exchange and implement ActiveSync.  I clearly remember proudly showing off how I could read and reply to emails on my Palm Pilot in real time to all my clients.  Nowadays that is just an expected thing, but back then I was pleased that we were pushing the envelope and being cutting edge.

Lots of nice memories, such as being the finalist in the Telstra Small Business Awards up here in 1998 I think.  Lots of other small awards and achievements.  But there were also some really tough times, and many days where I didn't know whether I wanted to close the doors forever and go raise sheep in the Italian mountains.

But through all that, I still wake up every day and look forward to doing the work I do.  I am always grateful to have met so many wonderful people through my business.  From clients (many of whom I still work with 20+ years later), to employees who have become close friends, to colleagues and competitors and everyone who has walked through the doors or called in the past 2 decades.  Thank You.

Proving that it is never too late to be a 'startup', this year I have embarked on a whole new reboot of the business, as we become a SaaS company providing subscription based business software.  Given that I will be turning 50 this year, I don't know if I will have the energy to keep on with the consulting and support role for many more years, and I am looking forward to setting up a passive income source from a modern, web based subscription platform.

Just another step in our long and interesting journey.  Hope to see you all along the way...

When your hard work becomes invisible

In my latest project, I have been working very hard on getting the UX right.  I want the interface of my web app to NOT fight the user every step of the way, and to make some semi-intelligent guesses as to what they want to do.  Wherever part of the interface looks clickable, I want the user to be able to click on it and get the result they expected.

That sort of precognition takes hard work - LOTS of hard work.  Just today I spent pretty much ALL day on one small piece of functionality, that at the end of the day, my users will probably never really notice.

Come to think of it, *I* pretty much don't notice it now that it is finished, but I know it is there, and it is making my movements through my web app a lot smoother and logical.  

Just this evening I was thinking about it, and I was a little sad that all my work was essentially invisible to the end user - after all, they only usually notice things when they DON'T work.

But I was reassured by something a wise man once told me - "Character is what you do when no one is watching".  I like to think that my app has good character.