The most important rule of building and managing a remote team: the burden of communication is on the people working together from the same location, not the people telecommuting.

It may sound obvious, but I just can’t stress it enough. Because when your head is down in development on a project, it’s easy to slip into side conversations and asides that never end up getting communicated to the remote team members you’re leading. You have to constantly remember to project what you’re doing out to your remote team members. Or pretty quickly you end up working from two entirely different playbooks.

That’s why at Table XI, our primary work infrastructure is engineered to support remote work. While most of us are co-located, we want to stay flexible, and we currently have staff working everywhere from Chile to Seattle. Using remote-friendly systems does a couple of good things for us, which I’ll discuss later, but the key benefit is that it keeps people who are remote from being at a disadvantage. All our work happens in a remote-friendly infrastructure. The rest — coffee runs, lunch breaks, movie nights — are additive. You don’t hear people talking about work on coffee runs.

Here are our tips for engineering effective remote teams:

Create a virtual office

When integrating a remote and local team, the first thing I do is establish an online meeting space, effectively the project workshop. This typically ends up being a chatroom, but whatever it is, it’s important that it will be persistent for the life of the project. By creating a permanent space for conversation, people, whether they’re remote or local, have that feeling of an office, of home.

We use Slack, because it allows us to quickly spin up these channels where teams can talk about their project, or their discipline, or even just their lives. Alicia, our remote project manager wrote about why she’s joined almost every channel:

It’s really chatty, but it helps me know what’s what. I miss the in-person hallway conversations, so keeping an eye on what everyone’s discussing in Slack gives me context.

Give your remote team a way to communicate availability

Once you’ve established a home for the team, you have to give everyone the ability to communicate presence. Just like a physical office, where people wear headphones to show they’re working and can’t be interrupted, you need remote people to be able to say hello, goodbye, I’m not around. Otherwise someone will ask a question and it will go unanswered. Or worse, you’ll be constantly pulling your remote workers away from their tasks.

Use video communication whenever possible

Keeping connected is one of the biggest challenges a remote team is going to face, kind of by definition. My advice: Always use video. Make every meeting a video conference. We like GoToMeeting for its reliability, but Google Hangouts works too. Just give everyone on the team a chance to see each other. Phone calls work, but you need a format that lets the human part come through. Video lets you see facial expressions and read emotions, so you have a better understanding of how people are feeling and what’s engaging them.

Just remember to use the video once you have it. Try to avoid side conversations between co-located people. If two people are whispering about something, the remote people are going to feel left out. Make sure everyone’s projecting their voices and looking into the camera.

Have everyone work in fully collaborative tools

To keep conversation moving, make sure any software or apps you’re using are fully collaborative. That means real-time changes everyone can see. Think Google Docs, not Microsoft Word documents in Sharepoint. If people are worried about whether they’re looking at the latest version or saving over someone else’s edits, you’ll spend half the meeting talking about that, not the work that needs to be done. A truly collaborative document gives you shared context, which in turn gives the team a sense of closeness.

Develop a way for employees to show their work

Once you’ve established a system for meetings and a shared online space for the team, you have to develop an infrastructure for communicating tasks and accountabilities. Because you can’t see when people are working with remote teams, you need a mechanism that communicates what people have accomplished. Otherwise it’s on the remote workers to make noise about what they’re getting done, and we’ve already established that the burden is not on them. Set up a work structure, that lets you give someone a task and lets them deliver it back in a public way. It will keep you from pestering not just your remote workers, but everyone on your team. And it gives everyone a chance for their contributions to be seen.

We’re lucky, because this is actually already built into the Agile workflow and Scrum methodology, where big projects are broken down into small programming tasks and assigned to individual developers. The only training we had to do to make this remote-friendly was find a tracking system that works well for everyone. We use Pivotal Tracker and Redmine for all of our project management needs, but any software will do as long as it’s something your team will actually use.

Deliver project work to third-party tools, not a person

There are so many reasons to deliver to a tool instead of a person that all our teams work this way — blog posts are delivered to WordPress, code is delivered to GitHub, designs are delivered to InVision, etc. Like the above, it lets everyone see when work is done, rather than hiding it in one person’s inbox or Slack direct message. It stops one person from being a roadblock by keeping the work somewhere everyone can access it. And it prevents different people having different versions of the same project. If a design lives in InVision, the designer and front-end developer can start breaking it into development tasks at the same time a project manager runs it by a client.

Create culture and engagement by building in the personal

Working together is always easier when everyone understands each other. If your remote team hasn’t already spent time together in-person, use these same work processes to learn about each other as people. Add 10 minutes at the start of each video meeting to talk about what everyone did over the weekend. Or share periodic memes and GIFs in your chatroom. Do whatever it takes to establish a personal relationship, so these interactions aren’t robotic.

It’s not just about making sure people get along and enjoy their work — though that’s obviously important for employee retention. It’s about creating a rapport so conversations can run more smoothly. You also need to be able to pick up on when someone’s having a tough time. Your remote employees may not always speak up when they’re stuck on something. And you can’t see a furrowed brow if you’re just communicating tasks via Pivotal Tracker.

The benefits of everyone using remote working best practices

I used to be a big proponent of 100 percent remote. In the past, that’s how I operated my own companies. I’ve come off that a little bit now. You lose something without regular face-to-face interaction. That’s why project manager Alicia lists airplanes as a favorite remote working tool. There’s a level of interaction and tempo you can get out of an intense workshop in the same space that you just can’t get being remote.

Still, picking processes that work for remote employees benefits everyone. For your actual remote workers, you can always plan to co-locate when necessary — like for a strategy day or project inception. For your co-located workers, a remote-friendly infrastructure provides its own benefits:

• You learn to communicate with your team in the way that’s most efficient for each task
• Everyone knows what work is expected of them
• Everyone’s work is recognized
• No one’s a roadblock to progress, because everyone’s working in a third-party tool
• There aren’t avoidable version control mistakes, because all the software you’re using is truly collaborative.
• The tempo stays the same, whether someone’s working from home, working in another country, or on vacation

A few weeks ago, our quality assurance specialist Robin was in Spain. An urgent question came up that we just could not wait on, so we sent it his way using these tools. He responded right away, keeping the tempo going with a minimum of disruption to his vacation.

Accommodating remote workers lets us all work smarter. There’s an expectation of 24/7 availability in tech, and while we value work-life balance, we understand that things come up. Being set up for everyone to work remotely means you don’t have to run back into the office if something critical pops up in the middle of the night. The tempo can always keep going.

A recent article about Uber’s interest in developing autonomous cars to replace the drivers in their fleet caught my attention.  On the surface, it makes capitalistic sense to reduce their costs and risk associated with human drivers.  Humans are seen as the weak link in the chain – the link that is most directly related to negative impacts on profitability. .  Investment into autonomous vehicles eliminates this weak link and everybody wins.

Or do they?

A lot has been made recently about how human progress for the next decade will exponentially accelerate due to sci-fi level advances in technology.  Peter Diamandis does a fantastic job of painting a picture of this new world in his books Abundance and Bold.  The basic premise is that silicon chips and computers are quickly reaching a tipping point where artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing and massive democratization of our economy will completely change the way we live. The flip side? This transition will  eliminate millions of jobs in the process.

A recent study by two professors at Oxford University estimated that 47% of all jobs (PDF) in the American economy will be replaced by machines, displacing all of those workers.  Drivers of Uber cars are included in this 47% and, as I explained above, it makes perfect sense to eliminate human drivers and replace them with robotic cars that will carry us wherever we want to go. Consistency and reliability of execution and dramatically lower costs are hard to argue with at the business model level.

Yet, while pondering all of this I can’t shake one little fact when I compare Uber drivers to a city Cab.

The reason I personally like Uber is the conversation I have with a driver.  I tend to use Uber when traveling instead of traditional cabs.  Uber drivers are particularly friendly, something I’m sure is intentional on their part due to the well documented rating system Uber has employed.  Uber’s unique method of tipping drivers also eliminates the awkward, “You’re being nice because you want a tip” effect, freeing up the potential to have a genuine conversation.

A trip in an Uber is a practical way to get from point A to point B, but also represents the potential for making a new friend and genuinely interacting with a stranger in a safe and controlled way (with a few rare exceptions).

This brings me back to the topic of autonomous cars.  This experience would completely change if the car was controlled by a powerful mix of technology.  I am not aware of anyone who is currently studying this, but I would guess that the effect is far more than we realize.

So, how do you bring together the rise of machines with the need for a truly human experience?  That’s a multi-billion dollar question.

Going back to our example of Uber for a moment, would people pay to have a driver sit at the wheel of an autonomous Uber car just for the sake of safety and conversation? Would they find enough value in that level of interaction to demand a better experience?

I think the answer is that we don’t know yet.  Our entire society believes that machine based interfaces are superior to human ones.  Click, order, eat – after all – is the new way to get a sandwich. The examples are everywhere.  ATM’s vs. Bank Tellers. Automated Supermarket checkout machines. Common wisdom says that replacing human interaction with machines is a better choice.

Yet, I see a backlash to this growing.

We have an entire generation of people who grew up with computers (the dreaded Millennials) who know no different.  I think they will reach a point where they will value a human interaction over a machine interaction.  Here’s why.

For those of us (myself included) who were born after 1980, particularly who have grown up in more affluent Western countries, our machine filled world is the norm.  We’ve always known a world filled with cell phones, unlimited TV and the world’s collective knowledge right at our fingertips.  We live in a world of massive abundance, as Diamandis argues.

So, what’s left to value when everything is at your fingertips?

This is the most human of all questions and borders on a dive into the unknowable depths of philosophy, so I will propose that instead of trying to answer that question by looking at the future, we answer it by observing the past.

Throughout history, unlimited abundance has been the privilege of the aristocracy of the world.  Kings and Queens capture our imagination because of their perceived life of comfort where all they need to do is snap their fingers for someone to bring them whatever they desire.

Yet, we don’t have to look very far to see that money can’t buy everything.  Things like happiness, genuine friendship, secrets or even love are the cliche answers to this question but faced with abundance they become very real.  Our literature and movies reflect this.  You don’t need to look much further than the recent Hunger Games series or even Shakespeare to see that the human currency in those stories has nothing to do with material things such as money or machines.

So, what does our future hold? What’s valuable in a world of abundance?

I don’t think discovering what is valuable will be too difficult, because we humans are very predictable.  The interesting bit will be how our society reacts to a world where people no longer value money (because abundance pushes costs to near zero) compared to the intangibles of being human like relationships and community.

We see several examples of companies getting this right today.  My personally favorite example is the Young Entrepreneur’s Council, an invite-only community for Entrepreneurs to connect with resources and develop friendships.  The YEC team has executed brilliantly on a community driven business that is both profitable and provides tremendous value to its members in the form of their own currency, particularly connections and resources.  I’ve been privileged to get a glimpse into how the YEC pulls this off and it’s a mix of machines and high-touch human beings who work together in flawless harmony.

I hope we see more examples like the YEC in coming years and it is where I believe we will see the future of our economy go.  Machines have done amazing things for our world and as they continue to take over more and more of our economy, I see the future belonging to companies who embrace the advances that machines provide while provide a high-touch and very human experience to their customers at the same time.

Have machines taken over your world? Do you miss human interaction or prefer machine interaction?

Many thanks to my friend Chris Rechtsteiner for helping spark the idea and reviewing this post.

In Jr. High, while shopping at the local computer store, I discovered Borland C++.  Unfortunately, the compiler and accompanying manuals were almost $200, far beyond my price range.

Fortunately, our home computer was soon upgraded to Windows 3.1, which I grew incredibly excited about. I discovered QBasic and found books at the library to learn rudimentary programming.

I was fortunate enough to have parents who provided the necessary equipment, which was very expensive at the time, and the foresight to let me satisfy my curiosity through countless trips to the library and annoying questions about things they understood little about.

Learning to code at a young age, with my parents support, has proven to be the single most important career decision in my entire life.

Thankfully, learning to code is now much easier.  Through the Internet, countless free resources are available to make it much easier to learn this crucial skill then ever before.

This is why I was so excited when a friend of mine, Will Little, invited me to participate in the “Hour of Code” program at Wells Community High School, I jumped at the chance.  Teaching others to code is a passion and I try to jump at any opportunity to help others learn.

At the event, there was a tremendous showing from the local Chicago community of computer professionals.  We went through a brief orientation where the sponsoring teacher, Ms. Daniels, explained the history of the school and a bit about the computer science courses that they offer.

All of the volunteers were then led down the halls to the school entrance chanting, “Hour of Code” to drum up excitement.  We then split into our pre-assigned classrooms where we welcomed students.

After brief introductions, we helped students walk through the tutorials offered by Code.org.  In these tutorials, students are walked through basic lessons to perform various actions on the screen.  You can take a look at several of them at http://code.org/learn.

I particularly enjoyed meeting the students.  Afterwards, I had several students say that they would continue learning to code on their own time, which was particularly encouraging.

Overall, the event was incredibly enjoyable and appears to have made a small impact on the lives of the students.

Do you know how to code? What’s holding you back? If you do, when did you learn?

Three hundred and sixty five days of anticipation build into one night. I’d struggle to fight off sleep, yearning for the sound of sleigh bells on the roof. My efforts would prove futile as I drifted off, only to awake in the blink of an eye.  I’d shake off the last remnants of sleep and spend the next two minutes in an enlightened state of being as I raced to discover what awaited that morning.

I was fully captured by the possibilities, the anticipation, the excitement. My imagination was fully engaged.

I now have the privilege of watching this drama play out through the eyes of my three young daughters on Christmas morning.  The expressions on their faces are my favorite part. Their rosy cheeks, still warm from sleep, can’t fully hide their excitement as they race to discover what awaits them.

These are magical moments, moments that we dismiss as rare and special far too easily.  As adults, we are content to leave these moments to children, telling ourselves that we have transcended the need to entertain such simplistic tendencies.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent enough time with “adults” and they can keep their unimaginative maturity.

What strikes me further about imagination and an experience like Christmas morning is the depth of it.  A child on Christmas morning is fully engaged in the imagination of the moment.  They aren’t participating half-heartedly, they are locked in a dance with awe and wonder at a level that adults seem to slowly lose the ability appreciate.

The question I ask myself is, “What has the ability to capture my imagination produce an experience at that level?”.  Our world is so completely filled with fascinating sights and experiences that we’ve become numb to the works of imagination around us. We’ve scalded our imagination to famous architecture, insightful art or even a beautiful landscape for the hum drum monotony of life.

Einstein famously said, “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination”.  We observe this in children, yet struggle to reconnect with it as adults. This says to me that our struggle for imagination is not an effort of learning something new, but reclaiming what the process of maturity has seemingly stolen.  Seeing adults go through this process of rediscovering their imagination captures mine and gives me tremendous hope.

What captures your imagination so completely that time seems to stand still?

Here at appendTo, we are a fully distributed company. We all work from home offices across the country and world, rarely connecting with one another in a physical space during the normal course of our work day.

The key to making this a success has been our perspective of translating the normal human interactions we are accustomed to in a physical office into the virtual environment.

One of the simplest habits we train every employee on is the Office Door Effect. When you work in a physical office, depending on the layout, humans observe when others enter or exit the building.

We replicate this by asking everyone to drop a message into a chat room when they arrive for work, when they leave, or when they briefly step away.  We’ve tried accomplishing this through chat status notifications, but it is never quite the same.

This creates a chat room with many small comments of, “Good Morning” or “Stepping away for a moment” which may seem like noise, but has had an incredibly positive impact on our culture.

It brings everyone together because it demonstrates commitment to our jobs by indicating whether we are focused on work at any given time or doing something else in front of our computers. It provides an easy and asynchronous way to discover where people are when they don’t immediately respond to a chat message.

The other important thing dropping a message into a room conveys is the duration of absence.  If you say, “Out for a few hours”, we know when to expect your return. If someone needs to connect with you, they can then decide whether to wait or proceed with other tasks until you return. If a client contacts us and needs access to a particular developer, it can also help us mitigate their need by giving them a specific availability time frame, or offering the services of a developer who’s immediately available.

We have a special “heads down” status that typically means someone is online for “emergency” purposes, but otherwise should not be disturbed because they are concentrating on a particular task or problem.

We use Slack as our platform to communicate all of the above, and love using it as our chat system. However, Slack is currently set up so that we have to manually type status messages into the chats. Adding an automated feature that would do this for us would make communicating on Slack a more seamless process. That said, we’ve recently submitted a feature request to Slack, to which they’ve been responsive and all around awesome.

How do you indicate presence in your organization?

Water shortages

The current potable water crisis in California is a foreshadowing of the unforeseen consequences of climate change and population explosion. Simple conservation will not be enough. Our planet’s natural water cycle is struggling under the burden humans have placed upon it in their unflinching quest for water. We can survive without oil but we cannot survive without water.

Short-Term Thinking

The second is more subtle, but I believe Western society has discarded and forgotten the importance of the softer attributes of what it means to be human. Our quest for progress has pushed aside anything that does not immediately contribute to short term goals and profit. We esteem this pursuit in the media and the “have-nots” are left with two choices. They either resign their drive to succeed and “coast” through the rest of their life, or consciously object and pursue a life at the edge of traditional society through other means.

This is catching up to us as the current trend of press around “Why aren’t millennials <fill in the blank>”. I’m a millennial myself (born in 1982, so at the top end) but see this distinction clearly between my social group.

Society will be forced to repay and repair the rips to our social fabric that have been created. Humans aren’t ready to face this, but I believe I will see the pendulum swing back during my lifetime.

The concept captures my imagination because the media is quick jump to the inevitable end depicted in the Matrix where our machines come alive and Human beings become biological battery power in a post-apocalyptic world.  Once singularity is achieved, humans fall to the dark side of evolution as we slowly welcome the ascension of our new robot overlords.

While that makes for a good Hollywood screenplay, it doesn’t work for two reasons.

First, computers systems will never replace Humans because they lack judgement. Machines can easily distinguish between good and bad options, but they cannot predict taste and style.  Judgement is the result of a lifetime’s experience of constantly making choices, choices where there are multiple positive outcomes. This doesn’t translate to the world of machines where basic rules and logic make up a computers brain.

Second, artificial intelligence falls far short in creativity. They cannot “muster up” the next Mona Lisa or replicate Shakespeare through an digital force of will.  Creativity is the ability to transcend tradition, moving beyond the known into the unknown. If a human programs a machine by transferring its “known” knowledge into instructions, how can the machine ever move beyond it’s own reality into the unknown? The answer? It can’t.

So how much of the world will software eat?

Machines are making a monumental impact in every area of society and as the generations pass by, they will become more and more accepted as a sub-class of steward, albeit more intelligently with each iteration. I believe the impact of this shift won’t be a replacement of what it means to be human, but an amplification of the amount of time we have to focus and spend on the things that truly make us human.

The inevitable end is not the singularity of machines, but the self-actualization of human beings in a beautiful chorus of individual creativity and art.

Optimistic? Maybe. But, that end would be much more interesting then the drab and hopeless background of the Matrix, even if you could learn Kung-Fu in 5 seconds.

One of my favorite habits that I’ve followed from time to time is scheduling what I call “Maker Time”. After starting appendTo four years ago, my day to day work is filled with meetings, writing emails and generally solving problems of all shapes and sizes.

The transition to this role from being a full time software developer left me wishing for the days where I could sit and code all day long without interruptions. I loved software development and I loved the challenge creating something new. Even though a long day of coding could be exhausting if I didn’t keep up my caffeine intake levels, it never felt like work because the act of creating something was motivation to keep going.

Paul Graham wrote an amazing essay that describes the differences between managers and makers and the schedules they each keep. I read this early in my career and was influenced by it quite a bit. However, I always thought managers and makers were mutually exclusive roles.

It’s only as I’ve stepped into more full time management that I’ve discovered that building in “Maker Time” has been foundational to keeping my sanity. Rather than choosing between being a “Maker” OR a “Manager”, I realized I needed to choose both to stay balanced.

Maker and Manager

I’ve solved this by forcing myself to make time each day to “Make” something. Anyone who’s in a management role knows that if you don’t make time for it, it won’t happen. So, I generally schedule my own “Maker Time” for the first two hours of my day. This is when our virtual office is most quiet and I can easily focus.

I view this Maker Time as foundational to my role as a Manager, managing people who make stuff. Putting in the effort to make something every day makes me a better manager and helps keep the priority level high for “Maker Time”.

Maker Time Rules

Along the way I’ve developed a short list of rules to keep myself accountable to my “Maker Time”. I’m not a very religious habit person and I view life more like jazz music then a line dance, but guidelines like these help keep me pointed in the right direction.

1. Schedule “Maker Time” first to keep it a priority. I generally find 2 hours a day works for me.
2. Shut out all distractions to keep focused.
3. Ship something by the end of each session. It could be a blog post, piece of code or an update to a contract template, but create something new and SHIP IT.

That’s it, it’s literally that simple. Sometimes, my maker time feels like the most productive part of my day. Other times I feel like I get nothing done. What matters to me is that I am keeping my creative muscles strong and focused. It is a discipline that I feel makes me a better manager, but to really measure that you’d have to ask my team.

If you’re a manager, do you make time to make something? If you’re a maker, what do you think of a manager who prioritizes “Maker time”?

It didn’t start out this way on purpose. In fact I set out to do things the way I was told.

When appendTo launched the first thing we did was hire a COO. Someone that knew how to do business the way business was supposed to be done.

Jonathan & I were the creative team, and we wanted to focus on delivering great customer experiences, not on processes and management.

But when the going got tough, the person we hired to lead the company didn’t believe in the vision of the company. So he left.

Revenues were tight and we were staring at a second business venture sinking. I knew the opportunity to build a business around jQuery was big, but it hadn’t started out the way I planned.

I sought advice from others who had started similar ventures and they pushed me to go get revenue the way all businesses did.

“Hire a Sales Team” they all said to me almost in perfect harmony. I wasn’t a believer. I didn’t feel that salespeople could properly represent us they way it needed to be done.

It was value that they were after. A great product and deliverable. Not someone banging on their door begging for the order. That was the way of yesterday and I knew it was wrong for appendTo

I Took the Third Way

The Third way meant doing what I knew was right even when it wasn’t popular.

Whether it be walking away from money when I know that we aren’t the best fit for a project or refusing to hire a sales team for a company that needed to be built through a network from the inside out.

The third way started out by accident when I couldn’t get on board with the way things have always been done and has morphed into a philosophy that I use for growth hacking.

When two roads divide I don’t take the one less traveled nor do I take the one most traveled. I take the one that makes the most sense which sometimes isn’t a road at all.

Understand, this isn’t about one way being right and one way being wrong.

This is about doing business in a way that reflects what we as an organization believe. Something that I aspire to see from more and more companies in the future.

Begging the question.

When 2 roads divide and neither option makes the most sense for your business, what is your approach? Better yet, what is your third way?

It wasn’t working.

On top of all of that, I was unable to shake a growing realization that I was in the wrong business.  My efforts to build a small consulting company around my favorite web technologies wasn’t producing the results I was aiming for and a new opportunity lay at my feet, the opportunity to start the first company solely focused on the little known (at the time) JavaScript library, jQuery.

I was faced with a choice.

It is a familiar choice, one we all face many times in our life.  Do I act, or do I sit.  Do I accept my current reality or summon the courage to change it.  Do I cling to the status quo or do I dare to dream that it could be different.

I had to choose.

Either decision was a choice.  Inaction is a choice but as you get to know me better, you’ll see that I’m a sucker for adventure.  I took two weeks off over the holidays to clear my head, re-engage with my family and allow myself the mental space to make a decision that I knew I could stand upon.

I chose to jump.

Taking this leap was one of the biggest choices I’ve personally had to make in my life.  However, I am eternally grateful that the foundation of appendTo and that my current circumstances are based off of a conscious choice.  Knowing that fate has not dealt me a short hand nor am I the victim of external forces such as market conditions or bad customers is empowering; it helps me to temper the inevitable peaks and valleys of being an entrepreneur.

We all face choices every day. Choosing to make an intentional choice takes courage, but makes all the difference.  What are you going to choose?