In my remote experience, I definitely don't talk to my colleagues that much.
But when you're trying to build a small company, one approach is to make it feel like a family. And families always have people we like and people we like not so much. But there's something special about one unit working toward a single goal.
My design is for a startup with young people. This would not work nearly as well for older people and people with their own families!
I managed distributed teams long before COVID. Having people meet in person a few times a year does wonders for team cohesion.
Some people handle remote communications just fine. Others were raised on a steady diet of internet flame wars and approach the screen names in their company chat the same way: As enemies to argue with every day.
Putting people in front of each other associates a real person with that screen name. Everyone starts treating each other better and working more cooperatively. The transformation is almost instant.
One important tip: Face to face meetings need to happen on regular company time as much as possible. Avoid anything on weekends or after hours as much as possible. You don’t want the team building to be an extra ask on top of their normal workload. It is their workload. Obviously flights and hotel stays must be an exception, but keep it in bounds of normal working hours as much as possible.
Yeah. Remote is fine but you need to budget time and money for plane tickets and hotels. That's been the tough thing for me the past year. I'm normally remote although I could go into an office--and am technically assigned to one but I normally travel to a lot of events as well as off-sites.
>Face to face meetings need to happen on regular company time as much as possible.
Yep. I sometimes hear people talking about how we should have team building events on the weekend. That's a big nope. In fact, while it's sometimes unavoidable, I sort of resent it when I need to travel on a Sunday to get to some event/meeting.
> In my remote experience, I definitely don't talk to my colleagues that much.
Maybe you should, then. I speak to my colleagues at the very least 30 minutes to 1h a day, and work full remote.
> But when you're trying to build a small company, one approach is to make it feel like a family.
An approach I immensely dislike. IMHO it's a huge waste of time to pretend like most employees aren't just there to make a living. I'm not looking for a second family or to make friends, I'm here to provide my skills in exchange for money.
> But there's something special about one unit working toward a single goal.
I don't need to like you or my coworkers to do it, they all just have to be remotely competent and do a decent job at it, and I'll do the same. Let's have fun at work when at work, then let's close our computers and have our own lives, please. If friendships evolve from there, cool, but I'm not actively looking to make friends at my workplace.
> My design is for a startup with young people. This would not work nearly as well for older people and people with their own families!
"not much" is a matter of perspective. In a workday, I have a lot of interactions. And then I thankfully have periods of 2-4 hours at a time when I don't talk to anyone.
As a developer, at least with my limited attention span, I need periods of no interruption to get anything done. That's why sometimes I stop "working" in the afternoon and resume at 00:00 for a couple of hours to really get things done.
On the family topic, I guess it's a matter of our experiences. Even at my current company, I feel like at least 2-3 of my close colleagues are sort of family. We can discuss some life issues, and we clearly care about each other. We also are totally committed to a shared goal, and we give our all in a sort of intimate way to get the result we agree on. This is the kind of sentiment I want to foster.
Maybe our definition of what counts as a friend differ? I don't really consider work acquaintances (some of those I loved working with and would do again in a heartbeat if the occasion presented itself) "friends".
A friend is someone I feel I can confide in and would not hesitate to call if I ever needed help with something personal. I can count those on a single hand, and in my case, none of those came from work, and that kind of deeply rooted relationship definitely wouldn't come from a company or team-wide organized retreat.
I have a close group of friends that I made at my current company. Some of them have moved on, others are still here but pre-covid we made time to hang out on the weekends or after work and during covid we've done zoom hangouts and stuff like that. A number of them were at my wedding, we were all there for support when someone's mom died during the pandemic and she couldn't travel home for the funeral, and we all supported each other when one of our friend group took his own life last year.
Obviously you won't find that applicable to every job or company, but I see a lot of similarities to making friends at work and when you're in school. You spend a lot of time with the same people everyday and you probably have a shared interest or two. Sometimes that means you find people you can be friends with outside of the time you're "forced" to spend together with.
Ah yes, the founder’s dream: gaining familial power over young people’s entire lives to further your start-up, before they realize they should develop a life of their own outside of work to avoid complete burnout.
Hey, they can spend 1-2 years with me, learn to be a good developer, and then happily go do whatever they want. I'm not binding them to be with me and my company forever.
This is not the US startup scene. There are decent alternatives which don't use people up. No VCs, so no short term fixations beyond having enough runway to last 6 months.
I'm a worker in the trenches myself. If you read a different story, that's based on your perception or experience rather than my motives. You can look through my previous posts. I want everyone to be happy and fulfilled, and money is not my driving force.
All that said, I do believe that doing things well and providing a great collaborative atmosphere (even family-like perhaps) can lead to high performance.
What I do not want is people merely trading their time, their lives, for a bit of money. That is not living.
In a nutshell, the problem with the "family approach" is how it puts a very powerful tool into the hands of one's employer they can hold against you: your committal, loyalty or even reliance on others in the same situation. Should you ever want to switch places, you will likely have to rebuild your circle of friends, as they often do not take kindly to people "leaving the family" or simply lose contact due to no longer sharing anything big in common.
Similar things tend to happen when one has a circle of "friends" related to a physical activity: when they stop or change clubs, they often lose most of those "friends", as often the only thread holding things together is a shared activity and location.
At least by recognizing this, people can opt to not put all their eggs in one basket, which lessens any potential loss. Also, it allows them to look at different ways to establish friendships, in a way they can withstand more changes. Finally, there is no third party (the employer) that can use a potential insecurity against them (e.g. less financial growth because Bob is so afraid of rebuilding his circle of friends, he'll accept a stellar performance netting him 1% wage growth).
And as others point out: forced participation into social activities is not something everyone is favorable towards.
The issue here is that in an honestly positive scenario, the family concept is good. But in a manipulative scenario, it is bad.
When I was 22 and taking on my first development job, I would have loved to have a family-centric groups of smart, motivated people to be a part of. Instead, I did a contract with an IBM subsidiary. We worked sort of like a family, but our idiot manager ignored our scheduling advice and promised delivery in half the time we recommended. So we worked our asses off, as a small ad-hoc family, and still lost the next contract.
What if instead this "family" could be led by a manager who understands reality and doesn't overpromise and underdeliver?
If you ever work with any person or person in a high stress situation, they will become your family or your enemy. Family is much better. And if the greater circumstance is also comprised of family, then you can take on the world. If you don't get this, then you haven't experience it yet. This is not some Cali startup bullshit. This is real people pouring themselves into something they believe in - foolishly or otherwise.
So, to be clear, your plan is no different than all the other crappy companies people complain about: replace real process and professional management with calling yourself a family, “perks” the employees already pay for through reduced salary like food, and taking advantage of young, cheap labor that doesn’t know any better than to be exploited?
Is that what you read? No, I am creating the kind of company I would have loved to work for.
Salary is fine, but I know firsthand that if there is good free food, I will stay and work through lunch (or at least talk with my colleagues about work challenges while eating the nice food).
Look, if someone is not happy with their work, free food or free trips is only going to hold them in place for a short while. They absolutely will leave at some point, and chances are they'll either do some damage on the way out or take some IP if possible. If you don't treat people well, you get what you deserve.
When fun and camaraderie happens naturally on a project, it's really amazing to be a part of. When an org tries to force "fun", it's awful.
I think you are dreaming of the first kind, and everyone against you in this thread is having nightmares about the second.
But I've also learned something about dealing with "corporate BS" -- if it's at least reasonably well intentioned, one can still decide to make the most of it instead of fighting everything and killing everyone else's motivation.
Very true. Marketed "fun" is usually not. And frankly, I don't have energy or patience to play the marketing game.
But I do know what fun is. I worked in the gaming industry at one point, and later in life I worked in places with Friday parties and foosball and food and spirits. Party play time can be a whole lot of fun - the kind you talk about Monday and even Tuesday and then look forward to next Friday.
Foster an environment where people work hard and you all gain, and you get to play nicely on a regular basis, and you have a place where you don't have to compete for talent. People seek you out.
How about just, you know, letting people have a lunch break that doesn’t involve work. By all means subsidise it if you want, but don't try drag people back to their desks with free food.
agreed. I have just found by my own experience that when nice free lunch is supplied (finance company, not SV startup), we typically talked about work and tech stuff anyway.
those who went out for lunch did because they needed some air and distance, and that was not frowned upon at all. but trust me, good free food is a powerful motivator to stick around!
> In my remote experience, I definitely don't talk to my colleagues that much.
I'm fully remote and this is weird to me. I might go a day or two and not talk to anyone because I'm busy on a problem, but there's always sprint planning every couple of weeks. We also have a general rule that if a slack convo gets too complicated we just start an impromptu video call in the channel and talk it out. This normally leads to a bit a banter after figuring out what we needed.
But when you're trying to build a small company, one approach is to make it feel like a family. And families always have people we like and people we like not so much. But there's something special about one unit working toward a single goal.
My design is for a startup with young people. This would not work nearly as well for older people and people with their own families!