I’ve been wondering whether I should just keep whereby.com on all day, so that I can see what my colleagues are doing, and they can see me.
Everyone at Lagom works remotely most of the time. We meet regularly, and place a great deal of importance on the time we spend face-to-face, but most of the time we’re in different places. I am sometimes hundreds of miles away from my team and clients.
I think it’s the best way of working. We don’t even consider taking on pieces of work if a client insists on co-location. Frankly it annoys me when they do.
Most of the time I think the way we work works really well for the kind of work we do. It means that I have a working environment that suits me, and I have face-to-face time when that’s what is needed. And the team are all such heavy users of tools like Slack and Whereby that I never feel alone.
But I’ve been thinking about what I might be missing out on. Because there’s a difference between the kinds of conversations I might have on messaging platforms, and the more natural unscheduled conversations that I might have if I worked in an office with other people.
I’ve been wondering whether we should sometimes just leave an Whereby room open when nothing is scheduled, to see if this more natural conversation between team members happens. Or whether that would just be too odd.
I’m going to give it a go, and I’ll post more here about how it went.
