Before the global pandemic I loathed working from home. I am one of those people that feeds off of the buzz of productivity in the office and it turns out studies show that boost is real. I hated not knowing when teammates were available. The increased friction on communication often frustrated me. It meant that I would punt work until I could get back into the office and simply tolerate the WFH state. Enduring remote work is not possible right now, so we have made it a priority to improve our process. This meant finding answers to a number of challenging questions.

How do you tell if the person you need to communicate with is currently available without interrupting them? How can we make the team feel like others are being productive around them? How can leaders have an "open door" policy while working remotely? These questions and more have forced us to iterate or change some of our cultural communication standards.

Slack

We use Slack for quick communication and avoid it for deep discussions and brainstorming. Every morning we run Slack standups and it is the first thing most people check every day.

Proletariat has three different types of Slack channels that have their own prefix:

Spellbreak - Any channel that is specific to Spellbreak, like for our development pods (sb-combat).

Proletariat - Official channels for the entire team, like for our artists (prol-art).

Unofficial - Channels for any other topic, like beer (uo-beer).

Very little has changed with how we use Slack. Some people previously used it for quick voice or video calls but now that is all handled in Google Meet or Discord. In Slack you can be a variety of channels all at the same time and it is high friction to set your status. We do not attempt to use Slack for presence.

Email

At Proletariat we use Email for deeper discussions and when responses/actions are not required within a day. We adhere to a model similar to the one discussed in this article.

The most important features are categorizing the type of response required in the subject line and putting the bottom line up front with details like when a response is expected.

We have made no changes to our email process while being remote. Since we use Email for asynchronous communication it does not help solve our many of our new challenges.

Google Meet

Before moving the entire team to remote we ensured every meeting had a Google Meet video conference tied to it. This was important because we have some full-time remote employees and allow liberal WFH. We still use Google Meet because it is better at face-to-face meetings than Discord streaming. However, with Google Meet there is no easy way to see meetings in progress if you were not invited to them and no sense of presence.

Discord

The problem with all the above tools is that they lack a good way to understand presence for the whole team. It was not easy to tell when to "drop in" for a quick chat. There was no good way to get a sense of the entire team doing work around you. Discord helps us solve that.

We rebuilt our office in Discord with the goal of providing a sense of presence. We do not use Discord for text chat at all, that remains only in Slack. If Discord had the ability to thread discussions and better external integrations we would probably stop using Slack.

Everyone at Proletariat logs in when they start working and joins the proper voice chat. When people finish working for the day they log off.

Team Rooms - These are roughly set up to mimic the regions of our physical office. We try to seat people who work together a lot in the same area. Individuals can talk in these channels as they would in the physical office being mindful of other people in channel.

Meeting Rooms - Every meeting room is remade in Discord to match the physical office. This includes individual offices where meetings sometimes occurred. We tag all meetings in Google Calendar with the specific tool for the meeting like [Meet] or [Discord]. Discord can stream to up to 50 people and we have found it has better quality than Google Meet.

The Library - This room is auto-squelched so there can be no voice discussion. People use this area for heads-down uninterrupted work. This is the same as someone in the office having their headphones on. Message them via Slack if you need something urgent.

AFK - If someone is not available at the moment they us this channel. There is no expectation that the person will respond immediately to a Slack message while AFK.

Miscellaneous/Gaming Rooms - We're a gaming company so we have rooms for people to hangout and stream their gameplay to others. These are most often used during lunch and after normal hours. Even when I am not able to join these groups it feels more social because I know they’re getting together. I can drop in and just listen/watch.

Conclusions

Discord has been a major improvement for my quality of life working remotely. It has allowed for some amount of organic communication as people will drop into my Discord office during the day to chat. That alone has made this process worth it to me as I feel somewhat isolated because I no longer work directly on the game.

Many people at Proletariat also feels it has greatly improved their ability to communicate with their teammates. This has not been unanimous, some people feel this is yet one more thing that needs attention and updating. I personally feel it is worth the added attention tax for the benefits to the broader team.