Enhancing Remote Work With Innovative Technologies

Our design team accidentally discovered a remote work hack that's transforming how we communicate at AirOps. It started when our head of design ditched traditional docs for quick video walkthroughs of her feedback. You'd see her cursor moving, hear her thinking out loud, catch her excitement about specific details. Our remote team across SF and NY loved it so much that the practice spread organically through the company. Rather than long Slack threads about product specs, they started sharing 2-minute videos explaining their thought process. Suddenly, everything changed: 🔰 Complex design discussions wrapped up in hours instead of days 🔰 Product feedback landed instantly without confusion or back-and-forth 🔰 Engineers started solving problems quicker without sitting through 20-minute meetings The best part is how natural it feels. No fancy process or rules. Just hit record, talk through your thoughts, and share. We never mandated this approach. But seeing how it caught on taught me that sometimes the best practices come from giving your team space to experiment. Watching this unfold at AirOps has changed how I think about remote communication. The tools matter less than creating an environment where better ways of working can emerge organically. Been thinking a lot about this lately as we scale across hubs. Would love to hear what unconventional practices have worked for your remote teams.

Taking remote work to a whole new level! We’re not just working from home anymore. We're operating heavy machinery, performing surgeries, and managing high-risk environments all from behind a screen. Thanks to automation, robotics, and AI, remote work now includes things like controlling excavators from miles away. But the problem is navigating these environments using 2D displays. Not having depth perception is super dangerous, just try closing one eye and having a catch, it's highly likely your going to get hit with the ball. Depth perception, distance, spatial awareness - a second perspective on our reality once eliminated leads to accidents, slower decisions, greater risk, and more effort to interpret what you're seeing. Magnetic 3D displays the problem by providing real depth perception - no '3d' glasses or headsets required. You can instantly judge distance, angles and spatial relationships as if you were standing right there. That makes remote operations faster, easier, and safer not just for the person controlling the machine, but for everyone working on-site in those environments. Magnetic 3D displays are being used to pilot 3D submersibles to safely inspect oil wells in thousands of feet of water and safe handling of nuclear materials at Idaho National Laboratory. Flat screens have reached the limit of their usefulness in these instances - the future is spatial and for any companies looking to move faster while prioritizing safety in mission critical applications like these need to be leveraging glasses-free 3D technology. If you’re building in this space - let’s talk: Tom Zerega!

I was recently interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, to provide a perspective upon how technology is being used within businesses due to hybrid working, in some format being here to stay. Take a look at what I shared. The High-Tech Meeting With hybrid work here to stay, more office meeting rooms will be equipped with artificial intelligence, holograms, virtual reality and other immersive technologies that allow remote workers to feel like they are in the same room as their in-office colleagues. New technologies could address some of the challenges that come with hybrid video meetings. “They are looking in but they can’t see everybody or they don’t know who’s speaking,” says Nilesh Parmar, business area director of places, U.S., for Arcadis, a global design and consulting firm. To address these sorts of concerns, Arcadis is using a new strategy with some clients: motion detection cameras that automatically pan to whoever is speaking in the room. “You’re literally having a one-to-one conversation and then the camera will pan back out and then take the whole room in again,” says Parmar. Technological glitches are bound to happen on occasion with these newer technologies, such as a slight delay in the camera coordinating how soon it pans to the speaker. But Parmar says if there is such a moment, the camera will automatically pan out to show the whole room. The company also has some clients using virtual reality to make participants feel they are physically experiencing the same room even if they are in different locations. “You just put on your glasses, sit on your sofa, and you’re in the conversation like everybody’s in the conversation,” says Parmar. Meanwhile, some technology companies are even starting to offer holograph meetings, with participants as holograms, design consultants and executive coaches say.

A little while back, Bradford Church & I pivoted Village. We started on one problem, but kept experiencing a bigger problem; how you make remote & hybrid work, actually work. Here’s how we’re solving it👇 Quick context: we came from Uber, and originally started Village to build tech that creates way better relationships between marketplace platforms and the workers and suppliers that power them. But a few big things changed along the way. Our team was fully remote. That meant we were able to hire incredible people, but the day-to-day of remote sucked. You often hear high performing companies — Uber, OpenAI, Apple — referred to as cults. These companies make talented people irrationally motivated to hit insane goals. Remote kills that. The high trust and vulnerability needed is hurt by fewer close relationships. You need speed and direct communication, but ~50% of employee time in remote gets spent on informational updates and transactional video calls. Finally, ownership erodes. It’s not because people can hide. It’s because you don’t bond as a group and create a shared sense of ownership of something bigger than each other. So what’s the solution? We call it Atlas. It’s already made our team 10x more connected and productive working remotely. How does it work? It 1-click connects to all the tools your team uses everyday - Workspace, Jira, Notion, Slack, Teams, Asana etc - and uses an LLM and rules-based automations to synthesize all their content and data to create highly actionable summaries, insights, and levers to drive performance and productivity. Atlas lets leaders see around corners and have a direct line of sight into performance. It turns managers into supermanagers. It makes employees far more productive. It makes orgs way more connected. You can do some pretty magical things with Atlas: get perfect visibility into what your team or an org is working on, and how that relates to broader goals. Totally eliminate the 50% time spent on busy work and admin. Get way more real-time coaching and feedback on how you’re doing individually, or how your team or org is doing as a whole. Way better understand who someone is personally, and what they are working towards. I’ve heard Atlas described as ‘the iPhone health app for your business’ or a ‘Chief of Staff for everyone in the org’. Whatever the analogy is, our goal is to make managers and employees 10x more effective. We couldn’t be more pumped to start talking publicly about Atlas and sharing it. We’ll be rolling it out over the next few months - if you want to experience it for yourself, reach out - we’re giving it away free for the first 30 teams we onboard.