Working from X
Sure, you could argue that I am late to the party here. Many of us have been working from home, garage, outhouse, or whatever since March - but I wanted to share my mental about face when it comes to having a geographically distributed team.
A few times I’ve had the opportunity to grow my team with remote workers, and - it’s never really gone well. On reflection that’s been more of an indictment on my ability to manage rather than a problem with remote workers.
One of my challenges in having a team work together is that I don’t believe in open plan offices - especially for developers, data scientists, designers, executives, accounts… well, everyone. We need space to think, and yes - noise cancelling earphones are helpful - but there is still the distraction of people passing by, and I feel people can be just a little too accessible.
“When you are all in one place, in an open plan environment there are two big losses that can occur...”
It’s way too easy to interrupt the person sitting next to you to ask a question, breaking their concentration and delaying their return to focus by up to 30 minutes. You also loose the opportunity to retain that knowledge long term because you were handed it on a platter - it came too easy, so forgetting it will be just as easy.
The new paradigm of Covid-19 team distribution means that people have their own space in which to function, coupled with modern communications platforms like Google Chat, Slack or Microsoft Teams means that you can tap somebody on the shoulder for a question when you need - but their response can be on their terms, when they are ready.
What am I doing differently now?
Pioneera’s CEO Danielle instigated daily check-in’s for the whole team. It’s more often than not only very sparsely peppered with business related conversations - we mostly talk about how we are doing, rather than what we are doing. Water cooler stuff.
Beyond getting the human contact we all need, the meetings allow everybody to feel aligned not just with the overall company values - but with where everybody is headed for that day.
I’m also being more thoughtful about how I personally communicate. Both making sure I recognise achievements by our team and highlighting things that we can improve on in constructive ways are some of the biggest improvements (IMHO) that I have made to my interactions.
And that’s really it.
What haven’t we done?
We haven’t added more formal processes, record keeping, time logs or anything like that. We trust the team we work with - and with trust comes responsibility on both sides of the equation. Our team members are responsible for the work effort they put in day-to-day, and I’m responsible for making sure it meets the expectations and needs of the company.
I’ve heard horror stories of companies measuring the length of time employees remain connected to VPN’s through to regular screen captures to ensure they they are doing what they are meant to be doing. I don’t see the value in these systems, my position has always been that if you are paying so little to your employees that they are tempted to do other things, then that is your problem - not theirs.
What will we do?
Both inside my role at Pioneera and outside of it - I am seeing real value in better project management.
We’ve tried a bunch of solutions from Salesforce to Accelo - with varying levels of disappointment in the product and the customer care. We’ve landed on TeamWork which, apart for some glaring issues with regard to data sharing between components of their platform, is working well for us.
I’m working towards getting my whole day into TeamWork as tasks, which gives others in my team visibility in to what I am working on, and helps me better manage and understand the time I am spending on different tasks.
Wrapping it up
In summary - I’m seeing success by doing the below:
Daily catch up with the team, not just to talk about work
Not adding more intrusive processes to their day that wouldn’t exist in the office
Trying to be as accessible as I can to the team
Exploring project management tools and embracing what they offer