Accidentally in Code

Tag: remote work

  • Working From Home: How To Set Boundaries With Yourself

    Working From Home: How To Set Boundaries With Yourself

    I was recently interviewed for an article about remote work, you can read the full thing here.

    Some of my suggestions:

    • I try to give myself a clear goal for each week, something that I think should be better than the week before. It means even in a leadership position with a lot of meetings, I stay grounded in my individual impact. It also allows for some flexibility and knowing when I’ve done “enough”. For instance if my schedule gets disrupted for whatever reason, I know what I think I should accomplish that week and focus on getting that done. I would encourage everyone, but especially people who are inclined to be hard on themselves or overwork, to figure out their definition of what is “enough”.
    • I feel like I repeatedly have to learn that taking breaks makes me more effective. When I’m overwhelmed, my instinct is to work more. It’s amazing how stepping away from the computer can help. Sometimes I go for a walk and use a notes app on my phone to work through something that is truly important and needs to be thought through free of distraction. Sometimes I get on the spin bike and sweat off the stress so I can focus.
    • Core, is being able to focus when I’m working and disconnect when I’m not, for me this means having a schedule for work and also having some kind of schedule for life. I’m fortunate to have a separate home office, but even when I didn’t, these things were useful habits.
      • Consistently being at my desk by a specific time (I’m not a morning person, so 10am).
      • Leaving the computer in the evening and focusing on something else (even if it’s just chores)
      • Keeping work applications off my phone
      • Making sure to take breaks – when I notice I’m feeling unproductive I normally need to either eat or exercise.
      • Finding reasons to leave the house! I have very back to back meetings days on Mondays and Tuesdays, so scheduling lunch with a friend on Wednesday or Thursday can help create a sense of balance.

  • Business Insider piece on Remote Work

    Business Insider piece on Remote Work

    I’m in Business Insider talking about remote work, the article is paywalled [link].

  • Three Core Ideas to Make Remote Work, Work

    Three Core Ideas to Make Remote Work, Work

    Credit: Robert Occhialini / Flickr

    I have been working for distributed companies for over 5 years – long before this pandemic malarkey and everyone becoming a “remote work expert”. The reality of the past 18 months for many people has been a lot of terrible remote work. Including for me at times – I love remote work in “normal times”, but in the darkest timeline I have never met any of my current coworkers, struggled to keep a normal schedule, and felt caged in (even in my beautiful, purposely designed home office).

    Throughout all of this I’ve known that normally I love remote work, I just hated the pandemic situation, but I have so much empathy for those who have concluded – based on this experience – that remote work is not for them.

    DuckDuckGo, where I work currently, is fully distributed, and we hire globally. The native apps team (my team) runs from Russia, through Europe, to the West Coast of Canada and the US. Prior to DuckDuckGo, I worked at Automattic, another fully distributed company where I led teams of 20-40 people, again based all over the world.

    Remote work, works – when we are intentional about it. My three core principles of remote work are:

    • Embrace async.
    • Enable autonomy.
    • Build connection.

    1. Embrace async

    Why: synchronous time is more expensive. It was always more expensive but in a remote context it’s explicitly more expensive. In a distributed context it can be prohibitively expensive because timezones mean someone is taking the call late at night. Moving things that don’t need to be synchronous to asynchronous reduces meeting overhead, and makes for a more equitable experience outside the predominant timezones.

    Embracing async means moving to writing as much as possible, especially things like status updates and announcements. Those do not need to be real time. Embrace written communication outside your chat app. I cannot stress this enough – Slack messages are not asynchronous. 1:1, fine. But in a channel, categorically not. Someone a few timezones behind will wake up, start their day, and find the conversation has happened and moved on without them ever getting the opportunity to be part of it.

    At DuckDuckGo, we use Asana to communicate asynchronously; Automattic uses custom blogging software. I’ve seen other companies use GitHub. I don’t think it really matters what is used, provided that everyone uses the same thing, and there is some way for people to opt into what is relevant to them (versus absolutely everything). Email can be used in this way, and might be better than a chat app, but email is not transparent, has no single source of truth and is not meaningfully shareable, making it a bad option overall.

    Thinking asynchronously will shape the way you communicate. Prioritizing clear writing and consistently structured updates will make async communication more efficient. The first step I suggest towards more async communication is to delete your boring meetings! Replace any useful part of them with text based updates, and reclaim your time for more impactful activities (or Netflix, no judgement here).

    2. Enable autonomy

    Why: People need to be able to get on with things when they are working, and not have to rely on other people being around. If you’re a manager, you need to be able to let people get on with things without having to constantly intervene or answer questions.

    Enabling autonomy means getting organized about your communication of priorities, resources, helping people understand how decisions get made and what parameters they operate within, and trusting people to get things done.

    Documentation helps a lot; it helps people help themselves. For example, our onboarding is well documented in checklists, so that from someone’s first day they can make progress on things, regardless of who is around – key to onboarding people across timezones.

    It’s also important to document decisions. Even if a decision happened in a meeting, it’s important to write it down (see also: async) so that people who weren’t in the meeting can still be aware. Think also about how decisions get made, because when you understand the parameters it’s easier to move things along. Operate with specific checkpoints, such as a tech design review, rather than random meetings and drawn out code reviews.

    Part of enabling autonomy is being organized. If you need input, you need to plan for it so you don’t get stuck (this is where the checkpoints are useful). If you need to give input, you need to be proactive in sharing information upfront and be clear about your availability.

    Autonomy is often seen through an individualistic lens, but team-level autonomy is a product of healthy collective practices. As individuals we don’t just get autonomy we need to make sure that we support other people’s autonomy.

    3. Build Connection

    Why: Better team relationships make for better team functioning.

    It might seem from point 1 that I am anti-meeting. I am not, I am anti-boring-meetings-that-could-be-replaced-with-a-document. In practice, this does mean I am anti most meetings. The reality is that we do not build any kind of human connection pretending to listen to status updates, and the value of meetings in offices for building connection was probably largely in the time before and after.

    Office culture builds structure around work and takes connection for granted. Good remote culture is the opposite: build structure around the connection, and let the work happen.

    Once you’ve deleted your boring meetings, you’ve freed up time on your calendar for fun. Play games! Share feelings! Have adhoc 1:1s! One of my favourite meetings each week starts with an extremely random question. Prioritizing building connection is particularly important during onboarding, as it is what helps people feel a sense of belonging.

    >>

    Making remote work work requires some rethinking of what you’re doing and why. The outcomes don’t change, but the way you get to them might. The good news is, even if you return to the office, there is still value in async communication, more autonomy and team connectedness. So why not give them a try?

  • The Return of the Office

    The Return of the Office

    There has been Much Discourse over the past few days on forcing people to return to offices, and judgement of those who may not want to.

    view of an office building all square boxes and cube farms
    Credit: Flickr / Jan Vrsinsky

    Has Remote Work… Worked?

    I always wonder what’s on the other side of these edicts about returning to the office. How do the people writing them think the last year has gone? What is their view on the performance of their organizations? What metrics do they have and what do those metrics indicate? What was their personal experience?

    It seems quite likely that for many organizations remote work has not been a success. There were a number of common ways in which the great remote work experiment of the 2020 pandemic was set up to fail.

    • Remote work was seen as a short term measure, with returning to the office always the long term goal.
    • Many companies just moved all their meetings online, and added more for good measure. Management didn’t rethink practices and rituals for the new world, resulting in meeting overload and zoom fatigue.
    • Remote work highlighted or exacerbated existing issues. Teams (or companies) with poor management practices (extremely common) no longer had the structure of an office as a forcing function for baseline communication.
    • Not everyone was set up to work remotely, with uncomfortable setups and a lack of boundaries between work and life. Employees weren’t “remote working”, they were trapped at home, working.
    • Generally life has been harder for most people, which makes management and team cohesion more challenging. If someone is less engaged, is it work, remote work, or the world burning?

    From the management perspective, I am not surprised to see some leadership teams thinking that remote work hasn’t worked, that it’s been detrimental to productivity and engagement. This is likely true for some people, particularly those who didn’t have a reasonable home setup or had to struggle with childcare alongside their job. It’s likely also true for some teams who relied on the structure of an office for certain things, and didn’t figure out how to replicate them outside the office (e.g. collaboration and cohesion). At some level of abstraction it’s reasonable to conclude remote work is the problem.

    The Hiring Manager Perspective

    I’ve been hiring people into globally distributed teams since 2016. It has always been true that some people just wanted to work remotely (for whatever reason). At that time plenty of software engineers were already committed to remote work, and whilst they didn’t have as many options as they might if they were willing to relocate (or just lived in the Bay Area), there were options available. The job market for software developers has been sufficiently competitive for developers to have significant leverage for things that are truly important to them for some time now.

    For people who had not worked remotely, I used to see some apprehension about it. People would want to know how they would collaborate, build a connection with co-workers etc. Now what I see is people who tell me they done it for ~12+ months, and want to keep at it. They often mention a desire to work in a place that was build remote first, rather than companies who went remote by necessity.

    I thought the shift to remote work would make it harder for me to hire, but that doesn’t (initially) seem to be true. Firstly, because remote-first companies are more appealing to people who want to give remote work a genuine try. But secondly, in the nature of “the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed”, the reality of modern, global, employment. Many newly remote companies are in fact, “Remote – US only”. Even within the EU, there is no concept of an EU-wide employment entity, and companies have to decide how to navigate that – or not. The reality: either companies hire in a constrained set of countries, or most “employees” are legally contractors.

    There is more competition to hire in the US, but there was always a lot of competition to hire in the US, which is why I’ve been prioritising hiring outside the US for years.

    The Self-Serving Nature of Power

    There was an article about the return to the office by someone in leadership at WeWork recently. I won’t link it, because I didn’t read it, and because do we really need to know more detail than the person in the business of renting out office space says that office space will still be in demand (and valuable under capitalism) as things return to “normal”.

    Similarly, other big companies that have issued memos about how nice it will be to all be in the office again together. The people making these decisions are not the ones most impacted by the realities of office work that many people find so unenjoyable.

    • They do not spend their days at a desk in an open plan office.
    • They are sufficiently highly paid that higher property prices / costs of living are immaterial (or at least: dramatically less impactful).
    • Their days are constrained by a meeting heavy calendar.
    • Statistically, they are more likely to be men, and it is more likely that their partner doesn’t work.

    Finally, I don’t believe remote management is harder than IRL management, but I do think that it’s more obvious and detrimental in a remote context when management isn’t being done well. If overall the quality of management in your organisation is poor, you can either opt to boost everyone by (total guess) ~20% by giving them the structure of an office, or set about addressing the root issue. One of those seems much easier than the other – at least in the short term.

    If it seems like people are talking past each other on this topic, it’s because they are. People who are making the case for the office have more to gain from it, or don’t experience the loss. But people who are making the case for remote work are more focused on their individual experience and lack insight into the broader reality of the organization. Are software engineers “entitled” or are they just used to having a stronger negotiating position?

    The Reckoning of the Job Market

    In the short term it seems that some companies will embrace remote work, others will embrace the office. Individuals will decide what is best for their lives and careers, and act accordingly. I doubt my career will ever require me to work in an office again (not something I was sure of at the start of 2020), but I do think we will still have offices for a while.

    I am skeptical that open letters and requests and feelings will change things. Individually, I think each of us has two powerful axes of impact.

    The first is to create change within our environments. There are many things that managers, or even individuals within teams can do, to make those teams more effective. Ultimately, it is only proving the effectiveness of remote work to work that will change the minds of skeptics.

    The second is to vote with our feet. Remote work can be a hiring and retention issue – I have seen that first hand as a hiring manager, and expect that trend to increase. The thing that is most interesting to me here is when we stop talking about working remotely – this has been possible for years in software – but building a remote career, and creating genuine opportunities for advancement. I am excited to see all the companies who have announced they will go fully – or partially – remote share how they plan to ensure equitable career progression and advancement. My prediction is that that will be the new competitive advantage.

  • Remote Work Discussion on Channel 4 News

    Remote Work Discussion on Channel 4 News

    I was on the UK’s Channel 4 news talking about remote work, you can see the video which is provocatively titled “‘Economy could be at a standstill if we don’t get people back into work’ – businesswoman Linda Plant”.

    Screenshot 2020-09-02 at 10.34.48.png

    I do get the concerns about the economy, social interaction, and creativity. But, I think we need to be realistic about the world as it is right now. Yes, there can be a great energy in person, but can we really expect that in a world where everyone is two metres apart, wearing a mask, and wondering what level of risk vector our coworkers are?

    I think more relevant question than “how do we get back to the old normal” are:

    • How are we going to support parents in this time? Who even if they have been able to send their kids back to school, are still navigating life with a higher burden of childcare due to reduced schooling times / lack of after school activities / restrictions (e.g. mandated time off for any sign of being in less than perfect health).
    • How are we going to help people feel creative in a world that now seems set up to burn them out?
    • How are we going to build connection and trust in teams, particularly new teams?
    • How are we going to create a sense of belonging and accomplishment for new hires in a newly remote world?
    • How are we going to rethink our hiring process when onsite interviews are no longer an option? Do we need to?
    • How are we going to support a hybrid model? Where people who value the space of an office still have a place to go to, but not everyone is there, and not all the time.
    • How are we going to build a culture of effective feedback in an environment where many cues are missing?
    • How are we going to create productive conflict and tension in a more asynchronous, written form?
    • How are we going to manage that zoom calls are more draining than IRL?

    Anything else you think we should be asking?

  • How to fix five of the most common pain points of working from home

    How to fix five of the most common pain points of working from home

    My latest in Quartz…

    Over the past couple of weeks there has been so much conversation about how to work remotely, missing the key phrase during a global pandemic, which I’m not sure any of us has the answer to.

    Meanwhile, a lot of people are struggling, even those who already have been working remotely for awhile. In situations like these, it can be helpful to break apart the different threads that people struggle with.

    These typically are:

    – Ergonomics
    – Systems
    – Focus
    – Context
    – Human contact

    Continue reading… (email gate)

  • The firm with 900 staff and no office

    The firm with 900 staff and no office

    I did an interview with the BBC on remote working, and how we operate without an office [full article].

    Cate Huston believes fully remote working can actually be good for communication. “Remote work makes the problems of work more explicit and then we can set out deliberately to address them.

    “If you work in the same office it’s easy to think: ‘Oh we have lunch together every day so we’re a cohesive team that support each other,’ but that’s not necessarily true.

    “When your team is spread all around the world like my team currently, we think much more deliberately about how to build ourselves as a team, how to make sure we are communicating well, are we documenting things clearly.”

  • A Taxonomy of Remote Work

    A Taxonomy of Remote Work

    pexels-photo-265129
    Credit: Pixabay / fancycrave1

    Multi-Location

    Multiple offices. Often teams are organized to be based in one office.

    Benefits: Employ people in multiple locations (e.g. outside of the bay area).

    Challenges: Communication cross-site, competition for projects, frequent travel (esp for leaders in the organization).

    Remote By Location Not By Timezone

    People don’t work in the same place but work on the same timezone.

    Benefits: Employ people in multiple but close-by locations. People’s working hours tend to overlap as much as they would in an office.

    Challenges: Remote communication, implicit expectations about working hours.

    Remote By Location but with Core Timezone

    People don’t work in the same place, or the same timezone, but close enough that there can be 4-6 standard working hours of overlap.

    Benefits: Employ people in multiple and slightly further apart locations.

    Challenges: Can mean that some people start very early or work very late. Have to figure out some more async communication.

    Fully Distributed (Location and Timezone)

    People work anywhere, and at any time.

    Benefits: Employ people anywhere.

    Challenges: Async communication and decision making.

  • Figuring out “Remote Work” is Figuring out “Work”

    Figuring out “Remote Work” is Figuring out “Work”

    Credit: Xisco Bibiloni /Wikimedia Commons

    There’s a category of Remote Work Think Pieces (by men) that is all about how they personally have had to adapt to remote work (different from the “remote work is the answer” think piece). These annoy me not because I don’t love reading about other people’s workflow and productivity (I do!) but because they are presented as the One True Way of being an effective Remote Worker.

    These pieces invariably talk about schedules, and home offices, and the importance of regular exercise.

    I don’t think these are things that you don’t need to figure out when you go to an office every day. It’s just going to an office every day provides some strong defaults.

    How am I most effective?

    The office default: arrive in the morning, leave in the evening.

    The new remote worker: omg what should I do? I can work anywhere at anytime?

    The remote workaholic: I’ll work everywhere and all the time.

    The thoughtful remote worker: I’ll have a default setting, somewhere I’m comfortable and effective and hours that work for me. Sometimes I’ll change them to mix things up, or allow me to do something during my “normal” working hours.

    I have worked with plenty of people who are expected to show up in an office most days who could have stood to ask themselves this question. People who never arrive before lunchtime, for whom social engagements (usually occurring in the evening) are stressful events occurring in what they consider to be “peak” working hours. People who are erratic, and seem to be working a lot and yet never feel like they are working enough – maybe because their working day has no rhythm, and often starts with an “emergency” (e.g., a meeting occurring before lunchtime).

    This is not just a question of remote work, but of flexible working hours (and, btw, not all remote jobs have that flexible hours – plenty are remote by location but on similar timezones). Waking up every day and having to decide when you’ll work and where is exhausting.

    If we sleep enough, work takes up more than half our waking hours, and is more time than we can work effectively in one stretch. This is a hard thing to schedule every day, and it turns out it’s easier to schedule things around it rather than try and schedule 8-9 hours of time around everything else – especially if we need larger blocks of time to be effective.

     

    How do I build relationships with my colleagues?

    The office default: I’ll sit next to them and have lunch with them. Sometimes we’ll go for a walk and get a coffee.

    The new remote worker: omg who are these people? How do I talk to them?

    The remote workaholic: sometimes when we’re both on Slack at 11pm, we talk about our favourite whiskey.

    The thoughtful remote worker: I’ll make sure we spend time together in person, and I’ll make an effort to include some chit chat and not just be all business all the time.

    It’s worth getting to know the people you work with as people, because it turns out they are people and not faceless automatons. This is one thing that I actually love about being a woman in tech – there’s always some kind of group, and women generally welcome each other (this is not always true, but has mostly been my experience – which I’m grateful for).

    How do you do this? Well you make an effort and take an interest. Not everyone wants to talk about their life at work, but most people will appreciate being related to like they are a human being with other interests than their job. This is also true in an office.

    The worst manager I ever had treated me like I was a faceless automaton (that he was trying to reprogram). I hated when we had to talk about anything remotely personal, because that just wasn’t the relationship I had with him and I didn’t feel like it was his business. I knew almost nothing about him personally, because he never opened up himself. Eventually, he made an effort to get to know me but it felt fake and made me really uncomfortable. We worked in the same office, within 10ft of each other, every day, for over a year. We ate lunch as part of the same group, frequently. I never knew anything about him other than he had a cat (which showed up in a meeting when he was working from home, one time).

    A little rapport goes a long way.

    How do I balance my personal life with my professional life?

    The office default: when I leave the office, I mostly manage to leave work behind.

    The new remote worker: omg when is work time and when is me time?!

    The remote workaholic: I can have a personal life later. Maybe next year.

    The thoughtful remote worker: sometimes work kinda dominates (like before a big launch! Or when I have to travel), but mostly I have a really rich personal life, too.

    Here’s a thing you can do when you work at an office: leave the laptop behind for the evening. Or the weekend. It’s hard to do that when you work remotely. I guess you can leave it at the coffee shop, but that’s pretty frowned upon – and who knows if it will be there the next day?

    Working in an office doesn’t mean people take time for themselves outside of work. But if you work from home, this often shows up as lack of social contact. Plenty of office workers don’t have enough friends outside of work, and would benefit from taking up some hobbies.

    But perhaps it’s that much clearer when you moved to the mountain six months ago because you can finally live wherever you want, but you still have no local friends. Or when you haven’t left the house in 3 weeks because you finally set up the gym in your basement.

    We all have needs (and wants!) outside of our jobs, especially social needs. Prioritising our personal lives is figuring out what those are, and how to meet them.