Month: February 2016

Iterating on One on Ones

I know, I know – I’ve written about one on ones before.

If you’re not familiar, a one on one is a short sit down between a team lead and a member of the team. Folks much smarter than me have written some really insightful stuff about them, why they’re important, what they’re for. Here’s a great one, from Rands.

I do them once a week, for about thirty minutes, with every member of my team. I’ve been thinking about one on ones quite a lot recently – some feel really productive, some feel like I’m really getting to know the team member, and some feel functional, perfunctory, useful not maybe not productive.

This coming week, we’re starting a new structure of weekly updates. Since Athens’ inception we’ve done roughly weekly updates with our sister team (Sparta, obviously) on Wednesdays.

These updates weren’t really structured at all – folks would write about their home being remodeled, or their recent projects, or their ticket or chat count, or maybe an upcoming vacation. They were nice, but not especially helpful, as someone trying to understand how folks were doing, what they were working on, etc.

We didn’t even have a great reason to be doing them on Wednesdays – at one time, all of the teams at Automattic did updates on Thursdays, so it made sense to schedule internal team updates on Wednesdays.

Our company wide updates are still called Thursday Updates, but they are usually posted on Fridays, sometimes the following Monday, depending on what time zones the team’s members tend to work from.

The time we scheduled the updates didn’t make sense anymore. Our internal stats for chats and tickets run Sunday > Saturday, so to do any kind of regular volume updates meant folks had to do some math by hand, which was a point of friction.

Wednesday was also suboptimal because it was right about the point in the week where folk started to catch their groove – breaking it up with unstructured reflection (or being ignored, or populated with throwaway content), wasn’t the best we could do.

Short story long – starting this coming week we’ll be doing our updates on Monday morning, with a consistent structure for each person on the team, including me. There are expectations for clear and transparent reporting of individual volume, as well as how it compares to our team baseline, which is a sort of cooperative understanding of what a day’s work looks like for us at this time.

This brings us around to the obvious question; what does this have to do with one on ones?

In considering the one on ones that I really enjoy, that I feel are Working, they’re consistent in that they are not simply status updates – they’re not “I did X. This week I’m doing Y.”

Instead, they’re about experiences and approaches, friction and family. They’re about building a relationship rather than communicating things I can easily find elsewhere, especially with our commitment to communication and transparency.

As our weekly personal updates become more focused, I think it’s entirely possible that they could take the place of the more status-update-like one on one conversations. This isn’t to say that I’ll stop doing them (I love one on ones), but rather I’ll have a chance to start doing them correctly – using them to get to know my team, rather than getting to know the stuff around them.

I think it is probably also a good move for me to start being more clear to my team how I think about one on ones – if they are meant for talking about bigger career thinking, about navigating the waters within Automattic, about finding the right way to be impactful, there is likely a better way to structure that.

I’m not sure what that structure will look like – I have been reading about OKRs quite a lot, and it seems like they could fill that not-daily-work-but-still-important-work structure.

I am also trying to be more aware that my natural inclination toward more structure is not always the right move – although, I think I’m probably right about this one!

 

Create Leadership Workshops at Your Company!

One ongoing project that I have at Automattic that I am especially proud of are our Developing Leadership Workshops. 

The workshops take place once per month, and last about an hour each. So far it’s been almost entirely Team Leads from within the company, with one guest speaker, Kevin Goldsmith of Spotify.

The workshops are stolen directly from Work Rules and Google’s similar practices – the idea, broadly, is to help individuals unlock the value in their own experience and practices to the rest of the folks at the company.

Continue reading “Create Leadership Workshops at Your Company!” →

Remote Work, Scheduling and Serendipity

Something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot these days is the role that structure and discipline play in the life of a remote worker, and a downside I’ve noticed to becoming too structured.

I wrote a little about the import of creating your own signals – in some way we can see that through this same conversation, right? We have to make our own signals in order to keep things running smoothly, to ensure we have the discipline or structure to work the way that we would like to work.

There is a definite tension when it comes to the idea of structure and the idea of working remotely: I think personal freedom is a huge part of what attracts people to a remote lifestyle.

I often find when chatting with others who work remotely, that there is a certain sense of reluctance around creating more structure in their day, or in their approach to work. This Post isn’t all about freedom and structure, although I do think that’s a topic 100% worth really taking a bite out of.

For today, let’s take a look at how I think about structure in terms of what helps me work most effectively, and then we can move on to this bigger topic of going a bit too far in terms of structure.

I structure my work time entirely around my calendar (Google Calendar that is) – I move everything from my to-do lists and legal pads to my calendar as quickly as possible. It’s where I keep everything.

If it’s not on my calendar it doesn’t exist.

That’s from Ramit. He and I agree on this one.

Especially when working remotely, having things laid out very clearly, in a structured and time-bound manner, helps me ensure nothing slips through the cracks, and allows me to see what my day will be like without having to check a dozen different places or processes.

It has been working really well, for years now. It’s kept me focused and successful and impactful in the ways that I have envisioned and planned out ahead of time.

As an aside, do you remember Blockbuster video, or other video rental places? I have really fond memories as a kid, high schooler, and even into college, going to the video store and just sort of wandering until something caught my eye. There wasn’t an algorithm or selection mechanism at play, other than the ones in my own mind, I guess.

I watched some awful movies, but also some really great ones, ones that wouldn’t ever show up on my Netflix queue today. This was a little bit of serendipity, a minor act of finding something that I wasn’t looking for.

The same thing happened in public libraries for me a lot growing up. That’s how I first found and read Stranger in a Strange Land, which was my absolute favorite book for decades. In fact, my first tattoo was from another Heinlein book, TANSTAAFL.

Before our last Grand Meetup, I told the newest folks on my team, joining Automattic for their first ever Grand Meetup, that the most important thing they could do was to leave room for luck – to avoid overpacking their days, to leave room to decompress, to engender chance; meet someone new, join conversations you’d otherwise rush by.

For some reason it never occurred to me, at least until now, that this advice is actually very important for everyone who is engaged in remote work, all the time – not just during a once-a-year workcation.

I would argue that not only is it important for remote workers to try to leave time for serendipity, you actually must find and create space for it. Teams and departments and approaches being siloed is bad enough when folks are in different offices – when you’re on different continents, the odds of a serendipitous meeting of the minds at just the right moment, well, it’s unlikely.

If you work remotely, you need to not only leave space in your day for chance, you also need to get out there. You need to ask folks in the design department to lunch – yes, maybe it’s a voice call while you’re eating breakfast and they’re eating lunch. You need to see if your HR rep would join you for a coffee – maybe they’re in a Starbucks in London and you’re having Cheerios in Chicago, but it’s still a coffee!

When we’re not physically close to one another, we lose something without the chance meetings of mere proximity. To recapture this, we have to make time, and make friends.

Get out there and meet someone new.

 

Working Remotely and Getting Weird

Boiled down, the Big Idea of this Post is this: working remotely is awesome because it lets you be much weirder than if you were working in an office, and this makes you happier and more productive.

I’ve spoken before about how working remotely means you lack certain social signals in your day – however, working remotely also means that you don’t have to worry so much about what folks around you think of your behavior – since there are likely only folks around you when you choose to have them around, be it in a cafe or a coworking space or whatever.

Something I have come to deeply appreciate in the remote work environment is the opportunity to run experiments on myself and the way that I work, to become happier, more productive, and a bigger impact agent within Automattic.

I don’t think of myself as a particularly anxious person, but I do think that I’d struggle to pull off some of the things I’ve tried in a more traditional office setting.

When I was working with the Terms of Service team, each day was a bit of a roller coaster – you never knew what you’d run into (but lots of golden cucumber derived medications, oddly), but it wasn’t always the sort of thing that weighed lightly on the conscience. I would often take 2-3 breaks during the day to lay quietly on the floor in Shavasana to still my mind and listen to my own breathing.

When I was first working with a live chat team, I tried working a number of different hourly and daily configurations – four long days, three long days and a few hours here and there the other four days, six shorter days, etc.

Working remotely also allows you to see how other activities can impact your day – for a long time I’d take a break in the middle of my day to go to the gym. I eventually found that my day before the gym tended to be less focused, less productive, so now I get to my local Y at 5AM on gym days – that way I’m home before Mango or the Doc wake up, and I usually get some quiet work done in that post-gym, pre-breakfast window.

The best part of working remotely for a company that understands the import of results over butts-in-seats is you’re able to fit your work to your own ebbs and flows, rather than trying to fit yourself into someone else’s understanding of what The Work should be or look like.

My current schedule would absolutely get me in trouble in most traditional workplaces – a lot of the work that I do doesn’t look like work – it looks like going for walks or staring at a whiteboard or reading a book. It also doesn’t look like a regular work schedule – can you imagine pitching this during a job interview?

Well, I’ll put in an hour, maybe 45 minutes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays between 6AM and 730AM. Tuesdays and Thursdays it’ll be a little more. I break for breakfast and picture books every day for about two hours.

I’ll be around-ish for most of the day until maybe 4:30, 5PM, although I won’t be at my computer or even really available for some unpredictable amounts of time.

I’ll also work on the weekends sometimes, but not always. But sometimes.

It would be a hard sell! But, this setup isn’t random or the result of whim; it’s the result of literally years of experimenting on the way I work, the times I work, when and how I approach each part of my day and each of my responsibilities.

Whether you work remotely or in a more traditional workspace, give some experimentation a try – you never know what might help you make a leap forward 🙂

 

Efficiency is Behavior

Working remotely and leading a remote team is not always so different from doing that same work locally. Many of the challenges are similar, if not exactly the same.

One thing that’s been on my mind a lot, and if you work in any sort of revenue-driven enterprise, it’s something you think about a lot as well, is the idea of efficiency, and how we can create more efficient situations.

I find a tension exists between traditional operations management ideas and approaches to efficiency gains (calculate throughput, build a sensitivity analysis, reduce waste) and my own approach to leadership, which is a sort of mix of servant leadership and hopeless romantic labor reformer.

That tension is the natural pressure that exists between the idea of employees, Workers, as a numerical input into a larger system (the average Subway sandwich maker can produce one point four sandwiches every five minutes. Reducing that to one point three would represent etc etc, just an example) and the belief that every person has creative value, that the folks working closest to the problem (the sandwich) are those most qualified to solve that problem better, or faster.

I’m not the first person to see this tension – we can read the massive acceptance of and growing excitement about Lean as an antidote to this very tension, if we’re generous, since we can see in the Toyota Production system great empowerment of what you’d call line workers to identify problems, repair, and improve their own Work.

There is a difference between efficiency on a spreadsheet (or, even worse, a Powerpoint presentation) and efficiency in action.

My team is fairly small – it’s me and eleven Happiness Engineers – and for us, efficiency is behavior. It’s actions – it’s not such a fungible idea, it’s not a board room topic. It’s about doing something One Way or This Other Way, and seeing which gets better results in the same amount of time – or the same results in less time, then going with it.

If you’re leading a team, especially a smaller team and double especially if you’re leading a remote team, you must recognize that efficiency comes from behavior, and by testing and changing behavior.

We will never get more efficient with a poster with a quote from Deming under a high res photo of a  fighter jet. The only way we’re going to get more efficient is by trying out new stuff, and chucking it if it doesn’t work.

That means leaving room for failure. That means kicking out the sacred cows and rejecting dogma. There is enormous value in reading and in discussing and in building spreadsheets – don’t get me wrong, I love spreadsheets – but all of those things have to result in action, in trying some shit out.

Otherwise, it’s just air, it’s just value locked up inside your head, and we’ve been over that.

Try something new today. Sleep one less hour. Sleep one more hour. Don’t check your email. Turn off Slack. Listen to one song on repeat.