Category: fun

The Emergent Import of the Tangible for the Remote Workplace

(what a title!)

The longer I lead remote teams, the more clear it becomes to me, that there are things which take on an outsized importance within a remote team – especially within an all-remote organization.

(an aside: I appreciate the definitional challenge of calling an organization “all remote” – remote from what exactly? “Distributed” is an alternate term that I appreciate more but, has yet to gain a ton of traction)

Some of the things that take on an outsized, and sometimes surprising, importance, that I’ve written about in the past:

Phatic Communication

Eating On Camera

What’s starting to appear more and more to me these days, is how important, or perhaps how impactful, the tangible becomes.

What do I mean when I say, the tangible?

Over the course of the last year, we’ve built out an in-house ETL solution that we call SQLT – pronounced “Sequel Tee” – and had to work really hard to gain buy-in from folks within the organization to start using it, rather than defaulting to other solutions that were more familiar or more comfortable, for whatever reason.

Once we had a couple dozen folks who had committed code using SQLT, I had some stickers made, and I mailed them to those who had a commit on their record – they were a surprise, no one was aware of them coming. I trucked down to the post office and sent a dozen envelopes to three different continents.

I have a few left! They look like this:

sqlt.jpg

…and it was a great hit! Folks really appreciated them!

I wonder, if we were in a co-located environment, if it would have had much of an impact. Since, in an in-person workplace, you have many, nearly constant, tangible artifacts of your work – an office, a desk, a cafeteria.

In a distributed workplace, the tangible is much more rare: your workplace is your home, or a cafe, or another shared space – areas that aren’t exclusively the place for work, and often serve many duties.

You don’t often interact with your colleagues in the flesh: this is part of what makes regular meetups or conferences an important source of connection and re-connection.

So too, I think, receiving something you can hold, something that comes in the mail, from your otherwise largely ephemeral colleagues, takes on an outsized impact in a distributed environment.

I used to send my teammates postcards on their birthdays and their Automattic hiring anniversaries (naturally, Automattiversaries) – something that would probably seem a bit odd in a co-located workplace, but in a distributed one, it really felt like a special token of recognition, a tangible touchstone of the time and the work we’d done together.

Due to the intentionality that phatic communication requires when working remotely, it’s easy for distributed workers to fall into communication patterns that are totally professional: interactions can be purely work focused, transactional, without the kind of socially pleasant borders and decoration that you get for free in a co-located environment.

Asking your colleagues to eat lunch on camera can feel a bit awkward or out of place.  After all, in a co-located environment, which we still have in our brains as the default, it would be odd to ask for! But, part of the distributed organization’s success relies upon us recognizing the things we no longer get for free, what we maybe took for granted in a co-located office, and how we might replace them, or improve upon them.

Like that eating-on-camera piece, I think a birthday or work anniversary postcard would be strange in a traditional office – but it is, not only not strange, but maybe quite important in a distributed workplace.

The injections of the tangible help remind us that our colleagues and relationships are real – a postcard or a goofy sticker, by existing between our fingers, offers a kind of reminder that our colleagues too, are real and tangible.

 

 

Packing a Conference Bag & Recommended Reading

Or, Packing a Carry On, 2016 Edition

I have a conference coming up next week, so I’m putting together my things, as one does. In prepping for the trip, I figured I’d do another What’s In My Bag post, since things have changed some since January of 2015!

Check it out:

Screen Shot 2016-10-20 at 8.04.02 PM.png

The last conference I attended was the first-ever SupConf (number two is coming up!) and it illustrated for me the allure and the failure (for me) of one-bag travel. I love the idea – go where you’re headed, have one bag and only one bag. The simplicity! The ease!

On the recommendation of my dear friend Clicky Steve, I went with the Osprey Porter 46 – it’s a great bag! I could backpack using it through all sorts of terrain and terroir for as long as I’d like and it would never let me down. It’s a great recommendation and it will be coming with me on this trip as well – but not as a solo bag.

The problem, for me, is that I don’t want to bring all of my luggage with me from the hotel room to a conference floor. Carrying a 46 liter backpack through a professional setting – it’s not a good look. At SupConf I settled on a reusable grocery bag to shuttle my laptop and conference materials from the AirBNB to the conference – and then promptly stashed it away from sight. I have some impostor syndrome around looking professional, I guess!

OK, so the Osprey Porter 46 will be acting as my clothes-and-sundries bag. Not a problem. That means that this faux-leather Timbuk2 will be doing double duty as my carry-on and my day-carry conference bag.

While it’s true that Automattic provides all of its employees a WordPress branded Timbuk2, and I absolutely adore mine, the lack of an exterior water bottle holder has come to be a consistent irritation on longer days – this bag, which I’ve had since my days as a community organizer for the City of Binghamton, has water bottle holders on both sides.

That means I can have a travel mug of coffee on one side, and a reusable water bottle on the other. What more could I need?

Here’s what’s going in my carry-on and daily-carry conference bag, for a 3-night conference trip with air travel:

1.) This is the bag itself. A quick look at the Timbuk2 website doesn’t look like they’re actively producing them anymore – it has the TSA compliant laptop compartment and notably fewer pockets and zip-ups than my WordPress bag. This will be its first big trip. This is your chance to shine, little buddy.

2.) A little notebook! It’s unlined, a sort of oversized Field Notes notebook. I’m 90% sure my colleague Timmy gave me this for doing QA testing on our new Editor. This is for various travel notes, potential blog posts, sketches, doodles, talk notes, etc. Your classic catch-all.

3.) It’s a Kindle! I left my last one on an airplane. This one, also, is secondhand. It’s full of books! Sort of! I’ll have to find my Kindle light before I leave, it’s not pictured but I would like to bring it – airplane overhead lights are too diffuse, and I always worry I’m keeping my seatmates awake with it on. A nice focused book light is key for late night and early morning flights.

4.) Fitbit Blaze! I did not think I was going to like this as much as I do – the latest update especially has added a few new front-facing templates. Being able to have the screen stay off until I’ve turned my wrist always gives me a sense of “Oh yeah we’re living in the future.” Plus, quantifying my heartrate, etc, is really interesting to see over time. This is the only small device I’m bringing that doesn’t charge using a micro USB charger.

5.) Stickerbombed Anker Powercore battery pack – this thing is seriously a lifesaver, especially in unfamiliar towns where I’m using GPS, wireless data, and other power-sucking functions. I can charge my Galaxy S4 up to six times with this beast!

6.) Karma Go Wifi Hotspot – Certified 100x better than airport wifi. Plus, it creates a wireless network that anyone around you can use, and when they do, you get some additional free data. Being friendly to strangers and getting free data is a nice combination!

7.) Dopp kit! This has toiletries, mints, an eyeglass repair kit, all that sort of stuff. Super handy to have on layovers! Once I get to the hotel this will stay in the hotel bathroom. I could do a whole post on the contents of this bag alone – it’s changed over time and is, I think, a pretty ideal balance of the necessary and the nice to have.

8.) 13″ Macbook Pro. Not pictured: the charger for this.

9.) Another notebook! This one is a slimmer Moleskine, specifically a Bullet Journal! The Doc has been following the format for about a month, and has been raving about it, so I’ve started giving it a try. I’m still undecided!

10.) I AM CRAZY ABOUT THIS THING! It’s a leather travel wallet made by a local company called Samwell Leather – I met them at a craft fair and they were the coolest folks. I’ve been complaining that I needed something like this for travel every time I came home from a trip – it holds a little notebook (how many notebooks do I need?), plus has space for your boarding documents and a pen. I am also the kind of maniac who likes to have hardcopy boarding documents, even with a massive smartphone battery pack.

(I’m skipping the pencils, pens, crayons and pencil sharpener – y’all know what those are, right?)

11.) Backup headphones! These are the in-ear headphones that came with my phone. They work, they fit fine, and they don’t need a battery to operate. They take up nearly no space, so I tuck them into a bag pocket and forget about them until I need them.

12.) These are the same on-ear wireless bluetooth headphones from Outdoor Pursuits that caused such conversation in the last Post! I still like them a lot for travel (since they fold up and don’t have a cord) and they’re holding up to lots of being thrown into and yanked out of bags, which is a good sign!

In addition to getting my bags ready, I’ve been doing a literature review of blog posts and other articles on maximizing my conference experience – I tweeted my way through them, but here are those links if you missed them in the information dump truck that is Twitter:

Use the Data You Have: Ask the Right Questions

Once you decide to start leveraging your existing data to unlock the value present in your support unit, the first thing you have to do is start asking questions – not just any questions, but the right questions.

If you haven’t used Google Analytics or Kissmetrics or Mixpanel before, these tools are very powerful, but they can also be overwhelming. The default Google Analytics dashboard has been described as “a dump truck of data.” 

If you go into that jungle without a question, it’ll be very easy to get lost, wander around, and never bring home the treasures that are out there and waiting for you.

The good news is that you already have a ton of really fertile ground for finding and asking great questions. The tougher news is that before you can start sharing real value with others, you have to check your own assumptions and dogma first.

I recommend using your support team’s existing beliefs around your customer base to get started on your quest. Take a minute, think back on the last two or three months, and challenge yourself to identify the big untested beliefs that power your support team. Every team is different, but at Automattic, some of our big ones would be:

  • Our customers want plugins for their sites.
  • Our customers struggle with domains, both purchasing and in their usage.
  • Our customers speak English first and everything else a distant second.
  • Our customers prefer replies from the same person, even if it takes longer to get them.

Once you have a few of these beliefs, the next step is to look at that same set of beliefs, and explicitly ask yourself, is this true?

  • Is it true that our customers want plugins for their sites?
  • Is it true that customers struggle with domains, both purchasing and in their usage?
  • Is it true that our customers speak English first and everything else a distant second?
  • Is it true that our customers prefer replies from the same person, even if it takes longer to get them?

This step is important because it helps you to get in the mindset that you need to be a really great practitioner of data driven support. Whenever someone makes an assertion about your customers or about the way they use the product, your first inclination should be optimistic curiosity.

(In the past I’ve used the term “skepticism” here, but given the more recent usage of that term, I’m getting away from it. It’s become something more negative and more aggressive than its original intent – so optimistic curiosity it is!)

Optimistic curiosity means that you assume best intent, but you’re curious about the grounding of the assertion – does it come from anecdotal information? Does it come from a personal motivation? Is there data to support it? Can we see the data? And so on.

Like the human mind, our questions are best understood by way of behavior – so consider each of your beliefs, no matter how strong, and ask yourself, what measurable behavior would our customers engage in if this belief were true? Let’s go through these examples again:

  • If it is true that our customers want plugins for their site, we would expect that “plugins” would be a top search term in our knowledge base. It would also be a top tag in our chat transcripts. It would also come up more frequently than other support topics in our public forums.
  • If it is true that customers struggle with domains, both purchasing and using them, then we would expect to see a greater incidence of domain related questions than we see for other similarly popular products. We’d also see more traffic to domain related support documentation.
  • If it is true that customers speak English first and everything else a distant second, we would expect to see sites set to English as the distant first in terms of creation rate and traffic. We’d also expect that traffic to our English language support docs would be far greater than other languages.
  • If it is true that our customers prefer support responses from the same person, even if it means waiting longer for them, we’d expect to see higher feedback scores for the products or teams who “own” tickets than the products or teams who do not.

One thing that you’re going to have to get comfortable with, as a data driven support professional, is a little slop in the system.

You’re dealing with humans and human behavior here, so you’ll never be truly certain that you’re right about something – when we start to ask ourselves about behavior that indicates confirmation of a belief or hypothesis, we’re necessarily abstracting away from the actual humans we’re discussing, and in that abstraction we’re accepting a certain amount of slop in exchange for a better understanding.

That understanding comes not from knowing something about your customers, but thinking deeply about what indicators matter. Since you’ll never know, not for sure, you instead have to pick indicators, things that will point to the actual truth even if you can never measure that actual truth.

(To read more about customer research like this, I recommend Just Enough Research by the peerless Erika Hall.)

We’ve moved from untested beliefs into if questions , and developed our hypotheses (our classic if…then statements, above.) In the next Post, we’ll talk about how to actually go find the data around those behaviors. In the third and final Post, we’ll chat about how to turn that data into an argument.

Salary Transparency Debate Tonight

This is going to be a pretty weird evening, you guys.

I was invited (somehow) to be one of the guests for PBS’ Point Taken pre-show Twitter Debate.

(Has there ever been a more 2016 sentence written?)

Their episode tonight is on Salary Transparency, which, as many of you know, I have opinions about.

The other guests, who I expect will be mopping the floor with me intellectually, are Marcie Bianco, Lauren Voswinkel, and Fatima Goss Graves.

This whole experience will be an outstanding opportunity for humility, at least on my part.  Please do feel free to Tweet comical and sarcastic asides at me while I try to look like a real professional.

The Twitter piece goes from 10P – 11P EDT, and the show itself airs tonight at 11P EDT. You can watch it here.

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 🙂