Category: Remote Leadership

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.

Going from Abstract Goals to Measurable Results

A few posts back I wrote about how important it is to think about results when you’re leading a remote team.

The TL:DR was that whether your team is remote or local,  clear, measurable expectations up front, ideally through consensus. Those expectations should come with a set of results that everyone agrees will have the desired outcome, results that help move bigger pieces into place, help to create impact toward a larger objective or outcome.

It turns out that these results are the trickier part of that equation – we very frequently, as humans, have personal and professional desires that don’t fit that neatly into check lists or “improve 10%” style goal sheets.

I’ve spoken to a few folks about this since creating that post, so I’d like to dip into this idea with a little more depth, if you’ll allow it.

Results are measurable, but they are only indicators.

OK, Simon, what does that mean?

I’m going to borrow from a friend of mine here, Bryce Boratko. I met Bryce when I was working in Providence, RI – I had three jobs at the time, one at a bakery, one at a community college, and one at the newly-opened Crossfit Providence.

Bryce was a former chef, having worked in Michelin starred kitchens, turned really extraordinary strength and conditioning coach. He was coaching at Crossfit Providence, and I remember a conversation that I had with him around that time.

I was talking with him about how I enjoyed Crossfit because it was a kind of exercise that mimicked my sport at the time, rugby. I liked that it made me better at rugby, or felt like it did.

He nodded, and said, “What do you want to get out of working out here?”

I said, “I want to get stronger!”

He kept nodding, “Ok, how will you know when you’re stronger?”

And I didn’t have a great answer for that. I’d been going to the gym for a long time, since junior high school really, with this abstract objective of becoming a stronger version of myself.

Through conversations with Bryce it became much more clear to me that what was more important was understanding what would indicate to me what being strong meant to me. It turned out to involve heavy back squats – but that’s a story for another day.

I could never put a number on what it meant to be a stronger version of myself – what I could do was look at where I was at that moment, and a place where I could say with certainty that I’d moved in the right direction.

I knew if I could lift X weight, Y number of times, that I was moving in the right direction. These small, measurable outputs were indicators of a larger change taking place.

This is important – small, measurable steps will always be more effective than large, abstract goals.

Javascript is different than lifting weights, Simon.

Well, it is and it isn’t, right? Any Big Goal that feels hard to put a number to is abstract in the same way. As a leader or as an autodidact or as anyone who wants to get better, being able to break your big, abstract goals into measurable, actionable results is key to your success and your team’s success. Here are some examples of Big Goals:

  • Learn JavaScript
  • Become a better team lead
  • Get a dream job

None of these goals are going to take well to quantification. What you can do, more productively, is ask yourself: what would indicate to me that I’m moving in the right direction?

Another great question to ask during this process is, “What would someone who already is a great team lead / JavaScript developer / dream job-holder be doing right now?”

Through this kind of questioning we can break our Big Goals down into more measurable next-steps, smaller results that indicate that we’re moving in the right direction:

  • Submit 10 pull requests to an open source JavaScript project before July
  • Create a survey for folks on my team so I can measure my progress month over month
  • Cold email 20 people with the job title I want and offer to buy them coffee

Results are the bricks. Your goals are the house.

Going from here to there, whether “there” is a personal goal (“Be Stronger”) or a business goal (“Get More Customers”), requires steps, steps that you can look at and check off a list and say to yourself, that’s done. What’s next? 

Measuring Performance in a Remote Workplace

One piece that has come up repeatedly in discussing the advantages and disadvantages of remote work is this question of performance measurement – if you’re leading a team, but you aren’t in the same room, or office, or even continent, how can you be sure that they are performing well? How can you be sure that they’re good employees? How can you be sure they’re not, you know, playing Playstation in the middle of the day?

There are a few things we need to break down in answering this question, so bear with me. We’ll go through this blog post in the same way my mental responses come – like waves upon a beach. But, less graceful. And some confused faces.

What are you measuring now?

The first place my mind goes, when this comes up with a friend or family member or at a professional event, is a moment of confusion.

If you can’t imagine leading a remote team because performance would be too difficult to measure, that tells me worlds about the way that you think about performance. This is the part where I make a weird face, because I am incapable of hiding my opinions for more than six seconds.

What are you measuring now, that couldn’t be measured in remote locations? Someone’s lunch? Whether or not they wear the same tie two days in a row?

You don’t measure people, you measure results.

Look – you should measure the results of all of your employees. Everyone who works with you should have a clear understanding of what their job is, and you as a lead need to do everything in your power to help them do that job as well and with as much satisfaction as possible. That’s it.

If when you say ‘performance’ you mean anything other than the direct measurable results that are agreed upon by all parties, you’re doing it wrong. It is important in all jobs, but especially in remote jobs: you have to focus on measurable results – if they’re the right results, they’ll roll up into the bigger pieces of the puzzle.

If they’re the wrong results, well, you’ll have to discuss that and revisit them. Sometimes this means jigsaw puzzling sort-of non-quantified results into a quantified result that isn’t exactly what you want, but instead serves as a suitable signifier of the less quantifiable stuff.

Results trump everything.

Really. Seriously. If the results are set up correctly, understood by all parties, and roll up into the bigger vision, then they bear an argument all their own.

In this sense, quantity has a quality all its own. Getting results accomplished makes everyone look good. There’s a lot of other things to say about Zuck, but ‘Move fast and break things’ did make him a billionaire.

If you don’t know what good results are, that’s your fault.

If you’re leading a team, a remote team or a more traditional team or even a sports team – if you can’t tell me right now what OK, Good, and Outstanding results from each person on your team would be, that’s not their fault. That’s your fault.

It’s very easy to blame a person on the team, or a tribal mechanism at your workplace, or “Oh, well, she’s remote you know” – but these are all really crummy excuses. Talk to your team. Figure out what matters to them and find a way to fit the Venn Diagram of their skill set and the company vision.

That’s what the real job of the team lead is, regardless of if the team is remote.

Good results, good communication, good performance.

If your current understanding of performance doesn’t translate to remote workers or remote teams, that isn’t a problem of remote work – it’s a problem with your understanding.

Remote teams are all about communication, in all directions. If your current understanding of performance requires you to observe folks in action, you need to find a better way to think about, establish, and communicate the results that matter.

To answer the question from before, if a member of my team is putting out solid results and communicating them transparently, they can play Playstation all afternoon if they want to.

 

Leading a Remote Team: Roundup!

I was chatting with a friend from my SUNY Binghamton days about working remotely, and he was asking me a bit about the way that remote leadership works – how to approach it, how to convince folks that you can lead teams remotely effectively and without hassle, etc.

I have a lot to say on this topic (of course), but I figured a good place to start (especially for newer readers) would be to round up my existing work on the topic, so we can all move forward with the same shared understanding.

I think the best thing I’ve written about working remotely in general, which also applies to leading a team remotely, is this longer Post about Working Remotely and an idea I call Aggressive Transparency.

At the end of the day, the lifeblood of a remote organization (or a remote arm of a larger organization) must be communication.

I would argue not just communication, but a particular flavor, that defaults not just to communication, but what many people would call overcommunication – I’d contend that the current state of communication within many companies is deplorable, and that is what leads folks to object to aggressive transparency in many cases.

Another really great starting point for thinking about what it means to lead a remote team is this talk by my friend and colleague Paolo Belcastro – he’s been at Automattic even longer than I have, and shares a great deal of insight in this workshop.

Additionally on the topic of communication, here is a more recent post about using your asynchronous tools most effectively – Communicating in 2016: Leave Good Messages

One thing I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about and really trying to figure out over the last year is feedback and expectation setting in a remote environment.

One thousand thank-you notes to the folks on my team who have been so gracious and understanding when it comes to the many, many experiments and iterations that we’ve been through.

Posts about feedback start here: Figuring Out Feedback, where I hastily sketch out the plan for how we first tried rotating monthly feedback exercises – this is something I really should revisit in more detail, we’ve learned a ton since then.

After that Post, we did a couple rounds of what we called Leadback Surveys, which are anonymous surveys providing the team an opportunity to let me know how they think I’m doing. You can imagine how potentially fraught with vulnerability and anxiety that might be – so I wrote a Post about the process, Leadership, Feedback and Ego.

One of the things I try to stick to, and would recommend for anyone else looking to lead a remote team, or to get better at leading a remote team, are weekly one on one conversations with everyone on my team. They’re generally around 30 minutes long, and I strongly prefer voice, though I can waver a little on that. Here’s a Post about one on ones in general.

Since, like everything, learning this lead role is a process of experimentation, failing magnificently, and then getting better, I also recently published a post outlining how I’ve experimented with one on ones over the last year.

That brings us to today – this is a topic I think about a lot, and something I could write volumes and volumes about. Is there anything in particular you’re curious about?