A job switch can be stressful, but a job switch during a global pandemic that's having devastating effects on the world economy is a whole different state. Before the pandemic began I had just recently switched jobs, passed probation and was getting comfortable in my new digs. At the time I was still commuting every day, I was seeing peoples real faces, doing the same routine I had been doing for months. But opportunities are always out there, and sometimes really exciting opportunities come up that you simply cannot ignore.
With the introduction of this little virus COVID-19 into our lives came many huge changes. Changes to our personal, professional, and financial lives. With social distancing measures being introduced in 195 countries, and the virus quickly spreading throughout the globe, I can't image there are many people left unaffected in some way. With most people spending anywhere from 35% to 42% of our weekdays at work, it was hardly surprising that a global shift to remote work would have effects on the economy, social relationships, and personal experiences. Though recently we have seen some "Return to Office" policies established at both big and small companies, most people remain working remotely and the issues we encountered at the start of the pandemic persist.
The Challenges
Adjusting to remote work can be hard on multiple fronts, and “business as usual” is not quite “as usual” as it used to be. Isolation has increased and that has presented white collar professionals with some human challenges that they have not needed to face in the past.
It becomes much harder for one to have a clear and healthy separation between work, and personal life when your office is sometimes also your bedroom, or dining room table, or (if you’re lucky) your home office even. Software development ICs (individual contributors) are already not seen as leading examples of healthy work/life balance as we can get completely consumed with our work and place enormous value on the coveted “flow state”. The combination of no longer having a commute to break up our day, and more common asynchronous communication has left a lot of young professionals feeling lonely, with the sentiment increasing in recent years.
Rising loneliness has been accompanied by higher anxiety relating to work, and I am under no impression that this is solely due to economic circumstances either. Our processes and patterns of work were never designed to accommodate remote working and async communication between individuals and teams. In my experience in the tech industry and particularly software development, we haven’t really put in a lot of effort to adjust and adapt to our new way of work either. We have instead loaded this responsibility onto ICs, providing minimal guidance and little support — as long as the outcomes are good, things have been allowed to roll on. As a prime example of this I point to barriers in communication that exist now in the world were Zoom and Google Meet dominate. You can no longer walk over to your co-worker, tap their shoulder and have productive conversations. Instead, now the barrier to entry for a conversation has increased, requiring calendar juggling and additional will to bother your coworker with a more formal meeting.
So how can we help our teams and team members be healthy and happy in the remote world?
Supporting Teams
Help Develop a Healthy Environment
A happy and healthy environment starts with the space our teams spend most of their days in, and continues into the quality of interactions that team members have with each other. Start by providing a reasonable budget for office improvements, with minimal restrictions on what that might mean. Cat poster to make you chuckle throughout the day? Approved! New microphone and camera to run all the silly Google Meet filters through? Approved!
Simple things can really help, and even the action of showing that teams are cared for and willingness to invest in people can go a long way.
I also encourage you to start getting creative around breaking down barriers to entry for conversations within teams. For example, much success has been seen through the use of virtual offices like Kumospace — counting myself in this bucket! Providing the ability to have more natural interaction can really increase the number of conversations that happen in teams, which in turn will increase productivity through collaboration and almost certainly produce better outcomes through diverse perspectives.
Provide Autonomy and Predictability
Invest time in developing your processes. There are seemingly an uncountable number of frameworks and patterns to adhere to, but every team is unique and requires different things to be successful. If you have not done such a review or reflection since going remote, it is all the more important. The game has changed and so to have the members of your team. It will pay dividends to take the time, collect feedback, observe, reflect, and experiment around new or changed processes of work. Think about how you plan, organize, prioritize, and execute work: What ways can you be more precise? Can you begin to distribute ownership? What decisions are you not making, and instead are inheriting?
On a more precise topic, I cannot express my value of good documentation enough. Emphasis on the “good”, brevity is the soul of wit as they say, and I could not agree more. Invest in re-hauling old and crusty documentation, remove duplication, provide a clear path for finding information, and ensure that documentation is a first-class concern of any new work or project. I promise you that the added effort and time spent will pay for itself down the line when you need to onboard, share decisions, or build upon something. And to be perfectly clear here, I am not only speaking of technical documentation, it is extremely important to document your processes and patterns of work as well.
Supporting Individuals
Put in the effort to create time for your team to meet as just people, work aside. This is something that we naturally get from an office environment, but we have to put forth a conscious effort to do in a remote first world. We can so easily get caught up in the mentality that we must always be working on sprint/board work otherwise we are doing something “wrong” or not pulling our weight. Without informal interaction with teammates it can be really challenging for one to find their place, and feel comfortable in it. Anxiety and imposter syndrome set in and can lead to a malformed self-image -- "Am I being productive enough? I bet everyone else is doing more work than I am...". Without effort to build empathy and common values within a team we sacrifice the added efficiency of a well gelled team that is comprised of comfortable, trusting, and confident individuals. A sense of camaraderie helps everyone feel better, and therefore do better work.
Another path to individual success for ICs is focus, and one of the major underutilized or incorrectly implemented focus tools are personal goals. Specific goals built around company and personal values can bring purpose to work. From a sense of purpose we can find growth, achievement, and reward which are common motivators for most people. Spend time crafting effective goals that are built around each individuals career trajectory, interests, strengths, and potentials. And please do not hesitate to evolve those goals over time as well -- the purpose of an excercise like this is not to create a checklist, it is to create focus.
Finally if there is anything that I can suggest to drive a healthier, high performing team of individuals it would be to sharpen your feedback patterns and skills. Provide opportunity for team members to provide you and their teammates with transparent and actionable feedback. I find that many people struggle with giving effective feedback, mostly due to a lack of trust. Building that trust with your team will take time and purposeful effort, you must lead by example and ensure that you are acting in a respectful way while doing it. I promise that it will pay off for you and your team eventually, after all the awkwardness is over with. One of the best resources I have found for developing skills relating to giving and processing feedback is the book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High (Amazon affiliate link), and I encourage you to grab a copy to keep beside your desk. You might find yourself reflecting, re-reading, and flipping through annotations frequently as I do all the time.
I hope this short review of the challenges of remote leadership have sparked some ideas for yourself and/or your team(s). Let me know if it has and what ideas you have implemented, or what you have taken away from the blog post through my contact form!
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