Advice From a Work-From-Home Manager
A little over a year ago, I took a job as an engineering manager of a small team. The thing was, the majority of the members worked from our main office in San Francisco, with only myself and one other senior member working from Waterloo, Canada. At first, I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to manage effectively in such an environment. After some encouragement from mentors and leaders I respect, I decided to take on the challenge. Here are a few things we’ve learned over the last 15 months, which I think might be useful for others moving to a WFH model due to precautions surrounding COVID-19 this year.
Over-communicate! (You’ll hear this one a lot, but it’s essential, so I’m going to touch on it.) But over-communicate the right things. I’m going to share a few examples of this, both when it wasn’t effective, and when it was. Wrong: I went through a phase of thinking that it was important that my team knew exactly what I was working on, all the time. I insisted on diligently participating in our team’s TextUps (more on these later) and always share the many things I worked on in a day. The unintended consequence of this type of over-communication was that my team always assumed I was too busy to help them with individual problems. Despite continually saying, “be sure to message me if you need anything,” the undertone of what I was frequently communicating was that I was too damn busy. I took corrective action and removed the details of what I was working on from my updates. I focused on sharing broader themes of my focus for that day or week. In this particular case, the details didn’t matter. Right: I quickly realized that assumptions about what others know need to go out the window. When it came to sharing information with the team, I’d try and reduce noise coming from me by not sharing announcements that I assumed were common knowledge. This kind of information included examples like “our Hackathon is happening in two weeks” or “our group’s all-hands is today at 10 am.” Despite these events being on everyone’s calendars, they appreciated the reminders. These messages sparked conversations such as “what is everyone planning to work on during the Hackathon?” — generating more discussion and thus a feeling of closeness and tighter culture across the team. Over-communication proved powerful on the team level too. Here’s some quick examples:
- Post on Slack when we’re starting work (usually via our TextUp), when we’re going for lunch or stepping away from the keyboard for any reason, and when we’re done for the day.
- Avoid Slack DMs whenever possible. If you have a question for an individual, post in the team channel and tag the relevant team member. Discuss in a thread, which gives opportunity for others to observe or even participate. This simulates conversations at desks, when you might hear a conversation taking place that you can contribute to.
- Since Slack is bound to get noisier using these techniques, we use emojis at the start of messages to provide extra context. (Thanks for CircleCI for this one!)
- When a decision is made in a thread, share it back to the channel outside the thread (use that little slack checkbox to “also share to channel”) so members not following the thread can still easily understand the outcome.
- If threads begin to get too long, involve too many people, or otherwise get confusing, move to a public zoom call. (But don’t forget to share the results back to the channel!)
Pay attention! I know it sounds silly because obviously, a manager’s job is to pay attention, right? But being remote requires an extra level of vigilance. When I was an “in-office” manager, it was reasonably easy to see someone having a bad day, or looking stressed, and offer to take them out for a coffee or a walk-and-chat. What does this look like in a remote environment? Here are some things you can watch for:
- A shift in Slack communication patterns. Is a team member participating less in threads, or general chat? Is the tone of their messages different than usual?
- Withdrawal in meetings. I try pretty hard to ensure all members are participating in our team meetings, without forcing any engagement. While different team members have varying levels of engagement, a change in those levels, either withdrawal or more aggressive involvement, can be a sign of something else going on.
Video Chat is your friend. I think this is the obvious one. But for some, video chat with the camera turned on isn’t natural or comfortable. But it’s essential. I know I’m not alone — many of us don’t want to see ourselves on video, or accidentally hear our voice in an echo. But the gain outweighs the risk here. No matter what your video conferencing tool of choice is — Hangouts, Zoom, Skype/Teams — make use of it frequently. 1:1s, team meetings, on-demand discussions, general hangouts…
We’ve built a culture around ensuring every participant’s camera is on. The added context around body language is essential in effective communication. We’ve recently made some attempts at having general Zoom hangout meetings. I’ve personally been in a few where there were long moments of silence or just the faint tapping of another member’s keyboard. Then, ever so slightly and under a breath, you hear it: “wtf.” Or a sigh. And this is the perfect opportunity to ask, “what’s up?” and spark further conversation.
Embrace asynchronous communication techniques. Even if your entire team resides in one timezone, you shouldn’t expect all communication to happen synchronously. Our team spans a 3 hour time difference, which isn’t too bad. But scheduling a “standup” is really hard to do when they are never going to be at the start of everyone’s day.
TextUps: We use tool called geekbot for this. It’s a paid Slack plugin. I know there’s others and potentially some free ones. We have a set of 4 pre-canned questions that geekbot asks team members to answer at 9 am in their local time (or the earliest moment after 9 am when they come online). These questions give the team context on member’s work for the day and the overall state of things.
- “What is your spirit emoji?”- I can’t take credit for this one. I “borrowed” it from another team. This is a chance for team members to select an emoji that represents how they’re feeling. If the user selects a tired emoji, the rest of us know they’re a little tired that day, and we should forgive potential shortness, for example.
- “Whatcha workin’ on?”- This is just a quick capture of what they’ll be doing this day.
- “Anything blocking your progress?”- a chance to call out blockers and ask for an assist.
- “How confident are you in your work being completed by the end of the sprint?”- a 5-emoji scale ranging from 💯, through 😅, to 🙅♂️. (I watch for trends here to see how the team is feeling about the sprint, and who has too much work to do.)
I hope these techniques from our 15+ months of experience can ease the transition for others to a WFH culture, even if it is only temporary. Please use the comments to share if these work for you, or if you have found other techniques worth sharing. Best of luck, and everyone stay safe out there!
