Working during COVID-19: How to get your distributed team to BURST with culture.
As we all adjust our lives to slow the spread of coronavirus, companies and schools are rapidly moving to work-from-home culture, so in addition to being good at video conferencing, here are some things that anyone managing a team should be thinking about.
Tools & Systems
There are a million articles about what tools and systems you should have in place for distributed teams, and any operations or IT leader at a company will be familiar with these things. Since work culture is rapidly moving remote, I would recommend two things at minimum if you need to make changes quickly.
(1) Ensure that you have reliable remote access to data and files. At ioby, we store everything in the cloud. We use google docs and dropbox to share documents and files seamlessly, we use Salesforce for all of our data. Cloud-based data-sharing has been around for a long time, and it’s key to high-performing distributed teams.
(2) Move to non-email cloud-based communication tools. We use Asana for work. Asana is one of many project and task management tools available. You could also use Monday, Basecamp, Trello, Wunderlist, or anything else. We use Slack for chatting. If you don’t know about Slack, and why you should stop emailing your coworkers, google “stop emailing use slack,” then read the first two articles. If you’re nervous about making this change, let me share that I’ve been on a few teams of people ages 20 to 65, and Slack is the tool that I’ve found to be most easily adopted by older adults.
If you do those two things, that’s probably a big improvement. However, I’ve found that building culture in a distributed team is much harder than selecting what tools to use. That is, in my opinion, how we use tools is more important than which tool we use.
How to Build Culture Through Screens
Let me begin by saying that building team culture when no one ever sees each other in person is really hard. It’s weird to not see your teammates in real life and in 3D. And it’s not second nature to figure it out. Most of our distributed team culture started when we opened our Miami and Memphis offices in 2013, and our team leadership all read the Automattic (the company that built Wordpress) story The Year Without Pants. Since then our distributed culture has evolved through experience. I’m just going to share ioby’s experience, but also note that there are many great resources out there. For example, Anil Dash (thank you, Anil!) and his team at Glitch made their employee handbook public here, so you can check out their approach to distributed culture.
An enormous piece of our team culture is about how we do video meetings, and here’s my guide on how to be good at video meetings.
But another equally important part of our team culture is how we use Slack. Slack is just for chatting so it’s a place where we can be silly, share family photos, recipes, make bets on sports, recommend TV shows and podcasts, be sad about personal and public tragedies, and vent about the news. We even have an entire Slack channel just for dog photos and videos. We also have 205 custom emojis (including 4 (or more) emojis just about BBQ).
Now, you might be judging me for writing about the importance of dog photos and sparkling Michelle Obama emojis. Fine. Judge me. But we live in a time when deaths of despair and loneliness are on the rise. With that as our baseline, forced social isolation and social distancing is going to feel really weird. It’s always important for companies to have good company culture, so especially now, when people are afraid and our social interactions are changing rapidly, managers have to be thoughtful about culture.
Friday Wins BURSTY Happy Hour!
One thing we’ve been experimenting with is called Friday Wins Bursty Happy Hour, or Friday Pops. The name isn’t important; what’s important is that it’s time we hold for bursty communications.
What is bursty communications, you ask? Well, one of my staff, Miriam Parson, shared this article about team performance and online behavior by Christopher Riedl that found that teams with delayed and dispersed communication suffered from lower performance. Constant communication is also not great for productivity, for obvious reasons. But, the article states, bursts of rapid communication, followed by periods of silence, were telltale signs of high performing teams. So we decided to try to construct bursts in our work week.
By structuring dedicated time to Burst, we share important weekly updates about our work and know that everyone is paying attention. We can ask and answer questions and feed off of each other’s comments.
So, every Friday from 3–3:30pm eastern, every staff person posts an update in their team’s Slack channel about a “win” they had this week. We post at 3pm, and use the half hour to respond to teammates questions and comments. It’s planned, it’s expected, and it’s often fun. When conversations go on tangents, and stray from the actual work, it’s important to let the conversation keep going — this is how teams get to know one another better. I’m sharing, with permission of everyone in this slack conversation, a thread that began as an update about our configuration of Marketo, and ended some GenX feels about Napster and Oregon Trail.
We want to give our team plenty of time to do their work every day (serving our ioby Leaders, meeting with partners) while also creating time for us to feel like we’re all together, to learn together, and to laugh together.
It’s hard to have a real “conversation” on Slack. You might ask a question and no one answers for several hours. Or maybe you checked Slack, and realized that while you were in another meeting, everyone had a hilarious conversation that you missed. And so you can just add a laughing emoji reaction and feel FOMO (or JOMO) from missing it. But this can become a drag on productivity if the management team isn’t clear about how to use Slack. When No One Replies to My Slack — “NORMS” — I might check Slack more frequently, constantly refreshing, hoping to get a reply, when I could actually be working on something else. It also can make me feel kind of sad.
Our Friday Bursts are a first step to addressing NORMS. I’m curious what other bursty communications other teams have tried or will try in the coming weeks.
For Managers: Learning to Let Go of Staff Visibility
I’ve noticed that a lot of organizations’ and companies’ managers inadvertently evaluate a staff member’s performance by the amount of time they see their Butt In Seat (“BIS”). In general, BIS mentality is not a good way to measure performance because some people think better standing up or walking around the block, some people are very fast, and some jobs require being out of the office. But it’s also really micro-manage-y and exhausting! Managers need other ways to measure performance, like clear goals and outputs.
Everyone at ioby has really clear goals and quarterly key results, and yet, sometimes, as a manager of a distributed team, I still feel weirdly uncomfortable when I don’t have enough visibility into when and how people are working. And since Slack is for chatting, I don’t want people to be on Slack all day long because they’ll all probably be talking about what kind of nightmares Jordan Peele is giving us or the latest podcast episode Dominique just dropped.
Measuring outputs, instead of activity, is a first step to being a good distributed manager. But it’s important for managers to think carefully about how they want to interact with their teams when many of us might be working from home for awhile. It could be by monitoring projects in a tool like Asana, or it could be by having teams report out their weekly wins in a Friday burst. I’d love to hear what you’re trying, and how it’s going.
