In the last two articles, I covered being a remote employee and leading a distributed team. As I was unwinding my thoughts, I found another grouping of ideas. The company can help in many ways make people, at any location, feel more connected, which helps drives success.

In this process of company review, nobody is perfect. Some companies optimize for experience, some solely on productivity, and others probably haven’t thought about what they’re optimizing for. I’ll try to point out what my viewpoint is, and how it could be fixed. As an aside, this doesn’t mean that my employer (Puppet Labs) is doing the things I point out well, or terribly, just that I have some thoughts on an area…except for the Help Desk. Puppet Labs totally does that well.

❤ Help Desk

First off, our Help Desk and IT teams are amazing. When you have any type of problem, they help so fast. I’m nearly 100% confident I will never work somewhere with as good of a help desk as we have. Whether it’s a software license, hardware issue, ship me something, or remote technology in the overlook, they are just on it.

Your company needs an awesome support structure for their staff. This is wonderful idea if you have just people in one location, but as your workforce becomes decentralized, having people to help make things happen, keep you unblocked, or just get a license of 1password quickly, can make an obstacle into a thought that never enters your mind again. They’re willing to ship things, work through things on chat, or basically make time for you. That’s how you feel appreciated.

Record Output from meetings

We use Trello for many meetings for agendas, which is great. Few meetings send output. If you miss the meeting, you’re effectively just missing information. We don’t often log things in cards. When we do, they’re difficult to follow. A quick email out with notes/minutes/status works much better IMHO, but anything written is better than just a broadcast meeting/discussion that was missed.

What can you do? Write things down. If you’re sensing a theme here, you are picking up what I’m laying down. You don’t have to use Trello or any other system. You can simply take some notes and send them out afterwards. If you get really good at that, maybe you can send them before the meeting and then not have it. See my previous posts for ensuring meetings are the thing you need.

Conference Rooms

I am fortunate to work at a place where video conferencing equipment is in nearly every conference room. It means when I want to talk to people, I don’t normally have to find special rooms and such. Of course the software we use works on laptops as well, so in the event only a phone-booth room is open, there isn’t any problem.

I do wish that the cameras in the rooms were controllable by the remote folks rather than the locals. It doesn’t make a lot of sense that the person in the room controls what we on the remote end can see. The remote folks may want to zoom in on the white board, or focus more on the person speaking. However, that camera position choice is left to the people who in the room, who have the luxury of simply turning their head. My recommendation: Enable remote folks to control the equipment. Is that really possible? Sure, given enough time and money.

“I also wish that the video equipment could subscribe to a calendar and automatically log into a meeting when the time came. I can see some cases where this might not be advised, but overall it would reduce to first 2–5 minute A/V coming online time.

What can you, the company, do? Invest in remote technology. Don’t put it in just a few rooms that the exec team has access to. Make it part of basic provisioning of a conference room.

Dashboards

In the office, we have many dashboards, radiators and other information panels just hanging around. If I am remote, how do I see those? We should have a collection of links to those for folks not in PDX to find and consume. Yes, I have some engineering ones bookmarked, but I have no idea how to find the sales and marketing ones. In the office, I would walk by those areas now and again and see their stats. I can’t do that remotely. I’d suggest a Confluence page with that information, but then we’d have to find that. Maybe a chat command would be better.

The basic question here is, what makes the walk-around experience at our office? What can translate to distributed teams? In this case it’s dashboards. It could be a webcam at the station where the helpdesk sometimes watches puppies. It could be somebody rotates out humorous artwork behind their work area every week. Is there a way to share that?

Community Participation

One of my favorite things about Puppet Labs is Luke’s (Founder and CEO) pride in Portland. Years before he moved back to Portland, all he talked about was how great Portland was. He’s believes it, and lives it. Because of that belief, among other reasons, Puppet invests heavily in the community. It sponsors lots of things. It offers meetup space. It participates in and sponsors many local events and groups focused on underrepresented voices in technology.

I wish we could do a small portion of those things for remote people in their community. I know remote employees are not going to host giant parties, meetups, or bring in at-risk high school students for learning at remote locations. We could, however, allow an employee to throw some cash at their local devops meetup now and then to buy pizza. We also could allow/encourage volunteer time at local food banks and other helpful places as is done in Portland.

While I work for a company with headquarters thousands of miles away, I still care about my local community. Anything I can do to improve that community, with the help of my employer, would be welcome.

Remote community engagement is one of the areas where I’d like to see companies doing more. A few brag about it (37signals/basecamp, Github) however, it appears most aren’t doing it, or at least aren’t talking much about it.

These types of community activities go a long way toward recruiting, networking and morale.

Recognition

I’ve been working remotely about a year. I have yet to receive a package from work that I didn’t directly request. In the office, somehow stickers, T shirts, and other swag magically appear and get dispersed among employees. That stuff doesn’t seem to make it to my home office.

As a company with remote folks, be nice, send a surprise now and again. You could put swag in it. You could just put anything that makes the person feel appreciated in it. You put in something food/drink that is local to the HQ area that probably isn’t available to most people on your distributed teams. This doesn’t have to be often. Once or twice a year would certainly garner a smile and sense of appreciation from the remote person.

If you figure out how to ship burritos, please let me know.

Another option here would be to allow employees to send care packages/rewards to other folks. In my reading I found https://www.uncover.com/ which allows employees to give gift cards at Amazon or Starbucks or iTunes (and others) to employees. The company puts in a dollar amount and employees and can nominate/reward people and get items. I haven’t used it, but it sounded pretty cool. I can’t just buy somebody a beer/coffee/burrito in the next few days, so a remote-friendly option sounds like a decent experiment.

Other tools to try

One of the tooling recommendations I saw in several places was to have an internal status system, akin to Twitter but with a little more detail. Recommended tools were http://www.telescopeapp.org/, or http://p2theme.com/. I’m sure there were others as well. I like the idea of being able to see what the team is doing. This could replace/augment standups, and be updated whenever an initiative or task changes.

The other tool categories were chat, video conferencing, wikis, ticketing systems, and project management tools. I’m not going to go into detail about any of those, because there’s so much content online already.

Travel

If there is one thing that was in every single article and book I read on remote work and management, it was that nothing beats face to face time. Every article/book recommended getting your whole company (if small) or team (if company is too big) together twice a year. They also recommended getting smaller groups together at various locations for projects (akin to Github using AirBnB for Hack Houses). I know this is expensive. Everybody knows this is expensive. However, every article also says the ROI of these types of get togethers is outstanding. You improve team cohesion and morale, align people on priorities and direction and most importantly, build trust within your team.

Quotes from articles on this subject:

“It’s hard to develop true friendships remotely. Meeting in person about 4 times per year or as often as possible is the best way to create stronger bonds within your company.”

“go to all reasonable lengths to be in front of each team member on at least a few occasions throughout the year.”

The Release Engineering team (a team where the name is only a very small reflection of the work we do) got together in February in Portland. We were fortunate in that we were there the one week in February where the sun pops out and gets everybody’s hope up about spring. We ran packed days of white-boarding design session, problem solving, brain storming, pairing on problems, teaching lessons, and then hanging out in the evenings. It was great. Everybody on the team said it was well worth the cost and really energized them about their work. In most cases, doing that is cheaper than sending somebody to a big Vendor training course, and has a much bigger ROI.

For some reason, travel, specifically for non-sales-related and non-exec folk, is often the first discretionary spend to get cut. This is literally a cut in the investment you’re making in your employees. Your remote employees aren’t getting the free snacks, massages, meals, beer, and cold brew on tap in the office. They aren’t taking up square footage, and counting against capacity for fire codes. You’re saving some money there. Put that money back into those people and allow them to travel to the main office, or to meet up with teammates when appropriate.

It’s easy to go overboard here and spend a whole ton. I recommend asking folks to justify travel. This doesn’t need to be a heavy-handed process, but at least make sure it’s not just “I want to hang out,” it should have a bit more context than that.

Changing the travel expectations for remote workers is also something the company needs to be careful about. When I am hiring somebody and they ask how often they are expected or can be in the main office and I give an answer, that should be the truth. It should stay that way. That was a portion of the expectations of taking the job.

As companies grow, policies change. They don’t have to change for the worse, though often do. Keep your distributed team engaged and have them work together, side by side, at least a couple times a year. Look hard at what other items you could cut to make this a reality if the budget truly is that tight.

Classes and Workshops

There are some classes and workshops that require people to be local. I get that. However, the scheduling of those can be problematic. I recommend not scheduling a course Thursday/Friday if you expect remote attendees, at least if the course/event on Friday lasts until the end of business.

The travel constraints can be harsh for some folks. For example, flying out of PDX, I can’t get a flight Friday night and be home on Friday. I could take a red-eye to Chicago, but then it’s 10 AM Saturday before I am back home. I have family commitments Saturday mornings, so a Friday class doesn’t work for me, and I imagine other people are in similar situations.

There have also been a couple times where a class was offered, but the notice was less than 2 weeks. That violates our travel policy, so I couldn’t attend that either. The recommendation here is to plan as far in advance as possible for courses and events that require remote people to be on-site. In the end, it probably won’t work for everybody, but the more notice, the easier it is to make arrangements to be there.

Make an effort to have courses available for remote attendees. In some courses, this works really well. I’ve seen some now, where everybody is remote and there is no central classroom. That’s even better because the playing field is completely level.

Remember the investment in education and training isn’t just for the folks who walk the halls of the main office.

Timezones

Let’s not put everything in Pacific time. Using UTC would be ideal.

I know it’s not fun, but it’s much more inclusive than having everybody doing Pacific conversions, or trying to remember if their country is or is not on DST.

Computers use UTC. It’s global. We should be as well. You can even do the conversions on your Mac/Linux. date -d ‘2016–03–28 22:00 UTC’

I realize UTC is a pain. However, it could be the same pain for everybody. I also advocate for running servers on UTC and basically abolishing timezones, so maybe this is just me.

All Hands

When I worked in Portland, I was a strong advocate for keeping the company all hands at 16:30 on Fridays. I liked the social aspect it prompted. Now that I’m remote, I really like when we do morning all hands. I can actually watch them live. I know that cuts into the social time, but maybe doing them at a time not Friday afternoon on the west coast would generate a cost savings in beer (which can be put into the travel budgets). Also, the all hands videos from Friday are not put up until Monday mid-morning in Portland. I often wish I could watch the all hands first thing in the morning on Monday. That rarely happens, and then I start the week and forget to watch the video.

Two actions come from this.

1. Record your events to allow employees to see them later. That’s a great service.
2. Consider timing of the event if you want people to watch/participate live and feel included. Maybe a static time isn’t the right answer. Maybe changing it monthly/weekly/quarterly is good. Maybe it’s fine the way it is. Ask the workforce.

Remote Tier

What do you want the experience of your remote workers to be? What tier do you strive for? In my mind there are three tiers for distributed work forces:

1. Remote First — minimal/no central location. Everybody distributed. Nobody is left out for not being in the main office, as there isn’t one or it has minimal presence.
2. Remote Friendly — large group in a single place, tries hard to include others. Includes proper investments in equipment, travel and experience.
3. Remote Tolerant — it’s on the remote employee to make this work.

There are some nuances in this ranking as well. For example, some places are great as long you’re in an office, even a small one. Others are great with remote workers in some departments, but not all. There also can be teams that are amazing with remote teammates while others disdain the hassle of it.

Wrap up

Working remotely hasn’t been nearly as bad as I had feared. While there is a lot of material available about remote work, there isn’t a lot of great material. We should be communicating what we can in terms of things that work and things that don’t. We should be experimenting with tools, processes and anything else to improve the lives and effectiveness of our remote staff. We all need to improve in our ability to work with distributed teams.

It’s been 10+ months that I’ve been doing this remote work, leading a distributed team and generally trying to learn about be more effective in this environment. My hope is that sharing my experience helps a few folks enjoy their work a little more, or enables companies to have happier employees. If I have glaring omissions or completely missed the mark somewhere, let me know.