Managing distributed teams from your pyjamas
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:04
Today, I'm going to talk about managing distributed teams from your pajamas. So a bit about myself. In the last six years, I was leading the distributed teams at Elastic, which is the company behind the open source
00:23
project, Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, Logstash, and also Giant Swarm. And starting with last year, I started two new companies, and one of them is Xata. Xata is offering a service database
00:43
for gemstack applications and also Tupo, which is a nonprofit organization that offers free mentorship for non-representative people in tech.
01:00
OK. So let's start with how explaining a bit about these three types of engineering teams. So the first is the classical one, the on-site where basically everyone is working from an office. Then remote, basically when the company starts to hire
01:24
people working remotely in addition to the people that are working in an office, so basically it's a mixture. And the fourth type is a team that is fully distributed. People are working from home.
01:41
Particularly very similar with what we are experiencing now in these pandemic times. A few years ago, many people had doubts about the productivity of a fully distributed team. And though there are so many successful open source
02:01
projects that kind of prove that you can build a successful product with people spread around the world, and there are such great examples like Linux kernel, Firefox, Ubuntu, MySQL, Kubernetes,
02:20
and these are just a few of those. And also there were many companies that kind of took this model of an open source and they were fully distributed from them. And here also you can see a few examples like Elastic, Sketch, Auth0, GitLab, Stack Overflow,
02:44
and many, many others. But then, you know, Corona came and basically people were forced to work from home during these pandemic times. And many companies struggled there because overnight they had to change
03:03
their style of working from an office culture to a kind of a distributed culture. And this is challenging because, you know, both, they have nothing in common. So you have to rethink everything more or less
03:23
from scratch how you are working with your team and how you are becoming productive and things like this. So that's why I want to talk today about the distributed work model. And let's start with some advantages. So what advantages you as an employee of a distributed company
03:44
have. And first one is that you are working from home. So you don't have to commute to work. And maybe for, hopefully for many of you, this is not a problem because you probably have to have, you have a short commute time to work.
04:02
But for many people there, especially people in US where they have to go to work one hour and then come to another hour. So they will basically save two hours of their life and work on something else that makes them happy.
04:23
So flexible schedule is also another advantage. Basically, you are not forced to do the entire work in a big slot, you know, the traditional nine to five. You are able to plan your day as you want and also
04:47
to have time to do something else in between. So this also allows you to have a better work life balance, which is a big advantage in my opinion
05:03
because it allows you to do other things that makes you fulfilled in one sense. So you can, for example, go to a doctor whenever you want in the middle of the day.
05:23
You can go and attend a sport event of your kid. You can take your kids early for school without feeling guilty that you are leaving the office at 3 PM and things like this.
05:40
And in the end, I think this is what makes people happy. Being able to do what you like and also you don't have to sacrifice some personal projects
06:02
if you want in order to be able to have a career. I think this is what makes most of the people happy. So that's, in my opinion, that's a big advantage. And no need to relocate. So in a traditional way, you've seen a job offer in a big city.
06:24
So if you're living in a small village, for example, you had to move to a big city in order to have a particular job. But with this model, basically, you can have your desired career without moving the place
06:43
that you love to leave. So let's see, also, we've seen a lot of advantages, what people have from your advantages. But let's see what are the company advantages. So I think, in my opinion, having happy employees,
07:03
this will make them unlikely to leave the company because they are happy. They want to continue working for this amazing company. And this will also make people more motivated because they want to put more effort in making the product
07:29
that they are building more successful because they really believe and they really want the companies to be successful in order not to lose these benefits.
07:40
And there were some studies. And here, there was a survey made by COSO Cloud in 2015 that showed that this distributed model also increased productivity. And there are so many things that you
08:01
can reach to prove that a distributed model increases productivity, which people had doubts for a lot of time. And in this survey, 23% of people that were interviewed said that they are willing to work for longer hours
08:24
to get more done. There are 52% that said that they are less likely to take time off. 40% of those, they are accomplishing more in less time. And what is interesting is that 77% of those,
08:42
they have an improved productivity while working from home. Another big advantage for a company is that you can hire the best talent across the region, across the continent, or across even the globe.
09:03
So you are not restricted to a city. So with this, you can basically have better qualified people in your company.
09:24
And I mean, if you are building a company that you need to have support coverage, being distributed helps you, right? If you want to cover another time zone,
09:42
you hire another person in another time zone. You don't have to find ways how to put people to work in different shifts, work during the night, work in a certain time frame during the day
10:00
in order to cover other time zones. And there are so many statistics there that say that diverse teams build better products. And let's think a bit about this. So what I mean by diverse team is not necessarily about gender. I guess most of you here think about this.
10:22
Diverse teams means also that teams or people that have a different background, a different nationality, a different culture. And imagine that this is also important because imagine that you are building, your company is building a rack to be used by different people
10:48
around the world. And if your team would be consisting of only of, let's say, white males that did the same prestigious
11:00
university in US, they probably have the same ideas. And the audience that they are building, this product is very diverse, is very different, and they have different patients from this product. So by basically having a diverse team,
11:22
you kind of have diverse ideas that go into this product. And then the product will have better results and will be better appreciated by a wider audience of your users.
11:43
So there were some statistics done in 2016 or 2017 that said that diverse teams have 90% higher revenue due to innovation. And what I mean by diverse, they
12:02
took into account gender, nationality, career, industry, age, and education. And basically, you see here that companies with below average in diversity lower for innovation.
12:26
OK, so let's see now from a perspective of a manager, what are the things that you need to take into account when managing a distributed team? So let's start with the challenges.
12:40
And obvious first one is communication, because I think the most difficult is to keep everyone on the same page. And the way we managed to do that, for example, elastic was you kind of need to learn to be more organized,
13:03
to take notes when you are having a meeting call, just to be available for everyone in the team, maybe the one outside the team, that kind of need to have an outcome of that meeting.
13:25
Work independently, it's a challenge, especially for those finish university, and they don't really have experience with a working environment. I personally believe that it's kind of difficult for them
13:42
to adjust, because they need a bit more coaching, which is, in my opinion, a bit challenging to be done over in a distributed matter. Time zones. Time zones is, in my opinion, challenging
14:02
when the team that you are leading is distributed across the continent. For example, at Elastic, I was leading teams that are based in US, East Coast, West Coast, and also Europe. And for a shorter period of time, I also managed to,
14:22
in my team, there were people from Asia, and it was kind of challenging for us to find time for our meetings, that'd be everyone. So I believe that time zone is really a big challenge when you have to cover, when you have your team from all
14:44
the continents, from Asia, and Australia, Europe, and also US. Isolation is something that I think you need to be aware of and make some effort to avoid
15:03
that, especially when you hire people in a, when you hire someone in a new time zone than the other team members. And sometimes this can feel, that person
15:21
can feel isolated. And I think it's important to make sure you have a big overlap, meaning a few hours a day, between the team members in order to be able to synchronize.
15:41
For work, I think this is the most important thing, because I feel like if you have very good and talented people in the company, they are very motivated. They are very willing to do whatever
16:04
they can in order to make the company succeed, to make the product succeed. Often your work is happening, and you have to be careful when someone is approaching a burnout.
16:23
Because when you are working from home, it's very difficult to turn you off, because it's hard to make this differentiation between your personal life and work. And sometimes you say, OK, I got a Slack message.
16:43
Yeah, why not a Slack message? So sometimes it's hard to make this. OK, so let's talk about collaboration. Yeah, so I was saying that it's very important to use the right tools for video conferencing.
17:02
And I think we are living now in an era where there are so many options there. For example, at Elastic, we use Zoom and Slack. At Giant Swarm, we use Google Meet and Slack. But I think it's important to learn to reduce the distractions.
17:20
Because I think you can easily have a few thousands of emails in a day, really a lot of notifications on Slack, and a few messages from your family and friends. And I think this can be overwhelming for you.
17:41
So I think it's important to plan your day in order to say, some people say, I do emails only in this period of time in the morning, and in order to be able to do some work done during the day. And that's why I think it's important to learn to work
18:04
more asynchronously than asynchronously in a distributed company. So what that means, for example, imagine that you are an engineer, and you have a problem, and you don't know the answer, and you need some help for it. And basically, you will need to ask another colleague
18:23
about a solution, a possible solution, and then you will probably use Slack in order to get an immediate response. But this sometimes, if you are always asking directly synchronously, this can be overwhelming for someone.
18:43
So for example, in a more asynchronous way, you basically are an engineer, you create a pull request with your feature, and then you basically ask for a feedback from other colleagues in that pull request in GitHub,
19:04
and then you wait a few days maybe to get the feedback. But this also makes you feel like you are stuck if you need to wait for a few days for feedback.
19:23
And I think the reality is that you need to learn to do things in parallel, basically not to wait for one feedback or one answer and to work on multiple things at the same time
19:41
in order not to be blocked by one. So this kind of requires maybe a bit of adjustment from my point of view. But people have this impression that if they are working from home, then they kind of need to be available 24 hours.
20:01
And the way basically people do, and also the way I also do it is that you block your calendar, and also with personal things. So you need to go to the doctor, or you need to also spend time with your family. Probably there are some people that are very,
20:21
for them, it's very important to have these two hours in the evening, to have dinner with the family. I don't know, things like this, right? You also block the time where you are sleeping. And this is important, especially if your team is distributed across multiple time zones.
20:45
That might be difficult for someone to know when basically you are sleeping. Yeah, and another one is have regular one-on-ones over video.
21:02
This is important because it's important to also know, you as a manager, it's important to know how your team feels about if they have any blockers. And you can also discuss all the things we discuss as a manager, as a people manager with the team.
21:22
You can basically, you will do it over video. I think people have this, people feel like if you are working from home, then they feel like they are not able to have a close connection with their colleagues.
21:42
But from my experience, I feel the other way around. I feel like if in a distributed company, I feel like you will have a closer connection with your colleagues just because you see them in their natural environment.
22:00
If you are going to the office, I feel like the moment you open the door to the office, you are a different person. You are more like a business person. And then you just do a chitchat and things like this. But when you are working in a distributed environment,
22:22
and then you see the colleagues surrounded by their family, and often you see a colleague with their baby in their hands during the conference call, you feel like you are better, or you have
22:43
a closer relationship with them. So I think also many companies out there, they also organize face-to-face time. I think this is also important. And there are some companies that do this twice or three times a year where the entire team
23:03
or maybe the entire company is gathering in one place to meet face-to-face. I think this is something that is important to have, and just to also have some time with the people.
23:23
So basically, how tall this person is and how this person is, yeah, they sometimes have. So recognize work. So I think this is something that no matter
23:42
if it's a distributed company or not, I think I believe that you need to judge people by their results, not by their working hours. I think in a distributed environment anyway, you cannot really count the number of hours a person works.
24:01
I think from my point of view, I think this is how I usually evaluate people, like their results over a longer period of time, usually a few months. And this also allows them to innovate. And from my point of view, this is really the most important thing,
24:23
is to offer engineers to have the freedom to innovate. And another thing is, OK, they come up with new ideas, but I think it's important to give early feedback and not wait for the idea to become bigger
24:48
before you give feedback. Career growth, I think this is. And I feel like when in a distributed environment, feel like you need to trust people more,
25:02
just because I think people feel like they can trust someone if they see someone near there in the office. But I think maybe in a distributed environment, you need to trust people more from the beginning.
25:24
I think it's important to encourage people to drive projects by themselves, because I know we are a bit late here. So I think an important thing to you as a manager
25:48
to help people grow in their career is to mentor them. And because of that, I created this nonprofit organization called Tupul.io, where we offer free mentorship
26:01
for underrepresented groups in tech. So feel free to join our list of amazing mentors, or if you want to be mentee as well. So this is free for everyone. This is basically all the people
26:21
that are helping me with running our volunteers. You can also apply to be a volunteer if you want. All the mentors are also volunteers. And it's amazing how many people are willing to give a bit from their free time
26:44
to help others grow in their career and succeed in their career. So let's see what's coming next. So what will happen after this coronavirus hopefully ends? And basically, companies will come having, again,
27:08
an office culture. And you see a lot of things on media, like Twitter goes remote and hosts global all hands on Slack. Even Google is now working from home until September 2021
27:23
and is thinking to allow three days a week in office afterwards. So I feel like this coronavirus managed to rapidly change the way companies are structured.
27:44
And I know many people out there are saying about the hybrid work model that will come in the future. That's something that we don't know for sure what will come. This is what the founder of Slack said in one of his tweets.
28:07
He said that for sure something will happen, but we don't know how the companies will change, if it will be a hybrid approach or something else. But for sure, this coronavirus changed something.
28:24
Yeah, thank you for your attention, and yeah.