Hi there, so our next speaker, Yenny Cheung, thank you very much. Yeah, nice to see you all here, even though we're gathered around, I guess in the virtual environment, but it's still really nice to be with the community here.

So, hi, my name is Yenny Cheung and today I'll be sharing with you my perspective on creating an inclusive team culture in times of change, which I think it's pretty relevant to what we have here and I will focus on navigating the changes that COVID-19 has brought to us. Before we get into that, you might be asking, hey,

Yenny, why are you online here presenting this session and how is that relevant to what I do? Brief introduction, I'm an engineering manager at Yelp. I lead the women in tech employee resource group at Yelp here in Germany, and I spend quite some time in the diversity and inclusion space.

I've given a couple of allied skill trainings and talks on unconscious bias, on workplace culture, and of course Python, and that's why I'm here with the EuroPython community. Inclusion is a really important topic when we talk about workplace cultures. This concept is like especially important during the times of change.

So today I'll be sharing with you my perspectives on creating an inclusive team culture, especially during the turbulent times so that we can navigate that together. The main audience for the talk is leaders of a company. Leaders, however, though, to me is not defined by title.

That means it will be relevant to you if you're an individual contributor, folks in management, technical leadership, as long as you have the will to lead. If there is anything I would like you to retain after the talk, it is people first. We will want to treat our colleagues as human beings before employees.

So how we communicate and manage the changes during COVID-19 really matters. Our employees, our teammates, and our colleagues will never forget how they were treated during this time. So all the content for the rest of the talk, we focus on how we can achieve this people first mindset and also inclusion.

So to give you a better idea, we can start with leadership styles described on Lara Hogan's blog, I'm a big fan, and I'll give you a minute to read through all of these leadership styles.

During the COVID-19 crisis, we want to focus on the green and blue. So what it means is having maybe high emotional intelligence, and also we want to appear calm, cool, and collected because during times of change, people are afraid and they want direction.

Great. So here is our agenda for today. We'll talk about safety and self-care. We'll revisit our expectations with the team. And during this time, communicating effectively is important. We want to conduct inclusive meetings, and last but not least, check our biases.

So let's get started. Safety and self-care. That's really the most important one, so we put it first. I'll tell you a little anecdote. Early March, I had a meeting with other engineering managers in the office, and we're talking about the possibility of working from home.

Some companies in the industry had already started doing that, but it was well before there were guidelines from the government that we need to do that. Some engineers in the office, they request to work from home, and we're discussing as a group whether we should start having engineers do that. There were some concerns raised on engineers' performance, and also like worrying

that they might not perform given that they're already given feedback about communication. But multiple managers disagreed, and we came to the consensus that safety trumps all the other concerns. And today, I think I stand by this principle as well, and we agree that safety just trumps all the other considerations.

So after we address the physical safety, let's talk about our emotional safety and well-being during this time as well. We're coping with a global pandemic, and we're advised to stay home, depending on which region you're in, but staying home is a wise choice, usually.

Schools could be closed, and if you're a caregiver, for parents, attention could be split between childcare and work. And with the economic downturn, we might even have to worry about financial stability, and something basic like toilet paper could run out any time.

All of these factors come into play while we're supposed to stay socially distant from our friends and family when, like right now, it really is the time that we need them the most. So it's really an understatement to say that we're under stress. There are several things that we can help the team do.

So 22% of the people rated unplugging after work as the biggest struggle when we're working from home. As leaders, we can promote people to take breaks, to log off after work and really check out, and also provide mental health resources. And the best way to do this is to lead by example, model the behavior you want to encourage your team as a leader.

The best advice I've gotten from my direct reports from my team is to take care of myself first, and then other people would follow. And I think this was a great advice that I got. Ever since the work from home day started or, you know, during

the pandemic times, we had different initiatives, for example, having virtual water coolers. It means we're keeping a video chat channel on to kind of mimic the kitchen conversations that we normally have in an office. We would also try out virtual team lunches, virtual daily breaks to keep everyone connected.

But keeping them optional is a good idea so that people don't get overwhelmed over more compulsory meetings to do when there are other things they might need to attend in their lives. So we have established that we want to care for ourselves and the team. Then I guess this question really popped in my mind is, what does the team really need right now?

I came across this interesting read on GitLab's definition of remote adaptation. Since right now, a lot of us are being forced into remote work. So I think it might be worth it to look at companies who have always done it that way already, and that can give us a bit more ideas on what to do there.

The first phase they highlighted is skeuomorph. So we're going to go through that to see what that means. We tend to imitate the design structures and norms of an office environment. So some examples we can think of here is replacing hallway conversations with private Slack messages.

So that it's like you directly talk to people and keeping the meetings with the same people with the same etiquette. Or we ask ourselves this question, and I think a lot of teams do, right? What tools can I use to replace the whiteboarding experience? We need to design stuff. We need to draw diagrams.

Like what are some of the software that can replace that experience? But staying in this mode prevents us to utilize the whole benefits that the remote situation can bring. And we move to the second phase of remote adaptation, which is called functional. So here are some of these examples here.

We start asking the questions, what if we don't do things the way we've always done them? Some examples include we want to record meetings. It helps fill in the gaps created by these undocumented discussion that could happen in private chats, right? So we also want to replace private chats with public messages so that more input can be gathered in the public channel.

And we can also use the team more. And the third phase of remote adaptation is asynchronous. So it depends on how well a company does in completing work without being synchronous.

So we focus on the asynchronous part of things. And we want to save that precious online time that we use with informal and social events. So information sharing is more centralized at this stage. We rely on issue trackers like JIRA that we use, or at GitLab they use GitLab.

And documentations are done first, and then it becomes a source of truth. So in this case, we can prevent information from being segmented across different channels. And in the following sections, we'll look into solutions, mostly in the phase two and phase three of the remote adaptation phase.

So while it's helpful to look at frameworks, I think for developers or engineers, we like structure and frameworks to see what kind of things the team would need. The best channel as leaders is still to understand the team's concerns and gather their feedback through conversations.

Like for me, I do regular one-on-ones with a team, so that's a good way for me to gather feedback. Try not to assume what is going on in their lives and also the impact. I think actively listen to really understand. And sometimes like being a good listener to absorb the negativity out and helping your teammates find a new path forward,

that's the most valuable thing a leader can offer at this time. Now let's move on to the second section, which is to revisit our expectations. So I am reiterating here, this is not a normal work from home situation.

Sometimes like people might be back to the office, but this is not normal. Firstly, our colleagues need to attend to their lives and second of all their employees. And hence the same kind of guidelines shouldn't apply. There'll be people who didn't have good enough connections during this time, there'll be disruptions and most people don't really have a good enough setup to work at home.

And hence we want to set clear expectations. But there might be a need to be more flexible. Be reminded that while our mindset changes, that we need to be more flexible and we adjust our expectations, we should revisit that along with the team. So ask our team members what they need right now and what we can do best to support them

and help them meet expectations and try to be as specific as we can. Here are some examples here. Apart from revisiting the expectations, like here are a list of things that we can offer. For example, flexible hours, list out some tasks that they're on and we think about what to drop or delegate

so that we can adjust the workload accordingly. Another thing to pay attention to is maybe not scheduling team events in the evening because teammates might need to attend to other engagements and like that they need to.

Feedback, that's a big part of a leader's job to give feedback. On giving feedback, again, people first, especially when we notice areas that people can improve on, try to assume good intention, especially when giving that feedback, be genuinely curious about the coworker and understand that their behaviors might be coming from a different place before we make a judgment call there.

One example could be a team member constantly looks disengaged in meetings and we might assume that they're not serious about their work. But the backstory could be that their partner also had work engagement at that time

and it's their turn to look after the kids. So in this case, we don't want to straight out go with harsh feedback. We want to understand the story. We also talked about the stress that we need to manage during this time and how folks are performing now might not be the best indication at all on how they're performing when things are normal.

It's also likely that we succumb to recency bias, which means that we will judge people mainly based on what they recently do compared to really looking at the whole track record there. Later on, we'll dive deeper into the bias section, but my take here is this is not the time for formal performance management.

We covered corrective feedback, but there is also the other side of things, which is positive reinforcement, praise, right? When a team does great work, we still want to celebrate. And it's actually a great way for us to build a positive team culture, especially during now.

These days, I found myself using Yelp Love More. So this is something that we use at Yelp to show appreciation to your colleagues. It could be that they did great in a project launch. It could be that, I don't know, they post the puppy pictures on the team channel and brought joy to our lives, different things.

It even has a Slack integration, so it looks like this. But this is a tool, right? It doesn't have to be this tool. It's the spirit that I want to emphasize on, the positive reinforcement and building positivity in the team. Next up, we have effective communication.

It's an interesting one. It is difficult because right now the team craves direction and information, and sometimes we don't have them, right? Transparency is key, but if we don't provide information, the team will just make up stories and explanations or do that behind our backs, right? And rumors will spread. This is understandable.

It's human nature, but there are tricks and tips to navigate through that. To mitigate that, we might fall into some traps where, as leaders, we over-promise. If we tell them, well, there will be no changes to our product roadmap, or our company could gain back its ground in three months.

Well, that might not be true, right? We cannot predict the future. We won't know. And the other trap is we under-communicate. Just because we don't want to say anything wrong, we just don't say anything. We avoid communicating to the team so that we don't take back on our words. But that's not ideal either, right? People make up stories.

So here's how we can navigate that communications. For the information that we already know, we can over-communicate, like spam the team. I could practice in general, but usually during the work-from-home times, let's make sure, or, you know, half work-from-home, half office times, let's make sure we work on better messaging and repeat them through different channels.

Like, sometimes I do that through one-on-ones and then through meetings, through emails and Slack, through blog posts. And this message we want to craft, we want to acknowledge the distress and the difficulties that we are facing. But at the same time, without giving in to helplessness.

In these few weeks, I'm spending much more time preparing presentations, blog posts, and communications to the team so that I can be as transparent as I can. Now one tip I got from Lara Hogan, Lara Hogan again, because I'm her number one fan. If we don't have the information yet, but if we can find out,

commit to a time and channel that we can give that information so that they don't, your team doesn't, so that your team feels better taken care of. And it helps set the right expectation for them so that they're less anxious. We cannot predict the future for sure, but we could still keep absorbing the news in the company

and then we can offer our more informed interpretations. That way we can curb the rumors before they spread too far. At the same time before, be careful to what we commit to for the team. There are a lot of things we don't know, even though we're leaders. And if we don't have the information, there are times when we need to say, I don't know.

So we want to put on that leadership hat on high emotional intelligence, calm and collected. We'll be assessing information as they come by, try not to over commit and also resist the panic mode. Now let's move on to conducting inclusive meetings.

But before we even talk about how to conduct inclusive meetings, one thing to ask ourselves is, is that something we need to discuss in person? Think about functional, the phase two of the remote adaptation that we looked at. If we can replace that meeting with other asynchronous channels, it might be more beneficial because we have other distractions in place.

And even if we don't, at least from personal experience, a long day of video calls, it seems like an intense Netflix binge-watching session for me. And I don't really want that. I don't know if you're into that. But as we were speaking, like our team, we're looking into different alternatives for video conferencing because of the tiring screen time.

One thing I've tried is doing walking one-on-ones. It could be like, so we do work from home still now. So I could be walking in my living room and my report could be walking in their living room or they could be taking a walk in a park. Another idea is usually we have this brainstorming meeting where it's quite long and everybody gather.

So what we try is to divide the teams into groups and we convene after a week or so, so they have time to work asynchronously on it. And then we come back to present to each other and discuss the results. And also let me know what you have tried so far.

I'd love to learn from your experience. We're all trying to figure it out here. Now when we participate in meetings, here are a few things we can do to make the meeting more inclusive. We need to get away from phase one skill morph of remote adaptation. Where we're just copying the meeting exactly as how we did it before.

So what we can do is like for folks who are normally taking up more airtime in the meeting, try to step back and make sure other people have time to chime in. In video calls, it's common to talk over each other and we stumble upon the, oh, sorry, you go ahead, like thing. And we might want to leave a longer pause after we speak

to ensure that people who want to participate can get the chance to. There are also other features like raising hands, for example, on zoom, you can do that too, depending on the video chat platform. And we can pay attention to those and make use of that. Everyone is behind the screen now. So some contacts could be lost with our body language.

One tip I got is to emote more. Okay, now I'm very self-conscious to convey our tone, to be more engaging and to avoid misunderstandings, especially when we give feedback or have crucial conversations. Now on top of previous suggestions, as a facilitator, we can send out an agenda before the meeting starts.

That way folks can be better prepared. In video chats, it's more often to have these long monologues and you don't really see people's reaction versus active discussion. Like right now, right? A long monologue. For people who are more extroverted or more used to talking as they're thinking, it might be pretty normal. It doesn't affect their working style too much.

But for people who are more introverted and they prefer to have ideas fleshed out before they speak, preparing an agenda and distributing them beforehand really helps. And we could also get some discussion out of that document already so that when the meeting actually takes place, it will be short and sweet so that we can get out of there faster.

Live captions also seem to work with apps like Google Meet, especially for people where the connection might not be optimal. As we've talked about, there are other distractions when meeting is happening. Like now it became a pretty often thing where your family member can just photobomb your video call.

One suggestion I have to you is to make participation optional. We can open up more channels where folks can communicate, like for example, an agenda asynchronously. And we need to acknowledge that not everybody has the same capacity

to participate right here, right now. Recording meetings is also a good practice, as we talked about, so that people can revisit the content later. And sending recaps and meeting notes after to make sure everybody's on the same page is good. In the end, it all comes back to overcommunication.

Now this is more important than ever for us to check our biases. They're always here, but there are several traps that we can talk about here. We want to help and be more inclusive, but sometimes we fall into more traps. So here's one, we could be subject to availability bias.

For example, during the work from home time, a team member had to go out on short notice because who knows, they might have found out that their supermarket has toilet paper again. Or another team member is taking longer lunches because now they have to cook for the family. And we might then just see them as less reliable members of the team,

even though they have been great before. There is a lot of stereotyping that could be dangerous. For example, if someone on a team, they have dependents and they're kids, you know they're not at school right now and you know they have to take care of them.

We might fall into the trap of assuming that we want to help, right? Assuming that they don't want to take on extra responsibilities and we didn't ask them. So the key is to fight against jumping to conclusion too soon. Try not to assume what's going on or the impact that it's having on people.

Try to actively listen and really understand the team's needs before coming to rushed conclusions. So we're wrapping up here, coming back to this slide. We want to be able to put people first. We want to lead with empathy and calmness during this time. And that would bring about an inclusive team culture.

And I want to close by this. An inclusive team culture helps us through crisis and it will continue to help us through peace. This is not something that is extra. I believe this is a core skill for all leaders now and it will continue to be in the future.

What I have discussed with you here today represents collective and diverse thoughts that I gathered from different places. So I want to thank these individuals and conferences for giving me the ideas. And these are the image credits, some resources I used to prepare.

And thank you all for attending. Now I'll open up for questions. If you didn't manage to catch me, we can talk on Discord or afterwards you can also tweet me at Yanisheng. Thank you.

Thank you very much for the support. Thanks for inviting me. I see there are no questions yet on the Q&A. Please go in soon. There is a Q&A button where you can ask questions. There is also the channel on Discord. If you want to join that channel,

just press Ctrl K or on Mac OS Command K and then you see a pop-up window and then you enter inclusive and then you will find this channel. I see there is upload in the channel already. But if you want to ask questions here live,

you can do that using Zoom. I see there are no questions yet, so let me start with the first question. I attended actually many, many, many meetings, online meetings the past couple of months. And one thing I realized, I got really tired.

You mentioned that too. Something in live meetings, I never have this. Maybe you can explain this, why this happens. I'm a programmer. I can be 10 hours on the screen. It's no problem. Actually, I'm curious about that, so I looked it up. I can't quote the exact research,

but they say that when you talk to people in person, there isn't a lag, but when you talk to people in terms of video chats, then there is a slight lag. Apparently, it's really tiring for your brain to process that. It doesn't know what to do when the person you're talking to is slightly slower than the speech, so there is that.

But I guess for myself, when I code, it's also usually dark mode. For video call, it's very bright, so that might also contribute to that. So one thing we have tried is we do voice calls sometimes now, not just stick to video calls. In the beginning, we say that it might be more personal

to do video chats, but sometimes we also switch to voice so we can take a break from staring at the screen. Okay, thanks. I see there are some questions popping up now. First question from Mathias Kresge. Do you have a daily status video meetings? What do you call them?

We still call them stand up, although everyone sits. Yeah, we still have that. We still call it stand up. Actually, I never thought about that. I don't think that changed drastically, actually. I think if anything, we brought more fun to it. For a while, we used the snap camera

so you can add different backgrounds or outfits or you can turn into a potato and stuff, so we started having fun with that. But we still call it stand up. I don't think that changed too much. Okay, thanks. Then we have one question from Diego Russa. You said there is no normal time for manager performance.

What if this will be the new normal long enough in order to force us to treat it as a new normal? What's your suggestion here? That's a tough question. Yeah, I've been thinking about that as well. I think the way I would approach it

is while we can have the formal performance management plan, but I think the way I would structure it would be more empathetic during this time. So instead of like, okay, you need to do this better, this is not meeting expectation. Let's do one thing at a time.

Let's focus on just one thing, do it well, and then we move on to another. So a more empathetic version of this. But I agree with you. At one point, we need to get back to normal or whatever normal would mean in the future. So we got to do something about it.

Okay, there is one more question. Unfortunately, we're running out of time, so please take all the questions to the channel. If you haven't scored, press Ctrl-K or Command-K on the Mac and type inclusive, and you'll see the first channel will be the chat channel of this talk.

So, Jenny, thank you very much again. Yeah, thank you. Have fun today with this talk.