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Remote control? How to organize work in Corona times and what we can learn from Open Source communities.

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Remote control? How to organize work in Corona times and what we can learn from Open Source communities.
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Open Source communities organize themselves for remote, distributed, and asynchronous work. Companies predominantly prefer colocated and synchronous collaboration. Keeping offices closed due to Corona, provides a challenge - and opportunity - to combine best of both worlds. Open Source communities naturally organize themselves for remote, distributed, and asynchronous work. Companies, on the other hand, predominantly prefer colocated and synchronous collaboration. Keeping offices closed due to Corona, provides a challenge - and opportunity - to combine best of both worlds. At eyeo, we create the Open Source software Adblock Plus. Organizing work as an Open Source community is deeply ingrained in our company's DNA. Still, as a company, this is not necessarily the best way to collaborate. In the last years we became more agile, more synchronous, and more team-focused. We try to balance both worlds. With nearly half of our staff working from home, distributed world-wide, we continuously improve remote collaboration. At the same time, we strongly invest in frequent get-togethers and colocated team building. With Coronavirus hitting Europe, we were very early to close all offices and ban all business travel. With our rich experience in organizing remote work, the crisis hit us by far less than others. My talk will cover our best practices in combining remote work with an agile mindset, and how we addressed Corona's challenges regarding international collaboration during crisis, supporting staff tasked with homeschooling and child care, and overcoming mental health issues. --- Jutta Horstmann is eyeo's Chief Operating Officer (COO). In this role she is responsible for eyeo's continuous improvement as an organization. She leads the company's Coronavirus Task Force and is responsible for its crisis management.
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
Welcome to my talk on how to organize work in Corona times and what we can learn from open source communities. I hope you can all hear me fine. Otherwise, please just let me know in the chat or contact my moderator, Liko.
So let me get this started with a brief personal story. For the last 17 years, I have been in and out multiple free and open source community. I enjoyed collaborating with KDE, Open Source, all the projects and open usability like Open Office and GIMP.
Later, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Plone and Drupal. And now at Blockplus. I was always fascinated by the fact that free and open source collaboration works across language barriers and borders, highly distributed, fully remote.
After a career in software development, organizing work in an efficient and effective way now has become my major focus as IO's chief operating officer. And I can make best use of what I learned in the past from open source communities, as not only are we developing free and open source software at IO,
we are also doing this with remote teams dispersed around the whole globe. In my talk, I want to share our experiences on how to organize work in an open source project, becoming a for-profit company,
and how this helped us to now stay productive and healthy in a global pandemic. I will walk you through the topics of remote collaboration in open source communities and remoted companies, what is similar and what is different.
Then I want to share some examples from our hybrid approach at IO pre-corona. And then as the last part of my talk, how we organized our remote work in the global pandemic that we are currently in. So let's get this started with a look at how open source communities organize their work.
You know that when software gets developed as an open source project, driven by its own community of contributors, they need to make sure to involve any contributor irrespective of their location, time zone, or working hours.
To make this happen, the community needs to ensure that communication can happen in an asynchronous written fashion, and that knowledge gets distributed in a written way as well. And everybody is aware that people work together in their spare time as volunteers, so no availability at specific times is expected.
Communities share proper tooling for remote collaboration like distributed version control, code review and build tools, chat and also bug tracking tools. But even if the day-to-day focus is on remote actions, vibrant open source communities
know that they need to get people together regularly to build trust and a sense of community. And this is why they meet yearly in conferences and also they offer local user groups.
Now let's move over to how work is usually organized in companies. Let's start with the teams. When we're looking at varieties of remote work in companies, the first question is, are the teams distributed or are they dispersed?
Disputed means that each team sits together on site. They are co-located on team level, but the other teams of the company may be located in another city or another country. Dispersed, on the other hand, means that the team itself is scattered all around the globe.
Some might live in the same place or even work from the same office. But in a meeting, for example, everybody will dial in from a different location. They don't share a physical team space. Then, on the individual level, people can live remote work in different ways.
Some might only work remotely, some may switch between working from home and the office. And besides these two, there might even be more locations to rotate between, like cafes, co-working spaces or even parks.
As a remote worker, you even might want to take this flexibility one step further and become a digital nomad. And then, on the company level, again, a multitude of varieties regarding the importance of remote work in your organization, depending on whether the needs of your distributed teams and remote workers come first
or whether your organization optimizes the workplace experience for the needs of the co-located, on-site staff. Whichever pattern your organization chooses, each comes with its own challenges and benefits.
So let's look a bit more into these. Remote work enables companies to support their growth by hiring the best talent on the worldwide market. It provides for an international, diverse workforce. And it provides their staff with the means to work from everywhere and as well to keep a healthy family life.
It supports disabled and sick people who want to work but can't commute. And the lack of commuting as well as occupied office space is also pretty eco-friendly.
On the other hand, remoteness can mean that individuals become remote to their teams. Building trust and psychological safety, which are key for a high-performing team, is way harder than when you share the same physical space. Little overlap in time zones and crappy internet connection turn conference calls into torture.
All of this may lead to the fact that it keeps people from regularly interacting with their teams. Still, keeping these challenges in mind, there can be several reasons why a company wants their workforce distributed or dispersed.
They want to tap into a global talent pool. Probably they are looking for lower salaries that they can achieve by outsourcing. They might have passed through a merger or acquisition and now have a whole team sitting in another location.
It may also be a way to have the staff closer to the customers if they are distributed internationally. Also, it supports diverse teams, which is pretty important because they tend to be in the end more creative and more performant.
So if you have different cultural backgrounds in an international team, this might lead to this result. Overall, offering remote work and home office can lead to a way more happy workforce because it provides for more flexibility and the means to achieve a healthy work-life balance.
So if you want to move into that direction with your company and ensure remote work is working for you, to get remote work right in a company, a well-defined remote strategy is key.
And like with building any kind of strategy, it all starts with the company's business goals. Then you need to have a good understanding of which culture you need to achieve those goals. And then, can you nurture this culture? Can you achieve these goals easier in an on-site or in a remote setup?
After having answered that question, a sound remote strategy ensures that the people you employ, the processes you defined, and the technologies you apply, all support you in achieving these goals.
And with that, a remote strategy will encompass, for example, a hiring strategy, how to hire for best remote fitness. An onboarding strategy, it will need to care for proper remote education and training.
There will be communication policies set up to ensure that communication, which is so important in a remote setup, happens in a proper fashion. A remote strategy also needs to care for team building, which is way harder in a remote setup, but even more needed.
Tooling is very important as part of the remote strategy, which are the best tools to support your teams in communication and collaboration. And you also need to keep in mind the aspect of privacy and security in that case.
And then there is remote facilitation. So how do you want remote meetings to happen? Do you want remote meetings to happen at all? And in which fashion? And are people able to conduct them in that way? And last but not least, which kind of workplace experience do you want to offer?
Both for on-site people, but definitely also for your remote people. So before going more into detail here in a remote strategy, by providing you a concrete example, let me now first quickly circle back to what we can learn from open source communities while building our company remote strategy.
So looking, for example, at hiring. Open source communities in general welcome people from all around the globe. For onboarding, they provide written documentation and they require contributors to read it before answering the same questions all over and over.
They educate about how to properly contribute by, for example, a heavy use of code review and also by adding code sprints as a co-located feature. They ensure decent and constructive communication by providing and enforcing, for example, a netiquette or a code of conduct.
They build trust in the community by regularly meeting in person, on conferences or in local user groups. And they provide ample tooling for remote collaboration, like, as I said, distributing these version control systems, mailing lists, phones, wikis and so on.
In this scenario, remote facilitation of meetings is not so much a topic they need to address, as they rely mainly on asynchronous written communication. So to make all of these topics around remote strategy more tangible, let me
now share some of our experiences from remote work at IO, first pre-corona. So I don't see you, but I now imagine the question marks in your eyes. So please, a quick virtual raise of hands, who of you is using an ad blocker in their browsers?
If you raised, you most possibly will know our most popular product. Adblock Plus is not only the most used ad blocker worldwide, it is also the most popular browser extension. And for sure, it is free software. But our mission at IO goes far beyond ad blocking.
By building, monetizing and distributing ad blocking technology, we create a sustainable ecosystem, disrupting the biggest market on the internet, which is online advertising. But I wanted to speak about our remote culture.
And for that, you first need to understand our special situation. We not only have distributed teams, no, every single team is dispersed worldwide. Additionally, you find us in three office locations and in 26 remote locations, which makes all of that a quite balanced hybrid model.
And even the people who are close to our offices, nearly all of them enjoy home office at least one day per week. Now, let's look at remote at IO and what came with our, what I call the open source heritage.
Now, IO builds on the success of an open source ad blocker that was created by software developer Vladimir Palant in 2006. When Vladimir founded IO in 2011 with Till Feider and Tim Schumacher, this
open source backdrop defined the remote work culture in the company for many years. As explained in the beginning, developing software as an open source project requires the ability to involve any contributor, irrespective of their location, time zone or working hours.
And this meant that we needed to provide support for public asynchronous written documentation and communication, like we have a public IRC channel. We are providing our code and issue tracking on GitLab and GitHub, our documentation you can find on the adblockplus.org website.
We also support public work tracking, like mentioned in GitLab. And we supported very individual preferences regarding working hours and availabilities, treating our employees in these days more like contributors to an open source project.
And this perspective was the one defining most of IO's remote culture in the past. While establishing IO as a business, we learned that some of these cultural traits do not work too well for a for-profit company.
So there are a couple of things that provide some conflict areas, but let me share some examples related to remote work. For example, that tooling needs to be publicly accessible means that we, for example, need to make sure that topics that underlie business confidentiality still can remain confidential.
And we are limited in the tools that we can use. So this provided a bit of friction already. Then this asynchronous working style, where people chose when to work, it led to long waiting times between different process steps.
And it was very hard to implement standard agile practices, as they often favor co-located teams or synchronous time together.
So we found the lack of real-time techniques like, for example, the daily stand-up or pair programming quite hurtful. And what also came out of that situation was a lack of trust and a lack of team coherence due to a general lack of real-time face-to-face interactions and also a lack of ability to give direct face-to-face feedback.
Anyways, we wanted to stick to providing remote work because it definitely helps us to attract and retain talent and to ensure diversity. So our remote strategy nowadays builds on four building blocks.
Ensuring remote fitness, providing best tooling, creating an amazing workplace experience independent of whether you are remote or on-site, and ensure proper trust building, both in the teams as well as across company. Let me show you quickly a couple of examples for these.
So ensuring remote fitness is already a topic in hiring where we try to find the proper candidates who understand what it means to work in a remote setting and are able to collaborate and communicate in a fitting fashion.
And it also requires ongoing training and training resources. What you can see on this slide, for example, is one of our ways where we educate each other how to properly set up your situation in front of a webcam and the whole situation when you're having a video call.
Tooling definitely affects our software and hardware for video calls, what we offer for chats, how we track our work and document our results, and also how we can visualize our thinking processes. What you see here on the slide, for example, is SoCoCoCo, one of the tools that teams use to create something like a virtual office space.
Then trust building is a major topic both in teams and across the company. So for the teams, we ensure that our HR coaches support regular team building and team cohesion, that they are able
to provide appropriate remote facilitation in the meetings, and that they ensure that the teamwork is not impeded by the dispersed setup. One of the means that we use, for example, are what you see on the slide here, that our retrospectives work also in a dispersed setup.
We make heavy use of tools like Google Draw and also different ways for running remote retrospectives so that people can make use of these tools for continuous improvement, even if they don't share the same physical space.
Still, we understand how important that is, to get together once in a while. This is why in the past, before Corona, we made sure that each team meets three times a year in person to work together and also enjoy fun activities and team building activities.
Additionally, once a year, the whole company gets together for an offsite where we travel together to some nice place to have workshops, give presentations, but also just enjoy the time together. Still, this year, we additionally started to experiment with cross-company remote events to make sure that we
are completely inclusive and can also have something additionally to these offsites, which works in our remote setup. In general, we started with a remote open space, which worked amazingly well.
Then the fourth pillar of our remote strategy is the overall workplace experience. This starts with just simple things like providing every employee with a high-quality headset that can make a big difference. And also, employees working remotely all of the time, they get an allowance for an economical desk and also a good chair.
Now, as the last part of my talk today, let's look at what changed at IO when Corona hit us.
So in a nutshell, we were well set up for remote work, as you could see in what I just shared before, but definitely not at that scale. We had to learn and to adapt a lot. Give me a second.
So let me briefly share how it all started for us. So already end of September, sorry, end of February, one of our colleagues had an encounter with an infected person. And she notified management of that. And when we learned it, we immediately closed down our Cologne office where she
had been the week before and had plenty of encounters with the people working there. So by sending everybody home in quarantine, we made sure that the virus, if it had already started to spread, couldn't spread anymore.
In the end, this colleague was not infected, but it was a safety precaution we took. Then, you know that moving forward in March, there was a general lockdown in Germany. We were not enforced to keep our offices closed, but we did so nevertheless.
We closed the office in Berlin and in Cologne and also the one in Malmo in Sweden. And we, sorry, we issued a general travel ban. And this was because it does not hurt our operations too much if people work from home.
As mentioned before, we had the set up already and we were able to keep our productivity up even if we closed down our offices. So we took the safety measure that we were just able to do to make sure that really each and everybody in the company keeps safe and sound at home.
Then the spread not only in Germany, but also across all of the countries where our colleagues are working from. So we saw not only lockdowns, but also real curfews. And then the schools and kindergartens closed.
Overall at IO, 12 people had to quarantine themselves, but in the end, luckily only three turned out positive and they are well again. So I think we have been quite lucky overall, which is also due to reacting so quickly in the beginning. And for sure, we had to cancel all our planned in-person company and team events, which hit us quite heavily
because we had a great remote offsite, not remote, we had a great offsite planned in a beautiful castle in Germany. So I said for our crisis management, the overall goal was that we wanted to keep everybody safe and that we wanted to keep productivity up.
And to make this happen, we went through a couple of phases that I want to explain now. So if we first set up a Corona task force from several areas in the company, like office management, operations, workplace experience, people ops, security and privacy, and a couple more.
We then set up proper communication and information channels. Next, we made sure that everybody is set up for working in that new normal.
And we also created emergency plans for the case that one of upper management would get sick from Corona so that we were sure what to do and where all of the resources were to be found. And then with all of this in place, we just iterated, learned and improved.
So let's now deep dive into some of these steps and phases and let me share some of our best practices and learnings. So I think the most important thing at the very beginning was to keep everybody in the company informed, involved and engaged. The whole thing started with me sending out an email explaining the situation with
this one colleague in quarantine, and that we closed down all of our offices. A couple of mailings followed, but we also made sure that we had a couple of information on our intranet, like weekly updates.
We created what you see here on that slide, this beautiful Corona news hub where people could find any information around the whole topic. Including an FAQ that addressed each and every question that came up during the weeks. We iterated on that in our all hands presentations that happen each and every week when the whole company gets together in a joint video call.
But I think the most important thing to keep everything together was our Corona virus chat channel. Where people could vent their worries and share information and upload millions of memes and just try to keep close together in that hard times that we had, specifically around March and April.
So the next thing we needed to make sure that everybody is able to adapt to and to work under these new circumstances.
And we set up a whole list of measurements around that. So we started with offering two additional leave days to each and every body. We called them Corona community days because we wanted to make sure that people use them either for setting up themselves in this new situation, like shopping groceries or getting the home office properly set up.
But also to care for parents or neighbors, shop for them, make sure that the homeschooling for the kids is properly set up and these things. So two additional days for caring for us.
Then we closed the offices, but they were not contaminated or something like that. So people could get into the offices and get their equipment from them, like get their chairs for home or their monitor or anything that they needed.
So that we could make sure that the people who normally worked mostly from the office had a good equipment now at home as well. Still, if this was not sufficient, we offered 100 euro extra office allowance for each and everybody to, for example, buy a better desk or whatever, because people couldn't move our desks from the office.
We also looked into making sure that all the tools that we normally use for our remote collaboration and communication, that they were able to properly scale. And I think that the most important topic here was that we set up corona family care, because as soon as
the schools and the kindergartens closed, it became clear immediately that people were not able to work like they were before. So we asked our staff to provide us with 100% productivity and focus when they were able to work,
but to make sure that they focused the same level on their kids when they needed to care for them. So this meant that people could and still can register for corona family care, which means that they just
enter in our HR tool that they need to care for their kids on that day and these times. They share this information with their teams and then they're good to go. So this means that they can work less time without any pay cut.
And I think this was the major relief to all of the families that were affected by ketas and schools being closed. Next, as I said, we ramped up our remote tooling. So we were set up quite well before corona hit, but we needed now to get way better and ensure scalability and stability of all our IT operations.
So we made sure that our video call infrastructure was able to support more connections in parallel, that we set up a 24-7 help desk. We switched chat tools so that we could use a more feature that we just use a better one than the one we had before.
So we switched to Mattermost. We added to our toolbox a whiteboard and flip chat tool, which is called Mural.
And also we added a couple of games and I will come to this a bit later. And for all of these new and additional tooling that we set up, we also wanted to make sure that our privacy standards were kept up. So, for example, Zoom were completely out of the discussion for us, but also for all of the other tools that were
now added to the bundle, our security and privacy team had to audit to make sure that they comply with our regulations. And what you see on that slide here in that graph is that as soon as our COVID-19 measures started and the team started to add more tools, the amount of requests our security and privacy team for audits grew beyond their means for answering them.
So let's then look a bit more into team collaboration. Even if before our teams were already used to collaborate in a dispersed and remote-friendly setup, everybody being remote was still a new situation.
And some were not used to it at all and they highly appreciated the tips they got from their always remote colleagues.
And additionally, teams had to create arrangements to cover for the colleagues that had to care for their kids. So what we added to our mix of working together were daily in-person standups before we had a mix of in-person and ASIC, but we wanted to make sure that everybody sees each other at least once a day.
And we asked the teams to create written team agreements so that everybody knows when each team member is available, taking into respect the times that are needed for family care and homeschooling.
Then we provided remote facilitation trainings, and I want to highlight here, and this is why I put this book cover on the slide. We are having two amazing agile coaches in our company, Kirsten and Jay, and they also shared their knowledge in two of the talks that were given in the past days.
And if you missed them, make sure to rewatch them in the recordings because they, not only in that book, but also in the trainings they gave in the company, they shared their amazing knowledge and how to make remote meetings work, which is so important. Because you all know with video call fatigue and people not speaking up, crappy
connections and so many things that keep people from interacting in a remote meeting. And we also use these techniques in our remote team days. So even if we couldn't allow teams getting together anymore, like we did before, when we asked them to get together in person three times a year, we still wanted to make sure that they spend some time for team building or fun activities.
So the agile coaches also facilitated remote team days, which were better than nothing, but still not the real thing because people could not really meet.
And you may also have experienced that, that after a full day of being in front of the monitor and having remote meetings, you don't enjoy a virtual drink with your colleague that much because it means another hour in front of the screen. But still we tried to make it as pleasant as an experience as possible.
And after we now had covered our basis with all of the measures that are lined out before, we knew that this now was fine, but not sufficient. And because it is not only on team level, we also wanted to make sure to keep us all together as a company.
And there were a couple of measures that helped with that, like the coronavirus chat channel that I mentioned before. Also a couple of colleagues, they started to blog about their experiences in lockdown or curfew in the different countries that they are at.
You can also find a couple of them publicly on our company website. We introduced an always-on video call where people that were just missing their colleagues could tap into and have a chat. Once a week, we joined for virtual drinks.
In lunch break, we had online lunches together and added some games. We also added what we call a happy hour for serendipitous meetings. It is like a chat roulette where you get mixed together with a random colleague and you
either can chat for five minutes about whatever you would like or they are also pre-prepared questions. It's quite fun and you really learn a lot about your colleagues. And then we had to make sure that we replace our cross-company summer week with a remote event.
And also, this is what we just did last week, we created a fully remote hackathon and innovation jam. And all of this really helped, but it only got us so far because really no remote event can fully replace getting together at a company summer offsite at some amazing castle.
So let me now share some of our learnings. So the first one pretty early was people don't forget vacation and ensure that people take them. Because we saw that people in the beginning of the year expected that the travel bans would get raised before the end of the year.
So they postponed their vacations and they got tired and performance in the team started to drop. And also that the expectation then would have been that as soon as the travel ban is raised, everybody goes on vacation and the team is not able to work anymore at all.
So we educated each other about that a bit. Then you might have seen that funny mock-up of the Gartner hype cycle for emerging current times. It just was quite helpful for us to think about how to keep a close eye on the mood and pulse of the company.
So for us, we all went through something like this mood curve here. So at the beginning, everybody was quite aware there's this pandemic we need to stay at home. And then we made sure to set up us all properly. And then we had that peak where everybody was quite engaged.
We can do it. We are all in this together. And then we got into that big valley of disillusionment where people were stressed with homeschooling, with video call fatigue and just getting depressed by the long isolation. Still, and I think this is the phase where we are currently in a bit, is that we are ramping, we are getting used to it, we are adapting.
And the big question mark here is will we reach a plateau of productivity? It will not be the same as in normal circumstances, but will this happen or will there
be a major loss of productivity due to people not being able to stand the situation anymore? Because overall, with schools closed for weeks and lockdown extending into months and offices still closed, people started to ask themselves and also us on management level,
when is this going to end? So we are all in this together, but this also means that we are all getting completely stressed out at the same time. And this also meant that people were really struggling to achieve the goals that we set in the beginning of the year,
while at the same time either having to care for their kids at home or covering for the colleagues that did so. So this was where we needed to acknowledge that we cannot change the situation, we cannot make it end.
There is a new normal which is way less comfortable and enjoyable than the old normal. And we can only try to make it tolerable for everybody and accept that we might not be able to achieve what we set out in the beginning of the year. And these principles that you see on the slides here, they were not set up by us, they came out somewhere from the net.
But we discussed them a lot because they highlighted quite well what you can expect under these circumstances and what you can't. So then to support our people under these circumstances, at IO we ramped up our mental health support.
So even before we had yoga in the offices and we offered meditation, but then now we move to online yoga twice a week and online meditation on a daily basis. We had mindful leadership trainings to make sure that our leaders are compassionate and also get trainings on real mental health issues.
So we involved a psychotherapist for trainings and we now offer the tool InstaHelp to our staff which provides access to a psychotherapist for a couple of sessions and is free for our staff.
We also made sure, I mentioned vacation before, that people could keep their vacation days from the years before and did not lose them. So normally you lose, I think, more than three or five. It is normal that you lose them after March, but we allowed to keep them so that people take enough vacation and get the rest they need.
But the major part here was that we needed, in the stuff that we wanted to achieve throughout the year, we needed to de-scope and to de-paralyze what we wanted to achieve in terms our strategic goals throughout the year.
And we discussed this quite diligently. And lately we are now discussing whether we should reopen the offices because, as in the past, keeping them closed worked best for achieving our goals of keeping everybody safe and keeping up the productivity.
But now, after nearly half a year, we see health and productivity declining and not due to Corona, but due to offices closed and the travel ban. And thus, we now need to reconsider. So we have a re-entry plan in our drawers already since April. We set up
all of the things that we would need to do to get people back into the office. And based on that amount of measures to take, we put it away again and said that there is no issue with having the offices closed for quite some time longer. So let's just keep it at that.
But as I said, now with the moods changing, we need to see what we need to do to make sure that at least more people than currently can use the offices again. So we involved our medical and our workplace security advisor and they supported us with a proper risk assessment of what we need to do and how we need to involve the whole company.
But I think the most interesting and most complex question of this overall Corona re-entry plan to the offices is not which rules do we need to take into account, but how to make people comply with these rules.
And I said we had this hackathon and innovation sham last week and we made it a project for that innovation sham. And a couple of teams worked on that and they came up with a couple of great ideas on how to enforce rules, but also how to incentivize people to comply with rules.
But the most important outcome of that innovation sham was that part of educating people why the rules are important, that this needs to be focused the most. So what's next for us? The first thing is that in August there will be a pilot for in-person team days.
So our security and privacy team, which is the most thorough and diligent in terms of making sure that rules are really complied with. They created a great framework on how to get together in person while
still making sure that people don't infect each other, including voluntary Corona tests upfront. Then in September, we are going to decide whether we want to allow people back into the office.
We will also provide influenza vaccinations to our staff to make sure that at least with that, we can probably ensure that the immune system is kept on a good level. Each and every year we are running our own ad blocker developer summit, which this year we will move to a remote setup like this remote FrostCon as well.
And we will consider whether internally we are going to have another cross-company remote event. We need to balance whether these cross-company interactions are valuable or whether we are adding to that video call fatigue that we are facing.
And last but not least, in December we planned our Christmas party. We don't know yet. Will this happen? Can this be in person? So what we learned in the last three months overall is that we just can't plan for something like that. Things will change quickly and at the moment we can still hope that probably we can meet in
person at least at the end of the year, but probably it will move to next year as well. So I'm wrapping up with a very quick overview on what we changed here between old normal and now the current COVID-19 times.
I won't go through all of the details here because I'm a bit late in my timing, but feel free to address these topics in the Q&A afterwards. So let me end with three very quick major takeaways that I would like to share with you. So first one, working remotely under normal circumstances is totally different from working remotely during a pandemic.
Our second takeaway is that both as a leader as well as whatever level or experience you have in the company,
it is so important to be approachable, to share your stories, to build up compassion and stay kind because you all share that same stress level. And third, really nothing beats an in-person encounter. We really tried it.
We tried so many options of emulating in-person encounters with remote means and you get so far. But in the end, nothing beats an in-person encounter. And with that, I'm done with my talk. I'm looking forward to your questions now. And also as said, because nothing beats an in-person encounter, I'm really
looking forward to hopefully meeting you again in person next year, next year's FrostCon. Thanks everybody. And please let the questions come in either spoken or in the chat.
There are questions in the chat. You should probably read them out loud and under them also on the stream cause the chat isn't recorded. I see. Okay. So there was one question. Are there any typical mistakes that should be avoided?
And I think that our major mistake was that we thought we could just move everything we did together on site or when we did cross company events or team events. And that we could emulate them remotely if we just did it really well and just wanted it enough.
But it didn't work out. So we even considered remote beer pong for one of our remote events. We let that drop in the end. But as mentioned, you can only get so far and you will really stress out people with offering too much and with involving them too much.
So if you offer some team building experience in a non-remote setting, it will be an enjoyable joint experience.
If you do the same thing with everybody at home in front of their monitors, it means that there are kids that people have to take care of in parallel. They will have spent eight hours already in front of the screens before that event and so on. And you need to take a lot more into account that the people are spread over different time zones.
So like when we had our first remote event, we really tried to make it work for all people in Asia as well as for our people in the US. Meaning that I, for example, started my day at seven with a breakfast and ended it at midnight with having virtual drinks with the people.
Which is totally okay if you're on an off-site. But if you spend that time in front of your monitor, it gets really stressful. Then there is another question or comment here.
One of the most interesting things that has happened with the remote conferences, remote working, is that people have been able to collaborate from different parts of the world. When we all get back to the normal, how do you think we can still accommodate this thing, which is geographically quite challenging? That means we will have to leave out people who have joined in, which would be sad.
I think for, I'm not quite sure that I agree with you here. Because to an on-site conference, be it a public one or a company event, you can invite people.
People can travel there. You spend the time in the same time zone. When you have a remote conference, you need to make sure that everybody can join in their specific time zone. So it needs to be a 24-hour thing, which again means that you don't have the interaction between each and every participant that you would have when everybody would be in the same time zone.
As the question of flooding, and I'm going to move forward, how to onboard new team members best, especially young ones which have to learn basics. We went with our normal approach, like providing them with mentors, but making
sure that these mentors are well versed in remote tooling and remote facilitation techniques. And also made sure that these new team members get the proper onboarding trainings as soon as possible. And also, so probably to explain how we normally do onboarding, this is that we, even for remote workers, we get everybody to cologne for two weeks.
And this means that they can mingle in between themselves, but also with the rest of the onsite staff. And now this was not happening anymore. But we hired 50 new people to IO since the beginning of the year.
So we did a lot of remote onboarding and it worked quite well. So the people I asked afterwards, they told me that the experience was really nice. And we also improved over time based on what we learned in the beginning. For example, that is also important even in a remote setup that the group of new starters can, has
their joint chat channel or video channels that they mingle as well and share their first time experience as well. Next question, you talked about team agreements beforehand. What did these contain besides the availability hours of the team members?
Additionally, it was also about how people can be addressed best. So would you like to receive an email or would you like to be pinged on our chat tool? Do you want to have your discussion in one chair ticket, for example?
So it was a combination of how the team wants to work together in these days, but also like a manual to me, how can you work with me the best in these days? Taking into account childcare, for example.
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