Among the many assumptions we had before fully ramping up on our recent projects, we understandably, though regrettably, took for granted the ability to work together. With a global pandemic and organization-wide remote work mandate, not only did we take on the ambitious projects, but we also did so without the benefit of working face to face. Although the organization as a whole adapted quickly, the bigger challenge was rethinking our workflows at the bottom line of our workforce.
When engineering teams shifted to working fully remotely, it seemed the only change was an increase in Slack and Zoom usage. In reality, the impact of a fully remote organization spanned greater than simply addressing how to get a “message” across to someone. We lost the ability to build rapport with teammates and managers, reducing empathy and a collaborative mentality. We now have the increased burden of sending more messages and also having to parse through more. We may have gained work schedule flexibility, but a recent people experience survey showed that we were now struggling with containing work hours and preventing it from bleeding into our personal lives. Perhaps the most unfortunate, due to our over-reliance on online interaction, is we lost the human aspect of being a team. We became just another point of contact to get something done.
Digital communication
To be truly agile, we need to effectively communicate the organization’s visions, plans, priorities, and timelines at every level. Engineers can feel closer to their work, align with the cross-functional partners, and consequently be more efficient, self-sufficient, and most importantly happy with their work.
Even communication within the same levels of engineering has posed a challenge. The most prevalent and ongoing challenge is coordination between our multi-timezone teams. It may be easy to “split up work” between the different timezones but there are always questions and issues to be worked out and the timezones continue to be a challenge.
Similarly, something novel due to our current situation is even more difficulty delivering information to pertinent parties. Everyone has an increased number of messages to parse and coupled with flexible working schedules, important announcements and details are missed, resulting in overwhelming friction between teams and delivering on time.
Safety
Safety is deceptively easy to overlook but exceedingly important, if not an imperative aspect of engineering culture. Of course, there is safety in the technical sense — having a robust continuous integration process to ensure we don’t introduce bugs to our customers. Even more significant is safety in the social sense. Engineers need to feel safe to make mistakes without being scolded in front of the team. If something breaks, we shouldn’t be saying “who broke it?”. We need to feel safe to voice our opinions regardless of position and history. Everyone has something valuable to add and not only should we be receptive, but we should also show our support where appropriate. We should feel safe to work overtime out of choice and free will, rather than pressure and coercion.
When everyone is behind a computer screen, it’s easier for us to allow unsafe behavior to slip by unaddressed. Leaders should proactively pulse check their team and address sources that make the team unsafe for its members.
In retrospect
My teammate once told me:
“I love having the option to work from home, but I hate being forced to.”
Remote work was thrust upon us and now that the initial joy of being able to work from the comforts of our homes has passed, we are now realizing how utterly unprepared we were to experience it for this long.
I am in full support of remote work, encouraging teams to use their time wisely and to spend their time where they want to be, but we need to accept that we were not ready for this. We need to actively find solutions and build tools to support the new remote work culture — to connect as a person, not a presence. Lest we forget our human nature.
