Remote Collaboration At RedLight
By the beginning of Summer, I’ve been asked several times: “and how is your company holding up with the new mandatory restrictions of working at home? Is it hard?”
Every single time someone posed this question, I smiled at the temptation of giving that simple and quick answer:
“Pretty good. We were a remote-friendly company way before covid-19 showed up.”
But the long answer is…
It’s complex.
A recent study from Steelcase concluded that “individual task is up, collaboration and creativity are down, short meetings are skyrocketing and longer meetings are decreasing”. At RedLight, we do feel exactly the same. We know by looking at our own metrics that colleagues who have their tasks set up pretty straightforward and can complete them independently, which is the case with most of our engineers and designers when projects start the development phase, are showing better productivity indexes since they started working from home.
On the other hand, people like me, project managers, product managers, Heads of HR and others, who have to keep a constant stream of communication, collaboration and inputs from teams to upper management, the lack of direct communication is not making my job easier.
Prior to the lockdown, most of the time, getting a message heard was as easy as stepping into a room and asking for everyone’s attention. Now it’s much harder, as we’re facing asynchronous communication and not everyone is online at the same time. People have their own schedules because of children, doctors appointments, taking their dogs out, whatever. This is not new for us but the scale is. Now you can’t invite everyone into a drawing board spontaneously. Instead, you have to schedule things first, which is clearly a barrier to the pace of collaboration we’re used to.
Thankfully, at RedLight, we already had systems in place to accommodate for semi-asynchronous, remote collaboration so we were used to some of the problems that many companies are facing for the first time. We just had to tweak our own processes so we can be 100% remote.
This came with challenges of course. And yes, we already had Google Meet and Zoom in our daily lives but making this our gold standard for collaborating remotely has its downsides which is the loss of non-verbal/non-written communication. If you’re attending in-person meetings, one can assess nonverbal cues like body language, gestures, facial expressions of a colleague — like getting if he or she is understanding the topic, getting the signal that they want to add something, or that they’re ready to fight with a new point of view. Most people talk with their own bodies even before saying something and this is very important because if you’re driving a meeting, you can fabricate a safe way for people to share what they have to say.
But by doing video calls, it’s not the same thing. In-person meetings allow me to look into everyone’s faces and see if they’re getting it or need further explanation. With video calls, I can’t even be sure if my colleagues are actively listening to me, which is frustrating to say the least.
Another issue with video calls — not just video calls but most collaborative tools of synchronous collaboration, is that they set an environment where extroverts can easily control the flow of communication at the expense of introverts. And if you are working in tech, you know this is a problem. A significant share of people I work with are introverts and they’re likely to pass on active communication unless they’re asked something directly. If this happened in an in-person meeting, I could easily sense their nervousness and create a safe space for them to share their thoughts.
These are, just to name a few, soft-skills problems that can damage our collaboration as a team, and ultimately, our results as a company. While video conferencing is providing a way to communicate, it’s still ineffective to support the flow of creativity that is felt in a physical space.
Which makes me wonder, how effective are the remote work tools that we’re using as a community of tech companies at recreating collaboration processes like the ones we had before?
So far we haven’t seen any tool that resembles an in-person interaction. This may seem obvious but remote workers don’t have access to situational chitchat, conversations at the café or kitchen or even being able to stand up and go discuss a problem at someone’s desk. Without a way to recreate this spontaneous social interaction, collaboration is very likely to be affected. And note that many companies, like RedLight, already supported remote-friendly workflows. But making it fully-remote is a whole new different thing. The organic sharing of knowledge that happens in a physical space is highly difficult to recreate and is lost very easily. The social fabric of a physical office is very fragile.
Furthermore, while working remotely, our social differences are exacerbated. These can be physical, cultural or even expressed in timezones. And that’s why you need to build a system of trust. To trust when your colleagues are not responsive on Slack. To trust when the tasks they have take longer than expected. To trust that they’re doing their job responsibly no matter where they’re working from.
Trust, by the way, is bidirectional — not only for you to trust your colleagues but for them to also trust you. And that’s why if you find problems by working at home, like being overly distracted, procrastinating over your tasks or just being unmotivated, you should talk to your manager or RH for the company to set out solutions for you.
Even with the main takeaway from Steelcase’s study, I don’t think we’re seeing the whole picture on long-term productivity. When working from home, the start and end times are getting eroded as the usual schedule you had before is now impossible to respect because of all your responsibilities at home, be it petting the cat, play with the kids, making lunch, etc. And this erosion of start and finish times are showing that people are working more than they have, which will lead to the offset of the work/life balance necessary to maintain mental health. One can easily foresee where this is going: working long hours for a long period of time will lead to burnout and no one wants that for their teams.
While workers were unconsciously protecting themselves from putting up long hours by practicing the log-on/log-off routines of commutes, now our workspace is almost overlapping our living space. Without an explicit separation between work and home, one needs to be able to set a system that reminds team members to stop working at reasonable hours. And this is something we have to look for in the future.
That said, it’s very important that team managers encourage the flexibility that people need while working from home, while still looking for work-life balance that suits everyone and works best in the long-run.
In Portugal’s current lockdown rules, there’s still no plans to allow “working from home” companies to go back to the office, making many companies embracing a full remote scenario, cutting on rental leases. At RedLight, we still want to provide an office solution for our team when all of this is over (will it ever?) so we’ll probably become even more of a mix between office purveyor and working from home company. All we can do right now is to provide the best conditions wherever our workers feel better and try to recreate an environment where collaboration and spontaneity are key characteristics of a platform where everyone can openly talk and feel included.
So what is different now at RedLight?
To address this, we moved all our morning status standups into a single one. It’s less time-efficient when it comes to merging all standups but at least everyone can listen to what’s going on across all of RedLight’s projects. It also works as our new smaller version of “chitchat by the coffee machine”.
We also rescheduled our All-Hands from once every two months to one in every three weeks. We’re also recording most of our meetings so if anyone is not able to show up, they’ll at least have a way to see what happened. Or products hands-on meetings were rescheduled from monthly to fortnightly. So yes, we’re spending a lot more time in meetings for sure, just to be certain that we all converge to the same page on what the next steps are and that the whole team is active. And yes, we’re pretty much aware of the trade-off between productivity and the amount of time spent in “unnecessary” calls. But these meetings are very necessary as they have become the most basic form of social interaction we can provide.
We started to take documentation more seriously. Not only do ALL meetings have a Google Doc to match it with notes on what was said and what the main decisions are but also all of our tasks now have a description where we state the context on WHY the task was created, what’s the GOAL with it and how’s the APPROACH to solve/implement. That way the engineering team has more information on the tasks even if the developers weren’t present at the meeting where tasks were outlined. By our experience, this action alone keeps team members informed, aligned with product vision and unblocked.
At RedLight, we want to keep the lively spirit from the office ever present within us and we need to fight loneliness and boredom at all costs. Instead of reducing team activities, we want to foster more and better connections with more agoges, more demos, more group calls. We need to create chances for team members to get to know each other. And instead of trying to replicate what we had before, we need to think how we can create a sense of belonging as a whole. It’s worth setting up a task force to outline how company culture is set to be kept alive mostly because we’re ought to be living in this scenario for a while.
To conclude, the question to how are you holding up with the working from home restrictions is more than complex. It’s a way to set your company apart from others when it comes to establishing proper collaboration while still respecting (and enforce in some cases) the work-life balance.
It’s something that as a team manager, I look forward to as this is one of the biggest challenges that our workforce generation will ever face.
Stay safe.
