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thank you so much for joining us today as we kick off the distributed teams
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track at railsconf my name is Maria Vera's I am VP of engineering at free
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agent at free agent for over ten years we've been building accountancy software using Ruby on Rails that puts
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freelancers and it small businesses in control of their finances our head
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office is in beautiful Edinburgh Scotland but about 25% of our
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engineering team works from home in other parts of the UK I'm Glen
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Vanderburgh I'm VP of engineering at first we use predictive analytics and rails to help real estate agents make
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more effective use of their marketing time and dollars our company is located in Durham North Carolina but I work from
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home in Dallas and about one third of our company works remotely the two of us
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recently spent five years as colleagues helping to manage a large widely distributed software development team at
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LivingSocial elite building social is started with offices in Washington DC
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that was our head office but it grew it opened engineering offices in Boulder
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and Portland but still the majority of the engineering team which grew up to
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200 people at one point we're working from home from all over the US but also
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in the UK Mexico Brazil and eventually China India and Australia between us
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we've been a part of several distributed teams for the past eleven years including today at free agent and first
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while working together LivingSocial we found that we shared a passion for understanding how to do distributed
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teams well we're strong advocates of such teams and we both think that the distributed teams we've been a part of
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have been some of the best teams we've ever experienced but when we say things like that a load of people seem to hear
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things like this we'll hire some senior engineers and we'll figure it out or distributed teams are just as good as
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co-located to in exactly the same ways or even it'll be easy so those things are not what we
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mean when we say that distributed teams had a good idea at a great choice for your business none of those statements
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are true and they don't have to be true for distributed teams to be a good idea
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there are also plenty of people who think distributed teams are a bad idea and they make statements like these from
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executives at Zaarly IBM and Yahoo we also believe that these statements are
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false and they missed the point that distributed teams have their own distinct kinds of benefits in these
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cases what we see is a lack of willingness or commitment to do what's needed what needs to be done to succeed
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and that it's okay if that's the way a company wants to run their business one
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size doesn't fit for everybody doesn't see it all but today we're going to talk
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about some of the lessons we've learned over the years we've made a lot of mistakes along the way and but whether
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you are an engineer a manager or a senior leader in your company we hope this talk will help you to avoid
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repeating some of those mistakes and we'll help you take advantage of the benefits in distributed teams provide
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and hopefully avoid the same part of some companies like you who are IBM -
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and others kind of building a distributed team and then having to take that benefit away if you are an engineer
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or an individual contributor some of these things might not seem immediately applicable to you but as a remote team
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member you bear some of the responsibility for making a distributed team successful through your own
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behavior and you can influence your management and help them understand the challenges they're facing and if you're searching
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for a new remote position you can ask the right questions to find a team that is set up for success part one make a
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commitment choosing this path requires commitment half-hearted efforts will
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result in a worse experience rather than a better one company leadership has to support a distributed team strategy in
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this section we'll talk about things that will test a team's commitment and show you some of the answers that we've found
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so that you'll be prepared at the start when you're beginning going down this
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path along the way as you face challenges and later when the strategy
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is questioned by new managers executives or investors and you start by investing
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in the basics and the basics is organizational culture but how do you
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build company culture when you are not working shoulder-to-shoulder a lot of people as that question a lot of people
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are very skeptical about this and but distributed teams can also have a great
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culture it will just be a little bit different the culture has nothing to do
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with the physical space in the you occupy or who you see it with kind of the space certainly contributes to the
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team environment but it does not build good culture we have amazing offices a free agent but that doesn't that is not
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what makes good culture for us you can have the best offices you can have people working shoulder-to-shoulder and
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still have a very toxic culture so to us culture is all about the people all of
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you kind of your common goals your common values and also their respect for each other so it's caring about the
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success of your customers and it's caring about the success of your colleagues and their world view in fact
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the two companies that have worked with the stronger cultures have fully embraced distributed teams in the case
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of LivingSocial their culture has furthered lethal agility of a team so
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most of the people we used to work with are is still in touch every single day supporting and caring for each other
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long after they've left the company another basic commitment is to invest in
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the best tools that your company can afford better tools make communications easy some simple things have really big
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payoffs good computers with quality cameras headsets easy to use communication software for chat video
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documentation etc start there and then pay attention to how well those tools
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are making meeting your needs make sure everyone that needs them has access and knows how to use them and
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help people who are having difficulties if your engineering team has access to slack and JIRA but no one else in the
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business does it will be difficult for them to collaborate successfully at first and free agent where we work every
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single person in the company uses the same tools consider that case that cost
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when making tool choices for example remote paring using SSH and tema T MUX
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works great for us nerds but it leaves out less technical team members like product managers and designers but a
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tool like screen hero can be more inclusive you need a critical mass of
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remote developers if you just have one or two remote people on a larger team that builds friction and resentment that
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comes from having special snowflakes that get special treatment if you don't have a critical mass of remote people
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they won't have a sufficient voice in the culture building process what constitutes critical mass is it a
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quarter of the team a third even a half the proper threshold will vary from team
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to team and it will actually fluctuate once you've made the important changes in work practices and habits maybe it's
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not as important to have as many people who are remote but here's the rule as
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long as the remote team members feel like second-class citizens your balance is off and it doesn't take senior
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leadership to influence that situation you can start by helping eliminate the us-versus-them attitudes between locals
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and remotes and terminology is an important part of this the terms remote
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and local are alienating and emphasize the distance and the difference so we
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started emphasizing the term distributed which puts people on an evil equal footing some big breakthroughs at
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LivingSocial came from individual contributors who started adopting this more inclusive language but that's it
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it's quite helpful to have managers and technical leads as well working full-time from home
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so one so that management understands the issues firsthand until so that there's not a perceived
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glass ceiling for remote workers at least it is at least it's very very high because if employees feel that that
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location is a barrier to their career progression they will live probably when you need them the most
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so everyone in this picture so blame in dollars event in LA and myself in
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Scotland I started as engineers and moved into senior leadership positions over the years working full-time from
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home all over the world but also those in the DC office and the head office like our VP of engineering Ryan Owens
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work sometimes from home so Ryan used to do a couple of days a week from home and
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I got this picture from one of the engineering All Hands meetings he was hosting from his home office with his
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amazing for bobblehead collection it's even more impressive today and I got him to send me a picture just for that's the
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latest version as of yesterday how that looks like is getting out of control but waiting and or Jesse link another of our
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directors of engineering who work place as well in our DC office if I used to
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strategize from home every solvent with us in her cut form as you can see here
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so but even today when I propose engineers to become team leads big
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question if that is possible given that the work from home and it should not be
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an impediment if the right support and commitment is in place for them culture
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grows through shared experiences that's why it's important for even the office based employees to work from home
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occasionally especially on days when they have meetings so that they can have the same experience as the home based
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team members eventually the whole team needs to work in the same style whether
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they're local or remote and this is another place where individual team members helped to shape the LivingSocial
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culture by choosing to work in ways that worked for everybody likewise it is important to get the team
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together face to face but fight the temptation to use that time to maximize
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productivity it doesn't have to all be fun and aimes either but the best use of face
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time for a distributed team is to get to know each other better that improves
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empathy and communication and it makes your team more productive even later
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when they're apart and finally you cannot treat remote homicide employees
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equally but you can treat them fairly under study sense so each group will
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have the perks and challenges that the other group doesn't and as a manager if
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you are not vigilant that can lead to a partner's kind of usually that means that you need to be aware of practices
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or policies that are fairly sable one group of employees over the other and try to find the balance but as a team
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member we see in recent it's important that you also focus on the unique benefits of your situation sometimes we
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focus more on what we are missing rather than our own privileges and it's
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important to be aware of the pros and cons of both groups once one of my team
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members who is based on the test Coast was asked to attend a meeting that began
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at 7:00 a.m. his time and as the meeting started he made a kind of annoyed
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comment about having to wake up so early and it was important for him to realize that his commute was from the upstairs
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bedroom to the basement but some of the people he was meeting with in on the East Coast had had to get up early get
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dressed put on makeup in some cases brave dc-area traffic in order to get to the office by 9:00 for another meeting
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that they had already had so it's important that you understand how good
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you've got it and where the real problems lie and empathize with the other people on the other end of the
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phone line other examples are for example important decisions it must be made in a setting
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with all the stakeholders have a voice so lunch time at the local restaurant is
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probably not the best place to have a strategy meeting or architecture than a
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review it also doesn't mean that you have to limit the social aspect of a
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team like just because some people are going to miss some so local employees still should be able
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to go for lunch together and enjoy the fact that they are together but remote employees can also find ways to engage
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in social events so at free agent we have Wednesday's remote coffee where a
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group of people if they're free they just get together have a coffee a drink and they just talk for a while the same
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but if you were going into the park after work or for lunch and during health and well-being month as well as
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free agent we have it specific sessions to address the challenges of remote employees and so that they can keep
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healthy because it's different what they might do is they're at home but if they have to come into the office every day
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part to communicate intentionally the point here is that on a distributed team
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communication doesn't just happen by itself look people are great at
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communicating face-to-face so good that it happens automatically in ways that you might not even notice
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think about it you notice facial expressions and tense postures or smiles
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high-fives and other signs of success you notice who's talking together a lot lately or what reference books are
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appearing on colleagues desks all of a sudden you overhear conversations in the hallway or in the break room and in all
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of those ways you implicitly pick up on things that are happening in your team and those things don't just happen by
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themselves on a distributed team you have to compensate in at least two ways you should plan for important changes
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and decisions to be communicated widely and repeatedly and you should make
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opportunities for more casual and serendipitous communication to happen through the team that might all sound
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like just a lot more work that you have to do but the casual implicit
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communication patterns of a co-located team have their problems too sometimes
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important decisions leave out crucial stakeholders often they're not communicated as widely or clearly as
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they need to be and nearly always the rationale and thought process behind the decision gets lost let's face it every
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team would benefit from being more thoughtful and about their communication patterns and
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in one respect is fairly obvious white communication is vital because on a support team that's how we get our work
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done but there's a less obvious reason and it's because communication is how we
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build trust within a team and without trust a team cannot be successful so
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Patrick Lencioni identifies absence of trust as a primary problem with
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dysfunctional teams so when we trust each other we can be both vulnerable
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with each other and when we are vulnerable we have made our mistakes we ask for help we tap into each other's
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experiences and skills more easily as well that's why blameless cultures are so important but all this leads ultimately
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to making better decisions and delivering better solutions for our customers but as importantly when you
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trust your team you feel accepted and you are more comfortable and ultimately
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enjoy your work more so as a manager trying to build the cohesive team or as
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a remote employee kind of most of our efforts should focus around kind of building that trust and Trust is
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important in several directions so it can be done worse if you are leading a team kind of with the team that you
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support it should be upwards with your manager or all the leaders in the company but as importantly it should be
00:16:57.010
outwards with your peers and those are not just other engineers is with fears across the whole organization so I spend
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a lot of time trying to understand kind of what are the problems of the head of sales where are the problems that
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customer services have what are the problems that marketing has and I try to make sure that I build those
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relationships and understand those problems every day so regular 1 1 is a good tool for this
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and an important way to compensate for losing some of that accidental
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communication the claim was talking about in the office environment with a 1-1 you get a chance to truly get to
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meet your team mates your manager kind of know more about them kind of the
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interest aspirations issues and have them light-hearted conversation and we do this because the better you
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know the people that you are with the easier will be for you to pick up on certain cues are they happy abalone Lee
00:17:55.129
are there spark is anything bothering them and if you are in an office as
00:18:00.710
we're saying you probably get those clues from bumping into them in the kitchen or by the lift but if you don't know
00:18:07.639
about it you won't be able to address those issues and there will be people like you can see here in your team but
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don't find that easy to proactively reach out to you or others like for
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example Kent Beck and it's everyone's job not just managers jobs to make sure
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that everyone in the team is successful so the takeaway here is that out of
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sight should never be out of mind so we need to make sure that we are present in
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people's minds hopefully for the right reasons we've talked about committing to good tools but internet-based
00:18:45.139
audio and video tools can be a real challenge it's worth learning the ins and outs of the tools that your team
00:18:51.259
chooses so that you can help meetings to go smoothly you don't want as a remote employee or even just a member of a
00:18:57.950
distributed team you don't want meetings that involve remote employees to seem like a bunch of extra hassle also
00:19:05.330
whenever you can prefer video to audio only conversation one-on-one it conveys
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so much more personality and helps geographically separated people get to know each other better in meetings
00:19:17.929
especially when several of the participants are in one room video is
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even more beneficial it helps the remote participants put names to faces and voices just seeing facial expressions
00:19:29.690
and and lip movement makes voice more intelligible over a noisy audio channel and even just seeing who the people in
00:19:36.859
the room are looking at makes the flow of a meeting much easier to grasp and choose the right tool for each situation
00:19:43.580
I think of communication tools is fitting somewhere along three different axes synchronous versus asynchronous low
00:19:52.009
bandwidth versus high as in text to video and persistent versus ephemeral
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and depend we're a tool fits in that space they should be used for different purposes
00:20:02.780
don't stress about this remember if you choose it it will be the right tool for the job trust David but you know there's no
00:20:10.700
universal rule well I find that when you're exploring ideas ideas that aren't well understood you need people
00:20:16.730
communicating fluidly in real time in other words a video conference or an in-person meeting when asking questions
00:20:24.140
you think others will know the answer to fire off a message in group chat so that you don't interrupt anybody the right
00:20:30.200
person can respond and other people who might benefit from seeing that answer can see it as well and when communicating important
00:20:37.190
decisions use a persistent searchable text-based channel to maximize the threat spread of the message and
00:20:43.610
minimize ambiguity possibly supplemented by a recorded or video announcement
00:20:50.890
different time zones and different work schedules make syncing up for meetings much more difficult time zones are a
00:20:57.890
bigger challenge for a distributed team than sheer distance time overlap on a
00:21:02.960
team is desirable so that communication can be more synchronous when possible try to build teams with compatible time
00:21:09.290
zones at least three to four hours overlap during the work day but even time zones aren't all bad at
00:21:15.260
LivingSocial we benefited from having round-the-clock coverage Maria and others in Europe and Australia saved the
00:21:21.620
sleep of many us engineers when things went wrong during our night time but you
00:21:27.920
should also learn to work in less synchronous ways write stuff down circulate proposals for review solicit
00:21:34.760
feedback and so on getting good at this kind of thing can make your team more effective with less time spent in
00:21:41.270
meetings or blocked waiting on meetings another way of building trust is showing
00:21:48.230
your work so letting people know what you are up to and being good at communicating in writing is very
00:21:54.620
important in distributed teams but being remote doesn't mean that you have to give up stand up retrospectives the most
00:22:02.060
planning meetings there's solutions to run all those things in effective ways
00:22:07.220
in a distributed context and those are great opportunities to really show your
00:22:12.530
purse and kind of share your interest with your team so sometimes unfortunately the
00:22:18.090
tools let us down but don't let them stop you you know get a little bit creative because as they say if there's
00:22:24.360
a will there's a way and you can work around those problems so those team gatherings are really key
00:22:30.660
to building kind of the social aspects of the relationship between team members
00:22:35.730
when they are apart so setup lemon here at LivingSocial was incredible at doing
00:22:41.640
just that Konoe she and others in our team contributed immensely to our culture
00:22:47.190
just by not being afraid of being themselves so demos in our merchants
00:22:52.620
team at LivingSocial came with our a guest DJ's at the beginning and at the
00:22:58.110
end of the demo and really was a big part of keeping all of us up to speed with what everybody was working on but
00:23:04.860
also learning and sharing that knowledge and kind of having fun together on a Friday at the end of the day so if you
00:23:12.120
can do a distributed conference kind of in keynote via hangouts like this you
00:23:17.700
can really do anything and if you are going to showcase your work you can make
00:23:23.940
it memorable as well and fun for everybody part three be clear even if you do
00:23:31.680
everything we've already said it will still cause problems if your team doesn't understand how the distributed
00:23:37.080
team should work if you're a leader it's your job to provide that clarity if you're clear about the goals and plans
00:23:42.840
the team will help you make it work if you are not a leader ask for clarity
00:23:48.300
about these things these are the areas that we've found demand clear expectations set by the team leadership
00:23:55.100
the first is about how work is measured and evaluated one of the good things about distributed teams is that managers
00:24:01.950
have to learn to evaluate productivity based on actual results rather than perceptions of busyness so set clear
00:24:10.260
expectations about how work is measured and evaluated and review those regularly
00:24:15.950
it's also likely that in non fully distributed organizations there will be
00:24:21.750
some positions that require being in the office if that is the case leader as well needs to be very upfront and
00:24:28.559
clear and explicit about it and it might be very senior executive roles or it might be more junior or
00:24:35.700
entry-level positions indications you might decide that you need to have senior engineers in the office to mentor
00:24:42.600
those more junior one because if you know what is the point of asking the more junior people to be in the office
00:24:48.029
if they don't have anybody to learn from or it can be a specific roles that require kind of intense collaboration
00:24:54.600
with other people in the company that are not set up as well for distributed
00:24:59.789
work if most of the business is co-located which is something that is happening in quite a lot of these
00:25:05.009
companies that are starting to embrace distributed it starts with engineering but the rest of the company are not
00:25:10.619
quite ready to work in that way it's important that engineering has a presence in the office so that they can
00:25:17.070
interact with the rest of the business regularly it's also very important and
00:25:23.220
we know that from experience and to know who you can actually hire based on the
00:25:28.799
location so not having a good understanding of different countries and States intellectual property employment
00:25:36.480
and tax laws can get you in trouble down the line this is normally not a big
00:25:41.700
issue for big companies that have the legal departments a big HR department
00:25:47.100
but that can become a problem for a smaller business and quite expensive as well and it can also be flagged as a
00:25:53.340
risk during investment rounds or IPOs so emotional acquisitions here so it's
00:25:59.309
worth doing it but going to look at the recent kind of the implications of
00:26:04.679
bringing people from areas and maybe you haven't hired before the same goes for
00:26:09.960
your budget if you are responsible for the money for the budget for the team you need to have a very clear picture of
00:26:18.119
the cost of having a distributed team so how are you going to budget for the tools it's not the same buying tools for
00:26:25.080
five people but for 200 people kind of what is you're always going to have to be investing the most you can in the
00:26:31.499
best tools that you can so that you can guarantee that communication and it can get expensive so you need to be prepared
00:26:37.570
and what about home office setup are you going to pay for it are you going to pay
00:26:42.789
for co-working spaces there's no that right answer some it's okay to choose no to or to do it but you need to be
00:26:49.690
prepared you have to have a clear message for your team but most importantly travel for face to face a
00:26:56.279
kind of basis of the team and I can get quite expensive it's normally again not a big problem
00:27:01.659
with five people but what happens when you have 200 engineers that need to kind
00:27:06.700
of all get together in a location and you're based in Washington DC or San Francisco where accommodation is
00:27:12.999
extremely expensive so it's important that you plan for for those things budget is normally not a big problem
00:27:19.840
where things go well with a company but what happens when things don't go so
00:27:25.989
well we have unfortunately some experience with that and those are the first areas a business leads to cut
00:27:32.499
costs and that can be very damaging for a distributed team so what I like to do
00:27:38.440
is to manage this a little bit of some tips is to set a clear budget per person
00:27:44.379
to travel to head office a number of times a year so I normally budget at
00:27:49.389
least four four trips more if it's not kind of too expensive to get to the office that budget is allocated to the
00:27:56.950
cost of employing somebody rather than being part of the travel budget so that
00:28:02.409
if then we decide to cut travel budgets that doesn't affect kind of the money
00:28:07.539
that is available to bring those people into the office and so when we hire people remotely we account for that
00:28:13.960
expense as just the cost of hiring somebody also think about your strategy
00:28:19.149
to set salaries depending on location there's no one perfect formula but think
00:28:25.450
about it and decide what works for you I like to have a common bond a across
00:28:30.460
everybody and then have a specific adjustments based on location a for
00:28:36.489
example expensive location like London will pay a premium when a 20% from what
00:28:41.559
we pay in Edinburgh a so that if people happen to move that will happen then
00:28:47.259
they you know what how you can adjust the Sun very accordingly because it's a little
00:28:52.840
bit unfair if your pain a lot more money for somebody in London and then they decide to move to Edinburgh and they
00:28:58.570
keep the same salary and so suddenly you have a team with completely and equal salaries in the same location so it's
00:29:05.200
important to do your homework because people will miss about and they'll miss home and go to other locations and
00:29:11.580
companies finally need to start setting those clear expectations during the recruiting process so that people know
00:29:18.190
what they're signing up for and if you are not in a leadership position what
00:29:24.159
you can do here is when you decide to join a distributed team as some of those
00:29:29.440
questions proactively you may interview process so that you know what you're actually signing up for and we have some
00:29:36.190
examples here so for example you could ask how is performance managed who works
00:29:41.470
from home are there any roles not suitable for working from home are the people other people employed in these
00:29:48.340
same state as me or this country there's my compensation change if I move between
00:29:53.649
states or between countries the what tools work expense for retrospective or team meetings do you actually do those
00:30:00.759
things with remote people how often are you going to want me to travel to the
00:30:06.669
head office or to meet with other team members in person so the key here is to
00:30:11.769
get as much clarity as possible during the interview process so that you know what you're actually signing a fork so
00:30:19.749
we've been talking for a while now about all the challenges you'll face and we've been showing you some of our battle
00:30:25.509
scars but we are fans of distributed teams and we want to close on a more positive note we'll conclude by telling
00:30:32.440
you what we love about this kind of team and what you'll get out of it LivingSocial was able to build an
00:30:38.619
extremely talented team that went from 12 to over 100 engineers in less than a year in large part week because we cast
00:30:46.210
a wide geographic net a distributed team strategy today can be a strategic competitive advantage that's especially
00:30:54.070
true if your company is located outside a tech center but it can also be a big win if you're in a tech center those
00:31:00.879
cities are usually expensive and there's a lot of good a petition for good employees a distributed team can reduce costs even
00:31:08.649
when you factor in travel expenses and increase retention and even in bad times
00:31:14.529
there are silver linings for us at LivingSocial it eased the burden of having to do a big layoff we didn't
00:31:21.730
flood a specific geographic market market with a large group of people with similar skills that made it easier for
00:31:28.840
our team members to find new jobs not to mention that they all had good remote working skills one underappreciated
00:31:36.220
benefit of a distributed team is that it can make organizational change easier once everyone on the team is working in
00:31:42.850
a distributed style it's easier to organize teams more dynamically and fit the team structure to the work for
00:31:50.230
traditional organizations Conway's law here is a constraint for a distributed
00:31:55.299
team it can be a tool you still need to be careful because you don't want to treat employees like interchangeable
00:32:01.600
parts but nevertheless that in organizational flexibility is an advantage and as I said when discussing
00:32:08.320
communication strategies even though that seems like a lot of extra work every team would benefit from thinking
00:32:14.470
hard and being more deliberate about communication patterns the work that a distributed team puts into this can
00:32:20.669
produce improvements throughout the larger organization and finally a
00:32:26.580
distributed team strategy can potentially help you build a more diverse and engage team as long as
00:32:34.090
you're not left handed apparently it is it is not a silver bullet but it can be
00:32:41.710
a powerful tool by removing certain barriers and provide extra flexibility
00:32:47.049
for those that really need it so both our LivingSocial emerge free agent I've seen from surveys and retention figures
00:32:53.799
that remote employees are consistently more engaged with the business we appreciate the flexibility and they see
00:33:00.940
themselves having longer careers here so almost seven years ago and time
00:33:07.690
time really flies so this happened to me and at the time I was commuting every
00:33:13.450
day to the office in Edinburgh after a few months of much nataly's I decided to go back to work
00:33:20.860
and I really really struggle with the fact that I really wasn't expending
00:33:26.020
hardly any time with my little baby so my husband and I considered different
00:33:31.480
options one of them was going part-time but I really enjoyed my career and I
00:33:36.520
wanted to continue working full-time it was then that the opportunity to join LivingSocial engineering team working
00:33:42.610
full-time from home came about so after joining the team I started spending all
00:33:48.670
mornings with Ethan I would drop him at they cared about 1 p.m. in the afternoon and then work eastcoast hours the rest
00:33:56.860
of the day my husband was also at the time working from home and he could pick
00:34:02.020
him up a 5 o'clock when he finished his UK hours and we both doing all that time
00:34:08.140
I'm after today he has managed to spend a very good part of our lives with Ethan
00:34:13.960
and continue developing our careers and I am 100% sure that my career would be
00:34:20.950
in a very very different place today had I not had that opportunity over six
00:34:26.440
years ago and this is applicable not only to mothers by all means it's applicable to anyone that needs that
00:34:34.150
extra flexibility because for example they are the family main carers or they
00:34:39.220
have a disability that prevents them from commuting easily to an office or just working effectively in an office by
00:34:47.200
having the opportunity to work from home by itself it's not enough can we file
00:34:52.630
the commitment of my manager and without the commitment of my peers the rest of
00:34:57.880
the engineers to make it work I am those that were in the same situation could not have been successful so it goes
00:35:05.560
without saying however that when you are working it's important that you give
00:35:11.200
full attention to your work especially with young children you shouldn't be attempting to be doing both things at
00:35:18.280
the same time so when my husband and I are both working we make sure that we have childcare covered but inevitably
00:35:28.720
war work and family will sometimes make that and anyone that has ever worked
00:35:36.350
from home knows the drill I mean show your hands so in my swears a
00:35:44.410
legend Judith and priceless in my first senior leadership meeting my husband
00:35:52.040
decided that it was a very good idea to walk into our home office after the
00:35:57.200
shower in his dressing room so as you can imagine I was kind of
00:36:02.960
mortified but at the same time I was so relieved that he hadn't been any worse than that
00:36:09.790
but you know so don't do that try to avoid it if possible but sometimes
00:36:15.460
mixing things up is just what the team needs - thank you
00:36:21.170
what's your name it's important what do you want to show them what is that my
00:36:29.750
heart I'm daring what does it mean um and they scored that's right yeah so
00:37:00.920
they say sniffing he came home from school one day it was we were doing one
00:37:06.770
of those merch and demos and he had a demo - I know he was so proud of his pictures that he wanted to show to
00:37:12.350
everybody and in bad context it was actually a fun thing for the team to see
00:37:18.140
and kind of gave them a glimpse of my life and who I am and everyone enjoyed
00:37:23.450
it as you can see by the chat a on the side and it really helped those kind of
00:37:28.910
things helps to create a bond kind of within the team it works in the right context so I wouldn't recommend you do
00:37:36.590
it during a board meeting for example and but if it happens just be gracious
00:37:41.970
about it and handle it with with some you know with some fun in the same way
00:37:48.150
just be close kind of my manager and peers had a huge influence in my career
00:37:54.290
every single one of us here has the power to impact positively and more
00:38:00.600
importantly negatively those we work with so don't underestimate the
00:38:06.360
importance that every policy every decision every engagement with each
00:38:11.430
other has on building a company's culture distributed or not so don't
00:38:16.740
leave things to chance this talk was conceived and written and mostly
00:38:21.780
rehearsed remotely from Dallas and Edinburgh and I think we have two or
00:38:27.360
three minutes for questions so the
00:38:35.250
question is you know you want to get the whole team together face-to-face local and remote sometimes but how do you
00:38:43.410
handle sensitive things like having to layoff somebody that would be best done
00:38:48.570
that you really want to do face to face I can take it ok so when we've had some
00:38:56.070
situations like the layoffs LivingSocial yeah we kind of the management team we
00:39:01.350
had to fly into Washington DC more than anything to spend some time with HR and
00:39:06.990
kind of to get some guidance and counseling but obviously we couldn't bring everybody that was going to be
00:39:12.660
impacted by kind of those situations kind of to to the office so we are still
00:39:17.700
there did it we did it through kind of the same way that we do our work every day hang out and I call we try to be
00:39:25.470
sensitive on the time zones so that people wouldn't wait and I start hearing about kind of what's going on and then
00:39:32.190
they're waiting seven hours or eight hours till it gets to them so we try to follow kind of as people we're waking up
00:39:37.920
to make sure that we talked to the people as quickly as possible that we got them energy to hang out and that we
00:39:43.710
were kind of as sensitive and accommodating and trying to be you know as empathetic as possible with them
00:39:51.300
but that is the way that we worked anyway like you know during normal you know a layoff it's a big kind of
00:39:57.360
specific situation but sometimes you have to do as a manager can assume because behavioral issues that you have
00:40:03.510
to address or performance issues and we just make sure that we were all very comfortable with communicating via video
00:40:10.740
and be able to address those things successfully and there's a flipside of that during one early incident an
00:40:18.840
employee had to be let go it wasn't a layoff situation it was being let go further reasons and because of
00:40:25.620
conventional wisdom right the the hiring manager had him fly to DC and he meant
00:40:33.540
well but he said afterwards the employee said I've never lost a job before and
00:40:39.480
now I have to go sit in the airport away from my family and my support system and
00:40:44.930
and travel home having received this news and it would have been better if you'd done it over video my advice is
00:40:53.220
always good people first and really seeing how it impacts them and how can they be best supported when you're going
00:40:59.700
to share some bad news with them one more anyone okay I guess we answered