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I'm here to talk to you about local and remote teams and we heard was in the
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last talk as well dozen awesome talk wasn't they really did great with that I'm going to cover some of the same things it'll be a little differently
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from my perspective but uh but yeah I really I really enjoyed listening to Glenda Maria tell tell their experience
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as well so my specific perspective on this is looking at hybrids where we have
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team members who are local and team members who are remote and how to get the best of combining those two styles
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so I wanna start with a quick poll if you would raise your hand if you today are primarily someone who works locally
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in an office not moving out every single day but most of the time you're in an office with the rest of your team okay I
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may be half and then how many of you are primarily remote the other half makes
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sense how many of you would like to do the other ok so that's what we're going
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to focus on is some of the advantages of each why you might choose one versus the other I think there's a lot of value in each
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one and I've done both and I enjoy both and there's I think there's a lot to look at there so an introduction a
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little bit about me first my name is Ben clang I have been doing Ruby for ten
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years doing open source for 20 a lot of my appreciation for remote work comes from open source where you know when
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you're doing open source work most the time it's remote any way that your collaborators are in other parts of the
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world previously I founded a company called mojo lingo we were a software consultancy we were a remote first
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company from day one about 12 people not a huge organization but definitely learned a lot from that experience today
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I'm vice president business technology for power home remodeling so it's a much larger organization about 2000 people in
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the company 51 in the technology department we have seven scrum teams six states four countries and really about
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half and half when it comes to local versus remote or local versus distributed
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and again I want to say I want to stress this is my experience you know it comes from what we've done in the past and
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what's worked well for us I would say that everything you hear today has come from something we've learned something
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that hasn't worked and I'm sure that some of the things that we do today we will find better ways to do tomorrow and that's okay that's just part of the
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process so I want to start with a bit of background like what kind of teams exist
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what are we talking about when we talk about remote teams and I want to emphasize that when I say team I'm really thinking of a fairly small unit
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I'm thinking of three or five people not the entire department say but the actual people that you depend on day-to-day the
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kind of people where if they're not around you would end up blocked right so first of all local games that's a pretty
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easy one right people in the same building not really in the same building but in the same floor and in the same
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room even I'm reading that people who are just separated by as little as one floor start to lose some of the benefits
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of being a local team right some of that face to face interaction is lost when you have to go out of your way to interact with them so local teams were
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focusing on people who are physically co-located together preferably in the same room another one instrument aims
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again pretty intuitive people who are spread out in many different locations sometimes it'll be at home sometimes
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it'll be in a coffee shop sometimes it'll be in a co-working space we actually do have one guy on the team who for some reason just loves coffee shops
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he will he will spend an entire morning in a coffee shop I couldn't deal with the noise but it works for him and then
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there's a third time third type which are mixed teams so this is a type of team where you have most of the people
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on one physical location and then one person who's kind of an outlier this is to me this is an anti-pattern I don't
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really want to talk about much other than to say I strongly advise that you don't do it this can lead to isolation
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right this can lead to this one person being left out of conversation this can lead to people not having the same level
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of understanding about what's going on within the business what's going on within the team what's going on within the software being developed and sort of
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another spin on the same topic is where you have one team that is split into two parts so you have a part of the team in
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one location part of the team any other again you'll end up forming cliques they'll be small communication patterns reference
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to Conway's law earlier right when people are are communicating together the organization will develop that way so again I don't recommend this style
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either so I'm gonna say something that may be controversial maybe you agree
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with me I just ask that you hold your pitchforks until the end and I'll explain why I think this but I feel
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pretty strongly that local teams win they're the most effective most efficient way to to develop software I
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don't think I I think that all else being equal if you can control for
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everything else having everybody in the same room is going to be the fastest way to to deliver what you want and I say
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this myself as a hybrid employee spending about half my time on-site half my time working from home I say it is someone who found in business that was
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remote first and successfully wrote first I was very happy with that company and I say this is a manager of three
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remote teams and one local team I think it's better for communication I think it's better for camaraderie better for
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brainstorming and for resolving issues and even scrum teaches we follow scrum
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free religiously and one of scrums big things is get your team's co-located right so this isn't just me saying this
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this is kind of the wisdom being being taught so then why why even talk about
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remote teams if local is clearly the way to go why would this even be conversation that's because we want to
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be removed a lot of us want to be remote just from your hands I saw earlier you know half of you are doing it and another good chunk of viewer would like
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to swap whatever you're currently doing so there's a really great Stack Overflow article or other survey and it came up
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with 53% of people looking for jobs want some kind of remote option is that is a
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top priority in seeking a new position which means if you're if you're trying to hire these people this is a major
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competitive advantage for you if you have remote options in your employment then you have the attention of a very
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large number of job seekers right away additionally 11 percent of remote
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workers report higher job satisfaction or I should say the job satisfaction is
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levels not hire some of local or remote options versus purely local so it's not
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just about acquisition it's also about retaining the teams that you have keeping them happy
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happiness is correlated with productivity and with longevity within the organization this is a big deal right and I do want
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to touch on something I think that that Glenn Emery has said very well which is that not every position can be remote
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and within our organization we've called out a few specific types of positions that we don't we will not consider
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remote applicants the two that are kind of obvious are application support and
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infrastructure support the people that day to day have to interact with some of the end-users we are self hosted so we
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have our own physical infrastructure and we have the teams that manage that infrastructure we want them local in
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case something breaks they can unplug and replug it as necessary and a third one which is a bit of a shift for us is
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junior development teams so we actually we did a first time for us experiment a
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year ago where we put together a team of developers who were junior and paired with them a mentor to to bring them up
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to speed and we did it as a remote team and it was successful I want to say that the people who went through that program
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are all with the company still today and and they're they're absolutely valued
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members of the team but what we found was it was harder to support them and mentor them in the ways that they
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deserved it was harder to establish the kind of communication to jump over to the whiteboard and explain some kind of complex process then it would be if they
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were local so going forward we've started saying that all junior developers we want to put them at headquarters where they can be mentored
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with other team members and given that they attention that's necessary there so
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what are the benefits what are the benefits of enabling teams to be remote I'll start with benefits to employers
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first of all obviously it's a broader applicant pool if you're looking in one location best case scenario
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you're kind of saying give me the best person within 50 miles that's just a small pool to begin with no matter where
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you are if you can open that up and say give me the best person plus or minus three hours suddenly have a lot many a
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lot more options to choose from and ultimately what you really want to say is who's the best person for the job so
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as your organization continues to expand and as you can start to form teams in multiple locations as you can start to
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organize teams around locations you just looking at one geographic location
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or even one timezone you can actually look around the entire world this has a bunch of Vantage's it has advantages
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like taking better advantage of referrals so the people on your team are going to refer their friends hopefully if you're if you're a place that they
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want to work hopefully their friends also want to work there as well and if those friends happen to not be in your
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city you might not have the opportunity to work with them it definitely improves things like time to hire so when we as
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we grew we had to grow we doubled in size twice over the last two years
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basically we know W each year and the only way we could do that was looking remotely we just couldn't get the a big
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enough stream of candidates looking only locally so that was that was a major ship for us but it also increases the
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opportunities for diversity I think that the last talk mentioned this well you
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know if you're a mother with a newborn child and you don't want to or can't easily get to the office that's the
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that's a limiting factor right when I
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was when I was a single father my daughter would come home from school at 3:30 and I could be home to be there
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with her that was a big deal for me right that meant that it's not if I was tied to an office I would have to drive
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home to do such a thing and that's not feasible right but if I was able to work from home I could be there for her so
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that was that was a big benefit for me so the sort of the benefits the employees as well I talked about being
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home when my daughter got home from school but it's more than just that it's also a choice of lifestyle for myself I
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like living in the city I like being in an urban area I like not having to have a car but I came to walk
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to shops and restaurants that's that's quality of life for me a very good friend of mine get five kids has five
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kids they lived about two hours away from the
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office so two hours one way to drive from his house to the office and at the time the company we work for this was
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ten years ago they we did not have remote options wasn't on the table so every day he
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would drive two hours into the office and he would work full day and he would drive two hours home so four hours of his day by the time he would get to the
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office he had already been up for at least two probably three hours he was tired from the drive he was stressed
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from dealing with traffic and then even at work sometimes he would be trying to figure out how to make his commute
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better trying to find just the right time to leave - would traffic or started looking at train schedules to try to figure out is there another way for me
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to get to the office no doubt that impact of this productivity alright there's just no way you can be as effective when you're spending that much
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of your energy getting yourself physically to a location so living getting live where you choose and being
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able to do so remote that gives you that flexibility gives you the option of picking the lifestyle that's right for you and being able to have the job that
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that is right for you as well so one size does not fit all and then there are
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mutual benefits things things that benefit both the employer and the company life is not static the one thing
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we can count on is that it will change what has actually happened with a lot of
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our team members is their life situations have changed and they have needed to move so one of my favorite
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examples is a very good friend of mine he was living in the UK he got married to a Brazilian and they wanted to live
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in Brazil if his employment had been tied to his physical location then we
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would not have been able to keep him within the organization and he's a very strong developer so that was important
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to us like having him be a part of organization while he still was able to live the life he wanted to do and and
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allow his life to evolve in the way he wanted to evolve it that's that's important so that gives that gives him the ability to transition his life with
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while retaining the stability of his employment and it gives us longevity of someone who's value T member somebody
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knows and that we've already invested teaching them about the organization those are those are things that benefit
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both sides pretty well so location independence adds longevity to employment which is a win for both sides
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all right there are challenges no surprise right remotes not all easy I
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hope everybody he brought a pencil and paper I'm going to give you the three most important bullet points remote work
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would be right for this okay number one communication no surprise communication
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is the biggest challenge to remote work what may not necessarily surprise you
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the number two is also communication and number three is communication right got
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it okay great communication challenge number one my favorite time zones love time zones
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hate time zones time zones were the biggest factor in figuring out how and
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where to grow the team because while we don't click Lea care where you live we do care that you have the ability to
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communicate with your team we do care that you can support each other you do care that you can ask the questions and get answers and and get unblocked so we
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have rule of thumb teams a team should not spread more than three hours total
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not plus n minus three hours three hours total right so we try to group things and these circles are not exactly
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representative but the point is that we try to group teams such that no one is more than plus or minus three hours
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anyone else in our team and that gives a nice amount of overlap to the work day now you'll notice that some of those
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circles are decidedly longer than three hours and as I mentioned earlier one of the benefits of smaller teams is you can
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orient your teams in such a way that the teams themselves are within that three hour rule but across the organization
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you can have multiple teams and you can you can spread the work around that way so that does work communication
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challenge number two being able to understand things deeply not just superficially but truly understand the
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work you're doing and why you're doing it I love this quote by George Bernard Shaw the single biggest problem in
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communication is the illusion that it has taken place so you might spend a
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bunch of time trying to explain what we're building and why and depending on how you do it you may or may not have
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actually been heard I think this is one of the reasons we love whiteboards because when you can get up and draw
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something a picture's worth a thousand words it makes it so easy to explain relatively complex concepts when you can
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map them out like that problem is I doesn't really work so great when you're remote right you can't just flip a
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whiteboard I have tried lots of online white boarding tools and they all are kind of disappointing in one way or
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another but you have to replace that somehow so we lean a lot on video
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conferencing we lean a lot on screen sharing screen sharing is huge code reviews are a big deal and then my
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my CIOs favorite flow charts don't be afraid of flow chart this this maybe
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took me 15 minutes to put together there's no color it's not very pretty it's a bunch of boxes a couple Arizona
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bit of text but it really conveys very quickly some some things we're trying to get done and so this this has become
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part of our culture or and we're even trying to encourage more of it the point here isn't to burden you with
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documentation the point here is to communicate as clearly as you would on a whiteboard if you start to build that
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into your culture you can partially solve this problem of deep understanding
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alright communication challenge number three perceptions and distractions
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everyone knows Dilbert I can't see them at their desk how do I know they're working it's a real problem right anyone
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dealt with this yeah point to your bosses everywhere there's a flipside of
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this though as a remote employee my team Lee is always multitasking how do I know
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she's taking you seriously a lot of our communication happens in video
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conference video conference for most of us today means working on a laptop so if
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I'm speaking with someone on my team and we're having a great conversation is
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really tempting really tempting just to alt-tab pull up email answer something
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answer or click instant message that is so destructive it's so destructive the conversations happening is even worse
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when you do it in it in a stand-up or retro and you're just you're not paying attention the team that's something you have to fight it takes conscious effort
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doesn't it doesn't come automatically you've got to get to put that away in
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addition you need to make sure that - back to the first point about if I can't
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see the team how do I know they're working you need to also make sure you proactively manage up talk to your
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supervisors let them know it's going on for us a lot of that comes through dealing with tools like pivotal tracker
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and code reviews a lot of it has to do with retrospectives and excuse me stand-ups and sprint planning those are
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opportunities to communicate within the team but what's going on but also to communicate about progress so people
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know what's happening I'll talk to you more just a second so that's kind of an
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overview of some of the benefits and challenges I want to be really specific and talk about how we do it this the
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next few slides are going to talk about what we do at power to to work with these challenges we understand that
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there's value in both styles of work local and remote we understand there are business realities of acquiring and retaining the people that we want on the
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team and a lot of that and then retaining has a lot to do with happiness so we need to find a way to get the best
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of both of them first we looked at structure small teams three or five
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people that is that is a big deal for us is keeping a small and if the team starts to get too big we don't hesitate
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to split it apart until it into smaller teams and also consistent teams I'm they
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believer in not trying to mix local nor mode you can put two people in one location on the same team
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but if you do it they need to act as if they're remote need to be on video conferences on their own computers so
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that they have the same they have parity at the communication layer with everyone else in their team so doesn't feel like there's just just two people and then
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the rest of the team back up one okay
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then we have process scrum as I said for a big believer in scrum and there's this
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sort of related constant of Xu Hari which is where in the beginning you do it exactly like the book says and we're
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probably at that point now we're probably most of what we do is is doing our best to stick to the principles exactly as written without too much
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variation and then the next step for that is ha which is like where you understand the principles you can start
00:19:17.680
to bend the rules where necessary to adapt to your situation and then there's a mastery level which is where you completely understand everything and why
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the rule exists in the first place and then you can break the rules whenever you want because the rules no longer exist sort of like a matrix neo flexes
00:19:31.120
his arms the balls Bend I want to do that so for us that process daily
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stand-ups and retrospectives are really critical parts for managing the communication ensuring the communication
00:19:42.220
with remote teams stand-ups if nothing else give you an opportunity every day to make sure you communicate with
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everyone on your team it's really ZP right if we were all remote and just focused on our pull request it's so easy to to get into the editor push the code
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move on next thing and not even talk to anybody but stand-ups at least if nothing else we'll give you a chance once a day to to
00:20:00.820
communicate in retrospect isn't wet as well we'll give you kind of an early warning system if things aren't going
00:20:06.280
great gret retrospectives will bring that to the surface and it's just again another way to check point communications make
00:20:12.370
sure they're happening regularly of course you have to emphasize remote friendly communication we do a lot with
00:20:20.230
code reviews every single piece that goes to production has had a code review it's one of the three criteria we
00:20:25.690
require to ship code obviously text chat a lot of people use slack we have a tool internally called connect it's the the
00:20:32.590
same concept but it's critical not only because it facilitates communication within our development team but also
00:20:37.870
within a larger company anyone can talk to anyone at any time that's critical video conferencing and screen sharing I
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mean I've already given the examples for that but again without the ability to pull up a whiteboard be able to at least
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look at the same thing and talk about it makes a big difference in facilitating communication and then as I said
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diagrams love diagrams and then culture
00:21:01.350
face-to-face meetings it is my goal to at least once every 90 days spend some
00:21:07.690
time face space with everyone on one of my teams just to have that personal relationship with them we also do lunch
00:21:14.409
and learns and I got to give a credit to to Jill who's my audience I'm probably Nordic I'm calling her out right now but
00:21:19.990
she did a lot to make lunch and learns happen for our team she's a great job with that and that has been not only
00:21:26.289
helpful for onboarding and bringing new people into the organization it's also been really helpful in just getting
00:21:33.549
people talking across teams we as we enter their small teams and as we grow we end up adding more teams they don't
00:21:38.770
necessarily communicate as much as they would otherwise so lunch and learns are great way to get a larger group together and then choose tell me yesterday she
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wants two coffee dates which I think sounds like an awesome idea I think we'll be doing that when you're back all
00:21:52.059
right so we've talked about how we're doing it I want to talk about one more topic which is how we optimize for the
00:21:58.179
different styles we'll talk first about optimizing for local teams for the teams that we have decided will be local
00:22:04.030
whether they're development or support or DevOps there are a few things we can do to make them more
00:22:09.280
to maximise the benefits that they have first we built a headquarters that has a
00:22:15.670
lot of collaboration space I mean a lot probably at least within our departments
00:22:20.770
sort of area of the building at least half maybe more than half of the space is dedicated toward collaborative areas
00:22:26.160
lots of whiteboards lots of tables where you can pull up there's power to plug in
00:22:31.510
there are I don't know if this little puzzle piece chairs are there sort of like beanbags but it's sort of not but it's just a
00:22:37.630
more casual space where you can you can discuss things and we use that space not only for internal conversation and I
00:22:44.860
think this is really important we use it to also talk to the business these two rather serious looking fellows are from
00:22:50.620
our talent acquisition department and we're in the process of building some software to help them automate some of
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the work that they're doing this is them coming in to our area and speaking with the guy in the red shirts an application support guy and he's
00:23:03.460
explaining some of the features we're delivering in some of the buds that we're addressing and so if this is communication not only for within the
00:23:10.540
team within the department's also communicating out to the business so there's a real danger if you have an
00:23:16.030
entirely rote team that nobody can see that stuff just happens and nobody knows about it this is part of our effort to make sure that the business knows what
00:23:21.970
we are up to and that they can appreciate and understand what we're prioritizing and why and then on that
00:23:28.240
same kind of vein and actually even more outbound we have this this area called the knowledge dojo which is very much
00:23:34.060
modeled on the Apple knowledge bar concept we have this area which is outside it's in a very public space a
00:23:40.300
hallway where a lot of people walk by and anyone who has a technical issue of any kind can walk up and ask questions
00:23:46.000
you know I need help with a mouse or printer ink where I have trouble with the application and again it's just
00:23:51.010
putting a very public face on what we're doing and why ultimately if you can if
00:23:57.220
you do this right if you build the kind of connections with the rest of the business what it does is it lowers resistance I don't know I don't think I
00:24:03.190
mentioned this earlier on but the the business Ren is home remodeling and the company Ren is is in many ways traditional very local very much people
00:24:11.140
come into the office you saw the people in suits that's because they actually wear suits and we're a little different not only do we not wear suits a lot of
00:24:17.740
us just aren't even there so we need to manage that we need to let them know that we're working with them we've got the back and this kind of outreach is a big
00:24:23.859
part of that so it lowers the resistance to enabling remote work and then finally
00:24:29.379
as developers sometimes you just have to get away from the noise so we have these little pods we built there 12 of them
00:24:35.349
for the people who are local they become their office and then for the people who are remote whenever there are
00:24:41.349
headquarters they can use them as office space they're quiet they're there away
00:24:48.070
from the noise and then the colorful lights besides looking really awesome in this picture have a purpose if the light
00:24:53.289
is red it means you're busy they don't to be disturbed and please leave me alone and come back later and if it's green you can come in and there's and
00:24:58.809
have a conversation all right that's what we do for local what can we do for
00:25:05.859
a remote or distributed teams daily stand-ups I'm just going to hit that
00:25:11.709
point again that is a big a big part of how we manage the communication how we
00:25:17.200
keep the communication good and we don't have to take them too seriously as Darin is showing you what else wants
00:25:25.479
out the other thing I want to say about this is this is kind of interesting team this team has since been reorganized so that they are now entirely local but at
00:25:32.259
the time this picture was taken three of the people were physically in the same location and two of them were in remote
00:25:38.529
locations but the reason I show this is this is a good example of getting everybody on the same playing field you'll notice everybody is at their own
00:25:44.769
workstation on their own computer talking and communicating as peers so the guy in the bottom left and the guy
00:25:51.909
in the bottom Center and the guy in the top right are roughly 10 feet apart from
00:25:56.979
each other in their cubes but whenever came to team communication they would they would love the playing field to to
00:26:02.139
ensure that I talked about getting face to face as a way of enabling remote
00:26:07.799
communication and this is a big part of it so we it's it's not just for work we
00:26:13.779
do a lot of work when we just three times a year we call it create we bring all the developers all the remote
00:26:19.629
workers to headquarters we bring in the application support teams that they work with we bring in the infrastructure
00:26:24.999
teams they work with and we find that it's not a hackathon exactly how do you
00:26:30.729
describe it it's basically we take goals and projects that are hard to get to in the normal cycle development sometimes their bigger
00:26:37.460
picture architectural things sometimes it's a cool feature that we just couldn't work into the normal flow and
00:26:42.710
we'll go build it we'll spend a week building it what's cool about this and by the way not something that we
00:26:48.230
necessarily plan but was a beautiful kind of emergence emergent behavior was that the team's self organized and they
00:26:55.429
did it in different configurations than their daily their daily teams so when
00:27:01.250
they're out in the field maybe you have this group over here in this group over here but when they actually came to this session headquarters they picked
00:27:07.399
completely different people to work with and that's beautiful for for the kind of personal connections that are necessary
00:27:13.370
to both grow and also to get questions answered beyond your team and of course
00:27:18.649
it's not just work it's social - right so we we have both structured and unstructured time where people can this
00:27:24.080
is we're doing some kind of weird game show thing so that's that's one of the
00:27:30.049
structure examples we've done go karting almost killed somebody bits okay you survived but it's important right
00:27:36.350
because these these are the things that are hard to do in your remote it's hard to build those those social connections and the trust that comes from goofing
00:27:42.590
off with somebody all right so in summary there are three things I would
00:27:50.899
say when you have a local team you want to optimize those facespace interactions that's your core strengths right
00:27:56.269
you've got people there you want to give them as many opportunities to to communicate with very high bandwidth
00:28:02.389
both internally and externally second you want to develop the tools and practices that are necessary to make
00:28:08.600
remote work successful and this this doesn't happen automatically it takes effort it takes conscious thought and it
00:28:14.450
takes evolution which is the third point don't accept the status quo whatever you're doing today is is great but
00:28:21.769
there's always something you've been doing better and the retrospectives are and create our big parts for us for
00:28:27.259
analyzing that process finding ways finding what's working finding what's not and then finding what can be better I want to give you two links for further
00:28:36.500
reading I want to thank Martin Fowler for a really awesome article that guided a lot of my early thinking about how to build
00:28:42.139
distributed teams it's articles from 2015 not that old but he goes into some more detail on some points that kind of glossed over
00:28:47.960
here hi recommended and then we work remotely calm when we were hiring specifically
00:28:53.210
for remote developers this is where we would advertise and got great responses it's such a focus demographic I think
00:28:59.960
that that helped a lot it's also associate with the book that the the
00:29:05.330
guys that I'm 37 signals for called remote the website goes on with that book that's it so my name is Ben Klein
00:29:13.190
you can find me at be clinging just about everywhere github Twitter etc and thanks very much ok I'll try to repeat
00:29:24.289
the question so one of the sides I had a team that was that was hybrid the mixed as I said it was a bad idea right and
00:29:30.500
the question I think was when we did bring them in to make them a local team how did we how do we handle that
00:29:35.809
transition and what happens to people that were remote I get that right okay
00:29:40.870
so a couple things one one of the people just started coming into the office more
00:29:46.760
regularly and he was already in the area but it wasn't a big deal to start commuting right the other one was in
00:29:54.679
Australia and he he's commenting story he came in the organisation by a fluke
00:30:00.200
to be really honest I missed that he was in Australia when I started the interview process but by the end of the
00:30:05.809
interview process I was so impressed with him that I said we got to make this work and he was great because he he
00:30:11.360
actually worked really hard he for probably seven months eight months lived on East Coast time in Australia which
00:30:18.850
god bless him I couldn't do it right but anyway he we ultimately actually had
00:30:24.320
sponsored him and had him moved to the INA States so no one on the team was let go we did reorganize to to put them all
00:30:30.620
together but we we made that happen organizational and they were all on board with it that team in particular it
00:30:36.529
was it was a positive thing for them right so to repeat the question when
00:30:42.169
you're in a mixed to do a situation and I'm not sure if you were the only person that was any outsider or one of a okay
00:30:49.039
so you were in that picture where you had a bunch of you in one location one person remote and then to your point you
00:30:54.200
were having conversations and decisions being made sometimes without that person just because they were spontaneous
00:30:59.830
and then how do you deal with that it's tough if you find yourself in that situation the only advice I can give you
00:31:05.649
that you have to be very conscious about it and try to force more of your discussions to happen in a mode where
00:31:12.399
they can be observed by the person early text chat is probably the best place for that I don't think there's needs the
00:31:19.390
answer I wish I give you on our philosophy has been just don't do it wherever possible you can you can
00:31:25.809
somewhat help that by keeping your team small there's less of a risk of that if you're only having to manage three or four people you know if you're keeping
00:31:32.260
the team small it's harder to have one person remote you're either on the remote you're gonna be local just by virtue of having few people to adjust
00:31:39.330
but yeah I hear that that's a difficult situation and I would best thing I can say just try to avoid it I'd say good
00:31:46.000
question so the question is are there certain types of projects or I guess to extrapolate certain kinds of work that's
00:31:51.220
or projects the technology the type okay
00:31:56.289
is that are better suited to local versus remote yeah well so projects that
00:32:04.389
require you to physically touch things like putting a server into a rack that's an easy one and that's that's really
00:32:11.380
what led us to wanting those teams on-site in the development space I'm
00:32:17.289
trying to think of any project where it's worth purely writing code where we have that issue I can't nothing comes
00:32:23.230
neatly to mind pretty much everything once you once you get past that physical realm as long as you have a way to communicate I can't
00:32:31.269
think of any I think that either can be can be made to work effectively with the
00:32:36.490
provider that you're doing all the other things that you're doing stand-ups are doing retrospectives and that you're gathering the team so that the communication is occurring naturally and
00:32:42.639
oh one thing I didn't mention is besides just the three times a year we also if we have a big launch for a big feature
00:32:49.029
will bring the team to headquarters for a week and we'll focus on the stories that feature and the payoff to that
00:32:54.159
lasts we might spend one week on site like figuring all the pieces out and then for three months they have a really
00:32:59.710
good clear picture of out there trying to build and that helps a lot as well so the question is for teams that are mixed
00:33:05.500
right now what's my recommendation for getting past that to make them work when we did it we we
00:33:19.120
had that we had the same problems that I've talked about where people were felt isolated people were left out of decisions and what we what we tried was
00:33:25.800
a lot of video conferencing a lot of text chat a lot of notes in wiki's in
00:33:32.590
pull requests written documentation and then and then would try to encourage
00:33:38.290
people to remember when you had a pull up conversation to go dump the artifacts
00:33:43.420
from that into something that everyone else can see it can be done my personal
00:33:48.580
opinion is you've just got to be superstar like focused on on proactively
00:33:54.730
pulling those people closer and closer to make sure that that happens and I think that's hard I just think human nature it's too easy to have a quick
00:34:01.030
conversation and then act on it without actually informing anyone else my advice
00:34:06.280
would be if you can try to reorganize such that you don't have the mix you know and that takes time I'm not saying
00:34:13.090
it's easy or automatic but X it can be done I just think it's hard and I don't
00:34:18.430
think we will do it again if we can help it all right that's interesting so is you're saying that in your company it's
00:34:23.590
mandated that you have teams that are mixed some remote and some locals with the goal being to ensure consistent
00:34:29.530
culture okay and then so what are the ways you can address the culture arguments while not doing it in a mixed
00:34:36.400
team mode right okay so tactically some of the things I talked about the lunch
00:34:42.400
and learns are good because they they cross teams and because they happen regularly and our case every two to
00:34:49.870
three weeks depending on how excited people are about finding something to present at least everybody's coming together for that the other thing we do
00:34:56.920
and I didn't mention this but the other thing we do is every week we do demos on Friday and again that's the entire
00:35:02.260
department everybody gets together everybody sees what everybody else is doing and everybody gets to ask
00:35:07.330
questions and in some cases in this in this case like right now we have two
00:35:12.400
teams who are working on alternate sides of the same feature and so one happens
00:35:18.190
to be local one happens to be remote and in those cases we are trying to do more we put them in a single chat room those
00:35:27.069
are all like really small answer to your questions I think I think the bigger answer is it's a it the answer to
00:35:33.310
culture itself is culture is is getting people to to understand each other to
00:35:40.480
respect each other and to want to communicate with each other all of these other things kind of grow out from that right I don't think I don't think
00:35:48.130
culture is easy I think it's conscious and I think it can be done and I think and again bringing people together so
00:35:54.250
that they get that face to face time helps with that so that the help okay
00:36:00.520
good anyone else awesome you've been a