I’ve been reading a lot of bloggers who try to brand their own spin on “work from home” It’s a bit exhausting. I kind of liked “location agnostic work” and I liked a whole lot less “living at work” The second just makes you really depressed but maybe that was the point? Ah yes, a counter point to work from home. Genius. When I talk to people socially, I hear the same line over and over “this is my 11th Zoom call of the day”
What a great story in timing by the way. Zoom, despite all of its flaws and privacy issues and the way they treat their users, we have people performing work on it. Not Skype or FaceTime or Microsoft Teams or Slack but Zoom is the winner here. Really a shame because there are a ton of companies who care more than Zoom but the reason Zoom wins 2020 is because they didn’t require participants work at the same company or have any sort of licensing lock in. They also allowed anyone to join for free and invite someone and you were talking face to face no matter what platform you used within 30 seconds. Skype required you create an account. Zoom, just one person needs an account and it’s “free” for most people. Great story in market timing and Zoom emerged like Facebook into a social utility of the decade. I just hope, unlike Facebook, they take this brand awareness and become better. Better at user data security and privacy, they throw up the middle finger to China and they charge for a service instead of selling people’s habits to the highest bidder. Zoom should also really focus on how safe their service is for kids and others who want to know they’re not being watched by a stranger. The Zoom success story is also why it’s so dangerous and sensitive to failure.
Sorry for the digression. I’ve been working at home since early March. I’ve watched our company who up until now had no work from home guidelines and used the “work it out with your manager” guidance that every big company does start to look at distributed work and how this looks over the next decade in our company’s future. This is huge. I often reveal in trusted company that I had a manager at this job who never allowed remote work. You could not work anywhere but your designated office. He was in Belgium and I was in USA so for a month, I’d get up at 3AM, go to the 3,4 and 5AM meetings in our office and then attend the local 3,4 and 5PM meetings with clients some of which were 4 hours behind. Then one day, I stopped. I setup my home office and worked from home 3-4 days per week that I didn’t have in person meetings. Due to the nature of our relationship, I did this for 2 years until I was transferred to a new manager. The boss who forbid working from home had 2 remote employees that worked from home.
I feel safe sharing this now not only because this was 7 years ago but because everyone, even the upper management of our company now understands how “head in the sand” his requirement was. I can only do work from an office? I can’t work anywhere else? I’m a single man with no kids and a gigabit internet connection with a home computer 4x as fast as the one you gave me to get work done and I can only work in these 4 walls? C’mon.
Now that I’m a manager of people myself and have spent 18 years in the professional workforce, I understand where he was coming from and can understand why it’s easy to just forbid something than try to understand and work with it. The same can be said for a lot of our political space at this moment. For the first time ever, I have 6 100% remote employees. They have never worked at one of our offices or even visited. They’ve joined our company from their homes with computer hardware mailed to them and I’ve taken a year or more of reading about distributed work to apply what I think is a good culture and methodology that will lead to their success. I hope I’m on the right track but if I’m not, I have zero shame in throwing out an idea that doesn’t work and trying something new.
Internally, I’ve said this a few times to colleagues. I’m 33 years old. I’m managing groups of 4-10 people now and doing so comfortably in an office setting. When I’m 63 (or hopefully much earlier), I’ll be living in a world where people are hired based on their skills despite where they live. The requirement for tech knowledge work in 2020 should be to hire the best person to do this job and if they don’t live or won’t live near one of your offices, you do two things for them
1. Provide a culture, tech stack and management style that thrives with a virtual employee
2. Ensure you take the savings of another warm body in an office and use that money to bring that employee to their colleagues or you regularly so you can breed a culture where the employees are bonded and there’s a nurtured relationship.
I’m so lucky to be in my early-30s to be able to learn how to manage remote employees now and not like one of my past managers and simply forbid it no matter the circumstance. To force people to drive to an office at 3AM to attend a meeting.
With this new group of talented people, I have a set of standards that I am trying to uphold to them so our relationship can thrive and therefore their work can be successful.
1. Honesty above all else.
2. Be approachable and kind and available no matter what
3. Be available at a schedule that allows for work life balance
4. Don’t expect them to be available at a schedule that interferes with their work life balance
5. Don’t put up doors inside of the team. Every meeting except 1:1s is open to all
6. Utilize group chats so the team feels in touch with you and each other but educate each individual on how to mute notifications and enable do not disturb
7. Bake in social time with each other
8. Celebrate successes outside of the group and showcase what the individual and teams created
9. Remain honest even when it’s a tough conversation
One thing I’ve really been working on lately and not in a smooth way since it’s new to me is ‘consent in communication’ When I message someone, now that we’re all remotely working I start with “are you free to talk?” With a follow on “about X project” Once I have consent, I may add “a phone call would work better, can I call you now or maybe 5 minutes?” This pitch with consent allows my team to feel that they have a choice whether they want to stop working and talk to me. When we do finally meet up, video is optional and everyone has agreed to be there. These ad-hoc meetings aren’t planned (obviously) so I have to tread lightly when approaching them.
Finally, this is my first time managing someone not on my time zone and we spent a few minutes on the phone talking about how we do this and what is a fair schedule and how do I ensure team collaboration and progress while still respecting those time zone boundaries? We’ve adjusted our daily stand ups a bit and I make myself available until 7PM for any questions that come up but I disclose that I have DND enabled after 7PM so their message will go unanswered. It’s my way to be available when they need me but not when I need some time off of the computer. We’ll see how it goes.
This wasn’t meant to be a long blog post about distributed work. I actually was going to talk more about my mental psyche and anxiety and stress in COVID-19 world but spoiler, I have none. I have a slight exhaustion from working too much lately which I’m managing but when I had a session recently with my therapist (our first since February), we agreed to extend our break until October and convene again then because I was doing okay. Everything we talked about last year was no longer an issue and her hot topic was on the subject of how I’m dealing with COVID-19 and the world we’re in. To be frank and completely forthcoming, I’m doing really well. …hmmm maybe this is turning into a 3,000 word post? Sorry!
Her expectation likely derived from other clients (supposedly she has 95 of them…wow) was that I would be exhausted, over-sensitized from news and politics, feeling alone and lonely from white guilt and my place in the world of racial progress and White Straight American hatred against other people of a different race or gender or sexual orientation or that I would be sort of curled into a ball full of non-productivity and weight gain and depression. I felt overwhelmed probably the first 8 weeks of this new way of getting things done but I have since adapted for the better. do I miss people? Of course I do! Am I functioning? Today I am and for the foreseeable future? Will I have a break-down implosion in August? Maybe! Who knows, let’s talk then! :)
Here’s what I can tell you about me personally. Born in ‘86, grew up online in a very diverse US State both racially and ethnically and then after realizing how much I enjoyed the gay and trans scene (mostly the parties), I found that openness, inclusion and technology were happening in San Francisco so I moved. I’m straight but most of my friends were not and I had a blast in SF because it was the future. People were happy, they weren’t judgmental or telling others how to live their lives and you could work from anywhere. You could build a company from a cafe and you weren’t called a weirdo for it. You could then go to a 24 hour rave and cross dress and do drugs and party with men and women and then get up Monday, go back to the cafe and continue to change the world. I loved that and it’s been almost 10 years since I left and nothing outside of SF has changed…well there’s been change but the country is kicking and screaming throughout the entire thing.
So when I see demonstrations (I hate the word protest / rioting) about black rights and I see people trying to work a job and being told they can’t because they’re transgender and my fellow knowledge workers struggling to work at home on their ideas and processes all the while in fear of losing their jobs because their manager can’t see them and therefore they’re not productive (not at my job but many are in that situation), I feel as if 10 years outside of San Francisco and nothing has changed. Hell, I don’t even have Uber where I live. Surely by now I’d have a local restaurant that delivered and 3G service at my house but instead I’m without cell phone service or delivery and the nearest theatre is 2 hours away. Where the heck is the technology and more importantly, the inclusion and love that I felt in SF toward everyone no matter where they came from or the color of their skin?
WTF America.
So when my therapist asks how I’m doing, I’m doing great! Everyone else is pissed off and afraid. I lived through this weird remote-work, love everyone culture 10 years ago. In fact, I sought it out and flew across the country to it. It’s everyone else who is having a tough time.
Alright…that soap box is broken so I’ll just stumble away as if none of this happened.
There is certainly a lot going on right now for many people but my advise to those overloaded with news and indifference and anxiety is that they should really log out of Facebook and Twitter and stop consuming breaking news just for a few weeks. It does a lot to clear your mind and help you forget about the scary in the world. That’s really hard with COVID and a presidential election year, I totally get it but all you need to know is there is no vaccine for COVID and given how much news coverage Donald Trump gets, he’s probably going to win the re-election and if you can accept those 2 things as truth and acknowledge that 2020 is ‘over’ from a news & social time standpoint and you’ll be in your house or standing 6 feet apart with your mask on for the rest of this year, it will help you to breathe a little bit easier. You and I will not wake up tomorrow to a just and fair system of political leadership or where companies are held accountable and people are given equal opportunities at every income level and background. We’re not going to wake up to a COVID-19 cure and we’re not going to to go hang out with our friends at a BBQ or club so with those truths acknowledged, you can start to recognize the things that are good and the people that love you and you can do your job to the best of your ability, save your pennies and look forward to a better year next year.
Alright, 2300 words. Not bad.