Hi, I'm Olya - hr in a small gamedev company in St. Petersburg. We've been working from home for over three months now. In this text, I want to summarize the experience gained as a result of observing our teams during the period of self-isolation and share our cases.
What is the difference between an ironing board and a work table? The difference between working from home and “telecommuting”
Imagine: you are constantly working in an office. But the courier, who is supposed to deliver the sofa to your home, called in the morning and said that it would not be on Saturday, but today during the day. You warned the / Team Lead / hr team that you have to work from home today. When you work from home, you will adhere to normal office processes. There is only one difference - your presence at meetings and communication with colleagues becomes virtual. The sofa will be delivered and you will be back at the office tomorrow.
On this day, when you are forced to work at home, you can get by with a laptop on your knees. It is quite another matter if the office becomes unavailable for a long time, for example, for a couple of months. Sooner or later, you will realize that you need something more comfortable than knees.... And if there is no way to put a desk and an armchair, you start coming up with “crutch solutions”. They will perform their functions for a while, but this is unproductive and inconvenient. The same happens in communication and processes.
Remote work, as opposed to one or two days of working from home, involves performing work tasks at a constant distance from the employer's territory. In this case, all your communication also takes place through the means of communication, but the processes, as a rule, are configured somewhat differently from the beginning (you even equipped the same workplace for yourself in advance).
In general, the story with the virus gave us all a good opportunity to test our processes. If, during a short-term work from home, the processes do not work as well as you would like, it is most likely that they are simply not debugged. In the office, it was less noticeable, but now you began to see in detail the cons and points that need to be fixed.
If we talk about the example of our company, then even before the pandemic there wereMost of our processes were initially performed in the “digital office” mode. It didn't take much effort for us to move to work from home. Yes, communication in chats has increased, all meetings have begun to take place in the zoom. We have shifted the opening hours a bit. We moved English classes, sports and parties online. We brought equipment and furniture home to those employees who wanted it. Every two weeks, packs were sent to all team members with something pleasant (goodies, mini-gifts in the form of branded masks and wireless headphones, and even alcohol). It seemed that we adapted very quickly and successfully, and the processes did not change much. But by the end of the second month of working from home, some transformations in the field of communications began to be visible.
In total, I have 9 teams, each has its own Team Lead, there is a project manager who monitors deadlines and resources. We always carry out tasks in the task tracker. Each team has a daily stand-up. There are team and cross-team meetings for synchronization. All teams are cool and cool, but each is unique. From the point of view of internal communications, they can be divided into three types.
K - Team
People who share common values. As a rule, the team has a common goal that everyone knows and sincerely strives for. This goal can be formulated in different ways, but the meaning is the same - a high-quality profitable product.
People in such teams know and deeply understand their product, put in effort and sincerely worry about it. Employee motivation most often lies in influencing the project and seeing how the result of their own efforts is realized and yields results (product popularity / positive feedback from product users / profitable product, etc.).
Typical for such teams:
- transparency;
- high level of trust in each other;
- awareness of people;
- a lot of communications.
Each team member has access to all information on the project. This does not mean that everyone is chaotically watching and connecting to any issue. But everyone knows their area of responsibility and can freely access the necessary information to solve their problems without “blocks”. Plus, this is prevention from the " bus factor ": team members can easily take on the tasks of one of the employees if he suddenly cannot work.
At first glance, it looks perfect. Many executives and HRs strive to create this kind of work environment. It's great if it works out. This is really difficult to achieve. But - and here it all depends on your goals - sometimes such teams are not needed by the company. This is especially true in cases where your tasks can be decomposed and divided between performers.
K- Command on the "remote"
It turned out to be the most difficult for such teams. Trust and partnerships are the result of the daily work of each of the team. The purpose of many peer-to-peer communication is to maintain mutual understanding, value, and understanding of the project. It takes time and effort. In an office environment, such communications are much easier to build than online. You see colleagues, it is easier for you to find a common time, drink coffee together, start a conversation and brainstorm a new feature for a project, or see a simpler solution to a problem. In the office, it will be easier to notice if something has happened to someone - you can immediately ask and help.
In an online environment, maintaining such a strong relationship is possible, but it takes more energy and even more time to communicate. You might end up being so overwhelmed with an incredible amount of appointments to sync that you virtually have no time to complete tasks.
In our case, the desire of employees to invest in the project led the guys to the fact that they began to overwork and catch up on tasks beyond working time. There are several disadvantages that we encountered:
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You probably know who in your team drowns the most for communication - with a high degree of probability, these same people are drowning for office work. Give them more time. The hardest thing for them is to adapt to the new reality. Direct their social activities in the right direction.
Be prepared for the fact that sooner or later people who are “communication drivers” will still feel that there is less communication and the significance of old values has weakened a little. This will make them uncomfortable. Individual employees will begin to think “the era is gone”, and such thoughts may lead them to search for a new team.
Mixed
Here are gathered people who have common stated values. Someone divides them, but for someone they “just are”. A similar story with a common goal. People perform their tasks, communicate with each other at a fairly good level, synchronize as needed. But their motivation is the high-quality performance of their tasks and positive feedback from the Team Lead / manager, their own professional growth.
We can say that this is a “mixed model”. There are people with different communication tendencies, and in general they complement each other in the team. Someone strives to maintain a large number of communications, someone sets a framework for their number.
Remote teams mixed
Less significant here was that employees started to miss communication with each other. But the load on Team Lead has increased dramatically. If there was not enough information / understanding, the guys needed his attention and the time of which was simply not enough for everyone. That is, in fact, the team at some moments lacked independence, because many issues could be resolved without the participation of the leader. But the team didn't quite understand this at the start.
What to do?
We acted quite simply and perhaps harshly. We left the team to solve the problem without Team Lead. Of course, he watched the process from the side and provided insurance. But he did not interfere in the process, if there were no critical situations. Gradually, the lack of independence began to go away. In reality, there were no radical changes in the mixed team. This is just a good example of the importance of balance and people who complement each other.
Working group
Of course, we strive to ensure that values are and are maintained in every team. But for this type of team, the motivation is primarily the completion of tasks on time and efficiently. Most important for people:
- streamlined processes, timely feedback on their work;
- clear terms of reference from Team Lead or an internal customer and the decision received from them in time is “accepted”;
- non-trivial tasks and the ability to build up your experience, portfolio.
There is a certain vertical that decomposes tasks and divides the team into performers, giving each of them his TK. Employees don't spend a lot of time communicating and building partnerships in a team. The point of work for them is to complete the task at a good level, to give a high-quality result. Next is the task of the Team Lead / Leader, how to integrate this result into the project.
Such working groups are formed most often when a significant number of tasks are not team tasks, and only one performer is needed to solve them.
Remote working groups
Perhaps this model is initially best adapted for remote work. Our members of such a team did not actually notice the difference when they went into self-isolation. And they are in no hurry to return to the office.
However, even in such working groups, we sometimes have tasks for the whole team. And this implies synchronization between all participants in the process. In the conditions of work from home, it was difficult for the guys to do this. They continued to perform the task in the “I do my job, the rest does not matter” mode.
Imagine: Sasha, an introverted person who loves to work alone, gets a team task. He is forced to find himself in a situation where one cannot do without synchronization with other colleagues. Previously, in the office, Sasha would simply turn quietly to his closest colleague. And already together with him, gradually I would somehow come out to communicate with the whole team. And now everything is equally far away, and the conditional Sasha may have a social obstacle at the right time.
The reasons for the block can be different, for example, the feeling that everyone is busy, low involvement of colleagues in common processes, etc. It is more difficult to overcome this block remotely. Perhaps Sasha is a fine fellow and can. But what if his introversion decided to go off scale for the time of "remote"? Of course, we will ping Sasha. But you need to set aside time for the fact that you will have to find out what is the blocker for Sasha, and to help him. In fact, the problem is solved simply by additional time for communication, a couple of team meetings and a good facilitator.
What to do?
Man is a social being. And despite the fact that there are not very many communications in such teams, each of your employees needs some kind of satisfaction of their social needs in order to feel important and needed in the project. Be sure: your guys, due to the lack of common tasks, implement these needs in their own way and separately from the team. Someone plays computer games at home, someone focuses on communicating with friends, someone helps children in Africa. And someone gets new experiences and satisfies their social needs while traveling, because it is the people who constantly work remotely who often travel.
It is important to make sure that each employee in the team has the opportunity to realize these desires, if not in the team, then in the company, perhaps when communicating with colleagues from other teams. Sooner or later this will play a positive role for both the employee and his team.
What is the result?
The first clear changes within the teams could be seen by the end of the second month of self-isolation. At that moment, the difference between working from home and “telecommuting” became clear. After three months outside the office, we can say that we have already begun a forced and full-fledged “remote work”. Somewhere else, changes are still taking place.
In fact, the solution for all teams sounds simple enough - find a balance. Where employees forget about the need to synchronize when completing a common project, put a good facilitator and hold regular meetings with the adjand. Where there is a lot of non-business communication, make it clear to the team that outside communication should remain outside the perimeter of tasks.
For example, we made an “online kitchen”. Previously, employees could socialize informally in the kitchen during lunch. In the absence of such an opportunity, they can drag out workers rallies, using them for non-work communication, in order to ask each other how they are doing. Therefore, we made an eternal meeting, to which everyone could join at any time, and urged everyone to have informal conversations in the floodilka. Informal communication is important for everyone - this way we get to know each other better and predict the behavior of colleagues in certain situations.
And of course, it's important to listen to the feelings of individual team members. This allows you to notice in time that someone is not inspired by changes in the team, and to react quickly to this.
For ourselves, we decided that we would keep our work in the office. And we are already smoothly opening it for those who are very tired of the home environment and feel more comfortable in the office. At the moment, we still have the opportunity to work both there and there.
At first, there were 13% of those wishing to return to the office. But only 4% actually got out. The main reasons for this decline (if we exclude the reasons associated with the coronavirus) are two:
- Self-discipline. Some noted that they were already used to working from home, and it was difficult for them to force themselves to go to the office.
- Absence of other employees in the office - many see the office as an opportunity for live communication, and until at least half of the colleagues visit it, there is no point in coming. This shows that communication is a strong reason for choosing an office, and this aspect cannot be ignored.
It's cool if you manage to survive the long, forced “work from home” regime together with the team. You may even be tempted to switch to this mode on a permanent basis. My advice is to take care of internal communications, which will be very different when working remotely from what you are used to when working from home. Remember, bringing all communications online isn't the only change that awaits you along the way.