As bold as it sounds, remote work is no longer a perk — it’s an expectation.
Since offices worldwide shut down in early 2020, companies have had to transition their operations and adapt to the changes required by a distributed workforce. But with a thoughtful approach, it’s possible for organizations to create a functional and collaborative environment no matter where their teams are working from.
To work around inevitable hurdles of a work format that was the outlier just a few years ago, Jake Lieman has focused his attention on team operations and incorporating joy into the work week. As a VP of engineering for Iodine Software, Lieman emphasizes the impact that motivation, empathy and boundaries can have on teams operating remotely. Add in effective tools for collaboration and engaging social activities, and you have a functional, deeply connected team — regardless of their locations.
But even with resources in place to offer remote support, isolation and fatigue can sometimes lead to frustrating, unproductive work days. Austin Barnes, VP of engineering at PLANOLY, realized that without a shared office space, it’s all too easy to take in-person communications for granted. That’s why, from engineers to managers, PLANOLY’s teams have become more diligent in how they operate all-hands meetings, run onboarding and build connections. Remote work, despite its challenges, ended up acting as the catalyst to not only limit the amount of time spent in meetings, but also streamline how — and when — teams communicate.
In conversation with Built In Austin, these engineering leaders offered deeper insight into how they are redefining collaboration by emphasizing the fun in their functionality. They also shared what tools are making their remote connections simpler and more fluid.
What qualities do leaders need to prioritize in order to help their teams excel at remote collaboration?
I firmly believe remote teams can outperform their in-office counterparts under the right conditions. It’s easy to see why employees like remote work: lower commute time, improved work-life balance and increased independence. The best remote work teams are highly motivated, and whenever I think about motivation, I remember the book Drive by Daniel Pink and the intrinsic self-motivation that comes from having autonomy, mastery and purpose in work.
Autonomy gives people control over what, when and how their work is completed. It speaks to our inherent desire to direct our own lives. Autonomy can manifest as individuals picking their work assignments, choosing what to wear or even what hours to work. Mastery speaks to an individual’s desire to continually grow, improve and progress. Giving people opportunities to share their skills via cross-functional collaboration has been a great outlet for employees to learn from others and refine their own craft. It’s equally important to give every employee purpose and make it clear how their work contributes to the bigger picture. Believing that they are working toward something greater than themselves encourages buy in from everyone.
We’ve put an even more significant emphasis on operating as a team and bringing joy to our work week.”
How are you collaborating differently today than you were a year and a half ago?
In the last 18 months, we’ve put an even more significant emphasis on operating as a team and bringing joy to our work week. It’s hard to be a productive worker when the world around you is in chaos.
To foster happiness and joy, we frequently engage our teams in non-work-related activities to give them a break from the repetitive monotony of pandemic life. We’ve replaced traditional happy hours with Zoom cooking classes and online Family Feud sessions. With technology today, you can do some pretty fun things.
Besides Slack and Zoom, we also use the Google OfficeSuite, Atlassian development tools and GitHub to foster collaboration in different areas of the business. The best tools are the ones that are effective, fun and easy to use — and custom emojis are key.
What advice would you give fellow managers who are running their teams remotely?
Here are a few things to remember: Don’t get sucked into being a productivity watchdog. Instead, focus on motivating your colleagues — properly motivated employees will be more productive. Offer empathy. Life is challenging for us all right now, and we need to give people flexibility and show them grace when unexpected things happen. Make clear delineations between your work life and home life. People new to remote work can get sucked into working early mornings and late nights without clear boundaries. Give yourself a dedicated space in your home to work, and leave that space when you’ve completed your work for the day.
When it comes to collaboration, what’s an important lesson your team has learned since transitioning to remote work?
Timely communication is the single most important element of success for distributed engineering teams. When you lose the shared office, you also lose the ease of communication that you take for granted in person. You can’t just turn your head and ask the person sitting next to you for feedback anymore. When you are at the mercy of everyone else to respond — and if they are slow to reply or do not respond at all — there’s not much you can do but wait. If a reply takes two hours, you can’t even get through a meaningful conversation within the workday.
For an engineer writing code all day, it’s easy to view remote work as a way to stay more focused and maybe even get more done. But for managers who rely on influence and collaboration to carry out their core job responsibilities, the prospect of a communication vacuum is terrifying and debilitating. Teams aren’t working together efficiently when they only talk in a daily standup, and in the long run, you become a loosely organized group of individual contributors instead of a high-functioning team.
How are you collaborating differently today than you were a year and a half ago? What steps have you taken to fine-tune your approach?
For one, we are more diligent in scheduling and managing meetings. Zoom fatigue is real, and having all meetings through Zoom has forced everyone to take a hard look at what’s really necessary and what can be shortened or combined.
It didn’t happen overnight, but through the pandemic, we wound up reducing the cadence of engineering all-hands meetings to focus on what’s really important, improved the way we prepped for sprint plannings to happen in half an hour or less and scrapped whole-team kickoff meetings when the task doesn’t require it. Despite the fact that everyone is working remotely, we spend less time in meetings today than before the pandemic. It’s a welcome change.
We are also more diligent in how we build connections with each other and what types of experiences our employees are having. PLANOLY now has a four-week, immersive onboarding program for new employees that introduces them to our people, processes and core values, as well as the products we offer. This helps new employees to get oriented and feel at home quickly, even without having met another PLANOLY team member in person.
We spend less time in meetings today than before the pandemic. It’s a welcome change.”
What tech tools have been particularly helpful in making remote collaboration easier and more successful?
Before the pandemic, team events like happy hours were a breath of fresh air, requiring little more than a drink and casual conversation — something not replicable in a big Zoom meeting. I’ve seen these team events replaced with online social games, such as those from Jackbox Games, where contestants can join and play against each other from anywhere. The internet is full of team trivia games that we’ve played too, sometimes splitting up into individual engineering teams to create some friendly competition. It’s a little more active than the old happy hours, and we’ve learned a lot about each other.
An honorable mention goes to Visual Studio Live Share, which has allowed our engineering teams to pair-program remotely with ease while staying within their comfortable integrated development environment. Live coding like this keeps alive the knowledge-sharing and mentorship that previously happened while sitting in front of the same screen.
