2022: The Year of (Hybrid Remote) Onsites

By summer 2021, I was hitting a wall. I was vaccinated. I had social distanced and minimized contact despite being an extrovert. I was exhausted. I had just changed teams, focus, and scope of what I was working on to regain the “spark” that I had lost. I was primarily working with people I had never met in person. I was optimistic that a change would help, but I suspected even more was needed. Before I go on, let me give some background context. If you don’t care about that, and just want to know how to approach a hybrid-remote onsite, skip to the end of this article.

I joined Zillow as a Technical Program Manager (TPM) in January, 2020; I had about 10 glorious pre-pandemic weeks to work in their beautiful downtown, Seattle office.

A picture I took during my first month at Zillow’s office.

When COVID-19 hit, Zillow was one of the first tech companies to adjust to being permanently remote. While I wish it didn’t take a global pandemic to bring a remote revolution to the workplace, I was excited by this silver lining. I had been pro-remote for years, following leaders such as Matt Mullenweg from Automattic and Jason Fried and DHH from Basecamp.¹ I helped bring about Zillow’s remote transformation, including writing a remote manifesto² for my organization that helped enact such change as a five minute offset of meetings to ensure there was always a break in between for stretching, refilling your coffee, or just running a lap around your house like a crazy person 🏃‍♂️ (I’ve been known to do all three). But no matter how well you prepare for remote work, there will always be something that is sacrificed: the human connection. There are few things in life that are binary, and working remotely (or in-person) is no exception. Like most things, finding a balance is key to productivity, motivation, work output, and overall happiness.

If you followed any of the above remote leaders like I did, you probably had the same thought as to what was missing to find the balance of remote vs in-person: in-person meetups. If that reads “obvious” to you, well, good; the best solutions are simple solutions. Although meeting up during a pandemic isn’t as simple as it used to be, it can — and should — be done.

Before we get into the frequency of meeting up, or who to meet up with, I want to focus on why to meetup beyond just morale reasons. Planning remotely is hard. Brainstorming remotely is even harder. Doing both at the same time? I don’t know about you, but I prefer to make necessary-but-hard situations easier. The best remote brainstorming I’ve found is being comfortable throwing splat on a wall, and then asking others to shape, scrape, and throw other splat on the wall too. But this suffers from unintended anchor bias, and I don’t believe my splat to be the best splat. This is key behind organizing your onsite; it’s not just to build that human connection among your teammates and peers, but to be efficient with necessary components of work. So, figure out a work problem that would be easier to solve in person, and leverage that as the primary reason behind your onsite. I’ll give a specific recent example of my own.

As a lead TPM for Zillow, I organize and execute large, cross-functional projects. Such projects require identifying large gaps or problems with existing solutions, and bringing together a seemingly disparate group of technical leaders to solve the problem at the scope of a complete organization, line of business (LoB), or the entire company. While Zillow’s culture is one of listening — I have never felt ignored or unheard — I do not pretend to have all of the answers myself.

So, in November, 2021, I brought together a group of technical leaders across the company during a challenging time. We had lost sight of our true North Star for the company, which CEO Rich Barton has publicly referred to as Zillow 2.0. We were on a mission that had begun before even we knew that we would be shutting down our Zillow Offers (ZO) LoB. Despite that shutdown, our North Star hadn’t changed.

I’m not here to go into details of this onsite, or a follow-up that we just had. I am here to share just how darn effective these were. In one week, we achieved more than we had in the previous ten. We came in unaligned and in disagreement about what problem we were even solving, let alone how to solve it. But we left a united team, uncaring of organizational boundaries. And despite a global pandemic, company layoffs, and a falling stock price, we left motivated and inspired.

So, while I am not here to share the company specifics of our onsites, I am here to share how I approach them, from getting through the initial awkward suggestion, to supporting remote and in-person attendees as equals. And yes, when I say “onsite,” what I really mean is “hybrid-remote onsite,” which both onsites I’ve organized during pandemic times have been. What this means is that the onsites do not have required in-person attendance, and there is no pressure to attend in-person as remote attendance is equal. For reference, my onsite in Novemeber had more in-person attendees than remote attendees, but my recent one had more remote attendees.

Because I like lists, let’s get into the details of the approach that I take in list format:

1. Prepare an agenda. First things first; why do you want to meet-up in person? Start with a problem statement, and work backwards from that. This will help determine how much time you need and how to scope your onsite. With equal importance as the input to the onsite, what is the desired output?
2. Get buy-in with peers & coworkers you want to attend the onsite. Just because this solution is working for me doesn’t mean it’ll work for you. While I now don’t have to be nervous about talking about meeting in person, your company and culture may not have approached this topic yet. Start with DMs and conversations in 1:1 meetings if you have to, but see if your coworkers and peers are open to an in-person onsite or not. Leverage your prepared agenda to show the proposed benefit. If folk just aren’t interested, there’s no reason to waste your time — as yes, organizing an onsite is work.
   a. I have avoided commentary on COVID-19 and work policies around the pandemic until now. While I’d like to ignore it altogether, I will at least say the following. Be sure to follow your employer’s policies, and accept that folk may opt-out of attendance due to these policies. While vaccination is required to entire Zillow’s offices, there is nothing about testing ahead of time. You should feel empowered to help maximize attendance so long as you are not violating corporate policy. For example, for a recent onsite but a week ago, I added an “honor system” testing requirement. The last thing you want is an outbreak to occur during/because of your onsite, and some peers expressed concerns with me that didn’t exist when we initially scheduled the onsite. The one modification I made to what governments require is accepting a Rapid Test result (but within 24h instead of 72h for PCR tests). The best advice I have here is: be flexible and understanding.
3. Align on a time to meet-up. Scheduling is hard; just accept that and move on. Be willing to schedule a quarter out. That doesn’t mean “ignore a problem” for three months, but it means be respectful and accommodating of your coworkers. It is common and normal to go back and edit your proposed agenda once you have a date and length of time. I find that quarterly meet-ups for about a week work well (flying in Sunday night and leaving Friday afternoon), but adjust as needed for your scenario.
4. Ensure you will support remote attendees as equal. In today’s environment, this is critical. I do not expect anyone to get this right the first time, but I do expect everyone to strive for this goal and get better as time goes on. Specifically:
   a. Ensure you have an omni-directional mic³ for audio for the in-person room if there isn’t VC equipment in your office.
   b. For video, you can then have everyone fire up your company’s VC software, mute their audio, and for video at least, it appears to remote attendees like a “normal” VC meeting.
   c. Encourage use of any VC “hand raise” style feature, and be sure to respect it! It’s easy for in-person folk to leverage a slight, unperceived latency advantage such that it is hard for remote coworkers to get a word in edgewise. That said, it is also important to close out a conversation/side-thread before moving on to the next one. Remember when I talked about balance above? That applies here, as well. If there are four virtual hands raised, but about four different subjects, close out a subject before moving on to the next subject.
   d. If whiteboarding, have a digital whiteboarding solution. Ideally your office has such a device (that can screen share while you are whiteboarding to be clear to remote attendees), but if not, bring a dedicated webcam that you can position/zoom in on an in-person whiteboard. Do not use a standard laptop webcam for this!
5. Figure out if you will be supporting asynchronous attendance. Be it due to time zones, scheduling conflicts, or just for general archiving, it’s reasonable to want to record your onsite sessions (broken our by session for ease of finding just the recordings desired rather than fast-forwarding through hours of content). Figure out your strategy for this, and send out dedicated meeting invites for each scheduled time block. I personally record onsite sessions and do the following:
   a. Create a dedicated time block for the entire day, which marks folk as tentative if they accept. This includes the VC link that we’ll use for the day. I do a different dedicated VC link for each day, as otherwise recordings can be grouped together and by the end of the week, you’ll have to skip a lot of previous recordings to get to a recorded session.
   b. Create dedicated invites for each topic, which marks folk as busy if they accept. I copy the VC link for the day in each of these meetings, and I record each meeting using start/stop buttons rather than pause so they will be their own, dedicated recordings.
   c. Start each day with a recap of the previous day and a summary of the upcoming day’s agenda (leveraging your agenda doc you already made), and end each day with a recap of the day and if there are open questions that need to be addressed. In my agenda doc, I have explicit themes and goals for each day, and I review these goals at the end of the day. Did we achieve them? I leave some flexible time in my days to help address gaps that (reasonably) arise. For the first day, have a dedicated kickoff which will still summarize the day’s agenda, but you can spend more time setting up “why you’re here” given there is no previous day to recap.
6. Take notes during your onsite. It’s challenging to run an onsite and take notes at the same time, but I use a collaborative doc for my agenda (where I take notes inline) and ensure that everyone has access ahead of time. Assign a dedicated notetaker if necessary, but everyone should have access and be free to take notes, add comments/questions, etc.
7. Have fun. This is the most important “rule.” Enjoy meals and drinks together and just general conversation. You’ll likely brainstorm solutions after a day of learning more about a problem, and maybe even have your most productive time outside of the scheduled agenda of the onsite. Enjoy it!

[1] There are lots of great people to follow in regards to how and why to approach remote work; these are but a few examples.

[2] See another post of mine for details about the Remote Manifesto.

[3] I use a Blue Snowball; no referral bonus exists with this link.