How Akeneo made remote working a success for its employees
[Full disclosure: I joined Akeneo in September 2020, in between two lockdowns. I was lucky enough to meet my teammates IRL and enjoy most of what was already in place]
It takes a village to survive a pandemic. And when it comes to the policies and measures that Akeneo set up for its employees, it’s definitely an understatement. When France went into its first lockdown back in April 2020, millions of workers had to pack up their desks and set up their office at home thinking they’d be back in the office after a month. A year later, as I write this article, I’m still wondering when we’ll be able to fully return to the office. Spoiler alert: not anytime soon, but I’m OK with it. Which makes you wonder how we all got where we are now, right?
Like every person in the world, we all suddenly, of course, became resilient and adaptive to a raging pandemic 🙃… Which makes you wonder how we all got where we are now, right?
Jokes aside, We all had to re-assess our standards. It sometimes feels like we’re all preparing for long-term Work-From-Home (WFH) policy until… well, forever.
Anyways. I won’t delve into the boring specifics of why and how, but rather give you some insightful details that helped us deliver while maintaining certain sanity.
We had to address new working norms while considering culture and delivery. Ultimately, it all came down to improving the communication between all teams across the board.
Communication is key
Yes, communication is key, thanks for pointing out the obvious. Yet, as we were all distancing ourselves from each other the right thing to do was to stay connected one way or another.
Agile methods are pretty standard throughout the Akeneo engineering department. No surprises here. We have always held daily meetings, weekly ceremonies, and other bi-weekly routine events that allow the squad members to stay connected.
It became even more important that we continued all of our usual ceremonies and that all calendar invites contained a Google Meet link. Here is something you should consider though if you want to avoid burning out your teams: turn off your camera for multiple reasons. Yes, video is a great way to read emotional cues but voice-only calls allow you to better focus on the words. You can also walk away from your desk and definitely reduce the now-infamous Zoom fatigue. Lesser known fact: turning off your video during a conference call can reduce carbon dioxide emissions and water usage (source here). Keep the video on for the first 5 minutes to say hello and then, turn it off.
Also, document your conversations and make sure you come prepared to each meeting and that everybody knows who is the owner of each task at the end of a meeting: remember, everybody’s responsibility is nobody’s responsibility. The tool that we have leveraged since before this pandemic is Notion. We’ve been using it for multiple tasks within the company (from writing notes to tracking projects, to documenting roadmaps, etc), and as of late, we’ve been using it to draft meeting reports with templates that you can customize at will. Everything is made easy to tag participants, to share prep material, to timebox meetings and to have actionable follow-ups.
We also learned a thing or two about writing code remotely and collaboratively. See, we’re a tech company with an open-source project and if, like us, you are into doing things right, you’re most likely using Git and using the pull request workflow to eventually push code to production. And for obvious reasons, it’s been working great until it became a back-and-forth nightmare between squads, yielding to trust and delivery issues. Even if we’ve been doing it for years, we found that pair and mob programming really helped the teams and produced great results, without deteriorating the synchronous and continuous aspect of our workflows. See for yourself here.
During the first lockdown we initiated different types of weekly meetings throughout the company to keep all teammates informed about key numbers, client updates and teammates information. We even organized tech talks (sometimes with special guests like Gregory Letribot from Carbone 4, Quentin Adam from Clever Cloud just to name a few) and ran squad reviews in order to provide engineering updates to the teams. We also had the pleasure of having Pat Kua as an honored guest for a training for the technical leaders at Akeneo.
Here are a few tools and platforms that we were using before and that turned out to be even more useful during the pandemic:
- PlatoHQ: platform to empower the managers via discussions with mentors. Here is a nice breakdown explaining how we took advantage of this platform.
- Donut.ai: donut intros are simple ways to connect teammates using Slack, use them. Especially if you are in a big company. That’ll allow for serendipitous conversations.
- Miro: great for real-time retrospectives, mind-mapping, example mapping, etc
- Zestmeup : collaborators engagement at its finest
- Skribbl: very cool game, especially during after-work drinks
We also built a learning platform for internal knowledge sharing and adding more guilds around backend development, devops culture, platform technologies to name a few.
After all is said and done, and communication between the teammates has been improved, nothing beats the perks Akeneo provided in the last few months.
Benefits to boost team morale
Leaders at Akeneo wanted to help employees with a productive set-up, as well as give the teams more flexibility. Caring for the wellbeing of the teams was another keyword. Needless to say, they did not disappoint. It didn’t take long for the management team to come up with actionable ideas.
Working from home can be a nightmare if you live in an area with crappy internet or if you have to care for young kids. Wireless routers with 4G access were given to those living in the backcountry with really bad internet connectivity.
The current coronavirus pandemic can be scary and can affect everybody’s mental health. While it’s important to maintain and improve communication, there are also a lot of things we can do to take care of our well-being during such times. Employees were offered access to Moka.care, a platform with several services that helps any individual who wants to focus on their mental health. The idea is to take action before it’s too late.
On the eve of the third lockdown in France, you could feel the tension was palpable throughout the employees. To help alleviate the stress, the french staff was given a paid week off the first week of April as an opportunity to completely disconnect and organize around this new change. Because everybody was off at the same time, we all knew that we could all come back the next week and not feel overwhelmed with emails or notes stacking up during our absence.
And if that wasn’t enough, we were provided with an individual budget to improve our WFH setting with a curved monitor, or a standing desk, or a balance ball chair… whatever floats your boat, really. Did I mention that we have amazing people here at Akeneo? Well, our very own Guillaume, Office Manager in our Nantes headquarters, personally delivered chairs, monitors and desks during the first two lockdowns to all of the employees in our main offices in Nantes.
Not sure where we’re headed from here, but I heard David Bowie say last month that it won’t be boring. I’ll take up his word of wisdom.
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