What switching to distributed team work feel like
Going out of your comfort zone is always a tough task even if you know it is for the better.
A year ago, I decided to move away from my lovely native region Paris to settle down in a much smaller city in the south west of France: Bordeaux.
I admit that even though moving to Bordeaux has been in my mind for a long time already, everything got way easier when my current company Manomano announced the opening of new offices in this city on the very first day I set foot in the Paris offices for the first time. They were looking for people to join the brand new offices in Bordeaux so I took the plunge and asked for my transfer.
Few discussions and a couple of months later, whop whop my transfer to Bordeaux is planned for the summer 2019. So came up all the questions about how to work in a distributed way.
Moving from the headquarters to another office even in the same company, in the same team and for the same position can involve many changes that I didn’t foresee at all!
The purpose of this post is to expose what has changed for the team but also to present my humble feedback about this experience.
What a change as a team
These new offices and new arrivals pushed our team to evolve and reconsider all of our internal workflows
Few months before I left Paris headquarters, the SRE team which I belong to was growing up. New coworkers joined us in Barcelona (which added yet another difficulty: English is now the default communication language for the team) and Bordeaux offices as well. So three fellow SRE started to work remotely as I was about to.
These new offices and new arrivals pushed our team to evolve and reconsider all of our internal workflows.
Agile processes, team meetings and communication channels were no longer suiting our needs. We had to find new tools and ways to discuss.
We really wanted to keep on helping each other, arguing on technical topics, sharing and basically working as a team and not as individuals.
As we needed to organize, many questions were raised. Here are a bunch of actions we took in order to make our transformation easier.
Set up and use the appropriate IT toolings
We had to make sure everybody was geared up enough!
Yes, working from three different offices needs a global IT tooling, we are using Zoom to do decentralized work through video conferences easily and also Slack as a communication platform.
Furthermore, even if choosing the right tool can be an arduous task, we also had to change our mindset on how we should use it. Everybody in the team wasn’t comfortable using Slack that much or spending all day long on Zoom. We all needed to get used to this new way of working and find a good balance between being fully connected (and getting crazy in a month) and keeping a good team work and spirit.
As we are more or less spending our day speaking through remote communication tools we had to make sure everybody was geared up enough and the first step is having a proper headset and microphone (avoid computer internal microphone which sound quality is awful and will most likely slow the transformation in your team).
Review of our team rituals
We decided to write down as much information as possible. Any documentation, minute, downstream information should be written somewhere so anybody can retrieve the information quickly and easily.
We are mixing Confluence and Slack to share and spread formal information and run actions that are happening during the day. Finding a good organization in our Confluence domain and Slack channels wasn’t a trivial task, make sure everybody is aligned where to write new content and share information.
Written Daily
Therefore we decided to get rid of our team’s daily stand up and set up a written daily instead. Every morning each individual of the team must fill up the written daily stand up before 10:15am. We are using “Stand up Alice” slack bot to get everybody’s feedback. No need to wait for everybody to get connected to the Zoom to start the daily, Alice bot will send to everybody a gentle reminder by asking three very simple questions:
Decentralized debate place with BrainFart
As a decentralized team, this is hard to meetup with the full team without setting up a meeting. We wanted a place where we could debate or argue on various topics remotely. The BrainFart gitlab repository was born. The idea was to create issue tickets on gitlab in order to expose new projects, technology choices or whatever and discuss through written notes. Unfortunately this didn’t work as expected in the team, it was hard for many of us in the team to leverage this tool and make it efficient so we stopped using it. But still, this is a good example on how it is possible to change the way you’re working when you team is split over three different locations
Set up a virtual SRE office room
The most ingenious one to my eyes is our famous SRE virtual office room. A virtual conference room opened 24/7 with a dedicated ID (easy to save up) where we can jump into in order to discuss, debug or interact with anyone in the team.
It wasn’t easy for the team to embrace this new tool, being all day long in a video conference can be quite exhausting. As the team is growing and people are comfortable using it, we can virtually meet coworkers in the Zoom room at any working time.
But the SRE virtual room is way more than a meeting room, this is a place where you can show up at any time for any reason. People in the team come and go as they will, we talk work of course but this is also a relaxing place where you can take a virtual coffee with your favorite coworker of the day, or even share a drink for afterworks. Most of us are spending time in the virtual room even if we have nothing specific to share, but we enjoy being here together just as it would be if you were seating in the same office.
This virtual room eases a lot of communication and promotes team building. It’s breaking the distance between all of us and help us to enjoy working as a team.
My individual feedback
On July the first, I packed up all my stuff and drove down to Bordeaux.
I will be honest, our team was since a few months already working as a decentralized team, with a couple of co-workers based in Barcelona and a fresh new fellow SRE who just arrived in Bordeaux I was very confident and reassured.
The whole team was focused to make decentralized work easier since a few time, people started to get used to all the new processes so I was expecting a very smooth transition without any single change in my daily work from Bordeaux.
And well, as you can imagine I got hit by a truck when I started working remotely.
I was convinced that everybody was going to adapt to help me feeling like nothing has changed.
I was also too selfish to realize that even myself I wasn’t really focused on making our decentralized work efficiently for the few of us already operating in remote places.
The first few weeks were tough, I entirely reviewed my daily routine to fit to my new work environment. Here are a few humble pieces of advice that helped me a lot into staying productive and motivated as well as to keep enjoying working.
Disclaimer: these few pieces of advice below are closely related to my own personality and my way to working. Perhaps some of them are trivial or obvious but still, having them in mind helped me a lot in my daily duties.
Stay tuned!
This is really easy to keep yourself posted when you’re working in the headquarter, information is surrounding you, you can catch up conversation at coffee time, people are talking about a specific topic just behind your desk and so on. This can be very tricky sometime when you are 650 km away. You will have to be proactive and have to move your butt to have the information you want.
Find and read existing written information
Most of the time, information has been written down somewhere, we can be lazy (I am) to dig into our documentation tools or Google Drive libraries. Ask for the proper project roadmap or the project documentation domain you really want to follow and check it up to keep yourself updated.
For instance as a distributed team, we push ourselves to keep all meetings notes and important information written down in our documentation tools. Something I never needed to do back in Paris was to read all the information stored in our Confluence. You might be surprised how much information is actually written down everywhere and you just need to read it! Confluence started being my best friend for a while.
Be 100% focus in meeting
Wake up! Meetings are supposed to be the perfect moment to share information. Even if sometimes it’s not that much valuable, enjoy this time to keep yourself updated and ask for questions (this is true also for people attending the meeting in person by the way).
Also keep in mind meetings in remote are quite different, it might be noisy as people are talking at the same time, you’re not physically present in the meeting room so it can be very tricky to get a slot to express yourself.
Remind people in the room that you’re attending the meeting. Enable your camera and ask others to do so it will help as a reminder that someone else is listening remotely.
So be 100% focused otherwise you would miss critical ideas, information and worse: you wouldn’t share your own ideas (and complain one more time the meeting was useless).
Save informal conversations
With more or less 90% or your team working away by definition you’re losing physical interaction and potentially one of the most interesting communication channel in my opinion: informal conversations.
How many decisions or ground-breaking ideas you had while having beers (or coffee)?
How many debates on any topics happen around the table football?
Just remind yourself how much information you get having these informal conversations. Unfortunately, you can’t really set up any solution that you will lose a part of it.. At least only with away co-workers of your company. Remember you have local fellow buddies working around you, maybe they won’t really care about specific topics of your daily work but still!
As a part of the SRE team, one of my missions is to provide developers support and proper tooling to code and deploy in full autonomy. Having all those informal conversations helps me a lot to understand the way they are working and how I can help them improve their daily work.
And if you really crave having this kind of information with your crew, just set up virtual coffee appointments, use your communication tools to spontaneously give a call to a coworker etc.
Ask questions
Ask questions: on Slack, during a meeting, synchronization point or whatever. Ask more questions than you used to. There is no stupid question and nobody will blame you if you are wondering what is going on in a particular topic… Unless this is already written in the right Confluence page in your team domain.
Finally, see the bright side: you are not flooded by that huge amount of information you don’t need!
Keep the contact with your team
Ok, I’m working away from 90% of my direct team but it does not mean I have no interaction anymore. I set up a few rituals that help me to keep in touch with as many individuals as possible.
Embrace the new tools and processes
As I mentioned above, it was first a team transformation, we set up new tools such as the virtual SRE room and processes such as the written daily. It wasn’t an easy task for all the team to get used to and it took time before we could see the outcomes.
The first thing I pushed myself to do was to embrace these new tools, and push the other to do so as much as possible:
- We set up a 24/7 virtual conference for the team to interact together. I’m connected on Zoom for most of my day and ask people to join me for any purpose.
- We have a daily written ritual which is amazing to keep you posted on what your fellow team members are working on lately, I try to take time to fill mine up and I ask people more details on what they did if I’m interested in.
If as a “remote” worker I’m not using these tools properly and not pushing it, perhaps it means that they are not relevant at all for me and for the team?
Round-robin selection for pair working
I like working as a team, I like asking for advice, sharing ideas and pair debugging a lot! So for the sake (and the mental health) of my unique office neighbor I’m using a kind of round robin distribution on my co-workers to select who I will bother this time!
Of course, I try to add more intelligence to my distribution algorithme and take into consideration everybody’s knowledge and availability, but this is another way to have time to share with everybody on my team.
Be reactive with your communication tools
This was one of the most difficult hobbies I had to overcome. Back in the days I was far to be focused enough on our communication tools (Slack), I could take a couple of hours to answer a direct message or even worse just miss it. When I needed to ask something to someone I was most likely the guy who was spontaneously showing up at your desk to talk about it, the Slack conversation was very short : “Are you at your desk? Ok, I’m on my way”.
As I’m now working far away from the Paris headquarter, I can no longer move around to speak to people in person (or it will be exhausting and expensive) so I am trying to be more focused and reactive on Slack.
We all know how annoying it can be when someone is not answering a question for some reason, I’m not this type of co-worker anymore unless I have a good reason.
Plan IRL meetups
Whatever all the processes, the tooling and the energy you’re burning, nothing will replace IRL interactions. This is why I take all the opportunities to visit my fellow workers in Paris as much as I can. I mix personal and professional reasons to drive up to Paris and spend a few days in the headquarters. Enjoy this time to share or tackle stuff which is hard to work on when it is far apart.
My choice, my burden
Last but not least, if like me moving into a remote office was your own decision, stop focusing on what you used to have but on all the new unexplored opportunities that are surrounding you.
Be grateful to all the coworkers that are accepting playing the ball with the bunch of annoying processes that you need to work altogether.
Keep on improving processes that help you and your team working in a distributed way. Stop grumbling instead of looking for solutions, if you have the feeling this situation is impacting you more than the others, dig into new processes and suggest it to the team.
Conclusion, we successfully pass through COVID-19 lock-down
Yes, the team transformation in addition to my transfer to a remote office hasn’t been easy at all. It took a while for me to adapt myself to this new environment and way to work. To be honest I considered a few times to change my mind and go back to Paris or even leave the company.
But the team effort and all these few actions I described above help me to overcome this challenge.
In the meantime the COVID-19 strike in France and the lockdown pushed our company to turn into a full remote working environment. 100% of the employees are now working remotely from March 2020.
I’m very proud to say that this situation didn’t really impact our team’s daily work. All the improvements we’ve made during the last year enabled us to overcome this crisis with almost no pain.
I would like to thank Manomano for giving me this amazing opportunity to move to Bordeaux and also to my amazing SRE team who played the ball and made this transition smoother. I’m today really happy and comfortable with this situation.
