Teamwork on Hangouts

How working with everyone’s screen shared made us more empathetic and accountable.

A few weeks ago, everyone on my team had their heads down working towards a product launch. We were 2.5 engineers and one designer on a tight schedule and in the final sprint.

So one morning, having just gotten into work, I get a Google Hangout call from Payam, our designer who it turns out was sitting right behind me. Somewhat confused, I answered to see this:

After being confused for about 5 seconds, I got it, and it was wonderful! Everyone’s screens were being shared to a Hangout. We had the developers with a mix of terminals, editors and browsers, Payam in Photoshop and other folks in Gmail and a packed calendar.

This is what our usual setup looks like. There’s a 27 or 30-inch monitor and a laptop on a stand. I’d have the hangout open on the laptop to the side and share the workspace on the large monitor.

The experiment made me realize two things — the first was that it gave me a better understanding of what everyone else on the team was doing. I’m often curious about what my teammates are doing, but this changed the dynamic:

1. “I wonder why JJ hasn’t looked at my diff?”
2. Take a quick glance at JJ’s screen
3. “Oh, he’s clearly working on this more critical thing. Yeah, this can wait.”

I could not only better understand what others were doing, I could do it without interrupting them. It was better than looking over their shoulder and potentially distracting them, it also works when someone not physically present, and is faster than walking around. It gave me a much better sense for what was going on.

• I could see that Jean was reviewing my code and seemed particularly intrigued by a certain section. Just by looking at the section of code she was highlighting, I could preempt her next question.
• I could see Payam trying to do his best to make new components work within the grid of one of our existing pages, making tradeoffs between what would be ideal and what we could ship.
• I could see Bipin drafting an email he was sending to some partners. I could see exactly what parts he was thinking long and hard about.

Programmers sometimes prefer to communicate in chat rooms even when they’re in the same room. They do this to broadcast messages widely and asynchronously. At other times, they work better in small conference rooms that enable faster, but synchronous conversations in smaller group.

The Hangout model has its own tradeoffs — it’s widely broadcast, extremely high fidelity, synchronous, non-interruptive and an elective subscription.

This radical openness led to more empathy. The other thing I realized was that I was holding myself much more accountable because my screen was now visible to anyone.

• Anything on my company email or calendar is stuff I consider open to the whole company anyway so I didn’t mind having those up on a screen. Same goes for my code, browsing or writing internal docs, searching StackOverflow or chat.
• There’s no shame in reading HackerNews in the middle of a work day. We all do it.
• I’d open Facebook or Twitter occasionally on the second screen (which wasn’t shared to the Hangout). This made me more aware that I was doing it. I have nothing against using Facebook at work (I used to work at Facebook!) but having my friends’ privately shared content off-camera was more comfortable. In Payam’s words, “Facebook is the modern-day smoke break, only healthier.”
• I generally found myself finding it easier to focus and in larger chunks of time. I never felt like “Big Brother is watching” because I’m very comfortable with my peers and managers. It did make me wonder if this might be a potentially awkward, easy to misinterpret exercise for a newcomer to the team. Making it elective is a no-brainer to start.

A bad manager could use this to micromanage, but a good one would use it to better understand how people like to work and build on their strengths. I can also see this being powerful in remote work settings, and I suspect some are already trying it out.

My only gripe was persistence — the hangout would disconnect when we closed the lid on the laptop and people dropped off and forgot to reconnect. Technically, this isn’t very hard to fix but this use case is an unusual one for Hangouts and one I doubt is high on their priority list right now.

I realize all teams can’t do this, for different reasons. However, it would fly at most Silicon Valley companies, so try it out and tell me how it goes! I’m very excited to see how we can incorporate new communication mediums to ease our cognitive strain and make people work better and happier together!

Thanks to Matt Bush and Louis de Vallière for reading drafts of this post.