The unlock to virtual management across geos
I had worked remotely for seven years before joining Wayfair to go back to work on-site in March 2020. With that remote experience, I had come to believe that the best way to work with any team was in person.
And that long-awaited day of working from an office, building solid human relationships and interactions finally arrived when I joined Wayfair. I was so happy! However, after only ten days, with the rising concerns of a world pandemic in place and to protect ourselves, on March 17th, 2020 — as with most of the corporate world — the company switched to work from home for the first time, and I was back to square one.
What I realized was an unlock to management across geos: I’ll share my learnings in how to improve remote-manager skills, leveraging the in-person experience to digital interactions, while keeping the human factor on top of everything.
About me
I was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, surrounded by a mixture of local cultures with strong Italian and Spanish influences that led to a unique Spanish accent that sounds like Italian. I started my career as a graphic designer and fell in love with digital product design in the early 2000s when I decided to steer my career toward it. I spent a few years in advertising agencies directing their digital department and then created my own agency, which I had to shut down after a few rocky years and tons of learning.
That was when I went back to work full-time but remote at TheoremOne (a contractor firm based in the US). I had the honor of working for big corporations like American Express, AT&T, Apple, and some other tech companies; and also had some fun traveling back and forth almost every month for quite a few years.
For these companies, I worked remotely before this was a typical way of working, and that led me to believe even stronger in the benefits of on-site work. I knew before joining Wayfair: In-person interactions were the answer to all working challenges!
Challenges of remote work
Ironies aside, the bold but wise decision to send all of us home, presented a massive amount of challenges for the people working for a company with solid foundations on in-person collaboration. Even though I had years of experience working from home, this was my new job, and it was introducing additional new challenges. Suddenly our busy calendars became busier, all the 1:1 coffees and the spontaneous conversations became scheduled, whiteboarding and brainstorming sessions migrated to Jamboards or Miro boards, and pod outings became virtual pod-outings. Everything that was happening in 7000 sq. ft. or more started to take place at the same desk, chair, and screen.
Those challenges were the tip of the iceberg regarding how this new way of working from a new environment was going to impact us. Some other personal and equally essential factors changed for all of us, especially caregivers. The previously organized routines that involved multiple locations, commutes, and more have moved to a single place: home.
Maintaining healthy [work] habits
I found myself alone in a new city with everything under total lockdown. All my previous years of remote work helped, but I wasn’t immune to the effects of this new working and living setup.
It took me some time to put together all these thoughts for myself and turn them into the default lens to use when interacting with my team, whether they were my direct reports or cross-functional peers; after all, we were all on the same boat.
I started by extracting the new unhealthy habits I was acquiring with this remote work setup and gradually started changing them: like multi-tasking, setting up a full day of back-to-back 30-minute meetings, eating at my desk, or working very long hours.
Prioritizing people over work
I was also paying particular attention to my directs regarding these habits, constantly providing guidance and best practices, and sharing interesting articles on how to mitigate them.
I put my direct reports as a top priority, ensuring our 1:1s were never moved around or canceled in the first place. Then focused on not only work-related conversation topics by always allocating some time to discuss their personal circumstances and how I could provide support. During those sessions, I also shared some personal experiences and challenges with them because it is essential to remain calm and supportive while showing that we have similar struggles and everyone can overcome them.
Building human relationships is a difficult task; doing it in a remote work environment for a company with employees who used to work at the office is even more challenging. As humans, we use verbal or written language as our preferred ways to communicate; however, when we are in person, our brains process additional contextual information from the person we are engaging with as part of the interaction. These non-linear and involuntary communication “additions” vary from body language to breathing rate and are used by our brains to complement our understanding of the interaction. We process all those data points to shape a picture of the person in front of us, which contributes to building trustworthy relationships.
Remote management took away a big part of all those “soft communication” attributes from our interactions, forcing me to become much more perceptive and innovative in managing my team.
Optimizations
As part of innovation for team engagement, we tried virtual pod-outings with a decent level of engagement, where online games or cooking classes proved to be the funniest activities.
I requested my direct reports to map all the meetings and ceremonies they attended to expose the percentage of time they spent in them. It was not surprising but scary to visualize how much time they had allocated to meetings as part of the multiple check-ins or team alignments that emerged as part of our remote working practices. After collecting this information, we prioritized and distributed the collaborative sessions when possible and reduced the time spent in meetings by around 30%.
We aimed to commit to speedy meetings (finishing meetings five minutes earlier than usual) to allow some human time between our busy calendars, but it hasn’t been our most successful story. However, one of our directors introduced a very out-of-the-box and clever idea by starting his meetings 5 minutes later instead. Sometimes simple adjustments can have a great impact but might require reverse thinking.
Tools support our work, not dictate it
Among my remote manager toolkit, I took advantage of all the available tools that support remote working. We started attaching Miro boards and Figma files to our collaboration sessions, created multiple on-the-fly Slack huddles, and jumped to Figma files to review designs or brainstorm ideas. As a team, we found that some of these hands-on activities are much more productive with the new remote approach.
Be human first
Over these past two years as a remote manager, I developed new ways of communicating with my team, gained new skills to understand them better, and improved collaboration. I also took advantage of every chance to have in-person interactions as the restrictions started to relax and health was not at risk. In-person activities reminded me why the previous fully-remote company I worked for implemented company retreats once per year, which became instrumental in building their culture.
After all, we are humans, we adapt, grow, and learn, but we need to interact in real life to unleash 100% of ourselves. Everything else will sort itself out if we are humans first.
About Wayfair’s Global Experience Design Community:
Global Experience Design at Wayfair is a cross-disciplinary function including product design, user research, and content strategy. We create experiences for all of our end-users, including suppliers, customers, agents, field champions, and internal employees. The Wayfair experience supports our mission to be the destination for all things home, helping everyone, anywhere create their feeling of home. Join the team reinventing how we shop for it. 🎉
