Far From Me

some ideas on the art of working remote

Almost exactly twelve years ago I was working on Xbox One at Microsoft. We had a snow storm - probably just a foot, but the hilly terrain, combined with a tiny fleet of snow removal machinery meant I worked from home for most of a week. Fortunately, we had a VPN to access the desktop machines in my office, and several of us had bought/built some serial controlled devices (remember serial ports?) that enabled us to remotely reboot consoles for testing and debugging. We didn’t really teleconference back then, so I just cranked out a lot of work. Some of it was work that I’d put off (I remember one thing was a tutorial on code coverage tools for the console, and I think another was some documentation on our dynamic analysis tools). It probably wasn’t the same work I would have done if I was in the office that week, but it was valuable work.

A year or so before that, I got a sweet deal house sitting for a friend of a friend…in Toulouse, France. I was going to stay a week and then leave my family there while I went back to the states, but once I discovered the house had a nice office and fast internet, I worked out a deal with my boss to stay another two weeks and work remotely. Every day, we’d go out during the day on various excursions, then I’d come back and work from 6:00pm to 2:00am (roughly west-coast hours). I wrote about that experience back in 2011 in an email to my manager which I also shared publically.

I have been able to get a ton of work done – but to be fair and honest, it’s different work than I would have done had I been in Redmond. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, since some of the things I’ve worked on (e.g. writing up thoughts and experimenting with fault injection, figuring out how Lync should approach model-based testing, writing up debugging tutorials, or polishing up a thinkweek paper) are the right work for me to do, but it seems that working remotely changes priorities slightly. By this, I mean that a big part of my typical role involves interacting with people on the team in a somewhat random pattern – e.g. answering questions in the hallway, discussing topics of the day over lunch, or following up with people 1:1 after meetings. Not all Microsoft roles involve this sort of interaction, but it seems difficult to interact in this manner remotely.

( note - Lync was the evolution of Office Communicator - which eventually folded into Microsoft Teams)

What’s Changed?

The post-pandemic remote work (I prefer the term “location neutral”) is different for sure. I remember in the months leading up to the pandemic, I felt guilty for only going to the office a day or two a week. At the time, none of my team was in Seattle. All of my meetings were over Zoom, so from my point-of-view, there was no reason to go to the office. My org - and my company was spread across over a dozen countries and even more time zones. We were an office first company, but we were already pretty damn good at working asynchronously. In fact, when March 2020 hit us, and everybody became a remote worker, my larger organization became more productive.

So…what’s the difference?

I spent over twenty years at Microsoft, where I was a rare employee who grew up within 30 miles of the Redmond campus. Over the years, Microsoft definitely became a global company, but it was massively Redmond-centric. Non-redmond employees were second class citizens in the global heirarchy (note - I left over seven years ago, and things have reportedly changed since then).

The Myth of RTO

The internet is full of articles about CEOs who want employees to come back to the office. They want employees to feel “the buzz” of working alongside each other and an opportunity to experience the ideas-meeting-ideas revelations that can only happen in a thriving office.

And probably more importantly, they are pissed off that they signed six-year leases in 2019.

The Non-Myth of RTO

Those RTO-CEOs are half right. There is power in the buzz of a good office workspace, and as someone who has practically memorized Where Good Ideas Come From, I know that great ideas come when not-so-great ideas get together, and that innovation rarely happens in a vacuum. Getting people to share their ideas with each other freely almost always results in great ideas being born.

But they’re wrong about half. You don’t need an office for those things to happen. In fact, unless you’re small company where everyone works within a few minutes walk from each other, the magic won’t happen for you. The moment you have more than one office, you lose a lot of the idea-shaping magic that comes from freely shared ideas across an organization. Sure - you get local coverage - and that’s good, but you don’t get the full effect.

Managing Remote

A long-freaking-time ago when I was in a lower middle management role at Microsoft, I did the managing by wandering around thing. At the time, I didn’t know it was a thing - but when I needed a break, I’d make a quick walk around our floor of building 27 and say hi to people, ask what was going on, answer questions, and just sort of check in. It worked well enough, and it kept me up to date on most things I cared about. It helped me discover, and nurture “the buzz” of co-working.

When I left Microsoft, I took a job leading a team in seven locations and six time zones. My manager worked in yet-another time zone. Managing by wandering around was a dead-end. At least for physical wandering. I didn’t do anything to help the team transition, they already were extremely good at communicating over Slack - and becaue of time zones, we kept synchronous meetings to a low level (at first, at least). I remember working from home for a few weeks at one point so I could take care of my dad - nobody even noticed that I wasn’t in the office.

Geographicall dispersed companies are, for most intents and purposes, already location neutral. If I can work as easily from the New York office as I can from the LA office, than I can be just as effective from the St. Louis office.

Managing Remote - The Bad Parts

Something weird happened during the pandemic. Admittedly, a LOT weird happened, but meetings got weird. Without the office, a lot of people got fierce FOMO. More meetings popped up. A lot of people got worried about making decisions from the isolation of their home office. People loved the autonomy of working from home, but without the office culture, many lost the alignment needed to successfully make decisions in that culture.

My calendar turned to shit.

But it’s worse than that - I had 40+ hours of meetings some weeks, and all we ever talked about was work. In the office, we’d find time for small-talk. We’d play games. We’d talk about the new Amazon building going up across the street. We had social conversations. In the fully-remote world, we had meetings, and in those meetings we talked about work right up until the moment we had to leave the call in order to go to another meeting to talk about work.

The “Simple” Challenge

As far as I can tell from reading way too many articles on the internet on these subjects is:

• We need “buzz”, but without the office.

• We need fewer meetings, but more chances to connect.

• We need better collaboration, but not in person

That’s…not easy at all - at least not without effort.

Managing Remote - Weasel Tips

This non-exhaustive list contains a few of the things I’ve seen make remote work better than in-the-office work. Would also love to hear tips from readers as well.

• Use meetings to discuss decisions, improve collaboration, or to accomplish a specific task. Information sharing can go in slack or email. Most importantly…

• Use Slack (or Teams, if you must) for discussion and debate. Async communication is a wonderful way to get more of the team involved in discussions. As leaders, we should invite more thoughts into the conversation, and beware of the weight our opinion brings. It’s too easy for a leader to offer a strong opinion and stop a great conversation in its tracks. Ask, “what if?”, or “what else?” questions - even when you (think you) know the answer.

• Use social channels in Slack/Teams liberally. Give people a place to talk about books, games, movies, cooking, or whatever. Give your org a place to connect that doesn’t require another meeting.

• In my last job, about 4 months into the pandemic, I started a “question of the day” channel. The idea was to replicate the sorts of questions that may come up as people met in the kitchen or cafeteria, but let people reply asynchronously. I think it worked well, and gave people a lot of opportunity to learn from each other on their own time.

• Value people’s time. In a meeting, never, ever, ever utter the phrase, “We have six minutes left - what should we cover?” If the purpose of the meeting has been met, the meeting is over. Give people a chance to breathe (or drink, or pee) before their next meeting. A five-minute break between sets of back-to-back-to-back meetings is one of the nicest things you can do.

• Encourage async feedback on document reviews. Bezos famously loved taking time at the beginning of a meeting for people to read a doc before discussing. I fucking hate that idea. Instead, share docs ahead of time, encourage feedback, and then - if needed, have a meeting where the summarized feedback is presented and next steps are agreed upon. Let people work at times that are convenient to them.

This may be one of those posts where I go back and add bullets later, but the above is, in my opinion, a bare minimum. I think it’s a lot harder than managing by walking around, but if you do it well, it’s way more rewarding.

Let me know what you think

-A