Until recently, it wasn’t uncommon to occasionally see people work from home. Some companies even made working from home (WFH) a fairly regular event, like having WFH Fridays. However, this is the first time that most of us have to figure out how to work from home full-time, the first time entire teams have had to collaborate from home all the time. In the past few weeks, I have read tons of great tips for WFH, talked with many people and teams to learn about their experiences, checked in with everyone on my team to see how they felt about WFH, and dealt with a list of operational incidents that caught us unprepared. Here is what I learned:
Different people experience WFH differently. Some people enjoy working at home and alone, while others thrive on face-to-face social interactions. Several engineers on my team say their productivity skyrockets when they work from home while designers and product people are struggling to bounce ideas off each other and brainstorm. Some roles function better when people go it alone, while others require more communication. Meanwhile, teams such as IT and facilities management are ones that need to completely re-imagine how they can function remotely. Even if your role allows you to work remotely, for many people like me who have young kids at home, WFH means taking on another role as a babysitter. Or during this time with schools being closed, WFH means you might have to teach your kids on the side, too. With the increase in video conferences, folks have been getting used to seeing kids pop up during meetings. Senior folks in the org tend to get pulled into more meetings now, while junior members are left alone. In my role, I used to touch base with team managers in the mornings by briefly stopping by their desks. Now, I have to set up regular meetings for those discussions. For companies who have had to bring on new hires during this period, it may be the most challenging. The common way for new hires to connect with their new team is to meet other folks, whether in the hallway, the kitchen, or the cafeteria. At this stage, teams have to be intentional about getting to know new hires. Regardless of how you and your team have been doing, it’s good to be aware that WFH is experienced very differently by different people. As a leader, a crucial task during this period is to identify those struggling with this transition and find ways to help them.
At the office, we do our jobs on top of a shared infrastructure. This includes everything from a stable and secure internet connection to well-stocked office supplies or quick access to IT support. But working from home, we realized that we have taken the infrastructure the office offers for granted. At home, not everyone has high-speed home internet. Some neighborhoods lack decent service coverage. Others had simply not installed high-speed internet at home before WFH and got caught having to wait due to the surge in business for cable companies. More importantly, at home, we don’t necessarily have the network security we have at the office. As a result, the company’s network becomes vulnerable and exposed to security breaches. (Some might be fortunate to work for companies with a large IT support network that made this transition quite easy. Consider yourself fortunate—and thank the colleagues who’ve worked hard to set things up that way.) We also take for granted the workstations or labs. In a new home-office environment, we have all had to find ways to find a corner where we could work from while connecting to the cloud to work and learn. And while you might have your home kitchen nearby, it’s not as easy as some of the food options at or near the office. These functions that are built into the company’s common infrastructure have had to be re-built or mitigated rapidly.
We build our company culture and processes on a set of common assumptions. We assume, for example, that coworkers are accessible during business hours. However, due to the unique situations each person has been dealing with, many teams have had to identify “new normal” business hours. This has interrupted some processes we had gotten used to, like having group meetings every morning. Meanwhile, critical operations such as new releases or data migration used to happen after hours, which would be considered safe as no-one would be logged into the system—but no more. Moreover, we also assumed business hours for others, including our customers, clients, vendors, and service providers. But with just about everyone working from home at strange hours, even the most reliable providers have been dealing with crises. For example, as a consumer mobile application company, we need to take into consideration that network operators are dealing with a surge in traffic, cloud providers are facing more frequent outages, our customers are changing their usage patterns, and our vendors may switch to new business operations. If your business is built upon a global network like mine is, this poses even greater challenges. In some countries, it’s harder to quickly formalize a distributed team to replace the existing operation. In those cases, you may have to form a temporary distributed team in other regions. Those assumptions are hard to identify, and sometimes painful to realize. But, it’s a great opportunity to review those with your team. It also poses many interesting questions for us all to think about how to further optimize our business practices.
Like always, every challenge is an opportunity. This is a time we are all forced to work hard to keep going. It’s also a unique opportunity for us to reimagine how we should operate in the future. We have gotten used to a centralized infrastructure and traditional business hours to scale our operations. While we are transitioning much of that online, this may be the chance to scale your business online with even better software and processes.
To grow a team to meet the rapidly changing business needs, hiring and training the right staff is the key. The hiring and onboarding processes have been hit hard in this global crisis, but I have found that good teams invest in better documentation, more standard processes, and new tools to really scale even this process while removing uncertainties.
For each function our common infrastructure provides, we can create a way for it online.
For each assumption our process depends on, we can try to remove it, or replace it with a different one, that can help scale the business in the future.
Like every crisis in history, great companies and teams thrive despite the odds.
I hope we all see a path forward.