Eamesy (by lunchbreath)
Anual questions to think through
This afternoon I watched a good talk from JP Rangaswami (of SalesForce.com), at Read Write Web’s 2Way Summit. JP was speaking on the gamification of business & work. Overall the talk was interesting. I don’t know if I yet buy into the gamafacation of work per-say, but he had some intriguing views that you can see in action within SalesForce products. JP also had some really good points about today’s modern work being “lumpy”, meaning today’s work comes in chunks and ebbs and flows instead of the traditional assembly line style of yesteryear. (More thoughts to come on this in a later post)
Near the end of his talk JP rattled off some of the anual review questions that Marc Benioff has instilled within the culture of SalesForce. My understanding is that these are questions that all employees have to answer for their anual review/planning.
- What do you want to do?
- Why is it important to you?
- How are you going to do it?
- Whats going to stop you?
- How will you know?
I liked the style of these questions as they’re not to formal and remind me a lot of the Netflix culture presentation that was being passed around a couple of years ago.
Your problem seems to be that you’re both approaching it like co-workers instead of co-owners.
Co-workers tend to compete with each other to prove who does the most work, to impress the boss and get the bigger paycheck and prestige.
Co-owners tend to work together to take care of their business, and will do anything to make it successful, because they each have a stake in its success. It’s not about who does more, or who makes more money, it’s about the business.
” (courtesy of ajtarachanowicz via redit)Do distributed teams make better use of communication tools?
I came across this great post from Toni Schneider from Automattic’s (makers of WordPress.com). In this post Toni goes into the five reasons that an organization should be looking at working in a distributed form.
It’s a great 1,000 foot view of the same reasons that I believe hold true across many companies and instead of me re-writing it I think you should just go read his post from March of last year.
His number three point, “You will use better communication tools” is an area I’m particularly interested in. The idea that working in a distributed style forces you to use better tools isn’t an idea I whole-hardily agree with. I think that the style of work forces you into using the tools that are available to you in a better and more measured way. As a result better communication occurs.
My hypothesis is this. In a traditional office, every morning you can observe this scenario:
Phil walks over to the coffee machine or vending machine and bumps into Sally. Phil commences to say “Sally, I meant to tell you that….”. This is something that Phil probably should have emailed Sally to inform her of what was to occur next. Instead, Sally now goes back to her desk and goes about her day and doesn’t act upon Phil’s statement from their earlier casual conversation.
Now this isn’t the fault of Phil or Sally, it was a casual conversation with no direct call to action that was easier but less formal. In a distributed style, a daily team Skype standup or task list review would have ensured that this call to action get’s documented and added to a todo list.
A post on Yammer or a message in Campfire get’s moved to a ToDo list quickly and is recorded for follow up later on.
Sure, things still fall through the cracks, but the nature of the todays tools and distributed teams are geared towards us connecting for a defined purpose, figuring out next steps and then returning to focus on our work. It’s not the tools that are making us better, it’s the combination of style and tools that result in better communication.
Like I said earlier, this is my hypothesis. A distributed team style of work forces better communication through the tools available to us. It could be true, it could be false. What are your thoughts and experiences?
Image courtesy of Flickr use ryan.grEEneye
Virtual, distributed, wide. What do you call your team?
The adoption of common language is one of the largest barriers from mass understand and appeal for a new concept or movement to overcome. This is true in politics, business and our day to day lives. You have to be able to explain something and have that repeated in a consistent way in order to grow and spread. Overtime you want the community at large to accept and recognize a consistent set of words and phrases that describe the topic or idea you’re trying to move forward.
We saw, and still see this, in the minor case of co-working vs coworking, politicians use this all the time when trying to get a new law or tax passed, just last month the new use of “revenue” instead of “tax” was overly prevalent.
Today there seems to be an abundance of terms being used to describe the notion of having a team working outside of a central home office. These range from the legacy of “telecommuting” to the newer “virtual” team.
Personally I’m a fan of “distributed teams” term. Distributed is defined as “occurs throughout an area” or “evenly spread throughout an area” and describes nicely the idea of a team working across several boundaries including geography, time and even skill set. A distributed team can be one that lives in the same city but works separately, or one that works 24 hours a day across multiple continents and time zones. A home office could be involved or not, a team can be one company or made up of several contractors. It works in explaining the flexibility and various arrangements that make up today’s teams.
Other terms that are out there are:
- Virtual Teams - Speaks to everything being digital, easily turned on and turned off. This connotation brings to it something that isn’t necessarily real.
- Telecommuting - This is more of a classic term but still has the connection with the heavy use of a telephone. In today’s age I can’t remember the last time I actually picked up a phone for a meeting, my work is done via Skype or google voice and I may be making calls, I’m not quite commuting.
- Remote Teams - The idea of a remote team is that they’re outside of the home office, which in many cases is true, but more frequently we’re seeing companies not even have a home office and thus the team is remote from what?
- Wide Teams - (great podcast by the way) I like this connotation as well, it goes well to the flexibility, breadth of knowledge of our modern team make up and doesn’t put a particular notion that the team isn’t sitting all in one cubical farm.
Image courtesy of Flickr use loop_oh
Strangers + Paintball = Team? A lesson in common ground
This past weekend I was up in northern Michigan for a bachelor party for a live long friend. The festivities were set to start at noon on Saturday in a town out in the middle of nowhere. A group of 12 of us convened on this ratty place and were promptly armed with guns, protective masks, pain-balls and plenty of compressed air. Most of us had never met one another. There may have been one or two of us, counting the bachelor, who knew everyone and for many of us this was our first time playing, me being one of those people.
So here you have, 12 guys, most who have never played or met up till now, plopped onto a field and told to work as a team to accomplish a goal. I’ve never been a huge fan of the game as it seems to result in many welts the size of a dollar coin where you’ve been hit. But as we got past the first few rounds, a bond began to build and our effectiveness got better.
After each around we would exit the field, convince around picnic tables and swap stories of who did what, compare bruises and talk a little trash about the other teams. Little did I realize at the time, but this was probably a perfect way to start out the weekend as we now as a collective group had something unique in common, something to discuss and bond further over.
I think this translates well to distributed teams, and really teams of all types. For ages there’s been retreats and company picnics to help build a closer culture within a business and make it stronger and more fun. These sorts of activities are more crucial now with a remote teams and shows the importance of face to face and shared physical meet ups to quicken the process of growing a common ground.
You can build a culture within a company all through Skype and email, but it will take a lot longer than the results from a single weekend trip out playing paintball, racing school, golf, whatever.
On a side note, I’m still sore all over.
Another great talk from Simon Sinek that’s well worth the 30 minutes of your focused attention - If You Don’t Understand People, You Don’t Understand Business (by 99%)
Whiteboard + Camera, a match made in heaven for a remote worker
One of my favorite tools that I use on an almost daily basis isn’t really digital. Simply enough it’s my whiteboard and my camera. I’m always surprised by the amount of people that just have a passion for whiteboards and the whiteboarding (is that a true verb?) activity. It almost surprises me now when I find people don’t make use of them. I start to wonder what’s wrong with a team if their office or space doesn’t have at least one whiteboard filled with sketches, lists and diagrams.
I use my whiteboard all the time, it’s where my product sketches start, my mind maps grow and my meeting notes get jotted. I love standing and pacing around. During 90% of my meetings I can be found wondering around my house while talking and thinking. Some people do their best thinking in the shower, mine’s found somewhere between our household kitchen and my office. There’s been many a’meeting where I’ve find myself speed walking back to my whiteboard to jot down an important note or realization before it disappears from my mind.
The camera comes into play when trying to take my awful sketches and mind maps and share these with the rest of my team. I always have my trusty iPhone but I’ve found that my little Canon point and shoot gives me better pictures, more clarity and I can quickly take the memory card out and plop it into my laptop, pull a photo off move it into somewhere for further collaboration with my teammates.
I’m starting to do some digging into virtual whiteboards where I can do some other sketching with my team, upload photos of my physical whiteboard and other collaborative efforts. Shoot me a message or leave a comment if you have any that you’re particularly thrilled with.
Lessons for building a collaboration platform
Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) has a great writeup detailing IDEO’s internally grown collaboration and knowledge management platform. In many cases a “home built” platform for such a complex problem, such as global collaboration, tend to end in disaster and abandonment. On the other hand IDEO isn’t your typical organization.
The write up, done by Doug Solomon, Chief Technology Officer at IDEO, covers some of the highlights, motivations and lessons learned during the early roll out and adoption of their TUBE system. I wanted to repeat these here as I think they have more applicability than to just IDEO’s one case study. These lessens re-iterate a lot of my believe on how any application should be developed and integrated into the ecosystem and culture of a company or community.
- Build pointers to people - Start with who knows stuff, as opposed to what stuff they have
- Build rewarding systems - Make them fun, engaging and useful, not forced and compliance based
- Demand intuitive interfaces - Great interfaces help adoption, limits frustrations and reenforces the notion of a rewarding system
- Take the road more traveled - Let the tool get out of the way, make it familiar and intuitive like other applications people are familiar with
- Iterate early and often - Pretty straight forward, start simple, test, re-try and repeat
