- Creative Commons Attribution Generic License One of the things I love most about the world we work in today is that, thanks to the internet many of us can do our jobs from anywhere. But, while the ability to work from anywhere is amazing, if you’ve done it for any length of time, you know it has it’s downsides. Remote work is challenging both for the remote worker and the distributed team they are a part of.
a better place for remote workers. I want to see the world become a better place for remote workers and the teams that support them! I’m going to speak today about what I’ve learned over the past four years as both in my personal experience as a remote worker and as someone who has had the privilege of helping shape a what has grown to be a really awesome distributed team that is passionate about making remote work work.
Creative Commons Attribution Generic License But instread, let’s go back to five years ago, first few members of the &yet team were working out of a single office in Richland, WA. We were a super close knit team and working at that office was a blast! I loved that office. The work we were doing was interesting and awesome and I was crazy about the people I got to do it with.
Commons Attribution-NoDervis Generic License However, there was one fatal flaw. Even though &yet was basically my dream job, it was located in my home town. A hometown which, like many misfit, strong-willed, ambitious and clichéd young people before me, I had always planned to leave. I found myself at a crossroads. “Do I stay at this job on this team of people that I love and respect? Or do I follow my life long goal of moving to bigger city?” OR WAIT!! Maybe I could do both. Could we make that work?” And it was with that thought that &yet’s story as a distributed team begins.
License About four years and a half ago, I moved to Portland, OR. leaving the Richland office behind. Shortly after, another co-worker moved to Idaho and &yet officially began our journey as a distributed team.
was tough. I was lonely. I missed watching my co-workers play weird pranks on each other way more than I thought I would. If I was working on a solo part of a project, I would sometimes go days or even a full week without any real contact with another teammate. It was the pits. ! Sure, we had a team chat, but a majority of the fun stuff and even some important stuff that happened in the office was still happening entirely offline.
distance felt more than physical. It felt like the other remote workers and I were *here* and the rest of the team was *here* …and we didn’t know how to close that gap. The pain and fear of missing out was feeling very real for everybody.
World Map” photo by Patrick Barry - Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Generic License Our positive team dynamic was still one of everyone’s favorite parts of working at &yet, but maintaining that positive vibe on a larger team and now across long distances was getting increasingly challenging. And just like I had felt I’d found the perfect job in the wrong town, we kept finding the perfect people to work with who lived in the wrong timezones. So how could we expand that positive in-office experience to include all of these people who couldn’t physically make it into the office everyday?
Poland/Philadelphia/Denver feels just as important and included as the person the next desk over? How can we make sure that a co-worker in Poland/Philadelphia/Denver feels just as important and included as the co-worker the next desk over. We had to take a hard look at how we did things across the team. Which also led us to ask why? This new team structure keep exposing flaws in how we did all kinds of interpersonal stuff on the team.
like your company’s communication style, project management and relational culture under a microscope. Something about having to spread everything out across the internet just makes any cracks in those things more apparent. We became hellbent on conquering these challenges. Slowly but surely we got more consistent about things like posting important information in accessible places, bringing the entire team together on video calls and finding ways creative ways to help team members make meaningful connections with each other. The more connections we were able to make with each other, the better things got. And not just for the remote people—but for everybody!
Attribution-ShareAlike Generic License Now, four years later, more than one third of our 30-person team is remote, spanning nine time zones and four countries and things are great! In fact, we’ve gotten so much better about making our office life remote friendly, that several of the people at the Richland office now choose to work from home a couple days a week. But that didn’t happen overnight. We’ve logged a lot of hard work, long discussions and trials and errors on this journey.
- Creative Commons Attribution Generic License Nothing we anything revolutionary or extraordinary. There’s nothing magic about &yet. Just like Disneyland isn’t really magic. It feels magical - but that experience is really just the result of a lot of careful planning and engineering decisions. At &yet, we work hard to create magical-feeling work life experiences for each other. There is no magic. Anything magical that anyone has ever felt walking through the doors of &yet is a direct result of a lot of small non-magical actions called choices.
magical feeling workplace. How our small, non-magical choices can add up to create a big magical feeling work place for ourselves and our colleagues to enjoy.
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Generic License And the first and most important choice you can make towards improving the health and happiness of you team is actually one you can make right now! And it’s what we have found to be the most important choice and change you can make for the health of your team.
team a priority. And you have to choose to make the health, happiness and positivity of your team a priority. Your actions towards you coworkers can have tremendous impact on your team’s dynamic. Good or bad! If you commit to working on this, it will help everything else—goals, productivity, collaboration–fall into place.
and maintaining an awesome place to work is everybody on the team’s job. The people responsible for making all of those small choices that lead to magically positive work places are NOT just CEOs or Managers or HR Personnel. It’s all of you! So lets talk about some of the common problems remote people face and then we can talk about how to help them!
purpose and meaning to our lives.” Brené Brown says, ““Connection is why we’re here. It’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives.” (and if you haven’t watched her TED talk on Vulnerability yet, do yourself a favor and do that asap!)
members are just a reflexion of a larger connection breakdown on your team as a whole. We are all individuals and if we don’t actively seek to connect with the people on our team, it doesn’t matter how close we are physically.
are. Rather than (or in addition to?) being the thing that held us together, physical proximity was a crutch that prevented us from reaching that next level of team togetherness.
at important practices that proximity let us be lazy about. Since almost all of these remote/team problems seems to stem from a lack of connection, Let's talk about how we can foster those connections on our teams! The core things that we have found to be extremely helpful as we tried to improve our distributed team dynamic.
co-workers matters. You spend 40 hours a week with these people working towards the same goals. Who else do you do that with in your life? This gives you have a tremendous amount of power in each others lives. You can not care about work… but you can’y not care about your co-workers.
go. It’s who you are as a group that will hold you together in times of uncertainty or strife. As wonderful as &yet is we’ve had our share of real struggles. We’ve had someone we all loved steal a ton money, we’ve lost clients had projects fail hard enough that we had to lay off incredible people we never wanted to let go, we’ve had plenty of times when our future as a company was just plain uncertain. But the thing that holds us together, even in situations where you could read the weight of our struggles of that on everyone’s faces, is that we know who we are as a TEAM. We know that we value each other more than any other part of our work and we know what kind of People-First team we are trying to work together to be.
towards common goals can be in credibly unifying! Also, your goals shouldn’t just be about the work you want to accomplish. What kind of team do you want to be? Figuring out how to work towards WHO you want to work towards being as a group is vital.
How could you create more meaningful connections on your team? I don’t have the specific answers, because every team is so unique, but I do know that if you make creatively seeking out those connections a priority, they’ll come to you. And so will the stronger team that comes with them!
come up with ideas that will blow anything we’ve ever tried out of the water. I want to hear about what works for your teams! I want to hear about what you are wanting to try! You’re all leaders! You’re all creative! You’re all completely capable of bringing a magical feeling to your work place!
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