GitLab Marketing, 11 Aug 2021

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From YouTube: Remote Right: How to Thrive in a Post-Office World • Brendan O'Leary • GOTO 2021

Description

This presentation was recorded at GOTOpia Chicago 2021. #GOTOcon #GOTOpia
http://gotochgo.com

Brendan O'Leary - Senior Developer Evangelist, GitLab

ABSTRACT
For all of those grappling with the new reality of remote working, the challenges and opportunities are plentiful. Even for those of us who were working remotely before the current crisis, we have had to adjust our lives in ways we never anticipated. How do you make your life and work well...work...in a post-office world?
In this talk, we'll discuss the tried and true strategies we've discovered at GitLab while building the largest all-remote company in the world. It is important to separate work from life, find a structure that works for you and your loved ones, and allow yourself to try new things quickly. Also, social distance doesn't have to mean losing the social aspect of life. By being intentional about the way you address being remote - either temporarily or for your career - you can avoid burnout and loneliness while finding new ways to leverage your time and be more effective [...]

TIMECODES
00:00 Intro
03:08 The all-remote team
05:57 Pre-pandemic
06:29 The COVID-19 effect
06:54 This is not true "remote work"
09:16 Remote team structures
11:30 Remote is always in transition
13:47 Establish a handbook
15:19 Don't do work in your chat tool
17:28 Build trust & community
19:19 Stay connected & build rapport
19:37 Meet in person too
19:58 Establish a remote leadership team
20:14 Roll with the changes
20:29 Define your values
21:13 Outro

Download slides and read the full abstract here:
https://gotochgo.com/2021/sessions/1766/remote-right-how-to-thrive-in-a-post-office-world

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Tsedal Neeley • Remote Work Revolution • https://amzn.to/3lTDGtI
David Burkus • Leading from Anywhere • https://amzn.to/3fUThp0
Maria Sam • Remote Work Secrets • https://amzn.to/3CDRYV1
Phil Simon • Reimagining Collaboration • https://amzn.to/3yGPXoA

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#RemoteWork #PostOffice #RemoteWorking #WorkingFromHome #PostOfficeWorld #DigitalTransformation #Transition

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A

Thanks for having me- and um I I'm excited to talk to you about remote work today, um but you know part of remote work and doing it right is knowing when you have to step away- and I I know there's a lot going on in the world right now. So I appreciate you being here, but I also understand if you uh need to disconnect, um but uh while we're here, uh I'm gonna be happy to talk to you about. You know how to do remote right and, um as natalie said, my name's brendan.

A

I've been at get lab for the past three and a half years, and I actually spoke here last year about going suddenly remote, because gitlab has been remote since its founding in 2014, uh and so it's something that we were kind of used to when the whole rest of the world um you know had to suddenly go remote with the pandemic, and so it was a time where we were trying to.

A

You know, help with resources and talk as much as we could about what it looks like to go remote and what it looks like to go remote suddenly. uh But now you know we're really in this.

A

I would call it a post office world, like I mean many of us, are, are seeing um you know the the light at the end of the tunnel or the light that I would say that we had already seen, and so I want to talk about how we can thrive as uh individual contributors as managers as leadership this in post office world and, like natalie, said as we go.

A

uh If you have questions that'd be great, we should also have time at the end for questions but feel free to raise your hand, and uh we can go from there.

A

So you know, as I mentioned, git lab uh is, and was one of the world's largest remote organizations. So we have 1300 team members in 65 or more countries and regions with hundreds of thousands of organizations and by beyond just our full-time employees. We've had you know over 3 000 individuals who contribute to the open source version of gitlab and, of course, they're all working remotely as well right, and so we don't have an office for those team members and we don't.

A

We never have really, and one of the things that drew me to gitlab is this the way we talk about our company and and the culture I'm going to talk a little bit about that later in the talk, um but suffice it to say that our leadership has made a huge investment in creating a strong culture and it's really paid off. um So here's just three ways that uh we were recognized in 2020, for you know essentially having happy employees.

A

um You know everyone. I know that works at git lab is happy to be there, and I think that's reflected in these these kinds of awards, um and you know, even before the pandemic, we saw this kind of need for organized thinking around the future of work and we created an all remote team and that team exists to help understand remote work for get lab and for others to help kind of codify.

A

What are the best practices around that and try to predict what the future would look like again at the at the time before the pandemic, we thought that remote work was the future, and now we kind of know that it is and to date, this all remote team has been very effective.

A

um They have strategies that are now being taught uh at harvest business school, for instance, um and personally um get lab is my first remote job, um but it's not the first time I've worked with a remote team, so I've always had global team members, uh but I've before gitlab was already was always in an office, uh and so when I joined in 2017 was the first time that I went remote and my focus has been kind of changing over that time.

A

When I started, we were only 150 people and, like I said, we've grown to 1300.. I spent time in our professional services organization.

A

I spent time in our product organization, and now I get to spend time talking to all of you as an evangelist for gitlab and in you know, february march, of 2020, all of a sudden we were joined by other remote companies and hundreds of millions, if not billions, of other people who are all suddenly learning how to work. You know outside an office and on some scale that you know we've never seen in human history.

A

I go back to uh arthur c clarke. Actually was the one who really predicted remote work. I can't say that gitlab take can take credit for that in a 1978 interview. He was interviewed by a journalist who had his young son with him there, and he said.

A

Oh, your son will he'll connect to a computer through a network of other computers and he'll do his work from anywhere in the world and he won't need to go into a city or an office, um and so we were slowly from you know that time till the real invention of the internet, that you know arthur c clarke, basically predicts there um through 2020 we're slowly seeing that happen.

A

uh But then you know we were hit with this huge transformation um and this big experiment where more and more major companies are deciding hey, we're going to continue to work remotely even after the pandemic is over, and what we're hearing now is like this global conversation about what does returning to work. Look like how much future work will happen in an office or not in an office and before the pandemic. These are some stats that we we had found and gathered.

A

These are from some get lab reports and other reports from other organizations and at the time we were trying to convince the world that it was the future of work, and so when we talked to people, you know we found those who are already working remotely. You know we found interesting results right.

A

Those folks said that look. We think this is the future of remote work. I would change for an all-remote job and then covid has you know, as we've seen this global remote work experience we're seeing other things happen, we're seeing this kind of like rubber band effect, where we're seeing people work more often more people working on the on the weekends. You know huge amounts of burnout.

A

um You know 63 are discouraged from taking time off right. This is this is really concerning um to me and I think to all of us, because it's not truly remote work, it's this crisis and do induced working from home and if you're feeling the stress on your teams, I think you know clearly you're not alone, it's happening to everyone, and I I think that reason is really obvious.

A

We didn't have any time to execute this remote transition strategy, we've been just in crisis mode, and we can't do that forever and the reason we can't do that forever. Is it won't scale, and this is a fun. uh uh I guess it's a meme from uh someone. I follow on twitter, chloe, cotton, um which is whatever I want to say the word scale. I have to bring this in um because it's not going to scale if we're not focused on what remote work should look like.

A

So to kind of paint that picture. um I want to pick paint a picture of like what it could be right. What does it look like on a team? That's implemented a strong remote work culture, so I got a little tally sheet out and I documented um my day this past monday, the 12th um and when this organization has a mature remote strategy, it can be a super positive experience. You can see here um I wasn't rushed. I worked a normal set of hours.

A

I had lunch and saw my my three-year-old who's still at home, not at school she's, never known me to be in an office which is a really interesting experience, because I have older children who did know when I was in office and understand the difference, and then my three-year-old just expects that I'm here all the time, because uh she doesn't remember before the pandemic, when I traveled some uh and- and she doesn't doesn't wasn't alive for a time that I went into an office, and so you know this, these few things a few meetings um trying to think the coffee chat, the one-on-one.

A

Those are half-hour meetings which are really 25-minute meetings. We, our meetings, are either 25 or 50 minutes to make sure that there's a gap between if you do have a back-to-back meeting very few emails. You can see we'll we'll talk about that later, as we talk about asynchronous work, um but a lot of work in get lab issues and in shared documents um all from the office. You see here in in maryland, and so I think that's you know this this all remote right. That's that's.

A

I think the definition of a truly mature remote team, but, as we've been thinking about how do we talk to folks um who are getting back to you know what does work look like when we come out of the pandemic?

A

um We've we've kind of identified five main types of teams on this kind of continuum. Right, I think no remote and all remote are pretty self-explanatory, but I think most teams, either today fall or will fall in these middle.

A

Three right, I think remote is allowed aloud, is how you know there was a good number of teams that were like that before pandemic, you have an office, most people work there every day, but some people choose to work from home some of the time remote first kind of flips that on the head, you have an office somewhere, but most people don't work there. Only some other people come into the office. Some of the time and in the middle you have this concept of hybrid remote.

A

This is a very popular option and, and it's becoming more and more popular as we talk about going back because it seems like the best of both worlds. You have an office, some people work in the office most of the time, but you also have people who mostly work remotely, maybe in more distant locations or specific roles, it seems really efficient on paper, um but it's it's actually in reality, extremely difficult, the most difficult of any of these to maintain, and why is that? Well, it's because people are being treated differently based on some.

A

I don't want to say arbitrary, but almost arbitrary reason right where they live exactly what their role is. It's going to create and and does create this kind of inequality. It creates two cultures right, the in-office culture and the remote employee culture, and it can really actually hamper uh operations.

A

uh So in the companies we've studied, you know, we've seen those that were hybrid remote. um Those kind of initiatives fail more often than any of the others, and I think the key to understand is there. Is this gradient um and it's always going to be in transition? Remote work is always in a transition.

A

I think um many started with one of those types of teams at the beginning of 2020 and had a different type in march and has a different plan for what it's going to look like at the end of 2021, um and you know that attitude towards remote work has changed a lot in the past year, and so what will happen by the end of this year?

A

Well, I think, even for an all remote company, like gitlab, we're constantly learning and iterating it's new right, it's remote working is still relatively new, but we're learning by doing- and so I think your team also needs to learn by doing and be intentional as you explore how remote work can serve your needs and how your team has to work together, and so, let's look. I want to look at a few practical things that you can do to help uh build stronger teams uh remotely one.

A

Let's talk about the uh the elephant in the room, which is meetings right. I think this is the number one topic I get questions about. This is the one that I get questions about, people that don't even work in anything related to me. I ended up. I could tell you a story some time of how I taught my mom, uh who works at a private school in maryland, how to run meetings like we do, but everybody knows about meetings.

A

It's an important part of learning to work remotely well is actually learning how to do meetings well, and why is that? I think, there's a couple of reasons.

A

First, we like to talk to each other right, we're human we're social beings, and so sometimes we just call it a meaning, because it's gonna be fun to talk face-to-face, of course, that can multiply quickly and and really quickly, not be fun anymore and second, I think we create meanings, because we don't know how or we don't trust, how we can figure out things asynchronously and sometimes that's valid.

A

A lot of things might take synchronous, talk like if you're, brainstorming or you've got a difficult conversation to figure out, but most of the time we're just defaulting to old habits, and it's okay to not have a meeting. If you can build that trust and how you build, that trust is a couple of ways. One is you know.

A

Most companies have a lot of tools. They have a project management system, a chat tool somehow to communicate a document. Library, a digital asset library, but don't have a centrally located up-to-date handbook and and get lab is the exact opposite here, and you know we maintain this handbook that if you printed it out would be over 8 000 pages, each of which is updated constantly by the entire team and it's a single source of truth for all of our essential operations.

A

It's how our teams function documented, exactly how they function and when you need to know how to do something in an office. It's easy! You just pop your head over someone's desk and say: hey. How do I work the copier or how do I get a requisition form for this, um but that doesn't work when you've got a team that's globally distributed, and I think we have a team member.

A

I did the math one day in almost every time zone, and so every question that happens is a delay and every conversation takes longer and that's a huge contributor to the burnout we've seen and you might not have a handbook now and 8. 000 pages may sound daunting, and it is luckily it's public and thus indexed by fantastic search engines and that's how I get at it.

A

um But the key is to start you just have to start right, start documenting your processes now in a central location, and then you have somewhere to keep it up to date um and once you commit to that, it becomes easier right. As you have this living document.

A

And then one of the hardest works, I think uh hardest habits to break or hardest things to get right and remote is. How do you separate work and chat work in relationships right right? We've got these chat tools and again we're leaning heavily on them. They have notifications, they're designed to get you to respond quickly.

A

So by nature you know they're synchronous, they're, not asynchronous, and it's tempting to use that for work. But again, that's that's. Basically, just like a meeting, then right, it's synchronous, and if you have it on all day, then it's you know an all-day meeting and the biggest problem is. It doesn't create an artifact right, there's, nothing that comes out of that that you can easily then reference as to what was the whole discussion.

A

What were the decisions made and it doesn't support that asynchronous work, that's required, and that doesn't mean that you can't work in the chapter that says: don't work in your chat tool, which I think that should be your goal, um but you should should use chat for the things it's good at right. Just like you would use a meaning for the things it's good at a helpful foursome function here is we say that slack is informal communication. We mean it because our slack messages disappear after 90 days right.

A

So if you have something you have to document, uh it can't be in slack, and we also you know. This is where we form communities. So I've got examples here, um I'm actually allergic dogs, but who doesn't love a good dog picture and in fact, it's a great way to experience dogs when you're allergic is through the internet.

A

So there's a dog channel. We used to have a bunch of different maker channels like woodworking and a couple different things, but now we just have.

A

I made this for all the makers uh at get lab that made things and um uh to come together and show them off, and then my favorite channel, uh having four small children uh is the in the parenthood channel, which is just you know: parents coming together and talking about um the problems that they're all facing, and you know it's just this kind of community building that really makes it special, and so I wouldn't get rid of my chat tool.

A

But you know the things I like about: it aren't the work related things, and so I think the question we hear from people about that is. But how do we know our employees are working? And to that I would ask you know why do you want to know how many hours your employees are working? Wouldn't you rather know what they're accomplishing and what their objective is and if they're hitting that goal, so building trust and remote work goes both ways.

A

You have to empower your teams by letting them set their own hours, but you also have to give them clear, transparent goals and metrics, so that work can be measured not by whether you attended or not, not by whether I saw your car in the parking lot before mine or not, but whether you were effective and a big challenge here in remote work for the individual contributor can be loneliness right.

A

People can miss this time having time to socialize and network and see each other in the office, and so as leaders, you have to make sure you're structuring, informal communication right so get lab. We have this thing called informal coffee, chats, 25 minutes, two people to talk about anything but work, um and and honestly I feel like a better employee when I'm doing more of that, and if I've got a week where I don't have any coffee chats, because I'm too busy um I'm it's such a key part of our culture that I understand. Actually.

A

No. That was bad right that I was too busy with work to not have a coffee chat and encourage people to bring. You know their full selves to work right, create those chat, chat channels for discussing hobbies, and we have ones for cities. People live in right, loc, underscore and name a city in the world, and we probably have that channel um or for sharing skills right.

A

um There's, there's lots of things that those those channels can be and finally be open with your team about the challenges you're having what the successes are and what the ideals are in. Creating your remote culture ask for feedback, share those values that drive your organization and that's going to really help. This is just some other examples of ways. We've we've stayed connected before we've done.

A

You know, virtual trivia, um we had juice box chats, which was an early pandemic creation when all of our kids were at home for the kids to meet and play and and meet each other, and you know you also have to meet in person right. You have to. um We have regularly scheduled retreats. It didn't happen in 2020.

A

We're very hopeful that it'll happen this year um and you know visiting people is important once we we can do that safely.

A

And I think, lastly, just a couple things is to establish a remote leadership team right. You might need to move an executive team to remote work and and understand how that team's going to work together.

A

Have people focused on making remote work, work for your organization and then also roll with the changes right. I think it's difficult for leaders and team members who are learning um to to you know admit you don't know what you're doing and- and I think the key the key there is. Oh sorry, went too far. The key there is defining your values, because that way, when you're not sure what to do, you can rely on your values to make the right decision. So these are get labs values.

A

um Every team has their own system and the thing I always say is gitlab talks more about our values than any company I've ever been at, and so I think, whether you're working remotely or in an office it doesn't really matter. You know learning how to work remotely is mostly logistics but understanding the impact of your work, how it's valued, making sure you bring something positive into the world with it. That's how you're going to live by your values and, ultimately, that's what's going to matter.

A

So, if you're in a difficult position, don't worry rely on your team. Have trust you'll find the answer.

A

I also like to plug the fact that our fantastic remote team wrote a remote work playbook, which has a lot of really detailed things that you can do as leaders and individual contributors so check that out also there's a 10 hour. Corsair court course, which is completely free to anyone, called how to manage a remote team.

A

um That's you know read goes into a lot of detail about what remote transition looks like and what leaders and managers need to be thinking of, and and that's really what I wanted to share with you today.