DOES20

I have learned to use more remote work sticky-note and white board replacement tools (like Mural). Surprisingly effective.

DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2020

I’m guilty of being a remote work skeptic. I’m learning with the right tools, virtual works too. (though, I miss in person meetings)

Love it, Johan! Any favorite presentations or networking moments?

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Following the DOES Summit London 2020 we also started a transformation at work, with coaching sessions and tracing a plan to improve.

Just how differently we communicate in a remote environment. Replicating the "drive by" hall way conversations we would normally have by using extra time before scheduled conference calls (or after)

@mrmarrocos That is so awesome! Hopefully you'll be able to join us for the Vegas-Virtual event, too! Although, the time change required can be brutal — operating for 3 days in BST was physically exhausting! :)

learn to setup meetings for 25 minutes instead of 30! Works magically well to hop between meetings especially when you don't have excuses of being late due to traffic

Kids are less taxed by online classes than adults are by online meetings. Hypothesis: they spend less time worrying about all of the non-verbal meanings that adults have come to rely on to make sense of what people say.

I've learned it's possible to interview for leadership roles entirely remotely. It's not nearly as surreal / weird as I feared, and as a bonus I get a tiny window into my interviewers' personal worlds (and they get a tiny window into mine).

The experience from being on the DOES London programming committee - my first virtual conference

@paula_thrasher It really impressed me as well at work. I mean, we had the flexibility to work from home one day or another, but having the entire organization (+5k workers in +26 countries) wfh out of nowhere and producing results was impressive.

Large, bureaucratic, traditional organisations can exhibit amazing agility in a time of need. Pivoting to 10s or 100s of thousands of staff working from home, call centres enabled from home in days

@jonsmart People come together and address the challenge. And then revert to old ways of working

OH: "Not traveling means that I can work on presentations at home for once, instead of in hotel night before the presentation."

@realmattkparker Definitely depends on the kid. Some in my circle have had total meltdowns due to the stress.

@RealGeneKim In fact, I'm based in Washington, DC, so the time zone challenge was faced on London event! :) I hope I can attend the LV edition as well. London gave so many good insights!

Wear a mask

@paula_thrasher https://www.mural.co/blog/growth-funding-series-a. cc @davemangot @johncutlefish

@RealGeneKim They deserve every bit of it. 3M should buy them before they put sticky notes out of business.

people might not want to come back to the office

I liked many talks and the kind, friendly feeling. I got a bit picky, some of the talks could have had better sound and images 😊

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one of my favorite things is meeting everyone's pets and kids!

People seem to be working more. Have to make sure that everyone is setting boundaries to make sure that they aren't over doing it.

More meetings but shorter meetings. Not sure if that is a good thing or not

We've had one of our managers dress up in costume every day since the pandemic started. She'll pop into people's conference calls and brighten everyone's day

There's more pressure to handle issues asynchronously, which is GREAT. Most things don't need a meeting!

The chat tools are more important. Before the chat tools were engineers only - managers sent email. That culture changed fast.

It's much easier to let meetings run long--nobody's knocking on the conference room door. That can be a good and a bad thing.

Managing a large number of multiple distributed teams I've found I know most of my team members better now

Remote work has been a great leveler. Everyone globally is same! This enables everyone to contribute their best!

@indfo Unless you have kids. ;-)

Also mixed teams with people in the UK and US has become more viable

That's super interesting, @mickfeech — there's some amazing data from GitHub about how OSS contributions are up, more commits, faster pull request merges, etc. cc @nicolefv

@paula_thrasher We've used that extra time not "in meetings" just to converse like we would if were in the office during the "hallway" coversations.

@davidstanke Kids too have become part of the team now. They show up as guests in many meetings

@davidstanke my neighbour has 5 kids under 10 include twins at 2 years old. Working from home isn't viable for some

I'm also stunned by the fact of how easily our entire day can be spent in online meetings. @jonsmart jokes that his entire day is wake up, Zoom calls, eat, Zoom calls, eat, sleep. Repeat. :)

The transaction cost has gone up AND down. We can communicate asynchronously with all kinds of tools, lowering the transaction cost. But video conferencing raises the interaction cost, as we fail to capture the non-verbal fidelity of in-person interactions.

I usually distinguish between distributed teams and remote workers. Remote implies that there are in and out groups. Distributed teams means we're all equal, which can be a strange feeling for people used to interacting with those who are "remote"!

@realMattKParker So true. The complicated math of finding the mode of interactions required to achieve goals.

On the upside, it is easier to meet with a range of people, from a range of locations, more easily, with fewer carbon emissions!

I think it's great that expectations have changed. I hope that gone are the days of hopping on a plane from UK to Switzerland for a one hour meeting...

My team was already working from home. Our challenge has been replicating the energy of the offsites we previously had where everyone came together a couple times a year. We've been doing them virtually which has helped.

@mickfeech I've found that the "meeting all the time" leaves out chat time, so I explicitly make time for old fashioned 1:1 more often

It's weirdo, but with all this situation and staying physically apart to each other, I feel more connected with most of my colleagues.

@wonderchook I was blown away that people were able to replicate the energy of offsites in a distributed setting. The amount of thought people put in was incredible! https://t.co/QGkNwKcktQ?amp=1

@davemangot we had a great virtual offsite last week for my team. Some of the feedback was "it didn't even feel like a work week, but we got so much done." We even ended playing a game online together

Be Present, Be Honest, and Be True to Themselves

Clear goals and context are more important than ever. Leadership sets the vision

Be open to new ideas, experimentation, and respect each ones individual needs.

Providing more opportunities for asynchronous work. Tooling has been super important for us, Slack has been an amazing enabler for us.

its made lots of things easier. Most meetings were difficult to collaborate properly with half the group in the room and half on VC. Now, no-one has an excuse and everyone can contribute

in office work is generally synchronous, but the best distributed teams learn to work asynchronously. That's why things like Slack work so well. Sync work still has it's place, but teams need to learn to "loosely coupled" collaboration!

It's always good to remember that its not a simple "remote work" situation, but in the middle of a pandemic with so many other things to handle and worry.

There is new opportunity to collaborate - teams are no longer geography defined, and for many organizations equalizing that silo has helped

Listen to them. Front-line software makers are facing a whole new world of challenges. Work life and family life have collided like never before, and support for them begins with empathy.

on thing I didn't expect, people have become a lot more punctual - can't blame the traffic ;-)

Connecting the right people in the right way. We do a lot of pair programming, small group sync-ups, breakout slack channels. These are useful in ordinary times, but particularly so noow.

@Ben_Grinnell at the same time, we need to allow them to be LESS punctual, because lord knows what some people are going through at home with children, pets, etc.

clear outcomes. Ensure that regular 'wellness breaks' are being built in, to step away from a day of Zoom. And regular check ins esp. with those in less fortunate circumstances, for example living and working from one room

@Ben_Grinnell I agree - everyone remote is actually tenfold easier than half and half (or worse - everyone in person and one on the phone)