A presentation at HackConf.bg in October 2019 in Sofia, Bulgaria by Euan Finlay
Notes From My Travels Building Effective Teams When You’re in Different Places Euan Finlay @efinlay24 hi! thank you for the introduction back in August last year, I was leading the Platform Health team at the Financial Times our team was split between London and Cluj in Romania
we had been in Cluj for a week, spending time with the team and planning our next quarter’s work
photo of up a mountain and that weekend, I thought it would be nice to travel to a nearby town to visit the famous salt mines
halfway through my journey, I started getting calls from our first line Operations team and my boss it turned out that we’d had a major network outage at one of our UK datacenters, and we were seeing a huge number of problems across the business
as it was a weekend in August, most of my friends and colleagues were away, or on holiday but despite that, we were able to quickly get a handful of key people online from each team
our incident lead was coordinating everything from her phone, while in a car on the motorway (don’t worry, she wasn’t driving)
I myself was in an open field, walking over the hills to the salt mines I was lucky to find a cafe where I was able to sit down, get online, and help investigate the issue
The people fixing the incident were scattered across 4 countries. @efinlay24 #HackConf while our workaround took longer than we’d have liked, we managed to get everything stabilised, without any major business impact the team of people who resolved this were spread across multiple locations, and 4 different countries
The FT’s culture of remote collaboration enabled us to fix it. @efinlay24 #HackConf next week, once we were back in the office, we found that the problem had been caused by another customer in the datacenter who had accidentally cut the fiber connection which provided internet access to all of our servers if we weren’t already used to working remotely and collaborating across multiple locations it definitely would have taken us far longer to get this resolved
fortunately, my hike across the hills wasn’t wasted once we had the workaround in place for that weekend, I still had time to visit the salt mines - they’re really interesting! if you’ve ever wanted to sail a boat on an underground lake, I definitely recommend a visit :)
/usr/bin/whoami @efinlay24 #HackConf I’m a Senior Engineer at the Financial Times. Currently I work on the Operations Support team at the FT - we’re responsible for production systems and technology across the globe
/usr/bin/whodoiworkfor No such file or directory. @efinlay24 #HackConf although we’re most famous for the newspaper, we’re primarily a digital content company 3 years ago, revenue from our online subscriptions overtook the physical paper and advertising
https://www.ft.com/ this means that our content and website are absolutely critical to our business, and we invest heavily in technology we try to empower our engineering teams, and as part of that, they design, run & support their systems - from the beginning, to the very end of the product lifecycle
London pin when I first started at the FT 5 years ago, I didn’t think of myself as working with remote teams after all, the team I joined was based in London, and I saw them every day in the office
these days our main technology hubs are currently London, Manila and Sofia (hi!) I came to realise that although my team were in a single location we still needed to interact and collaborate with people in different countries and timezones on a daily basis
Lots of pins and when I started researching this talk, I realised we had even more bureaus and journalism offices across the world they’re not our main technology hubs, but we still have people and services there that we need to support I started to think more about this when I joined the Operations team 6 months ago
Ensuring the services supporting the FT are operational and available. Our mission is to ensure that the services supporting the FT are operational and available to our customers
because we’re a global company, with offices and partners around the world, our team is split between London
and Manila, which ensures that we can provide 24x7 support for all our systems and products, no matter where they’re located
It’s hard leading a team split across locations… @efinlay24 #HackConf I had previously lead a team split across two locations, so I was familiar with some of the communication and culture challenges that arise in my old team, we always had to put extra effort in, so that everyone knew what their teammates were working on video calls are good, but they still add an extra layer of friction for communication they’re not as efficient as chatting face to face and if people were stressed, there was a risk that people could slide back into an us-and-them mindset - but we were careful to avoid that however, now that I had joined the Operations team, there were two additional challenges that I hadn’t expected
Harder across an 7 hour time difference… @efinlay24 #HackConf the first is that there’s an 7 hour time difference between London and Manila this is a much wider gap than the 2 hours I had been used to between London and Sofia
And even harder with a 24 / 7 shift rota. the second challenge is that we run a 24/7 shift rota which means we may only have a small number of the team working at any given time
How do we include the team in decision-making? @efinlay24 #HackConf when my old team needed to make a decision, it was relatively simple we were able to easily jump on a video call, chat, and come to agreement but when everyone is on shift across a wider gap in timezones, that’s simply not possible some people will be on an early shift, others on late that’s a more extreme example though, so what about everyone here in the audience?
Obligatory audience interaction. @efinlay24 #HackConf who here frequently works remotely, or with a team split across locations? who mostly works from an office, with your whole team in the same place? and who doesn’t like putting their hands up in the middle of conference talks?
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/sur vey/2019 I quite enjoy reading the StackOverflow developer surveys when they come out and this year it provided some interesting statistics around remote work
51.8% work remote at least a few days a month or more https://insights.stackoverflow.com/sur vey/2019 of the people who responded, just over half said that they work remotely for at least a few days a month nearly 30% work remote at least once a week or more
42% prefer working from home or non-office location https://insights.stackoverflow.com/sur vey/2019 just over 40% of respondents prefer working from home or a non-office location
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/sur vey/2019 and finally, almost 42% said that they find a distracting work environment their greatest challenge to productivity
These challenges affect more of us than we might expect. @efinlay24 #HackConf my point here is that even if we don’t work with a fully remote team, it’s not uncommon for people to work from home, or from different locations like coffee shops this means that the increased difficulty of remote work may affect more of us than we might expect
How do we enable and encourage remote collaboration? @efinlay24 #HackConf the intent behind this talk was to discuss some challenges related to remote working that we’ve run into and to outline some of the things that we do to help fix them and to keep with the slightly tenuous theme of travel, I want to sketch a quick map of where I want to go with this talk
What even is “remoteness”? first of all, we should go over what I mean when I talk about remote teams and remote work
What even is “remoteness”? > Communication challenges second, the challenges we face when we need to communicate remotely
What even is “remoteness”? Communication challenges > Culture challenges third, how we can build a culture so that people in other locations don’t feel isolated
What even is “remoteness”? Communication challenges Culture challenges > Why enable remote work? and finally, why it is important to enable a remote working culture, even though it can be difficult
What even is “remoteness”? Communication challenges Culture challenges Why enable remote work? I’ve been talking for 35 slides already, but I’ve not defined what I mean by remote teams and remote communication let’s do that now so we’re all on the same page
Martin Fowler groups teams into four categories. https://martinfowler.com/articles/remo te-or-co-located.html I really like Martin Fowler’s blog post on this topic he groups team structures into 4 general categories, going from least to most remote
Single-site https://martinfowler.com/articles/remote-or-co-located.html a single-site team has everyone in the same physical location - usually within the same room, or bank of desks this makes it really easy to turn around, speak to your teammates and see what they’re doing
Multi-site https://martinfowler.com/articles/remote-or-co-located.html a multi-site team consists of two or more groups in different locations for example, the Operations team which is split between our London office and Manila office
Satellite workers https://martinfowler.com/articles/remote-or-co-located.html satellite working is when most of the team is in the same location, but a small number of them work remotely we have a few of these at the FT - for example, the Cloud Enablement team, who I’ll talk more about later on
Fully distributed https://martinfowler.com/articles/remote-or-co-located.html and finally, we have fully distributed teams, where everybody on the team works from their own location full time we can expand this to include fully distributed companies as well, where there is no central office this has grown in popularity over the last few years - especially with newer technology companies those are 4 categories of team structure, but in reality it’s more of a sliding scale
in London, we moved into our new office 3 months ago we practice agile working, so we don’t have allocated desks, but teams have an area they can sit together often, some people will be on the roof enjoying the sun, some will be in their team area, and others will have found a quiet space where they can focus without interruption
It’s rarely black and white. this means that even when we’re based in the same office, we need to consider remote workers what if people regularly work from home every week? what if part of the team decide to sit on a different floor of the office for the day, to be closer to their users?
in our case, we often don’t even realise when people are WFH, because the majority of our communication is remote-first it’s common that we’ll be talking and collaborating without any trouble, and only later realise that everybody is actually at home
What even is remoteness? > Communication challenges Culture challenges Why enable remote work? with that in mind, let’s go into more detail around some of the challenges with remote communication, and what we can do about them
Communication is one of the most important factors for effective teams. @efinlay24 #HackConf communication underpins almost everything that we do in technology and software development so much of what we do relies on frequent, open and honest communication - whether that’s with our teammates, our stakeholders, or our users
http://agilemodeling.com/essays/com munication.htm most people agree that face to face is the most effective communication we can do just dropping down one level to a video call adds another layer of complication with technology we lose a lot of expression from body language, and in practice only one person can talk at a time
@efinlay24 I mentioned the Cloud Enablement team at the FT earlier they have 4 team members based in our London office Andrew Grant is the 5th member, and he works remotely full-time from The Hague, in the Netherlands
the team had previously worked with someone else who was remote, so it wasn’t a complete change when Andrew joined the team but what they did find was that the tools they were using for collaboration no longer fit their requirements
Screenshot of CE collaborating Google Meet is our default option for video calls at the FT but the team found that they struggled with poor video quality when they were pair programming they spent a two week sprint trying out different options after which they decided that Visual Studio Code’s Live Share plugin, alongside Whereby for video was the solution that best fit their needs
https://www.gov.uk/government/orga nisations/government-digital-service I spoke with my friend Lee Porte for this talk, and he emphasised tooling as well he’s a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at the Government Digital Service, and he leads the Platform as a Service team
https://www.gov.uk/government/orga nisations/government-digital-service his team, along with many of the teams at GDS, are remote-first people sometimes come into the office, but it’s not uncommon for the whole team to be working from different locations for whiteboarding and architecture sessions, they find that [using an interactive whiteboard]
an interactive whiteboard makes collaboration much easier it allows everyone to view and draw on the board, then easily save and share their diagrams afterwards they use Google Jamboards, but there are lots of other alternatives out there too
Take the time to find the right tools for your team. @efinlay24 #HackConf switching to shiny new tools doesn’t magically solve the challenges with remote communication, but it’s important to remember that new options appear, and it’s important to make communication as frictionless as possible if the tools you’re using no longer meet your needs, take the time to try out alternatives
Reduce the friction of communication. @efinlay24 #HackConf they are the foundation upon which we build everything else if you’ve ever fought against blurry screenshares and poor audio, or spent 5 minutes trying to get a meeting room to connect, you’ll know that it’s a miserable experience that detracts from what we’re trying to do in the first place - communicate and collaborate
It’s difficult to read intent from text. @efinlay24 #HackConf I’ve talked mostly about video calls so far, but dropping down another level of communication, text can struggle to convey intent and emotion most of us use some form of instant messaging at work - we use Slack, which I think is pretty great however, a new set of challenges appear when we rely only on text someone may find a short, direct sentence to be rude or abrupt, while the writer was only trying to be to the point, with no rudeness intended on the other hand, if you’re like me and sprinkle a liberal use of emojis into your messages to be friendly, it can come across to some people as unprofessional or flippant
Cultural and language differences can make it harder. @efinlay24 #HackConf this can be even harder when we’re split across countries, or have people whose first language isn’t English! while it’s our primary language at the FT, it’s easy to forget that not everyone has the same cultural background for phrases
@efinlay24 #HackConf a small example of this was when I discovered some of my friends in Sofia were confused by my use of “ta”, to say thank you I hadn’t considered that it might be unique to British English, and that not everyone understood what I meant that’s a harmless example - but misunderstandings can cause a problem in other situations the cultural subtleties of language can be very difficult to grasp on both sides
Private team channels are important for bonding. @efinlay24 #HackConf another thing that gets lost easily is casual team bonding chats we’ve found that having a private team channel works well for the team to socialise and feel comfortable with other alongside a public channel for our customers to reach out to us and ask for help
Desk moves within an office can have an unexpected impact. @efinlay24 #HackConf even moving desks can have an impact since we’ve moved to our new office, there’s now more floors between Ops and some of the other technology teams we’ve found that people are much less likely to mention things to us as they walk past our area one of our current challenges is how we build that relationship and communication back up, so they don’t forget to tell us what they’re working on, without needing to specifically schedule in a meeting
I found it hard to get my team’s agreement on changes. @efinlay24 #HackConf I mentioned at the start of my talk that I struggled with a way to include the whole Operations team when I wanted to make changes to the way we worked I was used to being able to quickly get feedback or agreement from everyone I didn’t want people to feel excluded but equally I didn’t want to send an email to the team, then have to wait 3 days for everyone to read it and respond
when I told my boss, they gave me some advice from Amazon’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos talks about decision making, and how decisions can generally be grouped into two types
Type 1 decisions are difficult to reverse. Type 1 decisions are like walking through a one-way doors - that decision has a big impact, and it’s hard to reverse if you later change your mind
Type 2 decisions are easy to change. Type 2 decisions, on the other hand, are much easier to reverse - like walking back through an open doorway I realised that most of the changes I wanted to make to improve the team fell into this category so rather than try and get full agreement from everyone on the team
Make incremental changes, then iterate. I realised it was far better to run ideas past everyone I could reach make changes based on their feedback then try it out for a week or two if the team felt that things weren’t working, we could go back to the old way with very little effort
Type 1 changes are reviewed by the Technical Governance Group. @efinlay24 #HackConf the larger type 1 decisions which have a bigger impact are where the FT’s Technical Governance Group comes in because our technical teams are split across 3 different locations it can be difficult to make wide-reaching changes that affect multiple areas of the business
This allows more scrutiny from more experts. @efinlay24 #HackConf the aim are to ensure that teams across the business have the opportunity to provide feedback on high impact changes in the past, it was only technology leadership that attended but we found it hard to make changes when one or two people were unavailable we now have it open to a much wider group, not just senior management and this allows more scrutiny from more experts in the business
@efinlay24 #HackConf people submitting proposals are expected to have broad agreement before they come to the group, which meets every 2 weeks this fortnightly review allows everyone to share their feedback identify gaps that might have been missed and be aware of upcoming changes that might impact their teams
Run effective meetings. @efinlay24 #HackConf the last point I want to touch on regarding communication is meetings as I mentioned before, face to face is often the most efficient way to discuss things and come to an decision but often, people hate meetings for a variety of different reasons often we have too many meetings, or we feel that some of them are a waste of time
https://medium.com/ft-product-technology/a-guide-for-accessible-meetings-2c1e54145187 Jennifer Johnson wrote a great blog post about when Ben, a deaf colleague joined their team they had to rethink how they ran their meetings in order to include him it turns out that a lot of the guidelines that promote accessibility and inclusivity are actually great ideas for all meetings not just meetings that Ben is in
https://medium.com/ft-product-technology/a-guide-for-accessible-meetings-2c1e54145187 for example, only have one person talk at a time during a meeting this is especially true when I’m dialling in remotely I find it impossible to hear what’s going on when two or more people start talking simultaneously
https://medium.com/ft-product-technology/a-guide-for-accessible-meetings-2c1e54145187 all meetings should have a clear purpose and agenda, so that people can prepare ahead of time it helps reduce wasted time, and to reduce the number of unnecessary meetings Lee at the Government Digital Service suggested another guideline I want to mention, which isn’t listed in that article
If three people are remote, make everyone remote. https://medium.com/ft-product-technology/a-guide-for-accessible-meetings-2c1e54145187 at GDS, if 3 people are remote, everyone dials in remotely, even if they’re in the same office when everyone is in a room with just a handful remote, it can be really hard for them to participate by making everyone remote, it ensures that everyone is on the same level of communication timezones can make the scheduling of meetings tricky as well Sofia has a 2 hour time difference from London, which I didn’t think was big
but when I was based in Sofia last year, helping to set up the FT’s new office I quickly found that once I included lunch, the 2 hour difference meant that we really only had a 3 hour window per day where we could schedule meetings
A 2 hour time difference is 3 hours of availability. and that’s before we consider at any other meetings or invites that people already have this makes it even more important that when we do run a meeting, we make sure that it’s as effective and efficient as possible we want to do our best to avoid people skipping lunch, or staying late in the office to join a meeting
What even is “remoteness”? Communication challenges > Culture challenges Why enable remote work? so we’ve talked about some communication challenges and how we can overcome them let’s think about building an effective remote team culture
Psychological safety is paramount. https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness/steps/introduction/ psychological safety the is ability to show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career for example - do people feel comfortable asking questions in public? can they can provide honest feedback, or raise concerns that they may have?
Psychological safety is What makes an effective paramount. team at Google? https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness/steps/introduction/ Google and re:work recently released the results of Project Aristotle this was a research project conducted over several years, aiming to identify what makes a effective team at Google
https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness/steps/introduction/ the most important factor they found was that effective teams had a strong sense of psychological safety interestingly for this talk - being located in the same place was NOT significantly related this suggests remote teams can absolutely be effective - but we may have to work harder at it I definitely recommend reading the full report - there is some some really useful information there along with tools that you can use to measure and improve team safety
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L hoLuui9gX8 Amy Edmondson presented a TED talk on this topic as well she outlines 3 steps that everyone can take to build psychological safety within a team:
Discuss and agree on the team’s values. https://www.ft.com/tech-principles this culture of trust and safety is a difficult thing to share, particularly when new people join the team people learn and pick up culture by observing how everyone on the team behaves this can be much harder for remote staff it’s a good idea - for everyone, not just remote teams - to meet, discuss and agree on a shared set of team values that they believe are important the Customer Products team at the FT did this recently, and they published their values online for everyone to see
https://www.ft.com/tech-principles I really like this one, especially as someone who is often on the sharp end of production incidents :) for new or remote staff, this helps set the expectations of what we consider important, and what we expect from our teammates
https://www.ft.com/tech-principles another one I like is to assume good faith - which sounds simple, but when I’m stressed, I can find myself getting frustrated and venting it’s always worth remembering we don’t work with people who are causing problems intentionally when we look at code or services that aren’t up to the standard we would prefer, there’s often context for why it’s ended up that way it’s far more valuable to lead by example, improve things and make them better
Schedule regular collaboration opportunities. when people are remote, there aren’t as many opportunities for collaboration it won’t happen organically - you can’t just ask the person sitting next to you for help the Cloud Enablement team that I mentioned before schedule a daily pair programming session this really helps with making remote collaboration happen - because it becomes the default, rather than something that we have to go out of our way to arrange
Set up coffee roulette. https://www.donut.com/ another way to meet people across your company is Coffee Roulette we use a tool called Donut to organise this the idea is that every 2 weeks, everyone in the coffee roulette Slack channel is be paired with someone they haven’t met before then when they’re free, they arrange a coffee and a chat
https://www.donut.com/ for people who are remote, it can really help to be paired with people that they may otherwise never meet it really encourages people to break down silos, and build connections across the business
another way of doing this is to encourage people to rotate through different teams, whether that’s a permanent move, or just a temporary basis the Reliability Engineering team at the FT do this - they’re responsible for building the tools that handle our monitoring, alerting, and support information every quarter, 2 to 3 people join them from different teams - when they return to their home team, they share the knowledge of the tools they’ve helped build because of our remote culture, people have been able to join from Sofia and Tokyo
tech talks - livestream get a photo @efinlay24 #HackConf monthly Tech Talks are another way that we do this, where internal and external speakers present a conference talk that everyone can join we make sure that we have a talk space reserved in each office, and livestream the talks to all locations this definitely requires good AV equipment and connectivity in each location, otherwise it’ll be a painful experience you also need to make sure you provide a way for people to ask questions, and that everyone speaks into the microphone
@efinlay24 #HackConf our annual FT hackathon also helps everyone to collaborate across locations people from across the company come together in small teams for two days, and work on a idea or proof of concept once time is up, they present their work to the judges, and prizes are awarded based on various categories our hackathon teams have included engineers from New York, London, Sofia and Manila
photo of sofia hackathon team this year, one of our teams in Sofia won the “most likely to enable new services and products” category Cait O’Riordan, our Chief Product and Information officer presented them their trophy over hangout I was told to make sure to leave enough space in my suitcase to bring their prizes with me when I flew to Sofia
Meeting in person is still really valuable. @efinlay24 #HackConf those are some ideas about how we can help other locations feel included, but there’s still a lot of context that we don’t understand about people until we meet them in person, and build those social bonds
https://www.giantswarm.io/ Joe Salisbury is familiar with this he’s a product manager at Giant Swarm, a fully distributed company that builds and delivers k8s as a service for enterprises
https://www.giantswarm.io/ normally, everyone will work from their own location he says it’s really important that they meet up twice a year to work together in person and do some social team events
https://www.giantswarm.io/ this helps to build the trust and understanding between the team who usually only ever see each other on video calls it’s a huge benefit to spend time together, work and relax afterwards
when we were setting up the FT’s Sofia office last year, we spent a few days in Sozopol, on the Bulgarian coast it was a great way to get to know our new team members, build trust and enjoy the beach and we still managed to get a lot of work done - honest!
@efinlay24 #HackConf the last point on culture that I want to mention is that we encourage everyone to take advantage of our flexible working policy we try to make it easy for our staff to work in a way that suits them best often there are a whole range of things that people use this for from working from home to collect a package to being able to support and provide care for their family
Flexible working encourages everyone to support remote work. @efinlay24 #HackConf because this is widely used across the company, it means that everyone supports and enables remote working many teams will work entirely remote one day a week everyone gets to understand the challenges in communication as well as the benefits of working from outside the office!
What even is “remoteness”? Communication challenges Culture challenges > Why enable remote work? so what are those benefits? if remote work makes communication and team building more challenging, why not have everyone work from the office full time?
Flexible staff are happier staff. @efinlay24 #HackConf as I mentioned just now, it allows our staff to be far more flexible they can save time by avoiding their daily commute which lets them have a better work / life balance
Recruit from a wider talent pool. @efinlay24 #HackConf we can recruit from a far wider pool of talent, without needing to pay relocation costs this is especially true if you’re not based in or near a tech hub city Lee mentioned that GDS staff need to go through security clearance checks, which means hiring new staff is expensive in both time and money their remote-first culture allows them to keep people who were otherwise going to move out of London
Improve team diversity. @efinlay24 #HackConf enabling remote work also helps to improve the diversity of our teams I don’t just mean diversity in location, culture, or gender but also diversity in people who have responsibilities of care we can hire great people who need to pick up their children from school, or look after a family member who isn’t well
Take advantage of timezones. @efinlay24 #HackConf finally, we can view timezones as a benefit, rather than a limitation our customers are global - people don’t stop reading the FT outside of London’s 9 to 5 by having teams in locations around the world, we can support those customers no matter where they are, or what time it is we’re nearly at the end now, so let’s wrap this up and recap what we’ve discussed today
There is no magic solution. If there is, we haven’t found it yet. @efinlay24 #HackConf there is no magic solution that will solve all of our problems it takes effort and time to overcome the communication challenges, and to build a remote culture there are 3 main things that we can do:
Ensure our teams have the tools they need. make sure our teams have the tools they need for remote collaboration
Think remote-first for communication. think remote-first for communication, and ensure that everyone’s included
Try things, and find what works for you. and make small changes, iterate, and find out what works for your teams because what works for us, may not work for you just before I finish:
Nearly the end. Don’t clap yet. @efinlay24 #HackConf this is a brand new talk, and this is the first time that I’ve given it to a real audience I would really appreciate any feedback you might have and if you have questions or stories of your own, please come and have a chat afterwards I will be sharing my slides on Twitter as well, so you can easily get the links to all the resources I mentioned my username is @efinlay24 and finally:
I wanted to give a quick shoutout to my Sofia colleagues and friends who are here today from the Financial Times it’s really lovely to be back here and see everyone again, I have missed you all!
The end. “Please clap.” Jeb Bush, 2016 thank you very much
We’re hiring! https://ft.com/dev/null/ @efinlay24 euan.finlay@ft.com bye
