Tag Archives: management

The Future of Remote Work (and why companies need to start hiring more community professionals NOW)

Community, Management, Tech, , ,

Slack just released some fascinating research on remote work in the age of COVID-19. There are some important takeaways every company should think deeply on.

People lean towards a hybrid workplace

Despite all the claims of “remote is the future”, the majority of Americans surveyed said that, post-COVID, they’d like to spend some time in the office and some time at home. Very few want to spend 5 days a week in the office, and they appreciate saving time and money working from home.

I suspect many more would have been excited about fully remote, save for one major pain point cited in the research: human connection. People are feeling less connected to their coworkers, and this seems to be one of the main things driving them to think about a hybrid workplace.

The office is not necessary – opportunities to connect as humans are

It’s clear from these results that the office as a workplace is unnecessary, but the office is an easy (if not cheap) way to drive some human connection. That said, it’s uneven, biased towards those who naturally connect with others, and frustrating for truly remote workers.

The future is much more likely about creating structured opportunities for people to connect, both online and in-person. With the focus on connection, these interactions can intentionally drive inclusivity and, frankly, spend more money on peak experiences rather than office perks that become less novel over time. (Hell, even just from a COVID-19 standpoint, safety at one big in-person event is much more doable than safety in an office open to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people every day.)

People Ops teams need to start carving out roles that focus on creating connections and belonging

In other words, they need to hire community professionals. Connection and belonging has become a big focus for People Ops teams in recent years, but it will need to be a top priority for hybrid and remote-first companies. Employee engagement is heavily affected by connection, so someone needs to be dedicated to not just building that into the day-to-day, but building intentional spaces for people to connect. This might look like:

  • Programs that connect employees over coffee
  • Career development buddies
  • Interest/hobby groups
  • Identity groups
  • Team offsites/onsites
  • Big internal summits
  • Onboarding processes geared towards building connection
  • Etc

This will certainly involve events, but won’t work if it’s simply an event planner hire. Experienced community professionals know that the logistics of the event are secondary to driving the desired human connection.

It also requires thinking through how you foster conversation and connection around touchy, emotional issues, something many tech companies are struggling with. These are community-building and moderation issues. Luckily there are a bunch of us who are very experienced at tackling these challenges and opportunities. Rather than learn these skills from scratch, People Ops should look towards the experts.

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This stuff is work. My team’s engagement score has actually improved during the pandemic, but that’s due to hours and hours of work and experimentation on the part of me and my lieutenants. If we leave these things to chance, we’re going to see this get worse.

Management and Operations Tips to Help You Avoid A Disastrous Holiday

Customer Service, Tech, , ,

So yes, I also felt a need to write about that Away article. The thing is, I have two sets of issues with what I read.

1) From an operations standpoint, a lot if this pain was avoidable
2) From a management standpoint, managing like this is cruel and unsustainable

I hope that the following tips can turn an unfortunate story and experience for these employees into something practical for those of you who have a good heart and want to avoid these situations.

Operations

I’ve run Operations teams in some form for over ten years now. It’s a little bit art, but it’s a lot science. And with a physical product, operations are incredibly important to get right. If you are selling a physical product that is likely to be a common Christmas gift, good planning is essential. I worked at the (partially) eCommerce site ZOZI for several years and successfully shepherded us through the holidays despite the massive influx in orders.

What I read in this article is a complete ineptitude in holiday planning for a physical brand…which is probably tied into the second part, because if you don’t care about your employees then you’re less likely to spend time planning for them.

The tips here are simple:

  • Plan
    • Understand your sales projections, estimated support volume per sale, support capability per staff member, etc.
    • If you’re retail, plan for a holiday influx. You will have one.
    • Staff should be allowed to have vacations, so you should plan how to handle vacation schedules early.
    • You should offer in advance, not at the last minute, vacation trade-offs for folks who truly are okay working during the holidays.
    • You should do your best to balance out people’s days off so you can have continuous coverage.
  • Invest
    • Not delivering Christmas gifts on time can be a death sentence for your brand, so you should over-invest during this period.
    • If your projections suggest you won’t have enough people, hire more early (full time or temp).
    • If you’re in a pinch, get all hands on deck to help with support.
  • Prep
    • You should address any quality issues with your product well in advance of the holiday and implement a code freeze (or in this case product freeze) far before so you don’t introduce any potential issues.
    • You should decimate any backlogs well before the holiday influx.
    • You should set expectations with your customers about holiday responsiveness.

Management

That said, the more important issue here is a complete lack of understanding of what makes a good manager. Managers are there to help their employees do their best work…and employees do their best work when they feel it is rewarding, challenging, and appreciated. Nobody does their best work when being yelled at, or if they do then it results in much quicker burnout. Every tactic on display in these Slack threads shows a fundamental misunderstanding, but here are a few tips that might help.

  • Your staff are both valuable asset and PEOPLE. Don’t treat them like gears in a machine.
  • Your on-the-ground managers are going to best know how to implement and deliver your directives. This “all communication should be public” thing is naive. Talk to your lieutenants to figure out the right approach, and let them deliver.
  • Don’t ever couch a punishment as professional development. It’s insulting and undermines any trust in you to actually help them develop.
  • Yelling at people in public only makes them feel worse. These people clearly felt dedication to the company, so any performance conversation would have been motivating to them. Doing it in public just shamed them and showed a lack of appreciation of their hard work.
  • If you’re going to get hands-on, ask how you can help, don’t threaten to take away the project. Get your hands dirty doing the same work as your team. People appreciate leaders that get in and help, but not when they do it as an exasperated, demeaning punishment.
  • When you are shitty to employees you lose them, have a harder time getting new ones, suffer from abrupt and rough departures, and maybe even get an article like this written about you.

I don’t like dunking on other teams, but I found the situations highlighted in this article pretty offensive…and sadly, I’ve seen versions of this in the real world. Life is too short to be a jerk. Build work memories you’re proud of.

Leadership is letting your team fail (safely)

Life,

“This is a bad post. Let’s delete it.”

My brain wasn’t wrong. It didn’t seem like a great post to me, based on my years of experience with content. But I kept my mouth shut. I let the post stay up. And, unsurprisingly, it failed.

Why did I do this? Because it’s way more convincing to learn from mistakes than from decrees.

Failure is Part of Learning

Think about your adolescence. Did you believe everything adults said, without question? No. You tried things on your own. You had crushing failures and exhilarating successes. You learned what did and didn’t work. You realized the world is relative and that you had to build your own system for navigating it. And hopefully your parents emphasized the right advice and rules: the ones that kept you alive while still allowing you to build your own personal spectrum of successes and failures. Too many rules leave you oppressed; too few leave you dead.

Failure is Part of Innovation

The professional world is no different. There are some hard lines, but not as many as you think; many of the major successes of the last few generations were due to bucking the status quo. It’s hard to argue with an employee that success is following the rules when Zuckerberg didn’t and is now worth 50 billion.

So how does one manage the business equivalent of a rebellious teenager? By letting them fail safely.

Too Much Freedom

I was managing a team of relative newbies, and our new project was content creation. They were fantastic at support, incredibly smart, and very empathetic – but they didn’t have a deep background in engaging content. I wanted to be the “cool boss” without too many rules, so I simply said: “Be creative.”

I told them to “think outside of the box.” I told them “there are no bad ideas.”

They came back with nothing.

Too Little Freedom

So I gave them more structure. I gave them brand guidelines and lots of examples. And they started to deliver! They had a direction to aim for, and so they moved.

Not all of it was good, of course. Some, to my trained eye, simply weren’t going to perform. At first, I said no to that content. But I immediately saw morale drop. They wanted to be creative – hell, that’s what I had asked of them – but I wasn’t letting them take risks. They trusted me, but they weren’t learning anything aside from my opinions. And it’s hard to get excited when you’re not learning.

Just Right

So I started saying yes. But I approved a lot of content I knew wasn’t going to perform. And? Most of the time, it didn’t perform. But the team was still excited and motivated.

Here’s the difference: They had been given the chance to experiment and see the actual result. They were much less likely to choose similar content again, because they knew firsthand what would happen. And they continued to be creative, because I gave them the freedom to.

By the end of my tenure, they were a content creation machine and could spot a high-quality piece of content from a mile away. Only occasionally did I have to weigh in, and often I was wrong!

As managers, it’s tempting to enforce rules and try to control people. We want a result, and the only way we know how to get it is by being in control. But this neither creates engaged employees nor scales.

Good managers give their team enough rules to avoid disaster and enough room to try, fail, and learn.

Support team retention? The MOST important thing.

Customer Service, Tech,

ladder to the sky“So many support teams see members come and go. It’s the stepping stone for ‘more respectable’ jobs. This can be okay in certain organizations, but most of the time it simply results in lower quality of support for the customer. High turnover means training, re-training, and undocumented processes … your customers suffer, and usually the bottom line does as well. Keeping support members who are good at the job is vital.”

(From Chris Bowler‘s blog)

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

I’m encountering this a lot while hiring at ZOZI. This is the first company I’ve worked at that is very attractive to the general public (UserVoice was more “startup cool”) and lots of folks have literally told me “I’ve been waiting for a job, any job to open at your company” while I looked on at their marketing-heavy resumes. Some of them are promising (and hey, one of my existing, awesome team members came to us that way) but most of them are the types whose first question is about the career progression track is at the company. In short, they want to know how long until they can go work in Marketing.

I’ve always been focused on keeping my staff happy but this is a great reminder that it’s not just important, but essential.

(Via Andrew Spittle)

Photo courtesy of Prescott Pym.

Fall in love with the journey, not the destination

Life, ,

illustrationThis article rings so true. Falling in love with the journey is the right way to reach success.

“If you look at the people who are consistently achieving their goals, you start to realize that it’s not the events or the results that make them different. It’s their commitment to the process. They fall in love with the daily practice, not the individual event.”

I’m good at half of this. I like inventing things and making them work and figuring out how to optimize them.

Where I fall down is the follow-through. I’m stoked about inventing something but once it’s reasonably established I’m not as interested in following through with the minutia that makes it a long-term success.

I attribute this to two things:

1) Weakness of character. Honestly, I just need to get better at following through.

2) Delegation. Previously I had very few resources in terms of delegation, so any detail-oriented follow-through fell on me. I’m happy to do anything, but trying to balance company-wide strategy and editing HTML emails is hard.

I need to fall in love with making the minutia happen. I hope with a fresh attitude and a passionate team I can do this.