Building Engineering Teams During A Pandemic

Adrian Trenaman at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkODNv_VRRo

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction and pay by location

[00:00:00] Catherine: Hi, Adrian, how are you?

[00:00:02] Adrian: Very well, thank you. Lovely to see you again, Catherine.

[00:00:03] Catherine: Yeah, nice to see you. I'll give you a brief introduction, for context for everyone listening out there. Adrian joined us on stage for one of the very first, or the very first, UXDX in 2016, and we genuinely are delighted to have you back. I think you have a really great way of wording information for people, and I'm excited for our talk today. Earlier, in a talk with Chris Grant, we had a designer's perspective on teams and work and productivity, and now we're going to have an engineer's perspective, specifically on building engineering teams during the pandemic, and the challenges and successes of that for you.

[00:00:46] For those who are listening, obviously, Adrian, you're an engineering director at Google, and I will ask you this question mainly to get it out of the way. I've seen in the news recently about pandemic employment and pay scales at Google. There has been some social media response to people being paid different wages based on location. What is Google's position on that?

[00:01:16] Adrian: Yeah, I think it's a great question. I think the general approach for Google is consistent with what it and other companies have always done. You always aim to pay fairly and competitively in the market that you're in, and I think that's been consistent for some time. I really do get that principle of fairness. It's not really sustainable to pay, for example, a London or a Dublin salary in another location where maybe the cost of living or the cost of labor is a half or a third or even a quarter of that. So I think that sense of fairness really drives it: paying an appropriate wage for the location.

[00:02:01] I think maybe it's bubbled up a little bit on social media because now the options for people to change location really expose that things may change. I don't really think there's something new here. In the previous company I worked for, I was leading an engineering team in Dublin, and we had some engineers in America, and they were very excited about the potential of coming to live in Ireland, until they learned that maybe their salary would be cut, because you just can't sustain a New York salary in Dublin. I think that was a really interesting learning. So I don't think there's something new here. I just think there's maybe a lot more heat or discussion around it, possibly because obviously there is that flexibility and that chance to move right now.

[00:02:48] Catherine: Yeah, it's a very good point. If anyone listening has any comments, put them into the chat on the right-hand side there. The conversation has been around for a while, but it's brought to a new level because the opportunity has never been so prominent for such a large percentage of people, I guess.

[00:03:06] Adrian: That's right, yeah.

Meetings in a remote world

[00:03:07] Catherine: So, Google: how are you managing the hybrid world there? It will be very different to a lot of organizations, I think.

[00:03:15] Adrian: Yeah, because I think it's actually been a really interesting journey for all of us. Google has always been a company that has prided itself on its offices, and on bringing teams together physically in a great environment to be really creative. And then March 2020, all of a sudden, it changes. So I think we've been learning, and there have been lots of things that we've seen along the way.

[00:03:49] One of the very interesting things was that everybody used to always complain that there weren't enough meeting rooms. And then we discovered that the meeting rooms were actually a natural bottleneck on our ability to have meetings. One of the first things that happened when we didn't need meeting rooms anymore was a huge increase in the number of meetings that people were having. That was a real learning. Not only are we maybe having more meetings in some cases, but the fatigue of being on a Hangout or a Zoom call all day really gets you. So it's really interesting to think about how we can make the time that we are together online really productive and really make it work for us.

[00:04:32] So what have we seen? By the way, when it comes to meetings, I'm a huge fan of a book called Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni. It's absolutely fantastic, and it points out all the anti-patterns of the kinds of meetings you can have. Nobody likes being in a bad meeting, but not all meetings are bad. So be really clear about the intent of a meeting. For example: we're going to have a weekly get-together, it's half an hour, and this is where we talk status. We just make sure that we all know what we're doing and we're not blocked. And actually that's not a meeting where we should start talking about strategic items, because we're never going to have enough time to do them justice.

[00:05:22] So really spin out and say there's a different kind of meeting: an ideation meeting or a strategy meeting. That's more the meeting where you really do close away your email and your chat windows and everything, and we're really going to solve a problem together. So be really intentional about the kinds of meetings and about their purpose. And by the way, that doesn't mean every meeting needs an agenda. Different meetings have different flavors. You can have one meeting that's driven entirely by a round table, and then another meeting that is more agenda-driven, with more work up front, shall we say.

Hybrid work at Google

[00:06:02] What we're seeing is that we're now moving to a place where offices are opening again, which is fabulous. We're already at a place where we've got Googlers back at work in some offices. So our meeting landscape is moving from one where you saw ten faces in everyone's bedroom, or wherever it was, to one where in some cases you have a bunch of people in an office together again, and that's actually great to see.

[00:06:33] Where we're going is, I think, really interesting. We're going to go to a place where there's a far more hybrid workplace. The pandemic's been really interesting: working from home is polarizing. This is one of the big learnings. Some people absolutely thrive working from home. Some people are doing really, really well. And other people are not. They really, really miss the office.

[00:07:09] In general, there's a bulk of people who are looking forward to coming back to offices, and what that looks like in general is a three-plus-two week, where we've got people coming in for three days and then the option to work from home for two days as well. That's a really nice mix. Then of course there are people who can choose to be in the office all five days if they want, and there are also people who can choose to go fully remote. So really getting that mix. I don't think we're ever going to go back to all being in the office all the time, in the same place.

[00:07:54] Catherine: And is it at an individual level that you're going to make those decisions? Is it at your team level, or is it a Google-wide initiative?

[00:08:01] Adrian: Yeah, it's interesting. I think whatever norm we set now in terms of when people should be in the office needs to be consistent over a pretty large work group. Typically, Google divides itself into what we call product areas. These are pretty large groups, and the norms for how that organization will handle and interpret hybrid work are handled by the organization at that size. For example, I'm in the commerce org, I work for Google Shopping, and the commerce org has decided we're embracing a three-day hybrid week, and we're embracing flexibility as a default.

[00:08:47] So the general answer that we're going to default to, if somebody wishes to go remote or transfer country, is probably yes. We're going to give that flexibility. Obviously, there's a very principled approach to how we determine whether somebody can go remote or not. There's a process that any individual can apply through. But really, when we step back and look at it, the reality is that all of our teams are going to have this very hybrid flavor going forward.

Situational leadership and being a better manager

[00:09:20] Catherine: There's a lot to pack in there. One thing you mentioned that stood out to me was that some people are excelling and some people are not excelling in a virtual world. How have you, as a manager, managed the differences in that, and managed individual people to make them excel?

[00:09:46] Adrian: Yeah, I think there's a great leadership training that I did once, which was really enlightening for me. In the last decade, I think we've seen a huge mass of people advocating for giving your teams autonomy: push everything down to the teams, and then within the team push the autonomy to the individual. This is great. I absolutely love that approach, and it's my preferred style of leadership. But I was challenged when I heard about situational leadership.

[00:10:30] Everyone, regardless of where you are in your career, finds themselves in areas where they're completely in their comfort zone, they know their job, they're completely nailing it. Or they're new to their job, they're new to their role, expectations aren't clear, standards may not be clear, guidance may not be clear. So really, when you think about us as leaders, as managers, we really have to step up to that. We have to understand where our people are. And then we have to handle it: if I've got somebody who does need guidance, that's great, I'm going to give them a different leadership style from somebody who doesn't need that level of guidance.

[00:11:22] In general, one of the things I'm learning is that the office was so forgiving. When you're leading in the office and everybody's there, everything tends to fix itself or right itself along the way. But now that we're remote, it's different, and I think we've got to lead into that. You've got to be a better manager. That's the bottom line.

[00:11:51] So when we think about it, one of the big things, and it sounds maybe obvious or flat, is: are you setting expectations correctly as a manager? Have you been really clear: this is what we need to do, and this is when we need to do it by? And are we checking in regularly, so that it's not a surprise if we discover that somebody's been held up, maybe by their own work or by somebody else's work? Are we giving appropriate feedback to individuals, so they don't end up digging themselves into a hole, so we're making sure that they can be the best they can be? So I think a little bit of that discipline, a little bit of situational leadership, really goes an enormous way for our people.

Individual performance, empathy and trust

[00:12:43] Catherine: Yeah, I really like that: expectations, feedback and discipline. It makes a lot of sense. Some companies are claiming that while individual performance is improving, collaboration and innovation are decreasing. What has been your experience of that aspect?

[00:13:02] Adrian: I think that's interesting. Maybe let's tackle the two. You've got the individuals. As I say, some people are absolutely thriving. They're nailing their job, they're loving the silence, the focus, maybe the work-life balance, maybe the fact that the time they might otherwise spend commuting they can actually spend productively in their lives. So you've got the people who are doing really well there. And then of course, as I said, for some people it's actually far more difficult on many levels. As I said, you need to really reach out and handle those differently, and really be understanding and supportive of staff. Empathy is so important in our leadership. We really need to step in and understand what's actually happening for this person, what's really happening on the ground, and then we can support them and help them.

[00:14:00] Catherine: Sorry for jumping in there, Ade. Have you increased empathy during virtual sessions, or has it got more challenging?

[00:14:17] Adrian: I think that's interesting. If I was thinking of a trend graph of really important concepts in leadership in the last five or ten years, I think empathy has been rising and accelerating. And I think maybe the need for empathic leadership is so much greater now, because our people need it more. We've just come through two years of a global pandemic. Everybody has been afraid, been distracted, there's been so much going on for everyone. So I think there's maybe a bigger call for empathy right now. Certainly, when I see the kinds of themes that my peers talk about, empathy is a huge part of that. And part of that is vulnerability as well: really building trustful relationships and building trust in the workplace. I think that's become really, really important.

[00:15:20] Catherine: It just piqued my mind, because I feel, from our team's perspective, we've got a lot more personable being virtual. But for a larger organization, somebody mentioned to me that they missed the office balloons, to know it was somebody's birthday or a retirement or whatever it might be. You don't get those prompts that you normally would.

The life path exercise

[00:15:41] Adrian: It's actually interesting. You're right, sometimes it's those little acts that mean so much. I happen to be blessed on my team: I've got somebody that I work with very closely, and they always remember. I'm terrible, by the way, I always forget. But we've got somebody who always remembers. And one of the other things that she's done, which has been profound for us as a team: we meet quarterly, and this began as an exercise called a life path exercise.

[00:16:15] Stay with me. Basically, the team gets together, and we all have a Jamboard. We have a page each, and you get to do a quick doodle of the big things that happened in your life. You drop in pictures and you do squiggles and all sorts of stuff. And then everybody just says, here's the story of my life, in two or three minutes. We did one of these, and I think everybody enters such a session going, I'm not sure how this is going to turn out. And all of a sudden we realized that there were connections and similarities that we had never known, and depth of character that we had never seen before. Because sometimes you only ever see the person who shows up at the office, but you don't know all of the things that brought them there.

[00:17:02] The successful things stick, and one of the things we found is that we're now meeting quarterly to riff off some of those sessions and have these really, really deep conversations. They're giving us an enormous sense of connection, and I think it's been really successful. One thing that didn't work for us was, "Hey, let's have a coffee hangout every Friday at 11." First week, 10 people turn up. Second week, three. And then all of a sudden it's fallen off the radar.

[00:17:37] Maybe that calls to this: this is a really specific meeting about connection, about social connection, and it's got a clear intent. I think that's a really important aspect. We've been really clear about what it is and why we're there. And I have to say it really has helped build incredible trust in the team, and an incredible deeper level of understanding and respect across the team.

[00:18:08] Catherine: Nervous, yeah.

[00:18:10] Adrian: I think it's definitely worth a try. It was really surprising for me how that worked.

Collaboration and innovation remotely

[00:18:19] Here's what's interesting: you mentioned collaboration and innovation, and I think this is really interesting, because I've been working on remote teams since 2000. It was a remarkably remote team, and I actually used to think that having such long experience as a remote leader or remote worker was a real unique selling point. Of course, now I don't have it anymore, because everybody's been remote for the last two years, so it's all gone. But I've seen teams innovate remotely for so long now. In particular, you learn from the open source community. There's just such incredible innovation from people who meet maybe once a year, or may never have met at all, and they're contributing and collaborating in an incredible way.

[00:19:14] So what do I think? I think we've seen continued collaboration and innovation. I think that's actually been really, really strong, and a big part of that is leaning into new tools. And I learned something that I thought was really interesting. I tried running an ideation session, or a question and answer session, on a particular topic, and there were about 30 people on the call. What I learned there was that when you ask a question, nobody answers. There's a magic number of about seven plus or minus two. If you keep the call small, then you can get real engagement with the group. In a sense, there's nowhere to hide.

[00:20:04] Even then, you can be gently playful as well, because there may always be people who are a little bit silent. I really do believe that if you're not actively including, you're excluding. Take that as a principle. So really reel people into the conversation. You can do that with the group, and you can really get engagement, which I think is great. So, leaning into new tools: we use Jamboards a lot, we also use Figma. I think everybody's got their favorite new virtual whiteboarding kit. I think that's been great.

[00:20:39] Here's the thing: yes, the future is hybrid. One of the things I remember most from working on a really effective remote team back in the early 2000s is that if you can bring people together, twice a year is great, but even if you can bring them together once a year, part of that is the more immersive, intense ideation and collaboration that you get when you bring them together. But the other part is the trust and the relationships that get built on the team. People move from being maybe a name on an email that you once saw to actually being friends and colleagues.

[00:21:21] I marveled at this in my younger career. I used to wonder how my boss could afford to take us all off the road. We were tech consultants. How could he afford to take us off the road for one week in the year? And the answer was: how could he afford not to? The upside was just so great. He ended up with a gelled team that would go to the mat for each other any day. So I think we'll see continued work on Jamboards and Figma boards and all this kind of stuff, but I think we will also see people being brought together, even remote people, for a real punchy period, maybe every six months, to really make sure that we're all on the same page.

Balancing empathy and targets

[00:22:07] Catherine: Amazing. I'm running out of time, and I have so much to get through with you. I have another question here, and I really like this one. We talked about empathy, but how do you balance being empathetic with ensuring that you're hitting targets for Google?

[00:22:24] Adrian: Yeah, that's right. Gosh. Obviously you have to be open and honest, even when it's difficult. The question reminds me of something from Radical Candor, this idea of ruinous empathy: I want to be nice, and I want to be loved by everybody, and I don't want to offend anybody, so I won't actually give the difficult feedback. And the reality is that just doesn't work. As a leader, we've got to make sure we give the feedback. When it's good, it's great: celebrate publicly. When it's bad, let's criticize privately, or give that constructive feedback privately. But let's make sure that we have those open conversations.

[00:23:23] One other key part, and this is something I've learned: when you build very close teams, and everyone's very passionate about a project and about the team spirit, it is hard to give difficult feedback. So we learned the power of the word dispassionate. It doesn't mean you're not passionate; it means that you can set that distance. You can have that care for someone, but you can still do the right thing and give them the feedback that they need to get better. Sometimes it's hard news, but you're a better leader if you're doing that.

Office perks and remote workers

[00:24:03] Catherine: Yeah, I really like it. Recruitment-wise, I'm not going to touch that, because in our prep call you talked about how you don't really have that issue, because you're Google and blessed in that way, and a lot of companies out there will be jealous. But Google is famous for its office perks. What are you doing for remote workers, if some people have the choice of going hybrid or staying remote?

[00:24:29] Adrian: It's interesting. As you see, our offices will open again, and if you look at the overall strategy, the bulk of people will be in the office for some period of the time. So the really nice Google offices and all the perks will continue. I have not heard of shipping perks to remote workers. I don't think that's something that can be done. I actually think that in some jurisdictions there are tax implications and things like that. So I think the office will always be Google's center for fun and perks and collaboration, and I think that will continue.

[00:25:13] Catherine: Yeah. I was talking with Shopify, who have spoken at our event before. They've gone all remote, and they've used their office as a collaborative space only, to get people together. So, as you said in the beginning, it will be there for people who want it.

[00:25:31] Adrian: Yeah, absolutely. And it's really interesting: lots of people want it. You have to remember, Catherine, not everybody has a six-room mansion with a home office where they can hide themselves away. There are lots of people out there who are like, "I just want to be in the office. I don't want to work from my room or my kitchen table in my apartment. I actually need to get out." So it'll be a nice mix.

Time zones, decisions and communication

[00:25:54] Catherine: Yeah, I know, it'll be really great. So if people are deciding different things, does all communication need to be async? And this is talking specifically about if you are remote, or some people are in the office and some people are remote. How do you ensure alignment there?

[00:26:16] Adrian: I think you need to be really thoughtful about the situation you're in. There's no one size fits all. One of my big things, and it's shockingly simple, is really understand your time zones. If you're working across a team, and it turns out there's, let's say, a 10-hour time difference, the only overlap you have is maybe early in somebody's morning or late in somebody's evening. It can be very, very difficult. So you've really got to understand how you are going to manage these time zones. Working the overlap is really good, and make sure that the meetings that need collaboration are in those overlap times.

[00:27:01] One big thing about the overall decision making is to be really clear about how we are going to make a decision. Lots of places, I think, now lean into a very consensus-driven approach, and this is great depending on the kind of decision you're trying to make and the kind of culture you've got. Sometimes, though, the best thing is actually to mix it up a little bit and say, this actually isn't a consensus decision, and it's not a democracy. This is going to be a decision a leader has to take. So we're going to make the decision process clear, and then we can communicate together to get the alignment or the input that we need, and then we can communicate the outcomes.

[00:27:44] So I do think it's going to be a mix, for sure. I think it's really important that you get the balance between chat, which is very immediate, and email. It's funny, somebody pointed out that the worst thing you can do as a leader is ping somebody in a different time zone with the word "ping." It just induces terror: oh my god, what do they want? Am I in trouble? Is something down? Just don't do that. I think it's really important to think about how your communication is landing and when it's landing, and just be really thoughtful about that. Understand your team and understand their needs.

[00:28:28] Catherine: And maybe note, at the same time, you could schedule emails to fit an appropriate time, if you're working late too, maybe.

[00:28:36] Adrian: Yeah, that's true. Obviously everyone's time is going to be different. One thing I have learned, though: there's a wonderful feature in Gmail, which is scheduled send. If you're working late on Friday night, you can have it send automatically on Monday morning, and that means you're not interrupting anybody at the weekend. Because again, emails from managers create a huddle or a hustle, and maybe you don't want that. So be thoughtful.

[00:29:03] Catherine: That's very true, and that's a nice note to end on. I could genuinely talk to you all day, Ade. I will say, the next time I get you on, can you do a presentation at the piano? Because that would be great.

[00:29:19] Adrian: I might have to pull in my daughter to play the piano, but we'll see if I can work that out. All right, thanks very much for having me. It's been a real pleasure.