Ensuring The Success Of Your Remote Engineering Team

Paul Savage, Vanessa Ferguson, Shane Nolan at UXDX Europe. Video: https://youtu.be/n7-a2MJGrS4

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.

Introductions

[00:00:02] Shane: As J said, I'm Shane. I'm from an organization called IDA. It's a government organization, as you can probably guess, since I'm wearing a jacket even at the weekends. We have a really cool group of speakers here who, even though they both coincidentally have set up their Irish hubs in probably the prettiest surfing towns in Ireland, have very, very different approaches to home working. I'll let Vanessa and Paul introduce themselves and talk about their organizations, and then, if we can get a bit of quiet, we'll also get them to talk about their approach to remote and home working.

[00:00:38] Vanessa: Hi everyone, I'm Vanessa Ferguson from LiveTiles. We are an intelligent user experience platform for the enterprise, and I run our people and experience arm of the business, which is our HR function. We are headquartered in New York City, but as you can probably tell from my accent, I'm actually from Australia. We're an Aussie-owned company, HQ in New York City, and then lots of different office locations spread around the world, as well as a lot of remote employees. We're almost 200 employees, and we've been around for about four years now. I'll get into a bit more about our culture and our remote teams in a moment, but I'll let Paul introduce himself first.

[00:01:27] Paul: Hi, I'm Paul Savage from a company called nearForm. We're a services company, so we help other people build modern web apps. We work with people like Condé Nast, helping them build Vogue, and big brands like that internationally. We've been around seven years. Our HQ is in Waterford, in Tramore [?], which is a fantastic place everybody wants to visit, and we have offices in Dublin, offices in Romania, and a small office in Lyon, France. We're also based across about 24 countries, and we have a lot of people who work remotely and work from home. So that's where we're pretty good.

Choosing locations and hiring remote people

[00:02:12] Shane: Vanessa, I imagine you guys have a number of remote offices. Maybe give us a sense of where they are, and some of the selection metrics or criteria you use to choose where you set up.

[00:02:25] Vanessa: Interestingly, our three engineering teams, the product arm of our business, are spread across three locations, and not necessarily obvious choices either. We don't have any of our product team sitting in HQ. The original hub of our product team sits at the bottom of Australia, in Tasmania, in the capital of Tasmania, Hobart. That's one. We've also got another team who sit on the west coast of the US, just outside Seattle, in a place called Richland. And then, probably very importantly, we have our third engineering team, which sits in Sligo.

[00:03:14] Obviously these are very different locations for us. The reason we went with those locations was, well, a number of reasons, but we really like to be close to tech universities where we can pull talent from those regions. We also look at a number of other factors, like the community itself, cost of living, quality of living as well, and how we can build a team in that location.

[00:03:45] Shane: Paul, the same question, but a little bit different for you guys, because you've got a lot of home workers as well. Do you have any different criteria for choosing people who work from home, or do you hire the same way?

[00:03:57] Paul: We're lucky, I suppose, that we have a great reputation for doing good work, but that puts a certain expectation on our teams. It makes it more difficult for us to hire people and train them up, because the expectation is immediate when they join. So we tend to engage people who are very experienced. We've got ten years plus of experience in a lot of the developers, so it's a different profile. We're also looking at what people have done before. If somebody has worked remotely before, that makes it a lot easier.

[00:04:34] It's about identifying the way they like to work. For some people, working from home works great. Some people just get lonely and curl up in a ball; they need some kind of social contact. With those people, we might have them in a co-working space near where they live. It's a question of using the interview process to get to know them, so we can make sure they don't trip over any of the trip wires of remote working.

Isolation and the case for meeting face to face

[00:04:58] Shane: Fear of isolation is always, I suppose, the biggest reservation we find when we reach out to companies about the concept of remote working. Vanessa, maybe give us a sense of what you do at LiveTiles to address that, from a communications or an interaction perspective.

[00:05:19] Vanessa: Our people are the most important aspect of our business. Being a tech company, a lot of the time it doesn't matter where you actually work from, but it does matter whether you're connected and collaborating and communicating efficiently. So obviously we use a lot of the tech tools available to us to collaborate. We're often on Microsoft Teams or Yammer or Skype for Business, and the dev team would obviously use their own tools as well for sharing code, etc.

[00:05:52] But probably the differentiator for us when it comes to making sure our team doesn't feel isolated, and I've mentioned the three hubs where we have our product teams, but we do have remote workers who work from home as well, is the importance of getting everyone together face to face. As a software company that started about four years ago, very early on I remember our CEO, Kyle [?], saying all the time when it came to customer meetings: get in front of your customers, get in front of them face to face. You're much more likely to win that business if they've met you and you've developed a rapport face to face.

[00:06:33] We used to invest quite heavily in that. It didn't matter whether you had to jump on a plane, a train, a bus, hire a car, whatever: get to your customer face to face. Now, as we've grown, that still remains very important to us as a business, but we've been able to allocate a fair amount of our budget to internal face-to-face collaboration. It's quite common that you'll have someone travelling from Ireland to New York, or even from Hobart to London or New York or the west coast of the US. People move around so that they can connect, whether it's running a team off-site, a series of meetings, or onboarding.

[00:07:14] We particularly try, for our American and European employees, to get them to our New York headquarters for a bit of cultural immersion. We also invest quite heavily in an annual get-together where our whole team comes together face to face. It was a lot easier when there were 20, 30, 50 employees, and now that we're hitting that 200 number it does become more expensive and difficult, given where we're pulling people from in terms of where they live in the world.

[00:07:47] Earlier this year we flew everyone to Hawaii, which was really tough to take, I'm sure you can imagine. That was a huge cost to our business. But the impact that had on engagement, and my role on the people and experience side was to measure that engagement, which I did right after the Hawaii off-site, means it really does pay for itself. Getting people together builds those relationships, and that way, next time you find yourself on a Teams conference call, you've already got that rapport established. So we're absolutely committed to doing this every year from now on, getting everyone together, whether we're 500 employees, a thousand employees and beyond, and we believe that over time it will pay for itself.

The real cost of a distributed workforce

[00:08:35] Shane: I think it's a really interesting point, the need to invest in the connectivity. Again, as we chat to clients about this concept of remote working, some of them say, "Oh, that would be a really good way to save money. I don't have to pay for an office." Paul, what's your experience been in terms of balancing the cost of a distributed workforce versus a very centralized workforce, and then some of the more qualitative benefits you've found from operating that model?

[00:09:07] Paul: I think this is a bit of a misconception. There's a figure shown around: I think if you're based in Dublin, letting somebody work from home supposedly saves 17,000 a year, and if you're somewhere like Sligo, it's about eleven and a half thousand. But the reality is that to keep people connected and happy, and the word rapport was the best one, that's the most important thing, you have to get them together. You have to invest in it. So thinking about it as a cost saving is not the right way to think about it.

[00:09:38] Talent is everything for these companies. For my company, as a services company, the people literally are the value: the knowledge in their heads, their skills. So keeping them happy, keeping them productive, keeping them connected to each other and working well, and obviously keeping them inside the company, is critical. That's what you spend on. We're lucky that there are projects going on for us all the time, so people get together about once every eight to 12 weeks anyway in project teams, and that builds rapport among those teams. Then we have the annual get-together. It's critical to invest in this. It's not about saving the cost of a desk. This is about being able to attract and retain the best people in the world.

Recruitment and onboarding

[00:10:26] Shane: Maybe just to go back to the communications and connectivity piece again: how important is onboarding for this group of workers, given that they're not really going to be working in the main hive, so to speak? Vanessa, have you found that?

[00:10:42] Vanessa: Yeah, it's really important, and if I'm completely honest, we haven't always got it right. As a fast-growing SaaS company, we have that scrappy way about us, we move very quickly, and often we just hope that people will jump on the train and come with us. I've learned: hang on, we need to slow down when we actually recruit. I'll take it back even one step before the onboarding experience. We actually pay a lot of attention to the recruitment aspect first, to make sure we are bringing in the right talent at the right time and that they are a culture fit.

[00:11:20] What we do to aid that process is make sure that at least four people within our global team have actually met and interviewed that individual before we bring them on. If one of the four is not so sure, we get together and have a chat about it, and sometimes it goes to a fifth person to assess, and often that person will be in senior management. So you might have a future candidate saying, "Oh, it was really cool, I was interviewed by the CEO and I'm only going for an SDR position." Usually that's not a good sign, if you went all the way to the CEO in those instances.

[00:11:57] But basically we make sure that a range of people meet with that candidate as well. If it's a dev role, we wouldn't just have people in the product team interviewing that individual. We'd probably pull someone from customer success, maybe someone from marketing as well, to interview that person, and often even someone who might be reporting to that individual. That's the first step with recruitment. We take it fairly seriously and slowly, not too slowly, but carefully.

[00:12:31] Then, when it comes to onboarding, it's absolutely important, particularly immersing new employees in our culture, making sure they understand our values and how we go about things here, and making sure they have a clear understanding of which tools are available for which purposes. Often a lot of people join new companies and it's like, "Okay, so you've got Teams, you've got Skype for Business, you've got Zoom, GoToMeeting. Which do I contact this person on? And what if I need this, where do I go?" So we have all of that laid out.

[00:13:10] But probably the more important and rich experience during the onboarding process is connecting with the broader team. As I mentioned, where possible we try to get individuals at least to a nearby office for a week or so, to immerse them in that, and for a lot of people that is New York City. We've got a really great office vibe. We're clinging on to that startup feel even though we're growing quite rapidly. I'd say we're no longer really a startup, but we fit the bill in terms of the office space and everything, and it typically works a charm. We've got a nice big bar in our office in New York, so we also think having drinks together is a great way to onboard someone.

[00:13:56] Shane: Good stuff. And Paul, I imagine, as a 150-person organization with folks in over 20 countries, the onboarding process becomes quite complex, or not necessarily straightforward.

[00:14:09] Paul: Sometimes we have the luxury of getting folks to HQ, and that's brilliant, because you can do that immersion, really bring them aboard, and bring them down the Vic [?] for a nice getting-to-know-you session and things like that. But we have some people we literally don't get a chance to meet. When we typically onboard people, we use what I call my bacteria model, which is we just split the teams. There are four-person teams, but then two people go here and two people go there, and when we bring the new people on, they're working with people who already know how we work in nearForm and how we connect, and they help them connect in.

[00:14:47] We have a slightly different issue in terms of connecting people to nearForm. We're a services company, so somebody might be working with Condé Nast, somebody else might be working with ADP, somebody might be working with TPD [?]. We have a culture where they take the customer's problem and make it their problem; they almost feel part of the customer. So how do we make sure they also feel part of nearForm? We use some of the tooling. Nobody's mentioned Slack yet. I think everybody uses Slack, surely? Yeah, brilliant, okay.

[00:15:18] The most popular Slack channel we have is a random channel, that's pretty good. We also have show-your-desk, which is another one, where literally in the morning people just post, and sometimes it's a view over a hotel, sometimes it's a beach, sometimes it's a really crappy hotel room. But it actually just fosters that connectedness, and as part of that, onboarding is helping plug them into the team in a different way.

[00:15:46] Vanessa: We do something a little bit similar, where we have "whose view is better this week." Particularly our Hobart engineering team are very aggressive with this, always having a beach view, or someone's working from a boat even, which I don't know how they get signal to do. Then we'll have someone from London or even Sligo chip in with their view that day. It's a nice way to create a bit of banter and back and forth between these people who are culturally very different and geographically miles and miles away, but you can have that really nice rapport.

Going global from day one

[00:16:23] Shane: Very good. Vanessa, one of the concerns some other clients have mentioned to us about the concept of remote workers is that they need to be at a certain scale to have satellite offices: they get their HQ to a certain size, and then they have all the infrastructure and supports they will need to do stuff internationally. It sounds like you guys went global from day one.

[00:16:45] Vanessa: Yeah, exactly. I think now, with how quickly technology has evolved and continues to evolve, that model is a bit outdated, because, as I mentioned, it doesn't really matter where you are. The biggest challenge for us is the time zone piece. If I want to run a global company update, which I do monthly, it's: okay, which time zone are we going to be favoring? We've tried to change it up every month. One month you've got everyone in Europe in their jammies and everyone in Australia just waking up; other times we've flipped it.

[00:17:36] Over the growth of the company: we started off with a couple of us in New York, a couple of us in Melbourne, and our chief product officer sitting in Hobart, which is why we built the team around him. We realized very quickly it didn't matter where we were, as long as we were willing to work outside that traditional nine-to-five. For our customers it's great, because we chase the sun and we've got support in every time zone. But we just have to be willing to accept that it might be 8pm and I'm on a call, but likewise someone on the other side of the world will be getting up extra early to chat with me. So it's going that extra mile for your business, which I think you tend to do if you are an engaged employee, you feel valued and you get back what you put in.

Burnout, not slacking, is the risk

[00:18:28] Shane: Which I think goes against a lot of the basic concerns about home working, which is, "How do I know that people are working?" Paul, you've had an interesting experience with this, which we could probably describe as the exact opposite of that concern.

[00:18:41] Paul: Oh, absolutely. Folks who work from home see it as a privilege, and that's fantastic, but they almost try to prove themselves. One of the challenges is that you're not seeing them every day, so you don't see when they've got the big black bags under their eyes, or they've taken on too much, or they're blocked, or whatever else. So a lot of what we put in place in terms of measuring people's productivity is actually just to make sure that people don't burn out.

[00:19:11] nearForm is the kind of environment where there's a lot going on, and people are always taking some initiative, starting things, doing things, getting excited, and then getting very tired, and you meet them a few weeks later and they're in bits. So we've had to be very, very careful about measuring people and what they do, just to make sure people don't get overloaded when they're away and not present. Even with high-def video conferencing, it's not the same as seeing somebody face to face.

[00:19:45] Shane: And on the tooling, do you guys use anything unique or funky that you've developed yourselves on the measurement side?

[00:19:55] Paul: No. The really cool stuff is really crappy tools, actually. It's the way you use them. We use Google Drive, and we use spreadsheets in Google Drive. One of the things we did at one stage, on some of the projects, was at the end of the week just ask, "Tell us how happy you are, one to five." That's it, simple as that. That builds a picture, and that actually serves as a predictive metric that shows when something is going wrong on a project, or with a team, or with a person. A very interesting little thing, but there's no magic to it.

[00:20:37] In terms of the more advanced tools, it's all to enable collaborative working. Slack has been mentioned. Zoom is fantastic. We do an awful lot of things remotely that try to replicate what happens person to person. With Zoom you can have a big group of people in a meeting room, then break them off into breakout sessions, with video and people controlling when other people speak, and it's also pretty good.

Is the zeitgeist changing?

[00:21:05] Shane: I know we've a lot of remote-working managers and workers here, so I'm going to leave some time for questions, but one last question from me, more about the zeitgeist around remote working. For a long time, as an investment agency attracting tech investors into Ireland, our assumption has been that they all want to be in a downtown, high-density urban area, because their expectation is that their employees want to be in that environment. Is that zeitgeist changing? Are you seeing something happening over the past number of years, given the locations you've chosen for your main hubs, Vanessa?

[00:21:48] Vanessa: I guess the trendy factor will always be there. If we were to locate ourselves in Silicon Valley, for example, that might sound sexy, and we might get a few more investor eyebrows looking at us. But you've got to factor in cost of living, quality of living, and competition for talent as well. We started out as a tiny company, and to be able to scale as rapidly as we have, we've needed to recruit top talent, draw them in and retain that talent.

[00:22:26] In order to do that, we can't always compete with the lofty salaries that a Google or a Salesforce or an AWS might be offering their tech staff. However, we really draw people in with our culture. We have a very inclusive and lovely culture, and also some flexibility around the way we work. We're actually a flexible-certified employer, meaning, similar to what you were saying, measuring outputs and things, not where you are all day every day for your eight or nine hours.

[00:23:01] That's really attractive, particularly for mothers who have kids and who might not otherwise have returned to the workforce after having kids. There's that flexibility to work from home, or to work a couple of days a week, whatever it might be. And also for fathers as well, who have kids and commitments that are more important than work, and want to make time for those. So for us, to draw in that talent, we really push the quality of life that working for a company like ours can provide, and with some of the locations where we've set up, I think that certainly rings true. I've just spent the last few days in Sligo, and I can tell you it's a beautiful part of the world, and people there are really enjoying the balance they've been able to set up for themselves.

[00:23:53] Shane: Paul, are things similar in equally beautiful Waterford?

[00:23:59] Paul: They are, yeah. But I think the big thing I'm finding is that the whole industry is changing, away from this idea of the Y Combinator, ramen noodles, get them in a room working 17 hours a day, to an acknowledgment that people have lives and work is just part of life. Some people actually do want to live in that environment, some people want to live in the countryside, some people want to work from home, and some people like co-working spaces. Enabling the flexibility is the real magic sauce, just enabling people to have their life.

[00:24:35] For me, it's like, well, I did the school run this morning, brilliant. I couldn't have done that if I had a nine-to-five job, back in the days when I took two hours to get to work in the car. So enabling that kind of thing is wonderful. But it's also enabling, for example, one of our guys, Brian, who's I suppose late 20s and really enjoys moving around from city to city, hopping around. You can enable that life too. He would be the classic demographic that those city companies would have tried to appeal to.

[00:25:07] Shane: So I guess the secret sauce is flexibility.

[00:25:12] Paul: Yeah. People are different to each other, amazingly.

Q&A

[00:25:13] Shane: Folks, we have enough time for two questions. Unfortunately the searchlights are on us, so we can't really see hands, but if you put your hand up, the roving mics will find you. Please don't be shy. Introduce yourself and let us know where you're from.

[00:25:38] Audience: Hello. I have a question. Could you touch on the topic of accountability and self-determination of the remote teams: how much freedom do they have to make the business decisions they need to make? And another topic is equality of opportunity: are the remote teams really visible enough in the HQ? Those two topics.

[00:26:06] Paul: I'll try that first. Actually, the last time I was at UXDX, a couple of years ago, there was this concept of radical agility and autonomous decision-making, and that's the real key to everything. The decisions should be made by the best person to make the decision. That's a key part of success. Most people here are probably working in some kind of agile methodology, and it's that you empower developers to make those key decisions, rather than some architect who supposedly knows better anyway.

[00:26:42] So it's getting that right and having the right level of accountability: structuring your teams, measuring what your success should look like, and holding people accountable against that. But it's more that people actually set the expectation themselves and then want to live up to it, rather than us trying to police it. It's more about autonomy. That was the first part of the question.

[00:27:02] Vanessa: The second part of the question, I can answer that one: being away from HQ, and whether people feel they've got enough of a say. Interestingly, and I know every company is different, so I can't speak for all, but for us at LiveTiles, some of our most important business decisions are made on conference calls while someone's driving, someone else has got their kids screaming in the background, and someone else might be in a physical office location. It's very rarely around a boardroom table at HQ. In fact, I'd argue that HQ is not even one of our busiest or more populated office spaces. It's just probably the one where we've put the most effort into the bar, so it's the one I like being in.

[00:27:52] Paul: The other way around, I'd better be honest for a minute with that one. You know those mistakes they talk about making when you're doing a startup and getting things running? This is the big one we made for a long time. It's a very difficult challenge. The teams were separated off; they were making decisions in their projects, and they were well empowered to do that. But over the last couple of years we've had to work very hard to connect people again with HQ. And HQ isn't really a place in our company anymore. It's more about the way the projects work together and connect to each other. But yes, it's been a really difficult thing to do.

[00:28:31] Shane: We've time for one express question. I think I saw a hand down the back, through the searchlights.

[00:28:46] Audience: Given trust to people to be remote, working nine to five or whatever, at the start did you track the productivity of, say, office workers against remote workers to validate that decision?

[00:28:59] Paul: We had no choice. We were based in Waterford, and there weren't enough developers, so we were remote. Of the first few people in our company, one of them was in Romania. One of the founders is from Romania, just to be clear, not just somebody who works in the company. So we were remote from the start. As part of our competitive process, we have to compete against people who are co-located, so we have done a lot of work around measuring productivity, and categorically we can hammer anybody based in an office environment in terms of productivity. We've proven that fairly well at this stage, and I can share that with people if they want.

[00:29:36] Vanessa: We've probably been too small and growing too fast to really map and calculate the productivity of our remote workers compared to office workers. I'm sure that will come later. However, for us it was an organic growth thing, where we wanted the top talent, the best person for the job, and they just happened to sit in Kansas, in the middle of America, or something like that. So when you ask about hang-ups with having remote workers, I think some people get worried: is someone taking the piss? Are they actually doing their work? We're moving so quickly, and we've got so much in terms of output, that it's pretty clear to see who's contributing and who's not, particularly given we also work in pretty tight teams.

[00:30:31] I think the biggest hang-ups we've had have actually been from the remote workers themselves, feeling a little bit disconnected: "I must have missed that, I didn't get that communication piece." So what we have asked our remote workers is to be a little bit more proactive, I guess, in seeking out information, which isn't always ideal. We don't want them to feel that they're always asking, "Can someone tell me what's going on?" We have the infrastructure there to push out comms continuously and effectively, but for those people to reach out and say, "Let's set up a one-on-one every couple of weeks and just touch base," perhaps with someone not in their immediate team, that kind of thing. It's a growing-pains thing, and we will continue to refine it as we evolve.

[00:31:19] Paul: And there's a magic number: seven is a magic number. Whether you're doing software or going to war, if you keep the team size below seven, you can see if somebody's not performing. Cambridge [?] has a lot of research on that; look it up.

[00:31:32] Shane: For size. Thank you. That's why my seven-a-side team always performs better than the five-a-side team. Okay, I think we've got a lot of very valuable insights into the methodology and the benefits of remote working. So folks, put your hands together for our contributors.