Faces On Screens – The New Reality Of Our Work Lives

Shruti Ramiah at UXDX Community: Europe West. Video: https://youtu.be/l7Rqs9tq5_4

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.

Starting a new job remotely

[00:00:00] Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining today. My name is Shruti Ramiah, and the talk I'll be giving you is called Faces on Screens, very much like we are today: the new reality of our work lives.

[00:00:14] Before I start, I'd like to share a bit of a personal story. I started a new job this year, on the 4th of January. I joined Zalando, so I'm pretty new here, and in the run-up to my first day I couldn't help but feel kind of awkward about it. My laptop had arrived in the post, along with a few welcome gifts and a few bits of information to get me set up on my first day. But in the end, I was still starting at the same desk, in the same room, by myself, logging into a computer that looked pretty similar to the one I had before, just with a new email address.

[00:00:56] There was something kind of underwhelming about it when I compared it with what I usually associated with starting a new job: that sense of excitement, that energy of being in a room full of people who were starting this same journey together with you, meeting other people who are starting the same day as you. I was a bit anxious about this day, but I have to say it went pretty well.

[00:01:24] What happened? I of course logged in to my new email address, and here I was on my computer, and the first meeting I had in my calendar was with Tim Keckowitz [?], my manager. He'd scheduled it and put it in our calendars, and it was the first meeting I had. He was there to welcome me, to make sure I had everything I needed, and to get me set up. He checked in on how my onboarding had been so far, if I had received all the information and all the kit. He told me a bit about what was going to happen that week and what I should expect.

[00:02:03] Then about a half hour, 45 minutes later, I had my first meeting with my team. I got to meet all these lovely faces, the team that is the Studio. The first meeting was a really warm welcome. Everyone was expecting me. They'd been informed about my joining, they'd been given a bit of information about me, so I felt like they knew me a little bit already. We spent that first meeting just getting to know each other. We talked about our holidays, about the new year, about the pandemic, how we were all doing. It was really just about getting to know one another, and it was such a wonderful way to get started. It felt like a warm embrace. I had a lot of meetings like that in that first day and that first week, and I have to say it was a great start.

Remote and hybrid work is going mainstream

[00:02:56] I was not the only one who started a new job this way. In these last 12 months, 15 months, a lot of people have had this experience, and in fact we're probably going to have these kinds of experiences even more going forward. In some data recently released by LinkedIn, they found that there are six times more jobs listed as 100% remote or open to remote working in the last 12 months, and three times more people are actively seeking a 100% remote job.

[00:03:32] Google recently announced their policy. They've decided that they expect and allow all employees to work three days a week from the office and the other two days from wherever they feel most productive, whether that's their home or somewhere else. They've also extended something they started in the last year called the work-from-anywhere weeks. For four weeks a year, every Google employee will be able to work from anywhere in the world. This can be that you stay home and work from home, because that's what you want to do. Or maybe you are going on a long vacation and you extend it by working from that location. Or maybe you're an expat and you decide to go to your home country and actually work from there for four weeks. This is really interesting. I think it's a pattern that has emerged in the last year, and that's something they've embraced.

[00:04:30] Now, remote working and hybrid working are not new. There were definitely many companies championing this already. But the interesting thing is this is going to become mainstream, which means that all of us need to learn how to work in this environment of hybrid and remote work. That's what I want to talk to you about today. How might we do our remote work better? How might it just be a better experience for all of us? How might we feel more productive while doing it, especially in the context of design? And how might we, in the end, have healthier, happier teams?

About me and the Studio at Zalando

[00:05:08] Before I dive into that, a bit more introduction. Like I said, my name is Shruti Ramiah. I'm head of design at Zalando. I come to Zalando after two and a half years at N26, where I led initially user research and then eventually product design as well, across their offices in Berlin, Barcelona and New York. At Zalando we have offices in Helsinki, Dublin and Berlin, so I'm quite familiar with this distributed team context. I've also worked a lot in consultancy, where you have the experience of working on-site with clients, so I'm going to be drawing on all of those references to share some insights with you.

[00:05:54] The team I work with at Zalando is called the Studio, and the Studio, those nine people that I showed you in that grid, is a bit of a different team. We don't sit within the typical product development structure, the typical triad teams of product management, engineering and design. We're a little bit outside of that. Our focus is really to tackle those ambiguous questions, the ones that are still not well shaped, and get a grasp on whether those are the right questions, the right problems for us to be solving at Zalando: whether those are meaningful problems for us to solve, problems that matter to our customers, that are going to have significant impact on their lives.

[00:06:47] The analogy I'd like to give is that we're like the nimble scouts. We run ahead of the big army, the large product development army of Zalando, and we scout out what are the opportunities, what is the landscape, what is the competition, where are the thorns, where is the path for us to follow to be successful. We help lay that path. We're one part of the organization that helps lay that path forward to where the opportunities might lie, so that the army can march forward towards it.

[00:07:21] That's a bit about the Studio. It's quite an unusual team, a little bit like an agency inside of a large product organization. If that sparked your interest, we are looking for new designers, so please do look for opportunities and apply on our LinkedIn pages.

Collaboration: process and ways of working

[00:07:39] But going back to better remote work and healthier teams, let's dive in. I'm going to talk to you about the familiar three Cs: collaboration, communication and culture. Of course, if you're someone who's leading teams, or who's interested in this topic of remote and hybrid work, you've probably read a lot of different theory and heard a lot about this. What I'm going to try and do is give you some concrete points, some things that we do at Zalando or I've seen work well at other places, so that you have some active things that you can put into practice.

[00:08:17] Diving into collaboration, I can probably hear some groans as you read the words process and documentation there. Nobody's a huge fan of process, I understand that, but it's so vital. It's the heart, the backbone of how we do human-centered design, and documentation is really our friend. When we think about remote work, the biggest thing we've had to learn to embrace is to de-prioritize presence and time together, and focus on outcomes and how everyone can achieve those effectively on their own time. What process, and documenting that process, allows us to do is lay that foundation, so we have a shared understanding of how we work, how we're going to get there, and how we should collaborate.

[00:09:08] The first one, of course, is ways of working. What you really need is a shared understanding of: what is our approach, what is our process, what are our key milestones, what do we expect from one another, how do we expect to get it done? This needs to really be agreed with stakeholders and to be shared widely, so everyone has this common language, this common understanding.

[00:09:32] At Zalando we have a pretty elaborately defined product development process. It's been through several iterations in the past, and it continues to be evolved and iterated today. It covers what we believe is the overarching product process, what are the key stages, the key milestones, what are the artifacts that are expected at these milestones, and how we expect different disciplines to contribute. It's one of the first documents you receive when you join the company, and it's really extensive and helps all of us across engineering, product management and design really know how we are meant to work together.

[00:10:11] Now, this is not right for everyone. We're a huge company, hundreds of designers, researchers, product managers, engineers trying to work together, so we need a lot of documentation. But maybe you're a team of five designers, and what you need is a Medium article that you all agree is the essence of your process, or a podcast that you've heard, or a book that you've read, that feels like the right backbone for your team. You don't need to write it from scratch. Just find the right piece of content, the right resource that anchors your process, and make sure that you share it and agree it with all your stakeholders.

[00:10:51] One thing I will call out is shared language. We all use so many different terminologies, but we're learning them from different places, so we might not all define them the same way. It's really important that you make sure that when we use specific terminology, we're all agreed on it. Maybe investing time to build a glossary is not a bad thing.

Collaboration: team contracts, team time and inclusive tools

[00:11:17] Second is team contracts. Team contracts are something you can Google; you'll find a lot of different formats for this. It's essentially agreements, commitments we make to one another as a team, promises we will keep to one another as a team in order to work well together. They can cover lots of different things, like rules of engagement, how we will communicate with one another, principles. What I'd like to focus on is something a little bit more pragmatic as part of those team contracts. One of the simpler things that I found has been really helpful for us is some of the logistics, some of the housekeeping.

[00:11:58] Something we do in teams these days pretty regularly, on all the projects that I'm on, is that we define the core team members and the extended team members really clearly. We specify how much time each team member can allocate to the project, so we all know how much engagement we can expect from one another. We also specify how frequently we want to engage. Is this person going to be in the core team working day-to-day? Do they want to be updated weekly? Do they want to engage on a monthly basis? As well as what kind of engagement they want. Do they simply need status updates to know that everything is working smoothly, or do they really want to get into the details and work with us on the content? So, really understanding who the stakeholders are and what types of engagement they want to have together.

[00:12:51] The second part of this is also something that's been created by the pandemic situation, which is negotiating time. We're not all in the office together at the same times, and therefore we need to agree our team times. Team times don't need to be the same 40 hours that we're used to committing to work. It can be four hours a week where we agree to be together 100%. What that means is that we can focus those four hours on those activities where being together really helps, whether that's ideation, doing synthesis together, brainstorming, or maybe it's problem solving and doing critique. So, really focusing the hours we have together on the activities that benefit from being synchronous, and then planning the other activities in the asynchronous time. Doing this ahead of time and blocking it in our calendars means that our day-to-day life and our day-to-day synchronization is that much easier.

[00:13:54] Finally, and this one is not always a popular point with the designers, using inclusive tools. I have a really concrete example of this, and this was at N26, where we were trying to run some ideation sessions, brainstorming sessions, with engineers, product managers, marketing, a bunch of different folks. Initially we tried to do it in Figma, but, especially not the designers but the other folks, were so intimidated by the tool. It was so unfamiliar and clunky for them: do I need to double click this, how do I copy paste, where am I now in this file? It actually intimidated them from working with us and collaborating with us. We decided to just jettison the Figma file, which felt like the perfect tool of course for brainstorming, and instead use simple Google Slides. Switching to Google Slides actually led to much better outcomes, because people were able to actively contribute and collaborate. So choose the tool that allows everyone to contribute and participate equally, rather than what might seem like the perfect tool.

Communication: be an active host

[00:15:03] The second point is communication. Of course we all know the importance of communication, and we work on it constantly, but what we're realizing with our new lives in screens is that our attention is even more valuable and is even more taxed. Every time we spend time with one another on a video call, we need to think of that group as an audience that needs to be engaged.

[00:15:33] The first tip I have for you I actually picked up from some communication coaches, which was really surprising for me as well. Their guidance is that when we're working through screens, we need to switch up the tempo and change the activity every 20 minutes, to keep people alert and engaged. That feels like a really rapid change in tempo, but it really does help, and we've seen that really work in our meetings. Of course, it's hard to do this for every single meeting, but especially when you get to a meeting that's going beyond 9, 10, 12 people, where the grid of faces is going to get smaller and smaller, it's easier for people to turn off their video and lean back. It's really important to think about that meeting as something you're producing, content you're curating for that session.

[00:16:31] It's really important to be an active host. Communication coaches say you need to almost double or triple the level of energy you bring. Whether that's using your hands, your expression, your voice, your modulation, you need to use all of those as tools to keep people alert and with you. Then of course there's the question of changing formats every 20 minutes and changing the tempo. For this meeting that we do every month called the Campfire, where the whole product insights and design team at Zalando gets together to share what we've done, we actually do an initial 20-minute session which is introductions and farewells: welcoming new people, saying goodbye to those who are leaving. Then we have these really snappy one-minute updates from every team. It seems unbelievable to do updates in a minute, but it's possible, and it's even faster than a PechaKucha. After that we have deep dives, so 10, 15 minute share-outs from a couple of teams, who are going to share something they've built, something that launched, something they've learned, in a much deeper way.

[00:17:39] One of the other sides of this changing of formats that I find really interesting about moving to video conversations is that it's actually allowed some people who would in the past be quiet to speak up. In the past, maybe it was a room of 15-20 people, and they'd be kind of timid to raise their hand and speak out loud. But now, if you accept questions over chat, they're much more willing to put that question in via text, or if you ask for a vote on Slido, or if you put your questions in a quiz, they're more likely to engage. So the video format has also opened us up to engaging people who in the past may have leaned back or felt a little bit less comfortable participating.

Communication: fit the format to the content

[00:18:27] The second point actually connects up to the previous one about documentation. Yes, documentation is our friend and it's really important, but at the same time, with asynchronous work, we are all reading so many documents and consuming so much information that we're all suffering from a kind of document overload. That just means that we need to start being really thoughtful about how we transmit the information we need people to absorb. Does it need to be long-form text, or could it just be a punchy bullet point update over Slack? Is this something people are going to need to refer to in the future, so should I document it in a deck or in a video? Or is it better consumed as just audio, where they don't need to see anything, they just need to hear it?

[00:19:19] A concrete example of this from N26 is something we did with the research reports. Research reports by their nature can be really thick and dense, and they need to be, so people have all the context and all the data and information they need. But what we were finding is that people were starting to read the summaries and skip the information and miss all the nuance. So one of the researchers came up with the idea of having the deck and sharing that out, but then also recording a video presentation over it. They either recorded the meeting they had where they were sharing it with stakeholders, or created a separate video recording that went alongside the presentation.

[00:20:00] What that meant was, if you're super engaged and this information is really important for you, you can watch the whole 45-60 minute video. If you want to, you can just skip ahead to the section that you want and dip into the details where you need them, or you can break it up and watch it over time as you need to. So really tailoring the format to the nature of the content is really important. Let's not just do things the way we've always done them, because that doesn't work for us anymore.

Communication: the virtual water cooler

[00:20:36] The third point I have here on communication is slightly different, but I think really important as well. I've called it the virtual water cooler, but really it's about those casual conversations. We're not bumping into each other at the coffee machine, at lunch, in the hallway. So in a way, beyond our day-to-day teams, the people we talk to every day, every week, the rest of the organization is sort of fading away from us. It's important to maintain those connections, because it's through those that we maintain a sense of visibility of what's going on in different parts of the company, but also facilitate our collaboration.

[00:21:18] What I'd encourage you to do is to take a little pause and think about who you aren't bumping into these days. Who haven't you heard from in a long time? Maybe they're not people who you work with on a day-to-day basis, but it's still important to reach out to them. We need to start being a lot more proactive about building and maintaining our connections within our organization, and investing time in that. It's worthwhile. It feels like investing in chat, or in non-productive time, but it's those collaborations, those connections, that are going to help us spot the opportunities and the synergies in our org.

Culture: belonging and playfulness

[00:21:56] Finally, the third point, around culture. This is such a fun one, and I really enjoy working on these topics. At the heart of this is the idea of belonging. If we want to work together and be a team and have psychological safety as a team, one of the most important things, perhaps the most important thing, is a sense of belonging. I really believe that a sense of belonging comes from knowing each other not just as colleagues, as the roles we have or the hats we wear, but as human beings, as people. What's going on in our lives, what are our hobbies, who is in our family, what are the things you're worrying about outside of work?

[00:22:40] In order to do that, it's not easy to open people up and it's not easy to share. We have to orchestrate it; we have to make it happen. Playfulness can be a really helpful trigger, a really helpful tool for this. Playfulness just doesn't happen. I know it's actually much easier for most design teams to be playful and bring a lightness to their work, but even in our case, especially in the day-to-day, it's important to plan in some of that playfulness.

[00:23:19] Every team is different, and you'll have to find the right tone for your team. What's the right level of playfulness that works for you? How close-knit is the group? Do they need a lot of nudging and encouragement to share and be playful, or are they already quite comfortable doing that? You'll have to try it out, but the nice thing is it's pretty easy to see when people are having fun, and you can tell whether your experiment is working or not. What I'd like to do is share three examples from our community with you, in order to maybe give you some inspiration. Maybe try exactly these things out, or modify them, change them and make them your own.

Dance cards, chat roulette and open questions

[00:24:01] The first example is something we call the Zalando dance cards. If you're a Jane Austen fan, that's going to resonate with you. A dance card is essentially something you get when you're onboarded. Your manager makes this little list of the people you should meet and talk to in one-on-ones. But it's not just your stakeholders, and it's not just those you need to collaborate with to be effective at your job. It's also those people who have shared interests with you, or perhaps have a hobby that you're also interested in, who might be those peers that you connect with outside of the day-to-day work, the people that you might want to go out for a walk with, or maybe have a coffee with in your personal life as well. If you approach these dance cards with curiosity, then the first person tells you about another person, and you can really use these dance cards all through your life at Zalando. It doesn't have to be just an onboarding thing. I found my dance card really helpful to meet some really wonderful people at Zalando.

[00:25:15] The second format I've called chat roulette, but it's of course not actually Chatroulette, and definitely does not have some of the risks of Chatroulette. It's a very simple format. Every two weeks we have a time slot blocked in our calendars, which we can accept or decline, and if you accept it, our lovely design ops team puts you together in a group of three to four people who are people we don't normally work with or normally bump into, so no one from our immediate sphere of visibility. You just have 30 minutes to get to know one another, to have a coffee, to talk about anything: what's going on, work, life, the latest trends in design, whatever it is that sparks your interest that day. As someone joining this company completely remotely, it's been a great way for me to meet the 130 designers, researchers and content writers at Zalando. Of course I haven't met everyone yet, but it's been one great way for me to do that.

[00:26:25] Finally, this is more of a prompt or a suggestion that I'm also trying to use lately. In the past, I approached meetings with a sense of efficiency: how can we get going, get to the point, maybe even resolve the topic faster, so we can give everybody back some time in their day? That was our goal with meetings. But now, when we don't meet anywhere other than in meetings, I'm trying to loosen that up. In every one-on-one conversation, or every conversation that's just a few people, maybe two, maybe three, I try to start with an open question. I try to ask, how are you doing today? How's your week been? What's challenging right now? Or, what's that book behind you on the shelf? Just looking for some hooks and triggers to spark a personal conversation, and using every opportunity, every interaction, as a chance to get to know that person better.

[00:27:28] Of course, in turn, I try to share of myself, tell them a bit about myself, and share generously and openly, so that we can mutually get to know one another and I'm not just selfishly learning about the other person. Sharing is just as important as asking curiously.

Summary

[00:27:49] Okay, so those are the three buckets of ideas I have for you. I hope they spark some ideas for yourself as well. The first one is of course creating just enough process and structure to enable collaboration within your team, and to make the collaboration smoother. As you grow out of your team size, out of your process, you'll iterate this and you'll grow your level of documentation, but start with just enough. The second is of course being really intentional about your communication, and not just doing things the way that you've always done them, because now we really need to fight hard for people's attention. The third is planning in and orchestrating moments of playfulness and joy in our work, so that we can really get to know each other as people, and that helps to strengthen culture.

[00:28:49] A final thought: yes, of course, all of these things have been born of and inspired by remote working and hybrid working, but in many ways following these principles, working this way, makes all work better. So it's really helpful agnostic of whether we're in a pandemic or whether we're working remotely. It's really something that I'm going to try and do no matter what the working circumstances are, and I hope you'll try some of these yourself.

[00:29:22] Before I sign off, I'd like to make one plug. If you have become curious about Zalando, if you think it might be the place for your next opportunity, we have something called the Hiring Days coming up on the 8th to 10th of June. This is an event where we try to compress the interviewing process into a day and give you a decision on whether you're going to be joining us or not within 48 hours of your interviews. So it's really quick and painless, or rather painless, and a really fun way to find out if Zalando might be the right next opportunity for you. We're looking for really seasoned, hands-on product designers at the moment, so senior product designers, principal product designers. If that's you, and if I've made you curious in any way, please go onto LinkedIn or onto the Zalando careers website, find out more about these Hiring Days, and send in your application. We'd really love to see you there, we'd love to get to know you, and we're excited to meet a lot of great designers at this event.

[00:30:34] With that, all I can say is thank you so much for listening. If you're still here at the end of this, thanks so much for sticking with me, for sharing your attention, your very valuable time. I hope you enjoy working remotely. Stay safe, stay healthy. Goodbye.