Remote Work - The Impact on Teams Globally

Catherine Madden, Cynthia Savard Saucier, Jessie Link at UXDX Europe. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEqdo3aLZUY

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 and the future of Shopify's offices

[00:00:00] Catherine: We took the opportunity. Kevin Lee, who's the head of product for eBay Korea, is going to be joining us for the APAC event in March next year. We will be sending you his session, but we took the opportunity to fill that spot with a critical topic. One that we thought, back in March when we were pivoting, might actually not be very topical, but remote working is the new norm for all of us, and we are all navigating it together. Speaking for us personally at UXDX, we've faced pivoting from being in HR to all of a sudden needing a dev team, and different skill sets for all of our team, trying to navigate this. So it's been amazing and challenging, but every single team, every single company and office globally has their issues.

[00:00:50] We have Cynthia and Jessie here today to discuss that. For context, Cynthia is the head of UX for Shopify globally, and she is going to be discussing what Shopify are doing at present with their offices and with their teams. And Jessie, the same: we're all keen to hear what Twitter are doing globally, but they've got an office in Dublin. They're two different perspectives, but some you might relate to, and some you might be relieved by, in what they're going to share. Either way it'll make for a thrilling panel. Please ask your questions. I'll be stopping intermittently to take your questions, so please do ask them, and I will kick it off. If it's okay with you, Cynthia, if you can give a one-minute introduction of yourself, that'd be wonderful, and then I'll ask you the first question.

[00:01:42] Cynthia: Absolutely. How does it sound?

[00:01:47] Catherine: Perfect.

[00:01:48] Cynthia: Good. I'm Cynthia Savard Saucier. You can guess I have a French accent. I'm in Montreal, Canada, so French Canadian, and I work for Shopify. I have been working for Shopify for the past six years, and I'm now head of UX, so I'm accountable for the discipline health and the quality of the product that we ship. I'm also the co-author of the book Tragic Design, which has been published by O'Reilly, in which we discuss the importance of good design and how bad design can actually have deadly consequences. That's another topic of discussion.

[00:02:18] Catherine: Absolutely. I think the more I talk to your entire team, the more I want to create multiple panels. But when we discussed this panel together, we talked in particular about Shopify's huge, beautiful, modern offices. Are you essentially walking away from those now? What's happening there with these offices?

[00:02:43] Cynthia: Shopify had a bunch of different offices around the world, but the big HQ, amazing offices, we had four of them: two in Ottawa, one in Toronto and one in Montreal. These offices were the pinnacle of office design. They were really, really nice. We have in-house architects that were working on them, and a team of people that really put all of their energy into making sure that the experience of working in the office is amazing. But with the pandemic, when it started, fairly quickly, even before it was asked by any government, our leadership team asked us to work remotely. We were all in for the challenge and thought it was a good idea.

[00:03:21] Then after a month they announced that, due to the situation, but also understanding that working remotely is going to be the future of work, "We don't want to be just following the trend. We want to lead the trend, and we want to be part of designing the digital experience." So right from the get-go, we knew that we were actually not going to go back to the office, and that was announced, I think, in May or June. So it was fairly early. Now the offices are still going to exist, but more as a hub, a place where people go to meet other people or to do certain tasks that cannot be done remotely.

[00:03:59] For example, we have the team that does hardware design. You can imagine that hardware industrial design is hard to do remotely, because you have to share an actual object, and you have 3D printers and a lot of equipment. So you still need a space to do those types of activities. That is what the hub is going to be like now. It's going to be a place where you can go and potentially meet other people, but we're still very much designing what that will look like, and whether we need to make any changes. Not only to change the usage of the space and how we're going to use it, but also to make sure that it's sanitary and following the best rules to allow for social distancing and reducing gatherings and stuff like that.

[00:04:44] Catherine: And how are you rethinking the design of that office? Can you talk a bit more about that?

[00:04:56] Cynthia: For sure. Right now we have squads. The company organized a bunch of teams that look into specific needs for the company. We have a squad that looks into what the IT requirements are for team members who are working remotely. We have a team that looks at how we will change the actual physical environment, so the architecture and interior design. But we also have a team that has to look into what we do with the space that we have for kitchens, for example. Like many large tech companies, we used to have a food offering, a fully fledged kitchen that was brand new. So what do we do with those spaces, now that this won't be their main usage anymore?

[00:05:36] With all of these things, we're trying to make a lot of decisions at the same time, which is hard, because we don't know how the situation will evolve. It's a building-the-plane-as-we-fly type of situation. So I don't know exactly what we will do specifically with the offices, but that's the process that we're going through right now.

Twitter's hybrid model and decentralization

[00:05:56] Catherine: Which is fascinating. We'll talk maybe more about your founder and your philosophies at a later point, but I want to move on to Jessie. In our conversations you talked about this blended or hybrid model that Twitter is now going to evolve to. Can you talk us through the process of that, and what that is essentially?

[00:06:20] Jessie: Sure, absolutely. Can you hear me okay?

[00:06:24] Catherine: Perfect.

[00:06:25] Jessie: Okay, good. This is the joy of digital work, isn't it? "Can you hear me" conversations. So we've gotten that out of the way. Fantastic.

[00:06:33] Catherine: Absolutely. And for context, I'd ask you to talk a little bit about what you do at Twitter.

[00:06:38] Jessie: Okay.

[00:06:39] Catherine: So you're managing the engineering teams, and not head of engineering, as you've corrected me. You're managing the heads of the engineering teams globally.

[00:06:50] Jessie: In general at Twitter. Previous to this, I was leading a good chunk of consumer engineering at Twitter. I've now taken an org-wide role. I'm a VP of engineering for a group we're calling team development. It's a brand-new group and unit and concept that we've stood up at Twitter. Functionally, what team development is really focused on is helping Twitter build teams with huge potential, and then providing the training, framework and coaching to unlock that potential. So it's a pretty broad, ambitious idea. It's really about how we hire diverse talent, bring them in and set them up for success. How do we make sure that diversity and inclusion are baked into all of our processes? We're going to look at things across the board, from how we hire, to promotions, to how we grow our talent in-house.

[00:07:36] Then there's something that's near and dear to my heart. As you can guess from my accent, I'm full time in London; I have actually lived here almost five years. One of my side jobs is that I am currently the engineering site lead for our London-based office, so I look after all of the engineering and experience tweeps based in our UK office. We had actually been on this journey going into COVID anyway: what does it mean to leverage talent across the globe? What does it mean for us to be more decentralized? Going into this year, we had already had a company-wide goal around being more decentralized and distributing our workforce. We actually already had targets around having more people working remotely, and having more people move out to some of our non-headquarters offices, because obviously Twitter is headquartered in San Francisco. So team development falls under that umbrella, as well as helping make sure engineering is represented in our decentralization strategy.

[00:08:26] Moving on to your question, though: what is flexible work, or what is this hybrid model we're looking at? Obviously, a lot of companies have had these sorts of choices to make. I think Google and Facebook have been fairly transparent that they still want to be an office-based culture when this all ends; that is their intention. I know other companies have gone full remote as their operating model.

[00:08:50] Really early on, we started doing what we call our pulse surveys, which is our in-house survey on how teams are feeling, which hopefully is a model that many of you are familiar with at your companies. We asked folks how they were feeling about their productivity, how they were feeling about remote work, and what their intentions were. We did that in March, when COVID started, in our March-April timeframe, and then we recently did another survey in late summer to see how our tweeps are feeling. What we found, uniformly across the board, is that around 80% of our tweeps expressed an interest in doing flexible work or part-time remote. We saw that most people expressed a preference to be in the office one to four days a week, and that they wanted to have a blend of remote working options and in-office options.

[00:09:36] We did see the number of people who wanted to be fully remote increase, which we expected, so that's good. But we did see a good portion, over 10%, who do want to be in the office five days a week, for a variety of reasons. So that's the model we're moving forward with: what does work look like at Twitter if 80% of the workforce is going to be in this flexible or hybrid model?

[00:09:54] We had a few principles we're looking at. The idea is that we don't want to just go back to the old way of working, when we assumed everybody was in the office five days a week. So our first principle was: you have to assume someone in this team is going to be remote one to perhaps five working days a week. All of the team practices, tooling and things we provide them have to accommodate that working model. We've also looked at what we can do to enable more locations. Even though people want to work flexibly, a few days in an office and a few days not, they may want to do it from a variety of locations. So we're actually still expanding in terms of the office space we think we're going to have, and the countries that we're able to support workers in. That's part of our strategy.

[00:10:43] Catherine: What has been the barrier... Sorry, Jessie. What was the biggest challenge of the decentralized teams that you talked about? Is it tools, providing them with laptops, or what's the biggest aspect for you?

[00:10:57] Jessie: There are definitely the logistical challenges of moving everybody: what does security look like in this world where people are going to be much more mobile, moving around, working in different places? Part of it is just how we make decisions and how we communicate with one another. One of the things we've been exploring at Twitter is how we can make asynchronous communication much more of a norm, so that the amount of required synchronous time is lessened. And then how you spend that synchronous time is fundamentally different from the way you used to work, when everybody was assumed to be in an office located in the same time zone.

[00:11:34] So the interesting challenge has been to really question how decisions get made. How do they get documented? How do we communicate with one another? There's a huge cultural shift that happens around that. And then all of the tooling and logistics to make that vision happen fast-follow on that. But the principles and the concept come first, if that makes sense.

Belonging and socialization when remote

[00:11:51] Catherine: Yeah, that's excellent. Cynthia, what has it been like for you in terms of the biggest challenges for the Shopify team? You have a lot of people that do work remotely, but what have been the biggest issues, or even the benefits?

[00:12:10] Cynthia: There are a lot of benefits, frankly, and the more we're into it, the more we find out about these benefits, so that's pretty amazing. But the biggest challenge, and we also have a pulse survey, the one that keeps coming up, is the lack of socialization. When it comes to belonging to a team, it's very important. Some people belong to their immediate team, their project team. Some people feel like they belong to the discipline, and some other people feel like they belong to a product group, a larger one.

[00:12:44] When you don't see people around you, that belonging is harder to get, specifically for new employees. There are employees that used to see each other every day, all day, so the trust is really high. But then a bunch of new employees have started since, and they joined this new world where everyone seems to know each other, and they don't get the same experience. So people have to be very intentional when they organize social time, for it to be inclusive, for it to be synchronous, not async. I guess being synchronous is a spectrum. So not entirely async, because you want some sort of conversation, but at the same time, on your team there will be people literally across the globe, in different time zones. So you also have to be cognizant of not organizing a dinner if it's breakfast time for someone else. These are still challenges that we're facing.

[00:13:38] It's also because people come to work and they don't necessarily allow themselves to take an hour to just socialize with someone else. When you're in the office, you just take that time naturally, by having coffee and chatting with someone. There are some innate breaks that just happen. But when you're working by yourself, you don't have those distractions, which is both a positive and a negative. For some people it's really relaxing not to have all of those distractions, but other people are starved of distraction. They're starved of that social interaction.

[00:14:07] Another piece of the puzzle is that right now we're comparing the most amazing experience of working in an office with probably the worst experience ever: working from home without the proper tooling and hardware and setup in your house, in the middle of a pandemic, where you don't get to go around and socialize with your friends, and you can't even call a meeting with people that are around you. In Montreal right now, we're confined, so you literally cannot see anyone else outside of your home. Of course it's difficult, because you're comparing it with what it used to be just six months ago, which was amazing, and now it's not amazing. So you have to think about the future of working from home, but not base your understanding of the future on what you're seeing today, because it is not representative of what it can be and how freeing it can be.

Productivity, and giving people time off

[00:15:00] Catherine: Now that's a very interesting point. I'm going to take a minute's pause to say to our attendees and audience listening: use the Slack channel. Our team are collating all the questions from our audience, and I'm going to take another break in a few minutes to ask those questions. So if you've got anything, from how to stay productive, to what Shopify and Twitter are doing, to what companies they've looked at or admired or modeled their approach on, ask the question that you'd like; this is the time to answer.

[00:15:30] Cynthia, I want to ask you first, if that's okay, and Jessie, we'll ask you the same question. Productivity within the teams, from a management perspective. I will go on to employees' health as well, but from a productivity perspective, has it dipped within Shopify?

[00:15:50] Cynthia: It has not. We have not seen a dip in productivity. Of course, we're looking at work in an environment where people are definitely not set up for success. Sometimes they have family duties: kids they have to take care of, or parents they have to take care of. So of course it's hard to really compare apples to apples, because it's not a normal situation. But we have not seen productivity dip; quite the opposite, actually. We see people rallying around the cause; they all feel united together. The mission of Shopify is we want to make commerce better for everyone. But our merchants, our customers, are really struggling right now. When it comes to retail operations, they have to change their perspective. They have to change their business model. They have to use our product in different ways.

[00:16:42] What we see is that it has really fired something inside of employees. It's really beautiful to see people rallying around these objectives and trying to ship things as fast as possible, to make certain business models available to our merchants. So no, we have not seen productivity issues, quite the opposite. To the extent that, right when we started working from home, our company announced that they were going to give everyone their Fridays off, without counting towards our vacations. We have unlimited vacations anyway, but everyone got Fridays off, just to spend some time with your family, spend some time resetting, spend some time doing things that you enjoy, because they acknowledged that the year has been completely crazy.

[00:17:23] And with working from home, we actually see people doing more hours than previously. So it was sort of, take it easy for the summer. For eight weeks, I think, we had a four-day week, which was really fun, but now we're back to five days, and it feels great, because I feel like I had my summer vacation [?]. So that actually feels really good.

[00:17:45] Catherine: I think Adobe, speaking to them, are doing a similar model, once every three weeks. We will talk about people's mental health in a moment, because I know you're both passionate about that. But I will talk about the company piece on productivity with you, Jessie, as well. How has that been? Is it straightforward, perfect productivity, because people are just nonstop working because they can't leave their house?

[00:18:14] Jessie: It feels like productivity hasn't necessarily dipped, but the nature of how we're productive definitely has changed. As Cynthia was saying, I think we worry about, and it's something we monitor in our pulse results, the individual level: people are stressed out. People are staying productive, but it's under the most challenging circumstances. Because again, the question isn't "are you more productive remote or not?" It's "are you productive in a time of pandemic?" Somebody said, look, we're not working from home, we're living at work. When you get down to the individual level, we do see folks struggling with their personal productivity, because they may only be able to give 50% of their time.

[00:18:53] So we've really had to rethink what productivity looks like. Instead of doing yearly evaluations, which is way too slow a cadence, we've moved to a system where we do monthly check-ins with our tweeps. It's really about trying to understand what's going on with your life, and what productive even looks like for you personally, given everything you're dealing with: the state of the project you're on, the state of your team, and all of those outside life factors that are crashing into your work environment right now.

[00:19:23] We've had to be really flexible with some of the leave programs. I know we'll talk about mental health in a bit, but we've offered leave programs for folks who have childcare or other caregiving duties, adult care duties, because of COVID-related things. We've had to enable that for a lot of our tweeps. We haven't done every Friday off, but one of the things we did find was that people weren't taking vacation. I think it was a weird blend: some people thought, "I'll save it for when this is over," as if there's going to be this magical time in 2020 when it'll be back to normal and we'll all be holidaying and taking cruises. So we had to get people into the mindset that there's no day this year when you might be able to spend it, so don't let it go away.

[00:20:06] But again, because teams are stretched so thin, we saw people feeling guilty taking leave. They felt like they didn't have that permission. So we've actually moved to doing what we call a monthly day of rest, where the entire company takes a day off, and we've gotten really great feedback from our teams. That's really helped be a relief valve for them. So I don't think productivity has necessarily dipped across the board. If anything, like Cynthia says, we worry about the opposite, which is teams putting in too many hours. We're keeping an eye on that and trying to help folks structure their day, so they have that relief, between the individual leave programs and even the company-wide day of rest.

[00:20:42] Cynthia: You're completely right. In my answer I might not have conveyed that really well, but while we totally didn't see a productivity dip, we are very mindful about how sustainable that is, because we know people are doing more. We know people have more responsibilities. We know that just grocery shopping takes a lot more time than it used to. It is not sustainable to also work the same amount of time. So we need to find ways to monitor mental health and to ask the right questions.

[00:21:12] There have also been guidelines sent by our CEO to the whole company saying: we're looking at productivity, but if someone has family duties, family comes first; it is expected. If you have any family responsibilities, you will not be shamed for it, and it will not affect your productivity at work or your rating when it comes to work stuff. So there's that general understanding. We'll still talk about performance; we'll still talk about poor performers and good performers. But if it's for family duties, it's off the table, it's fine. You have that free card, which is extremely useful. But like you said, Jessie, we don't see a lot of people taking vacations right now.

[00:21:52] Jessie: And I think it's interesting, because I always say what's interesting about remote work is it makes the implicit explicit. Everything has to be super intentional, because remote doesn't let those implicit things hide. And what you really realize is that I don't think a lot of companies have a good definition of what productivity looks like. It is very much: do you show up to the office? Can I physically see you? We're trying to move to a model which is about output, not attendance. I don't need you to be working 40 hours a week. What I really want to focus the conversation on is: what is the output you want to have? What are the goals you're trying to accomplish?

[00:22:27] And then really make sure that we train our managers and our teams to be focused on measuring that, not just defaulting to "this person shows up to the office every day, and I see them looking busy, so I know that they're working, or they're being productive." So I think it's been a good wake-up call for us to even re-evaluate: did we have a great system for managing productivity before? I'd argue most companies probably did not.

Burnout, flexible schedules and permission

[00:22:49] Catherine: It's a very interesting one. We've got a few questions coming in from the audience, and I'll address the first one, from Victoria. In her company, she observes that the increase in productivity can often result in burning people out: having meetings late in the evenings, or just because people don't have anything else to do. How do you think this will change after this crazy period, and hopefully soon, will remote work still be that productive?

[00:23:26] I'll just pause here. Cynthia, I'll let you answer in a second, but Jessie, we had an interesting conversation about the permission piece of productivity and burning out. If you could elaborate on the time-off piece that we talked about in our conversation, and what your thoughts are on increased workload and extending the hours of the day into endless meetings.

[00:23:55] Jessie: The way I try to think about how remote work needs to work, particularly if you're going to be a global workforce, is flexibility and control, so that the individual can tailor how they work to their unique needs and their unique life. And then giving them the right tools to say yes or no to the different demands of work. For example, like I mentioned, I'm an American living full time in London right now, and one of my passions is NFL football. So I like to stay up very late on Sundays and watch the game until the late hours of the night.

[00:24:31] So I actually work a flex schedule that's tailored to my life and how I want to work. I will work 12:00 PM to 11:00 PM on Mondays. I will work 1:00 PM to 9:00 PM on Thursdays. Those are the two days a week that I set aside for that. Then I work until around 7:00 PM on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and Friday is the day where I draw a hard line. I say, "I will not take meetings after 5:00 PM unless it's an emergency." Obviously, if there's an emergency, I'm always here to talk and to support the team. And I publish those working hours. I have a shareable doc that the whole company can see, and I'm pretty relentless about practicing those hours all the time.

[00:25:07] I have a predictable cadence, so that helps me anticipate for myself how to set up my life to work around that, and it lets my coworkers know how they can work with me. That's a practice that I try to share with other folks and encourage for other teams. Again, that idea of tailoring it to the life that you want to live. Not everybody wants to be a night owl, working those late hours. On the flip side, I used to work with a guy in Seattle who would wake up at 5:00 AM because he had a newborn, and he would actually schedule meetings that early. I asked, "Are you sure you want to be up?" And he said, "Kathryn's going to wake me up no matter what, so I might as well be up and have a chat with you." So for his life, that schedule worked. Terrific.

[00:25:42] I think there's a real power and a real unlock with remote work that I would hate to see us lose when we go back, and I think the smart companies are going to take these findings, these things that are actually interesting positives, and leverage them. So when I talk about permission, I think about these things, and I think that's where I was going in our conversation. But if there's something else you want me to talk about?

[00:26:02] Catherine: No, that's exactly it. It's allowing the individual to [inaudible]. You were talking about them not letting the team down, in the other sense. I really thought it was great that you and Twitter empowered the team to just go: the work will get done, you need to take a break, and that's what we're going on rotation for. I thought that was really great. Cynthia, I'm going to direct a very similar question on the same topic to you, and it's from Chris on Slack. [inaudible]

[00:26:47] Cynthia: Sorry, you're breaking up.

[00:26:48] Catherine: So, with me working full time and my partner working [inaudible], what are your thoughts on that? For me, it's, as you said, Jessie, about giving people flexibility. But for me it highlights something that people have had to juggle with anyhow; it's just put it in the spotlight. Cynthia, what are your thoughts on that, and how is the team coping?

[00:27:10] Cynthia: I'm going to rephrase the question, because the sound broke a little bit. What are my thoughts on being at home and doing the double duty of parenting and working?

[00:27:25] Catherine: Yes, basically. It's the flexibility. They're highlighting the fact that they need a day, because, as in many cases, partners are both working from home. Their kids are often now back to school. Having that one day off is really valuable.

Parenting, time off and working from home

[00:27:44] Cynthia: My partner also works for Shopify, so we both had our Fridays off for eight weeks, and we keep saying that this was a priceless gift, because we would never have done it. We would never have said, "We're just going to schedule one day off for eight weeks in a row without our kids," because our kids are going to daycare. So we had that time as adults to just take a break, and also to physically feel more autonomous, because anyone that has kids understands that they're attached to you physically, and we have two young kids. Just having that space to breathe, that space to do what we really like and enjoy, just tinkering around the house, was really, really special.

[00:28:29] We saw the same thing that Jessie was explaining: people need permission to take time off, because they don't feel like they can.

[00:28:38] Catherine: Yeah.

[00:28:39] Cynthia: Usually they would use vacation or traveling as a reason to take time off: "Oh, I have this trip coming, so I have to take time off." With people not traveling right now, they don't have any reason to take time off, so they don't. This is something where we have to push people, especially in a company where there's unlimited vacation. We see a massive dip in people taking days off, because they're not losing it. If you don't take it, it's fine; it doesn't add up in the end, so it's not like you're missing out on anything.

[00:29:09] That's definitely something we have to address intentionally, and have very open conversations with our team members and ask them how they can support their partner as well, because not every person at Shopify has a partner that works in a company that'll also give some time off. We know that we have that responsibility to help them maintain a household. They have to be happy, and their partner has to be happy in their household, if we want them to be productive at work. It doesn't work to just think about a single individual in isolation when it's a family situation, of course.

[00:29:45] We're talking about family, but we've seen other situations, like couples, for example, who were just so isolated as well that they needed some time to go out of the house and see other stuff, have other inputs. So it's not specific to families, but it's definitely visible with families. But working from home enables a lot of other things. I spend way more time with my kids, because we just drop them off in the morning and we go pick them up; daycare is just next to our house. So we don't have the traveling to the office and back. We spend a lot more time with them, which is amazing.

[00:30:17] And I get to cook while I work, which is also very fun. I literally have bread cooking right now, so I'm going to have delicious homemade bread for lunch. All of these things, I think, were not possible before. So you really have to find what works for you and try to integrate it into your day-to-day, because if not, it's just going to be boring.

Mental health support at Twitter

[00:30:38] Catherine: Absolutely. I just pulled out a comment from Adam R. here, and I thought it was very topical. He says he's really enjoying listening to the live session on remote work and the impact on teams globally, and, as he says, we are not working from home, we are living at work. Definitely a bumper sticker there. And I think that's a good point, and it leads me on to the really important topic that we want to talk about just before we finish up, which is mental health. Jessie, I'll let you start, because I know you do a lot separately on the side, and it's how you got into your role on diversity, inclusion and mental health in the workplace. Talk to me about what Twitter are doing, but more so, from just a general team-to-team level, how are you actually trying to help people?

[00:31:25] Jessie: Sure, absolutely. Obviously I think we should take a layered approach to it; there's not just one solution. We go back to that theme of choice and flexibility based on the individual's needs, so we try to offer a wide range of things for our tweeps. Again, we have the monthly check-in, which is half about just saying, "Hey, where are you at mentally? Can I help you?" We have a variety of tools that we offer within Twitter in terms of getting mental health professionals covered by the company. Obviously that used to be an in-person service, so we pivoted pretty quickly to offer things like Modern Health and other apps that let you do virtual check-ins with a licensed therapist, and that's all covered by the company, so our tweeps can take advantage of that.

[00:32:14] We also have a full-time psychiatrist on staff who is part of our people team. She's actually leading one of what we call our in-house affinity groups: people who are passionate about accessibility, different topics like that. The newest one we've launched is called Twitter Owls, which is a team of tweeps who take certifying classes with Candice [?], who leads that group. We take training to learn how to talk about mental health in the workplace with your teams. It's actually mental health month for us at Twitter, so we have a variety of activities we're doing this month. We have one day where we're encouraging everybody to pause work and take advantage of a variety of sessions that Dr. Candice [?] and other folks are going to set up for tweeps throughout the day.

[00:32:59] Our Owls are volunteers, so they volunteer to have office hours. If anybody just wants to come and have some real talk and have someone listen to them, they can be a resource. Again, we're trying to offer these scaled options. If you want to talk to a peer, we have that through Owls. If you want to talk to in-house professionals, our people team is trained for that. And if you need external help, we try to accommodate that as well. And again, things like the day of rest have done a huge amount to help our tweeps out.

[00:33:22] But it's always a learning process. A big part of inclusion is considering the unique needs of each population. The people team really prioritized listening to our Twitter parents group, another in-house group that had some pretty specific stressors and pretty specific requests. We did a whole bunch of things; we actually had what's called Twitter Camp [?], a week of virtual activities for people's children that Twitter hosted and sponsored throughout the week. We've done different activities like that, and we've also just announced our team budget for the quarter. We're going to equip our managers with a bunch of different tools to have virtual social hours and different activities that are intended to help lift the spirits of their teams. So it's a holistic approach to looking at mental health for our tweeps.

Mental health support without big resources

[00:34:13] Catherine: Right. That's a really interesting point. Cynthia, I will ask you, and I will ask you both, to talk about [inaudible]. You talk about psychiatrists on the team and really big supports. There are a lot of people out there that don't have the team size, and therefore the resources, to have that help. What would you recommend for them in terms of reaching out?

[00:34:40] Cynthia: Absolutely. I completely understand we come at it from a very privileged point of view, where we have access to these resources. However, we see a lot of people who are very creative about bringing help to the team. For example, instead of having a psychiatrist on staff, and at Shopify we don't have one on staff, we have access to a team of mental health professionals as well, and we have coaches internally, who are licensed therapists but not psychiatrists.

[00:35:09] What we see, for example, is whenever a lead has some questions about mental health, or someone on the team burns out and they want to be quicker to discuss that with their team members, they will invite someone to do a session, like a workshop, and invite other leads to join that workshop. It's a good way of sharing learnings internally, and sharing the video of that workshop so that other leads, whenever they are available and have time, can join in and learn about that topic as well. So we've seen a lot of people pioneering new workshop styles to discuss mental health, and the same with social activities as well. We need people to be very creative about those social activities.

[00:35:55] What I keep telling my team is we want to leave no one behind. We want to make sure we check in with everyone on the team every now and then, see how they're doing, and have a face-to-face conversation, no matter how junior or senior, remote or not they are. It's super important. So we've put in place a lot of check-ins, and whenever someone joins the team, I send them a little video. We're testing new tools to send videos and have video replies. It's all very creative and fun, because it's new and you get to test a bunch of new things, but it's important that you do it intentionally, that you really do spend some time and add some time in your calendar to do those reach-outs.

[00:36:36] As a leader, it's extremely important, because your team is looking up to you. They want to talk to you, but they sometimes feel bad just reaching out to you and saying, "Oh, can we grab a coffee?" They feel you're busy, so they don't want to do it. So it's about creating those coffee chats and putting them in the calendar, making sure you attend them, and prioritizing that time where sometimes you probably would not have. So mental health, like Jessie said, is not just one thing. It's not just talking to a psychiatrist when you have a breakdown. It's daily, it's sustainability, it's talking about your performance, feeling secure, having the tools in place so you don't feel like you cannot do your best work, feeling fulfilled at work, feeling accurately and fairly rated by your manager.

[00:37:23] All of these pieces go into the big, overall mental... I don't know what to call it, but it's a layered approach, for sure. And that's what I would recommend to someone who doesn't have all the tools accessible in-house: be creative and be scrappy about inviting the right people and having the largest number of people attending these meetings and workshops.

[00:37:39] Jessie: I 100% agree with that. It really is about the resources you have, and how you want to use those. The first step you do have control over, which is: be proactive and make it a first-class topic amongst you and your leadership team. Just being intentional about it, like you said, and bringing that conversation up at the leadership level. If you're leading a small company, say, "Hey, we care about mental health. What options do we have, based on the resources we have access to?" And to your point, you can get real scrappy and very creative and see what's out there in the industry. But like I said, it doesn't cost you anything to have that conversation or create that space with your team and your folks. You can do a lot more than you think with free or cheap resources. But you have to make it a priority.

Advice for someone struggling, and closing

[00:38:29] Catherine: I'm just reading some of the comments here. There's a private message from somebody saying this time has been incredibly stressful for them and their family. They've never experienced the volume of stress that they have during this time, and they're contemplating quitting their work. It is incredibly important to try and talk to somebody: to talk to a colleague or talk to your boss. The one thing I can lend, I guess, for this audience in this industry, is that the tech industry is very open to helping, probably better than any other industry I could possibly work in, and we're all incredibly lucky to work in it. But is there any advice that you'd give this person who's struggling with how to cope, or who to talk to, or how they can manage the stressors beyond just COVID and beyond working from home? There's a lot of other things going on in the world. What would be your advice to them?

[00:39:34] Cynthia: First of all, I feel so much for them. This time has been incredibly difficult. I look happy talking about it today, but I was on maternity leave up until a few months ago, and it was depressing at times. Reach out. I make it an invitation to you: send me a DM on Twitter and I'll be happy to have a discussion with you. Sometimes just reaching out and having someone you can talk to can make a big difference. I'd say that's the best advice I can give you. But aside from that, there are a lot of tools and a lot of resources. Reach out. It's really important that you do.

[00:40:11] You'll be surprised: sometimes, having that discussion with your lead, they might be able to give you some space. They might be able to give you some time, so that you can have the 20 minutes a day that you need to just refuel, to read or spend some time not being stressed. It can make a huge difference. So reach out to me, reach out to someone, reach out to your lead. I think it can make a world of difference.

[00:40:38] Catherine: All right. We have to wrap up now, but is there any short closing piece that you want to leave people with? Otherwise, I can ask you what's the future for your offices. Will they stay remote? Will they grow even further into your hybrid models? For example, what is Twitter Dublin's status? We're all keen to know about that.

[00:40:59] Jessie: We have no plans to close our existing Twitter offices. We think that in-office culture is a core part of the work experience, and letting folks take advantage of that when they want to. We anticipate actually growing this year; we have a very aggressive hiring plan. So if you're considering different places to work, Twitter is an amazing place to work. I'm happy to chat with you offline about that; my DMs are open. But yes, we fully plan to continue to invest in our existing offices. And like I said, we are actively exploring what it would look like to be in even more locations, to again offer that flexibility to folks.

[00:41:36] Catherine: Fantastic. Cynthia and Jessie, thank you so much for your time. You both are phenomenal. I've really valued meeting you both and chatting with you both, now and before. I want to summarize briefly: flexibility and control. Adapting to your personal way of life, and making sure that your company does that, I think was a really key message there. I loved the positivity of spending more time with family, and baking. I know it's a cliché in a way, but I really love that positivity, and I think people should embrace it. And then your Twitter Owls, and both of you doing mental health awareness. I think that's important. To finalize, as Cynthia said: refuel, take charge and take a step back. Attend more pieces like UXDX, not just events like this, but in general do different activities, yoga online, whatever it takes to have that mental break.