What have been your top challenges with WFH and what techniques have helped you overcome them?
Yeah. Being in IT, we all are used to having 24/7 jobs, right? So we're relied on for everything. I still hear it from the CEO. If he has a problem with something, he doesn't want to go to the regular channels, he'll still come straight to me and say, "Hey, I have this problem. Can you quick fix it for me?" Right? So I still live in that world. So From that point-of-view, it didn't really change much.
I constantly am reminding my staff, and myself probably more so than anybody, there have been a couple of silver linings in this. I think that helps the team keep going. It's on us, as leaders, to remind people to take advantage of this, as much as this has been such a negative impact on our lives, I think you can also turn it into some positives. If you don't, I think you find people are probably starting to find themselves in maybe a bad state of mind.
There's all these little tricks we started to learn after we settled in for, whatever it's been, 9 months. Where it's like, get outside every day, stop and have lunch. Don't eat at your laptop, because I was running into that terrible habit. For people that have family that they live with, and not everyone can do this too, all of a sudden I spend way more time with my kids. Lunchtime now, we hang out. And my kids love to do puzzles, so there's a huge puzzle always on the dining room table, and people are eating lunch. Little things like that. I never did that before. I was traveling and I was never home.
Take an opportunity to force yourself to get outside every day. I don't care what it is. You get up from your desk, and you go outside. You take a meeting, only audio, put the headset on and walk around the block. Get outside, get some fresh air, because you will start to go crazy if you don't.
Well, it varies. I mean, I'm in the same situation as you Eric. I mean, I watch shows with my son before work, we have lunch together some days. But then I have a team member who lives in a studio in San Francisco, and he was afraid to go outside because of all the people around. But then, you have situations like that, where I made sure not to say how great it is to work from home, and make him feel even more miserable.
Yep. I've done outreach to my team to actually enjoy that Blue Bottle right across from SurveyMonkey. I've been there many times now, and it's just a great natural place to meet up. I've done the outreach to my team, and even people adjacent to the team. Knowing the Tenderloin example, or someone that has three roommates in a very tiny SF apartment, and it's hard for them. Sometimes it’s about giving folks a reason just to have coffee. And depending on your comfort level of things, I felt like getting them a little bit more human connection, other than Safeway and their roommates, has been helpful.
We used Azure Labs to create a template for a Developer Machine that runs the tools required, the machine also ran a version of FFMPEG that video records the entire user session over RDP and dumps that into Azure Storage, with the convenience of Azure Labs the team was able to enroll candidates using email and they proctored the exams using Web Cams. the whole setup wasn't expensive and did the needed pretty well!
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Follow up to my previous travel question… What is your favorite place to travel to for work and why?
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The hours were another thing, because not everybody wanted to work a regular 8:00 to 5:00. A lot of people were either working earlier or later, and it was harder to get a hold of people. We didn't really have any rules for when you had to be available specifically. But the biggest one for us was work-life balance, because now, there's no work, so you lose the balance because everything is home. So everything's life and not necessarily work, unless you have a big enough house to completely separate that.
Then our offices, when we were there, all had great food and everything, but now my fridge is right there and I can put whatever I want in it, and so that's distracting too. And then trying to coordinate meetings when you don't see people in the hallways, the hallway conversations aren't there.
But not having to book a conference room makes meetings so much easier.
That's for sure.
I mean, getting meetings was the biggest problem when we were all in the office. We always seemed short on conference rooms.