What have been your top challenges with WFH and what techniques have helped you overcome them?
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We've done a great job using Teams to meet, collaborate, see faces and experience togetherness. What's missing - still missing - is the 'water cooler' communication and unexpected pop-ins. While we've tried to replicate that convivial experience, you just can't plan or coordinate it. Zoom happy hours are fun but also feel like work. We're missing the spontaneous exchanges. I feel like we've chipped away at all of the challenges except the ones we used to not even consider to be deeply important.
Working from home, sometimes I think the staff gets a little bit worn down from feeling like they’re always at work. You leave your bedroom, you brush your teeth, you have a cup of coffee and then next thing you're in your office, right?I always try to remind people of a couple of things that, at least just for me personally, help.
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.
I definitely miss the office. I'm at a point where I have a WeWork subscription. It's good for me. I go to the one right by Snowflake. I'll go there once a week. It's just good for the family also. When I'm home and my wife's stay-at-home teaching, I'll go into the kitchen to make coffee, and then try to solve something she is working on. My wife just kind of gives me the side eye, and like, "I got this, you don't need to just come and solve all of a sudden. Just make your coffee and go back to your office." So I think it's good just from a mental standpoint. Also, I really like when you're at work, you're thinking about work. And then when you're coming home, you're thinking about home. And so it's a good physical separation for me.
I think one of the things that has been the biggest downside I've seen is just the motivation. People are doing good work and they're staying, but I saw a good picture right at the start of the year, I think maybe Harvard Business Review published it. It was a graphic of a guy with a contraption with this thing kicking him in the butt to get him going. And I felt like that's kind of what I needed, and what I think other people needed, just to say like, here we go, another year in work-from-home. I came to this realization that I'm the one that's supposed to be doing all the, "Let's get this group going. It's a new year. Let's go." And that was really tough. The more people I've talked to, other leaders in the company, it's kind of a common sentiment. That challenge with motivation.
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.
One of the challenges we faced was technical validation exams for candidates, we normally hire developers, and our development division requires that developers are technically validated using an interactive technical exam running on a real development environment; candidates used to take these exams at our offices.
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!