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Challenge of Building distributed teams
- 1. The Challenges of Building Distributed Teams
- 2. Relocated to Manchester in October 2018 @oscsparky https://www.linkedin.com/in/markkevans/ Head of Engineering @ Moonpig
- 3. Our purpose is to Unleash the caring instinct + cultivate the caring habit
- 4. We created over 18 million magic moments in the last 12 Months That’s pretty Cool Kinda like this guy, on top...
- 5. London
- 7. Manchester
- 9. Why did we go Distributed?
- 10. Challenges
- 11. Interviewing
- 12. On-Boarding
- 14. Communication
- 17. The Basics
- 18. Us vs Them
- 19. How can we overcome some of these challenges?
- 23. Keep teams local
- 24. Our fearless leader :) Make personal connections
- 26. Don’t let distance be a barrier
- 27. One team - One Goal
- 28. One team - One Goal
- 29. One team - One Goal
- 32. Almost done. One last thing... Sadly, this is the end. But if any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me at mark.evans@moonpig.com
Editor's Notes
- You might be wondering why we decided to take Moonpig distributed, Hiring in London is difficult and slow, hence we explored other locations to help us grow quicker, whilst maintaining our quality standards. We chose Manchester because Largest tech hub outside of London Great talent Short travel time between offices No timezone difference We have senior leadership experienced in opening Manchester tech hubs
- So you are thinking of building a distributed team, what things might you discover when trying to do this for the first time, these challenges aren’t unique just to distributed teams, many are also relevant where you have partly remote teams as well
- The first challenge to consider when building a new distributed team is how will you deal with interviewing, depending on the types of roles you will be looking to hire for the interview process might work well purely via video conferencing but what about if there is a more personal element to the process? For example when hiring I like the interview process to reflect as closely as possible what it would be like to work at the company, if that involves running retrospectives with a team or coding via pairing it makes it a particular challenge, especially when hiring in a market where skills are in demand and you need to move quickly. One thing we have tried for some roles is to have the candidate to travel to London to speed up the interview process, this has worked better for some roles than others. Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash
- Once you’ve actually made a hire, how do you plan to on-board them? Typically inductions are held at a “head-office” and usually start in the morning so depending on where the distributed team location is compared to other locations distance might be a challenge. We’ve tried remote inductions as part of our standard induction but found these didn’t work as well as we would have hoped as it’s more daunting to ask a question when you are one of a small number of people not in the room. Photo by Etienne Boulanger on Unsplash
- The next thing that comes up is once people have started then have no context on any of the existing platform or technology, how do you ramp people up so they can be effective as quickly as possible You might not realise it but within your teams and organisations there is a huge amount of implicit knowledge that everyone who has been there a while knows but doesn’t realise it, it’s not documented and they found out about it during the onboarding process or within the first few months Often confluence can be the place where information goes to die Photo by Joao Tzanno on Unsplash
- Communication is likely to be a challenge you’ll come up against especially in the early days of forming the team, Slack is a great tool but can also be part of the problem I’m sure we’ve all been part of a chat that goes something like A: Are you there? B: Yes I am A: Let’s chat B: OK A: (sets up video call) A: (waits) B: Can’t find a room, I’ll use my laptop at my desk B: (joins call) Compared to a co-located person A: (turns head) B, I have a question can you help. Photo by Pankaj Patel on Unsplash
- There are studies which show that when people are more than 30 feet apart collaboration and communication drops significantly and over 100 feet is almost zero See: https://thefutureorganization.com/distance-impacts-employee-communication-collaboration/ and http://info-architecture.blogspot.com/2008/08/collaborative-thinking-communication.html
- Often people treat slack or other chat tools as synchronous communication channels when they are clearly anything but synchronous This can leave new people feeling isolated and like they are screaming into a void waiting for a response to what should be a simple question In this scenario the tumbleweed gif becomes very well used
- Depending on the size of the organisation, simple things like having equipment setup and configured for their first day, in a previous company that was a real nightmare to get right, especially when the machines are bound to an Active Directory domain and need specific machine images to be created and installed by one of the IT team Photo by Ben Kolde on Unsplash
- This one is the big one, the culture forms very early on when a new team forms in a new location and it’s incredibly easy for teams to see things as a competition, it’s incredibly important to catch this early as it can create a toxic culture between teams where none needs to exist, this ties into the “Always assume positive intent” suggestion Photo by David Clode on Unsplash
- The first thing you need to do is to throw any any preconception that you can work around how things currently work, taking the step to setup a distributed team mean things will need to change for your existing teams as well For example we used to run induction sessions on the first day which shared our strategy and vision and gave new employee’s the chance to meet our senior leadership team, we now run these one a month but start after lunch so that new starters in Manchester are able to be there We are also training up all of the managers in Manchester to run our standard induction process which previously was owned by our people team so that employees get a more consistent experience Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash
- How do you identify the things that people know that they don’t know they know? The answer is slowly, if you only ever skirt around the problem however it will never resolve itself. We decided to tackle this head on and set ourselves an ambitious goal that our new team would take the lead in supporting our production systems during one of our peaks, with the knowledge the existing team was there as support to them. The result was the team learning a lot about how systems operate in the real world incredibly quickly and gaining confidence that they were able to keep things running. Photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash
- Call it out and call it out early to all new starters what to expect from the communication tools Slack is Asynchronous, if you need synchronous arrange a video call / phone call or other medium with the person directly, there is nothing worse that seeing @here “is there anyone there?” @channel @channel help me! Keep the use of private channels to a minimum, transparency is key for distributed teams so only use private when the conversation really is private and not just because other people might not be interested Use @here to notify all currently active members in the room. Please only use if the message is important and urgent. Use @channel to notify ALL members in the room, irrespective of away status. Please only use if the message is very important and urgent. Photo by Jessica To'oto'o on Unsplash
- There are some companies feel they have cross location teams working well however in my experience I’ve struggled to make this work as well as I would like it to. When you think about distributed teams my advice is to ensure teams have everything it needs to deliver it’s goal, a real world example for this is during my first attempt at distributed teams we only had engineers in Manchester and left product and other functions in London, I think this caused teams to be far less effective so for this time we have placed engineering, product, agile and design roles in the same place to ensure teams are self-sufficient Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash
- Building a relationship with people outside of slack / video conferencing and other electronic communication methods is incredibly important. Doing this means that when conversations happen using text medium where it’s easy for things to be misunderstood, having that existing personal connection means that you have a better understanding of where the other person is coming from.
- Accept the travel needs to be the norm and if people need to get together face to face that they know it’s okay to just do it, don’t make it hard for people to collaborate in person As a leadership team, be prepared to travel way more than the rest of the team, depending on how you setup the structure, for example in my current role we have a member of the C-team in Manchester every week and often can have 5 or 6 others coming to work with the teams in any given month, this has helped build a real culture of collaboration Photo by Christian Wagner on Unsplash
- It’s important to call out early to help with the us vs them competition that for the company to be successful all teams need to be successful, it doesn’t do anything to help if one half of the organisation is doing well and the other half is struggling
- Think about how the teams can share experiences to make the entire organisation better, if one location has a particularly strong skillset think about how you can use that to raise everyone else’s ability Photo by Ali Yahya on Unsplash
- We are all in this together and working towards the same end result which is the achievement of the strategy Photo by "My Life Through A Lens" on Unsplash
- It’s very easy to misinterpret the intention of some code or someone else’s actions, even more so when there is no personal relationship for which is use as guidance. When working with distributed teams it’s important to call out that people should always assume positive intent, no matter what happened and no matter the outcome the person did the best job they could based on the information and context they had at the time, this is reinforced with the building of personal connections by people meeting in person and chatting around the water cooler / over a coffee Photo by MARK ADRIANE on Unsplash
- Don’t wait for people to become disaffected, ask for frequent feedback about what is and isn’t working Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash