Today’s the last of three consecutive days that I’ve spent working in Milton Keynes. On each day I’ve taken a short walk while I’ve eaten my lunch to find a nearby geocache. This was
today’s.
After admiring the sculpture I snapped a selfie while I waited for my GPS signal to settle. The coordinates and the hint made the location seem obvious, yet somehow I did three laps of
the hiding place before I reached down to what by all accounts was, indeed, an obvious hiding place!
Muggles weren’t too multitudinous, so I soon had the cache hidden again back in its snug little spot. TFTC!
I’ve been working in Milton Keynes the tail end of this week while my kids attend a ski camp at the X-scape centre. While eating my lunch today I came out for a walk to find this
geocache.
Approaching from the direction of the car park was definitely the right route and I was soon standing at GZ alongside a likely host. I had to search for some time, though, before I
found this surprisingly we’ll-concealed cache.
(I was hindered perhaps by my own eagerness to check the hint, which left me searching several feet lower down than the container eventually turned out to be!)
Found the host easily, but had to wait for a gap in thir lunchtime dog walkers to be able to mount a good search. After checking in a few obvious places I picked something up and there
was the cache!
Took a walk up to the Light Pyramid where I snapped the attached photo of me pointing towards the X-Scape centre, where I’ve been working today (my kids have ski lessons, so I’ve been
sitting in the cafe with my laptop with the exception of this, my lunch break!).
On which note, I’d better go find myself a sandwich! Thanks for bringing me up here, and TFTC.
Super quick find on lunch break during a day coworking in Cheltenham. Love the hiding spot which seems pretty much made for a cache of this shape and size! TFTC!
I’ve been working in Banbury this morning while my car was being serviced at the nearby garage. Once I got the call to say it had been done and I could come and collect it I walked back
past this cache. Instant find. TFTC!
Off the back of my recent post about privileges I enjoy as a result of my location and first language, even at my highly-multinational employer, and inspired by my colleague Atanas‘ data-mining into where Automatticians are
located, I decided to do another treemap, this time about which countries Automatticians call home:
Where are the Automatticians?
To get a better picture of that, let’s plot a couple of cartograms. This animation cycles between showing countries at (a) their
actual (landmass) size and (b) approximately proportional to the number of Automatticians based in each country:
Another way to consider the data would be be comparing (a) the population of each country to (b) the number of Automatticians there. Let’s try that:
There’s definitely something to learn from these maps about the cultural impact of our employee diversity, but I can’t say more about that right now… primarily because I’m not smart
enough, but also at least in part because I’ve watched the map animations for too long and made myself seasick.
A note on methodology
A few quick notes on methodology, for the nerds out there who’ll want to argue with me:
Country data was extracted directly from Automattic’s internal staff directory today and is based on self-declaration by employees (this is relevant because we employ a relatively
high number of “digital nomads”, some of whom might not consider any one country their home).
Countries were mapped to continents using this dataset.
Maps are scaled using Robinson projection. Take your arguments about this over here.
The treemaps were made using Excel. The cartographs were produced based on work by Gastner MT, Seguy V, More P. [Fast flow-based algorithm for creating density-equalizing map
projections. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 115(10):E2156–E2164 (2018)].
Some countries have multiple names or varied name spellings and I tried to detect these and line-up the data right but apologies if I made a mess of it and missed yours.
Take a look at the map below. I’m the pink pin here in Oxfordshire. The green pins are my immediate team – the people I work with on a
day-to-day basis – and the blue pins are people outside of my immediate team but in its parent team (Automattic’s org chart is a bit like a fractal).
Thinking about timezones, there are two big benefits to being where I am:
I’m in the median timezone, which makes times that are suitable-for-everybody pretty convenient for me (I have a lot of lunchtime/early-afternoon meetings where I get to
watch the sun rise and set, simultaneously, through my teammates’ windows).
I’m West of the mean timezone, which means that most of my immediate coworkers start their day before me so I’m unlikely to start my day blocked by anything I’m waiting on.
(Of course, this privilege is in itself a side-effect of living close to the meridian, whose arbitrary location owes a lot to British naval and political clout in the 19th century: had
France and Latin American countries gotten their way the prime median would have probably cut through the Atlantic or Pacific oceans.)
2. Language Privilege
English is Automattic’s first language (followed perhaps by PHP and Javascript!), not one of the 120 other languages spoken
by Automatticians. That’s somewhat a consequence of the first language of its founders and the language in which the keywords of most programming languages occur.
It’s also a side-effect of how widely English is spoken, which in comes from (a) British colonialism and (b) the USA using
Hollywood etc. to try to score a cultural victory.
I’ve long been a fan of the concept of an international axillary language but I appreciate that’s an idealistic dream whose war
has probably already been lost.
For now, then, I benefit from being able to think, speak, and write in my first language all day, every day, and not have the experience of e.g. my two Indonesian colleagues who
routinely speak English to one another rather than their shared tongue, just for the benefit of the rest of us in the room!
3. Passport Privilege
Despite the efforts of my government these last few years to isolate us from the world stage, a British passport holds an incredible amount of power, ranking fifth or sixth in the world depending on whose passport index you
follow. Compared to many of my colleagues, I can enjoy visa-free and/or low-effort travel to a wider diversity of destinations.
Normally I might show you a map here, but everything’s a bit screwed by COVID-19, which still bars me from travelling to many
places around the globe, but as restrictions start to lift my team have begun talking about our next in-person meetup, something we haven’t done since I first started when I met up with my colleagues in Cape Town and got
assaulted by a penguin.
But even looking back to that trip, I recall the difficulties faced by colleagues who e.g. had to travel to a different country in order tom find an embassy just to apply for the visa
they’d eventually need to travel to the meetup destination. If you’re not a holder of a privileged passport, international travel can be a lot harder, and I’ve definitely taken that for
granted in the past.
I’m going to try to be more conscious of these privileges in my industry.
A love a good Jackbox Game. There’s nothing quite like sitting around the living room playing Drawful, Champ’d Up, Job
Job, Trivia MurderParty, or Patently Stupid. But nowadays getting together in the same place isn’t as easy as it used to be, and as often as not I find
my Jackbox gaming with friends or coworkers takes place over Zoom, Around, Google Meet or Discord.
There’s lots of guides to doing this – even an official one! – but they all miss a
few pro tips that I think can turn a good party into a great party. Get all of this set up before your guests are due to arrive to make yourself look like a super-prepared
digital party master.
1. Use two computers!
Using one computer for your video call and a second one to host the game (in addition to the device you’re using to play the games, which could be your phone) is really helpful
for several reasons:
You can keep your video chat full-screen without the game window getting in the way, letting you spend more time focussed on your friends.
Your view of the main screen can be through the same screen-share that everybody else sees, helping you diagnose problems. It also means you experience similar video lag to
everybody else, keeping things fair!
You can shunt the second computer into a breakout room, giving your guests the freedom to hop in and out of a “social” space and a “gaming” space at will. (You can even set up
further computers and have multiple different “game rooms” running at the same time!)
2. Check the volume
Connect some headphones to the computer that’s running the game (or set up a virtual audio output device if you’re feeling more technical). This means you can still have the game
play sounds and transmit them over Zoom, but you’ll only hear the sounds that come through the screen share, not the sounds that come through the second computer too.
That’s helpful, because (a) it means you don’t get feedback or have to put up with an echo at your end, and (b) it means you’ll be hearing the game exactly the same as your guests hear
it, allowing you to easily tweak the volume to a level that allows for conversation over it.
3. Optimise the game settings
Jackbox games were designed first and foremost for sofa gaming, and playing with friends over the Internet benefits from a couple of changes to the default settings.
Sometimes the settings can be found in the main menu of a party pack, and sometimes they’re buried in the game itself, so do your research and know your way around before your party
starts.
Turn the volume down, especially the volume of the music, so you can have a conversation over the game. I’d also recommend disabling Full-screen Mode: this reduces the resolution of the
game, meaning there’s less data for your video-conferencing software to stream, and makes it easier to set up screen sharing without switching back and forth between your applications
(see below).
Turning on the Motion Sensitivity or Reduce Background Animations option if your game has it means there’ll be less movement in the background of the game. This can really help with the
video compression used in videoconferencing software, meaning players on lower-speed connections are less-likely to experience lag or “blockiness” in busy scenes.
It’s worth considering turning Subtitles on so that guests can work out what word they missed (which for the trivia games can be a big deal). Depending on your group, Extended Timers is
worth considering too: the lag introduced by videoconferencing can frustrate players who submit answers at the last second only to discover that – after transmission delays – they
missed the window! Extended Timers don’t solve that, but they do mean that such players are less-likely to end up waiting to the last second in the first place.
Finally: unless the vast majority or all of your guests are in the USA, you might like to flip the Filter US-Centric Content
switch so that you don’t get a bunch of people scratching their heads over a cultural reference that they just don’t get.
By the way, you can use your cursor keys and enter to operate Jackbox games menus, which is usually easier than fiddling with a mouse.
4. Optimise Zoom’s settings
Whatever videoconferencing platform you’re using, the settings for screen sharing are usually broadly similar. I suggest:
Make sure you’ve ticked “Share sound” or a similar setting that broadcasts the game’s audio: in some games, this is crucial; in others, it’s nice-to-have. Use your other computer to
test how it sounds and tweak the volume accordingly.
Check “Optimize for video clip”; this hints to your videoconferencing software that all parts of the content could be moving at once so it can use the same kind of codec it would
for sending video of your face. The alternative assumes that most of the screen will stay static (because it’s the desktop, the background of your slides, or whatever), which works
better with a different kind of codec.
Use “Portion of Screen” sharing rather than selecting the application. This ensures that you can select just the parts of the application that have content in, and not “black bars”,
window chrome and the like, which looks more-professional as well as sending less data over the connection.
If your platform allows it, consider making the mouse cursor invisible in the shared content: this means that you won’t end up with an annoying cursor sitting in the middle of the
screen and getting in the way of text, and makes menu operation look slicker if you end up using the mouse instead of the keyboard for some reason.
Don’t forget to shut down any software that might “pop up” notifications: chat applications, your email client, etc.: the last thing you want is somebody to send you a naughty picture
over WhatsApp and the desktop client to show it to everybody else in your party!
Lots of companies have something like this, even if it falls short of a “creed”. It could be a “vision”, or a set of “values”, or something in that line.
Of course, sometimes that just means they’ve strung three clichéd words together because they think it looks good under their company logo, and they might as well have picked
any equally-meaningless words.
But while most companies (and their staff) might pay lip service to their beliefs, Automattic’s one of few that seems to actually live it. And not in an awkward, shoehorned-in
way: people here actually believe this stuff.
By way of example:
We’ve got a bot that, among other things, pairs up people from across the company for virtual “watercooler chat”/”coffee dates”/etc. It’s cool: I
pair-up with random colleagues in my division, or the whole company, or fellow queermatticians… and collectively these provide me a half-hour hangout about once a week. It’s a great way
to experience the diversity of culture, background and interests of your colleagues, as well as being a useful way to foster idea-sharing and “watercooler effect” serendipity.
For the last six months or so, I’ve been bringing a particular question to almost every random-chat I’ve been paired into:
What part of the Automattic creed resonates most-strongly for you right now?
I volunteer my own answer first. It’s varied over time. Often I’m most-attached to “I will never stop learning.” Other times I connect best to “I will communicate as much as possible…”
or “I am in a marathon, not a sprint…”. Lately I’ve felt a particular engagement with “I will never pass up the opportunity to help a colleague…”.
It varies for other people too. But every single person I’ve asked this question has been able to answer it. And they’ve been able to answer it confidently and with
justifications for or examples of their choice.
Have you ever worked anywhere before where seemingly all your coworkers profess a genuine belief in the corporate creed? Like, enough that some of them get it tattooed onto their bodies. Unless you’ve been brainwashed by a cult, the answer is probably no.
Why are Automatticians like that?
For some folks, of course, the creed is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Regarding its initial creation, Matt
says that “as a hack to introduce new folks to our culture, we put a beta Automattic Creed, basically a statement of things important to us, written in the first person.”
But this alone isn’t an explanation, because back then there were only around a hundred people in the company: nowadays there are over 1,500. So how can the creed continue to be such a
pervasive influence? Or to put it another way: why are Automatticians… like that?
Do we simply attract like-minded individuals? The creed is highly visible and cross-referenced by our recruitment pages, so it wouldn’t be entirely surprising.
Maybe we filter for people who are ideologically-compatible with the creed? Insofar as the qualities it describes are essential to integrating into our corporate
culture, yes: our recruitment process does a great job of testing for those qualities.
Perhaps we converge on these values as a result of our experience as Automatticians? Once you’re in, you’re indoctrinated into the tenets of the creed and
internalise its ideas.
Or perhaps it’s a combination of the three, in some ratio or another. (What’s the ratio?)
I’ve been here 1⅔ years and don’t know the answer yet. But I’ll tell you this: it’s inspiring to be part of a team that really seem to believe in what they do.
Seven years ago, I wrote a six-part blog series (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) about our Ruth, JTA and I’s experience of buying our first house. Now, though, we’re moving again, and it’s brought up all the same kinds of challenges and
stresses as last time, plus a whole lot of bonus ones to boot.
In particular, new challenges this time around have included:
As owners, rather than renters, we’ve had both directions on the ladder to deal with. Not only did we have to find somewhere to move to that we can afford but we needed to find
somebody who’d buy our current house (for enough money that we can afford the new place).
The first letting agents we appointed were pretty useless, somehow managing to get us no viewings whatsoever. Incidentally their local branch
got closed soon after we ditched them and the last time I checked, the building was still up for sale: it doesn’t bode well for them that they can’t even sell their own
building, does it?
The replacement letting agents (who sold us this house in the first place) were much better, but it still took a long time before we started
getting offers we could act on.
We finally selected some buyers, accepting a lower offer because they were cash buyers and it would allow us to act quickly on the property we wanted to buy, only for the
coronavirus lockdown to completely scupper our plans of a speedy move. And make any move a logistical nightmare.
Plus: we’re now doing this with lots more stuff (this won’t be a “rally some friends and rent a van” job like
last time!), with two kids (who’re under our feet a lot on account of the lockdown), and so on.
But it’s finally all coming together. We’ve got a house full of boxes, mind, and we can’t find anything, and somehow it still doesn’t feel like we’re prepared for when the
removals lorry comes later this week. But we’re getting there. After a half-hour period between handing over the keys to the old place and picking up the keys to the new place (during
which I guess we’ll technically be very-briefly homeless) we’ll this weekend be resident in our new home.
Our new house will:
Be out in the fabulous West Oxfordshire countryside.
Have sufficient rooms to retain an office and a “spare” bedroom while still giving the kids each their own bedroom.
Boast a fabulously-sized garden (we might have already promised the kids a climbing frame).
Have an incredible amount of storage space plus the potential for further expansion/conversion should the need ever arise. (On our second-to-last visit to the place with discovered
an entire room, albeit an unfinished one, that we hadn’t known about before!)
Get ludicrously fast Internet access.
We lose some convenient public transport links, but you can’t have everything. And with me working from home all the time, Ruth –
like many software geeks – likely working from home for the foreseeable future (except when she cycles into work), and JTA working from
home for now but probably returning to what was always a driving commute “down the line”, those links aren’t as essential to us as they once were.
Sure: we’re going to be paying for it for the rest of our lives. But right now, at least, it feels like what we’re buying is a house we could well live in for the rest of our
lives, too.
When the COVID-19 lockdown forced many offices to close and their staff to work remotely, some of us saw what was unfolding as
an… opportunity in disguise. Instead of the slow-but-steady
decentralisation of work that’s very slowly become possible (technically, administratively, and politically) over the last 50 years, suddenly a torrent of people were discovering that
remote working can work.
The Future is Now
As much as I hate to be part of the “where’s my flying car?” brigade, I wrote ten years ago about my dissatisfaction that remote
working wasn’t yet commonplace, let alone mainstream. I recalled a book I’d read as a child in the 1980s that promised a then-future 2020 of:
near-universal automation of manual labour as machines become capable of an increasing diversity of human endeavours (we’re getting there, but slowly),
a three- or four-day work week becoming typical as efficiency improvements are reinvested in the interests of humans rather than of corporations (we might have lost sight of that
goal along the way, although there’s been some fresh interest
in it lately), and
widespread “teleworking”/”telecommuting”, as white-collar sectors grow and improvements in computing and telecommunications facilitate the “anywhere office”
Of those three dreams, the third soon seemed like it would become the most-immediate. Revolutionary advances in mobile telephony, miniaturisation of computers, and broadband networking
ran way ahead of the developments in AI that might precipitate the first dream… or the sociological shift required for
the second. But still… progress was slow.
At eight years old, I genuinely believed that most of my working life would be spent… wherever I happened to be. So far, most of my working life has been spent in an office, despite
personally working quite hard for that not to be the case!
I started at Automattic six months ago, an entirely distributed company. And so when friends and colleagues found themselves required to work
remotely by the lockdown they came in droves to me for advice about how to do it! I was, of course, happy to help where I could: questions often
covered running meetings and projects, maintaining morale, measuring output, and facilitating communication… and usually I think I gave good answers. Sometimes, though, the
answer was “If you’re going to make that change, you’re going to need a cultural shift and some infrastructure investment first.” Y’know: “Don’t start from here.” If you received that advice from me: sorry!
(Incidentally, if you have a question I haven’t answered yet, try these clever people first for even better
answers!)
More-recently, I was excited to see that many companies have adopted this “new normal” not as a temporary measure,
but as a possible shape of things to come. Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, Square, and Spotify have all announced that they’re going to permit or encourage remote work as standard, even
after the crisis is over.
Obviously tech companies are leading the way, here: not only are they most-likely to have the infrastructure and culture already in place to support this kind of shift. Also, they’re
often competing for the same pool of talent and need to be seen as at-least as progressive as their direct rivals. Matt
Mullenweg observes that:
What’s going to be newsworthy by the end of the year is not technology companies saying they’re embracing distributed work, but those that aren’t.
…some employers trapped in the past will force people to go to offices, but the illusion that the office was about work will be shattered forever, and companies that
hold on to that legacy will be replaced by companies who embrace the antifragile nature of distributed organizations.
Tomorrow’s Challenges
We’re all acutely familiar with the challenges companies are faced with today as they adapt to a remote-first environment. I’m more interested in the challenges that
they might face in the future, as they attempt to continue to use a distributed workforce as the pandemic recedes. It’s easy to make the mistake of assuming that what many
people are doing today is a rehearsal for the future of work, but the future will look different.
Some people, of course, prefer to spend some or all of their work hours in an office environment. Of the companies that went remote-first during the lockdown and now plan to
stay that way indefinitely, some will lose employees who
preferred the “old way”. For this and other reasons, some companies will retain their offices and go remote-optional, allowing flexible teleworking, and this has it’s own
pitfalls:
Some remote-optional offices have an inherent bias towards in-person staff. In some companies with a mixture of in-person and remote staff, remote workers don’t get
included in ad-hoc discussions, or don’t become part of the in-person social circles. They get overlooked for projects or promotions, or treated as second-class citizens. It’s easy to
do this completely by accident and create a two-tiered system, which can lead to a cascade effect that eventually collapses the “optional” aspect of remote-optional; nowhere was this
more visible that in Yahoo!’s backslide against remote-optional working in 2013.
Some remote-optional offices retain an archaic view on presenteeism and “core hours”. Does the routine you keep really matter? Remote-first working demands that
productivity is measured by output, not by attendance, but management-by-attendance is (sadly) easier to implement, and
some high-profile organisations favour this lazy but less-effective approach. It’s easy, but ineffective, for a remote-optional company to simply extend hours-counting performance
metrics to their remote staff. Instead, allowing your staff (insofar as is possible) to work the hours that suit them as individuals opens up your hiring pool to a huge number of
groups whom you might not otherwise reach (like single parents, carers, digital nomads, and international applicants) and helps you to get the best out of every one of them, whether
they’re an early bird, a night owl, or somebody who’s most-productive after their siesta!
Pastoral care doesn’t stop being important after the crisis is over. Many companies that went remote-first for the coronavirus crisis have done an excellent job of
being supportive and caring towards their employees (who, of course, are also victims of the crisis: by now, is there anybody whose life hasn’t been impacted?). But when
these companies later go remote-optional, it’ll be easy for them to regress to their old patterns. They’ll start monitoring the wellbeing only of those right in front of
them. Remote working is already challenging, but it can be made much harder if your company culture makes it hard to take a sick day, seek support on a HR issue, or make small-talk with a colleague.
These are challenges specifically for companies that go permanently remote-optional following a period of remote-first during the coronavirus crisis.
Towards a Post-Lockdown Remote-Optional Workplace
How you face those challenges will vary for every company and industry, but it seems to me that there are five lessons a company can learn as it adapts to remote-optional work in a
post-lockdown world:
Measure impact, not input. You can’t effectively manage a remote team by headcount or closely tracking hours; you need to track outputs (what is produced), not inputs
(person-hours). If your outputs aren’t measurable, make them measurable, to paraphrase probably-not-Galileo. Find metrics you can work with and rely on, keep them transparent and open, and
re-evaluate often. Use the same metrics for in-office and remote workers.
Level the playing field. Learn to spot the biases you create. Do the in-person attendees do all the talking at your semi-remote meetings? Do your remote workers have
to “call in” to access information only stored on-site (including in individual’s heads)? When
they’re small, these biases have a huge impact on productivity and morale. If they get big, they collapse your remote-optional environment.
Always think bigger. You’re already committing to a shakeup, dragging your company from the 2020 of the real world into the 2020 we once dreamed of. Can you go
further? Can you let your staff pick their own hours? Or workdays? Can your staff work in other countries? Can you switch some of your synchronous communications channels (e.g.
meetings) into asynchronous information streams (chat, blogs, etc.)? Which of your telecommunications tools
serve you, and which do you serve?
Remember the human. Your remote workers aren’t faceless (pantsless) interchangeable components in your corporate machine. Foster interpersonal relationships and don’t
let technology sever the interpersonal links between your staff. Encourage and facilitate (optional, but awesome) opportunities for networking and connection. Don’t forget to get together in-person sometimes: we’re a pack animal, and we form tribes more-easily when we
can see one another.
Support people through the change. Remote working requires a particular skillset; provide tools to help your staff adapt to it. Make training and development options
available to in-office staff too: encourage as flexible a working environment as your industry permits. Succeed, and your best staff will pay you back in productivity and loyalty.
Fail, and your best staff will leave you for your competitors.
I’m less-optimistic than Matt that effective distributed
working is the inexorable future of work. But out of the ashes of the coronavirus crisis will come its best chance yet, and I know that there’ll be companies who get left behind in
the dust. What are you doing to make sure your company isn’t one of them?
Today my #distributed #remotework office is provided by @OCFI_OI, which provides me that most #Oxford of views: simultaneously containing architecture of the 1960s… and the 1160s.