(Still) Working Alone Together
2020 is behind us (yay!), but we’re still in a pandemic that continues to shape how we live and work. For those who are privileged to have a job that allows them to work from home, 2021 looks no different from 2020 — we’re connected through our screens and devices yet still physically isolated family, friends, and colleagues.
As manager of a group of designers, I’ve helped them and our teams navigate the transition from office to online. Some of the adjustments we’ve made stuck while others were scrapped. Now that we’re approaching year two of working alone together, I want to share a few trends I’ve observed and what’s worked for our teams.
Scheduled spontaneity
Elevator conversations with an engineer, hallway high-fives with a researcher, grabbing lunch with a product manager — these small interactions are the foundational bricks and mortar to building relationships with teammates. With working from home, these spontaneous social interactions I once depended on are gone. I can’t mill around the design studio to get to know a new hire or see the slump of someone’s shoulders to signal they need a boost.
To make up for this gap, I now have to schedule spontaneity and create small check-ins throughout the work week. Specifically…
- I meet with each designer I manage 1:1 every week. In the before times, I’d do bi-weekly 1:1s for some but that included random encounters throughout the day. It can add up (3–4 hours a week), but it’s time well spent.
- Schedule virtual morning coffee, breakfasts, lunches with folks on and outside my team. Walking chats over the phone to stretch those legs are wonderful as well. The key here is no agenda. I’ve got other meeting blocks for that.
- To kick off the week, our Monday morning team meeting includes time for everyone to share what they did over the past weekend, quick gut check on individual mood, and space to acknowledge internal and external events; appreciate others’ work and achievements; and apologize for mistakes.
Time is transactional
As I’ve scheduled coffees and casual check-ins with folks, I’ve also managed my calendar to cluster work blocks, childcare time, and meetings to communicate when I’m available or heads down (Slack status FTW). Along with other teammates, I’ve also tried to be as crisp as possible with agendas, meeting notes, and action items. Our weekly design studio time has sign-up slots and assigned roles to keep chatter and feedback on topic and time. So efficient!
But with that efficiency, my work time became highly transactional. As myself and others were mindful with work hours, I needed a reason to chat with someone during the day. Don’t get me wrong, I did the same. My interactions with teammates felt over indexed on efficient exchanges, so I conceded a few adjustments to loosen up the stiffness in my schedule…
- No more sitting in silence as folks show up to a meeting. Allow the beginning — and end — of a meeting to be for chatter! Yes, we all want our co-workers to teleport from one meeting to the next on time. In reality, this never happens. I’ve recognized that 30-minute meetings don’t have to be all business and alignment can still be accomplished in 20.
- One of our designers created “Focus Pods” — blocks of time where anyone could pop in to work, in silence, alongside others. Think virtual study hall. Surprisingly, the weekly working sessions were both comforting to see others jamming on their to-dos and effective for myself to get things done.
- Every other Friday, a few product teams have 30 minutes of online game time. Watching a group of designers, researchers, engineers, data scientists, and product managers play skribbl is always a highlight.
- Lastly, outro music for meetings cannot be understated. One of our UX researchers, Jessica DeLong, has a ukelele within reach to lighten any awkward goodbyes as large meetings come to a close.
No more boundaries
I am a parent so I get this one for free. Mornings I’m up at 6:30 AM and my workdays have a hard stop at 5:30 PM for family time and dinner duty. I do recognize that family was a welcome forcing function for me. Before kids, I’d sometimes work until 6, 7, even 9 PM before figuring out dinner. While some of our designers are parents, others live alone and with daily commutes gone, they needed to impose their own work-life boundaries. Easy for some, difficult for others.
Beyond workday bookends, vacation also became some nebulous event that never really got planned. If you can’t travel or go anywhere, what’s the point? Even with an unlimited paid time off policy, even fewer folks were taking any time off. Here’s what our design and product teams did…
- The small stuff: define work hours in Google calendar to dissuade early or late meetings; set up a notification schedule in Slack to avoid late night pings; encourage and remind everyone to not email or Slack after hours — use schedule send or drafts.
- Pad the big holidays — Memorial Day, 4th of July, Labor day — with a day off before or after. Having 4–5 days off every so often not only helped our teams recharge, but gave everyone a collective break to look forward to.
- On that tip, each month, everyone takes the last Friday off. Teams can go 4–5 weeks putting in long hours that extend into the weekend. Sprinting to a monthly finish line compliments our sprint-cycle cadence.
- While holiday padding and monthly days off may seem like a lot of time, it only added up to ~3 weeks time off. During a pandemic, a team pencils-down approach reinforced a work-hard, rest-hard mentality.
If there’s one takeaway from this past year, it’s acknowledgement. Acknowledge it’s tough out there for many, acknowledge it’s a privilege for few, and acknowledge the events of 2020 are still cascading into 2021. Be mindful and flexible in how we work alone together.
Interested in joining the Lyft Design team? We’re hiring.
