Sarah is our Automation Software Implementer. She has a background in Mechanical Engineering and has been a remote worker for her entire professional career. When she joined the Method team, we leaned on her past remote experience to figure out how we could make it work better for our team. Drew sat down with Sarah and Josh (via Zoom, of course!) to discuss the various ins and outs of remote work, from logistics to company culture.
Drew: We're talking about how to be with the team when you're not physically with the team. So, remote work. We’ve talked about it in passing before, on how you ended up working in a position to do remote work, and how that can be hard to establish.
Sarah: I lucked out because years and years ago before everyone started working remotely, I started working for a company that was fully remote already. The company culture was already rotating around staying in touch remotely with everyone.
How old were you when you started working at your previous firm? What did the age demographic look like?
S: I was the youngest, and was right out of college, 22. It was a large swath of ages. The four or five founders were all in their 50s – but youthful 50s. It still meshed well because of personality, so the age differences weren’t too noticeable.
From that previous experience, I’ve become used to that aspect. And I think one of the most important things, as an individual, working remotely from home is to be able to separate work from home.
You can do that physically by having an office that you can close, you can do that habitually with the end of the day or beginning of the day routines since you don’t have a commute anymore. Do that for you. You can start your workday with making coffee and in the end, it can be shutting down your desktop and taking yourself out of the work mentality. Those are the things as an individual I’ve found to be crucial.
Are those your rituals for the workday?
S: Since starting part-time work, my workdays have been more sporadic. My routine now is the opening and closing of the computer when I have a chance to work.
When I was working 40 hours a week, it started with getting out of bed; some people like to still get dressed and feel like they're going to work. I’d go into my office, shut the door, and get out my list of things to do for the day. At the end of the day, I would prep for the next one by writing out tomorrow’s tasks. It becomes a closed-loop cycle where I don’t have to think about work afterward because I've already written everything down.
Is that a ritual you’re still able to do, prepping for the next day?
S: Because I work so sporadically, I prep for the next week. During my One-on-Ones, I recognize and write down all the things still on my plate to do. It's a little broader, but it's still helpful to have that written list.
Josh: One comment on the getting dressed for the day: I just read an article that measured how many were doing that, showering and all that, they found that was happening in 90% of the people they talked to. They followed back up later, and it’s switched; 90% of the people are now not doing any of that. They found a high majority that has a Zoom shirt, something they can throw on for a video call. They start out the day in sweats and a t-shirt.
S: It’s a comfort thing. You don't want anything to worry about while you're working. For me, I've never found myself getting ready for the day. What really helps is the division of some kind to separate work from home.
That’s one thing I’ve grappled with, a division of space, like having a workstation to just do work and then leaving that station. When I work from home, I do it in the same chair where I do everything else. I don’t have a strong division of space but I don’t know if it would be stronger if I made a cubby somewhere else.
S: It might be that if you enjoy your work, it’s not so much a problem. My husband Jared has his own company. During the workday, he does a bunch of stuff that he doesn't like to do that he has to do. I think Josh is the same way. when you get home and you're technically off the clock, you can continue to work on the things that you actually want to do and get excited about doing. If that's the case, then it's your division of work and home is blurred anyways, but it's not that it's causing problems. So that gets a little fuzzy with business owners.
That leans into this personal responsibility that comes with remote work when you can feel accountable for every minute. When you're in that office setting, there’s a sense of peer pressure not to be on Facebook for an hour. How do you maintain a solid workflow when no one’s peering over your shoulder?
S: I actually have given a presentation on this at my old company. Basically, yes, you have more freedom at home to distract yourself. But you have a choice when to be distracted. So yes, you can hop on Facebook in between tasks, and spend time letting off steam however works best, but you’re still treating yourself after you've accomplished something.
In a work office setting, you don't get to choose your interruptions. Someone’s knocking on your door and saying, “hey, let's talk,” or someone is leaning over and saying, “hey, I need help with this.” When you work from home, you have more control of your distractions.
If someone doesn’t have good self-control, I can definitely see 20-minute treat-yourself breaks turning into three-hour Netflix binges. But that personality type isn't going to click with long term working from home anyways. Some people don’t click with office working.
It's shocking how many people are actually more productive working from home.
Companies are elongating and looking into more options after COVID. That could be from not having to be in the office for eight hours, so people aren’t dragging their feet during the workday. Like, I have to be here for eight hours anyway, might as well, you know, chit chat. When you're working from home, you have a task if you get it done in three hours, the day is yours now. So I think that's helped productivity.
I've got two questions from that: we’re talking about the idea that a portion of workers is more productive working from home, and employers see this as a benefit post-COVID, but then there’s still some employees that work better in an office setting. Is there an ideal office setting where we take in all the different personality types and create a hybrid office that still has both? That’s the general question, we can narrow it down to our field as well.
S: I think that a hybrid office should be the gold standard in a post-COVID world. Not only will there still be those that need to work in the office, but there are instances where you do have a hands-on group effort that needs in-person brainstorming, for example. Zoom isn't a great option for that because it operates best when one person speaks at a time. Whereas in an office round table with a group of five or six, you can have mini conversations that lead to a big conversation. In-person gatherings can be more productive in a large group meeting. I definitely think that having 100% remote does lead to some projects being less productive.
I agree, it is detrimental in the design field to lose out on crosstalk and the downtime that’s spent together as a team. To go back to when you said, on getting a task done in three hours instead of eight and now you have time for yourself. We’re at a point in history where productivity continues to rise and yet the time to do tasks has stayed the same. Does remote work become a frontier for addressing the 40-hour workweek?
S: At the end of the day, most businesses are all about bottom lines, and they're all about making money for their board and their investors. People who are profiting off the company generally don't care how long the individual person is working in the day-to-day. They care about how much money the company is bringing in. So I think yes.
Now if the company is billable by the hour, then that’s a different story. The hours you work equate how much money the company brings in. But most companies are based on productivity. There’s this antiquated idea that ‘if I can see my workers eight hours a day working, then they are at their optimal productivity.’ But that's just not true. It's been proven through this work-from-home situation that managers don't need to keep visual tabs for them to work productively. That applies to anyone who's in charge of employees.
I've heard of managers wanting to do all day zoom meetings where they watch you work from home, which seems silly and counterproductive. For a lot of people, their natural work patterns include frequent breaks where creative processing has some decompression between intense tasks. It helps too when you’re not constantly distracted by 50 coworkers on a mandatory zoom meeting.
That’s a concern of mine that there are managerial ideas that are going to push against efforts to cut back on the 40-hour workweek.
S: If people start becoming responsible for their output, then the managerial jobs might vanish. Workers are realizing that they do not need constant micromanagement.
J: It's this low-trust environment that’s pervasive in our field. It's also a lazy manager approach because then you don't have to train your employees. Instead of training, you can constantly touch-base and react to issues on the fly versus doing the hard work in the beginning. If a manager trains someone correctly, then they can trust that employee to get things done; the manager only checks at the end to make sure that it wasn’t done incorrectly.
S: If I’m constantly being watched and hawked as an employee, I won't feel like I'm able to figure things out on my own. I’ll feel that constant judgment and question myself on if I’m performing correctly. And if that judgment is a constant possibility, it doesn't create a productive environment. It's entirely counterproductive.
J: There’s another discussion going on about hourly employees. Some are being hired as full-time employees paid hourly, but they work with the assumption that they're darn near 100% billable all the time or 120% billable or 150% billable. Their employers have built it into their model that the employees are working 5, 10, 15 hours of overtime, all the time.
What happens then is that the employers use that overtime to balance out overall employee salary. The employee believes they’re making more working overtime, but they’re at a lower hourly rate than what they would make in a salary position. It can also go the other way if you’re working less than 40 hours and it hasn’t been pre-agreed that you get a base number of hours.
This ties into that low-trust environment, where employers don’t trust their employees to figure something out on their own. If you want to go watch a video on how something gets put together, or if you find a topic you’d like to learn more about you want to dig, but that's not necessarily billable to the project, then the employer doesn’t see the benefit. They only see your time as billable. That comes from the business model perspective as well.
At the end of the day, if we stacked up the productivity between someone working a 65-hour workweek and someone working less than 40 hours, would we see a higher productivity level for the person who worked 65 hours?
J: You would see some, but not much. We've had this on our team previously, that when we’re working 60 hours a week as a team, we’re not actually producing more stuff. Or, that stuff has to be redone. There are more errors because people are tired.
Back on the zoom calls: where everyone has them open 100% of the time, I've thought about that. But it’s more from the perspective of how it's easy for you to say, “hey, coworker, what do you think about this?” Like what you might see in a physical office
S: it's not so much for keeping tabs, rather that they can access you.
J: It’s more from a cultural perspective. You have more media access. We've proven that we've got relatively immediate access due to programs like Slack. When we compare that to the previous office style, it’s easier to reach around the monitor and say, “hey, what do you think,” rather than typing it out because you're not used to doing that. Switching to fully remote will require a cultural shift.
Sarah’s perspective directly influenced how we shifted to remote focus only – because she felt left out. There was a division between in-the-office employees and our remote employees. That means we need to be focusing only on the remote versus the in-person because that will happens regardless. Sarah’s opinions 100% swayed how we operate.
What were the effective changes from those opinions?
J: Telling people they need to communicate in Slack.
S: Even for the smaller things, like leaning over and asking what material should be used for whatever we’re designing. And it's a twofold benefit because not only is everyone aware of the discussion and answer, but now also it's written down. It's like live streaming notes on every project.
J: And seeing when that decision was made.
S: Which adds to the productivity, because now you don't have to ask the same question twice.
J: Lately it's been making sure everyone's having project conversations in public channels versus private messages. I'm guilty of this too. But discussing publicly allows for that overhearing that’s there in the in-person office setting. That’s the other preference that people have working in an office is to overhear and join the conversations. On Slack, it’s harder to achieve that, but it’s possible if your conversations are on public channels.
S: I'm typically not involved with the majority of the projects, but I go through and read all the conversations that took place. If I need to jump into a project, I wouldn't be jumping blindly because of those conversations. That was one of the reasons why I didn't feel utilized.
Last year, I didn't know what the projects were, so I didn't have an understanding of the issues or complications with those projects or the decisions that had been made. I wasn’t comfortable offering help. But now I'm at least semi-aware of all the deadlines and issues we have going on.
J: All digital communication gives Sarah the opportunity, at the administrative capacity, to question our decisions from a different standpoint. It gives an extra layer of interest, but also creates accountability to the person she questions.
S: Right now, it really seems to work for us, but this is useful in small companies. Past a certain size, it's counter-intuitive and makes everyone's experience worse with open channel communication. but that can be mimicked on a smaller scale. Say, a department has its own channels and another has its own channels but there's still one big company channel.
I'd be curious to see the steps you'd have to take to make it scale. I'd like to think it would be easy to put those in place, but that’d be a lot of notifications.
S: I feel like that kid on Magic School Bus: “at my old school…”, by the time I left my previous company, they’d grown to 15 or 20 different people. There were enough people and departments that I didn't need to know everything that was going on in the company. The developer side didn't need to know everything that was going on in the sales side, same with where I was in the implementation.
We would have our open channels where we’d solve problems with the entire implementation team. That gets recorded and is available for everyone. I wasn’t in them, but I'm sure the developers had their own channels as well, and then we had a couple channels combinations where it was relevant to a specific person on one team and a different person on another. Those combination channels would be a stage for open discussions. That would be how it would scale, with more specific group channels.
Do you know if there was like someone who oversaw all that communication or just like made sure everything was running correctly?
S: I don't believe there was any one person who was involved in everything. There are a few people that were in most of the channels people like the project manager. She was the gateway between implementation and development, so she was active in both channels. On top of that, she was in sales and marketing channels too to know what we were telling customers before they become customers. So, for the most part, there is no one thread, which I can see being a problem.
J: I think that's a conversation that you can have with your team as you grow, how we configure this stratum of information.
S: There could be some sort of Gantt chart overlap of who's in which groups, where you divide who’s all in what channels. That way, there aren't duplicated conversations. To me that’s inefficient.
J: It can be helpful from a leadership perspective to hear that common ground chatter. As you're going up those strata of management, you see more of the overall picture. Not everyone needs to know or can do something with that perspective. For some people, that may be too much perspective. But if you can handle that perspective, you can identify problems as they’re happening in implementation that will then inform the development or vice versa.
That level of visibility, do you tailor that for those you don’t want to overwhelm with everything but still keep this communication open?
J: It's a conversation. It's all related but it's also a conversation. We have to ask ourselves, where do you want to be? What's your trajectory? Because there are learning opportunities within a company. being more involved outside of your current role and hearing those conversations can help with that.
S: A big aspect is creating an environment that encourages people to go to the right person who can respond to their concerns. For us, since we're so open with our communications, we can have a discussion with anyone on or off the project. For bigger companies, the concerns should be brought to someone in an integrator role that can make that concern be heard. It’s messy when everyone’s telling everyone everything that they thought was wrong or had concerns about.
J: That only works if you have effective managers. Because that can also work to the team or company’s detriment. We've all seen this where that system becomes a fiefdom and the managers know that they have the power. Or, if they’re busy or overloaded they never get to the concern.
S: That goes back to creating the environment, which means hiring the right people who fit within your outlook on how to run a company.
Within architecture, I’d think you'd have to hold some tradition, like where the general manager is the project manager. We're not reinventing the wheel in our practice; we're rolling it into a digital framework.
J: You could have some kind of timetable. If it’s not dealt with within one week, then you can go to the next person or to the CEO.
S: The way our company is, we don’t have software development; we don’t operate on tickets for issues. At my previous work, we had an open ticket board that everyone in the company had access to and it was mainly for things like software updates, functionality requests, bugs that were sent in from customers. But our team could use that board to log issues as well. When a department slack channel started clogging up, we’d log a ticket instead so that everyone could then see it. Now, I think our company is at a size small enough where we can still mention those issues in slack. We haven’t reached the point to have an official ticket to solve anything.
Were there any other policies at your previous company you'd still like to see us attempt?
S: There's the One-on-Ones which we do well. But the way we did it differently was that we had huddles. It was a few people meeting with the project manager who acted as an integrator who would ask us how our projects are going. We’d say which are going great, which are going wrong, here's what’s upsetting customers.
Next, we’d be asked how we are doing, if anything is holding us up. I came to enjoy having that time to talk through your week because it's helpful to get things out. You might not know that something isn't going right until you start talking.
That's one of my favorite things about our One-on-Ones as well, that it can be organic time to talk through your work and realize those two things, that there’s an issue and you don't know how to fix it. In telling someone, it opens a door to resolution. For a group setting, was everyone allowed to be heard, and was everyone comfortable with that?
S: The group setting was good for two reasons. It allowed people to know what was allowed to be talked about. When someone brings up an issue similar to yours, but you were unsure if you could share yours, which creates an open environment. Whereas if it's just a one on one and you're uncomfortable with the person conducting it – or maybe you're new to the company – you might just say everything's great and back away. A small group setting helps with that.
It also helps whoever's the leader, because they can address an issue at one time if everyone’s having it. You don’t have to hear about the issue four times from four different people.
I can see this happening if we reach that size, it's hard to shake where we are now.
S: if it works for us, and we already have plenty of small group time to talk about stuff. At this point, I don't see a benefit in moving away from a one on one and into a group setting.
Is there anything that Method has done – or that you’ve introduced here while remote working – that you wish was present at your previous company?
S: There’s been a few. We had a chit chat channel, but it was limited to my implementation team – it was the same size as what we have now. Even though we saw each other once a year, it did create sort of a level of familiarity within a part of the company.
When we would meet up for our offsites, we gravitated towards our friends we talked to every day instead of those we talked to like once a week. But I don’t think having a channel with 15 or 20 people chit-chatting all day is possible.
I do like our happy hours and lunch meetings, a time set aside to see each other casually. Again, because my company was so comfortable being remote, nobody actually got ready – everyone was still in their pajamas.
We would have weekly meetings with the entire company, but only the person leading would share their screen and camera. We didn't see each other a lot, which I didn’t like. Without that, when we do meet in person, there’s an awkward intro where you’re like, “oh, hi…that's what you look like.”
The biggest benefit this year was when we got a stronger remote setup.
To change topics, where do you see us going regarding - hello? Sarah?
J: We lost her video.
Why? that’s so strange. It’s not letting me call back either.
J: Oh! I know why. Our free forty minutes of Zoom ended and cut her off.
Ha, ok. Imagine that. I guess that’s a good place to end it. thank you for your time Josh.
J: Anytime.