What's the New Normal? - Umuzi's new conversation series - started today with a roundtable discussion on Remote Working Employee Experience.
We had over 60 people join us from around the world to share their experiences on how they, their teams, and organisations are transitioning to distributed working.
A big thank you to David Gaynor our special guest, who guided the conversation from Japan, and shared his experience of leading distributed teams across the US, Africa, and Asia with Andela.
Below is our summary of the resources that David and others shared on the call.
How can we keep our employees happy when working remotely?
ICE BREAKERS
Leigh Wallet gave a good suggestion of starting off a meeting with one or two ice breakers just to get things going.
Paul Steenkamp then added some really cool Ice breaker questions in the chat to help you connect with your colleagues:
- As a child, what seemed to be the best thing about being a grown-up?
- What is something you have tried, but will never do again?
- What is special about the place you grew up?
- When have you surprised yourself?
- If you could relive a year of your life, which one would it be and why?
- What question in your life is currently unresolved?
- What has been the most significant plot twist in your life?
- What do you believe happens when we die?
- What are some things you've had to unlearn?
- What is one belief you hold that, if it turned out not to be true, would render your work irrelevant?
- What are you pretending not to know?
- What role does passion play in your life?
- What brings you joy?
- What is uniquely yours to bring into the world?
- Who has been kindest to you?
How can we help our employees to be productive?
MESSAGING TOOLS
SLACK - the favourite professional messenger of the tech community. One of the big advantages of Slack over WhatsApp is that you can organise your conversations in Channels and Threads rather than have all conversations in one place. This allows for good search functionality as well as directed communication.
ROCKET CHAT - Very similar to Slack. Umuzi (http://www.umuzi.org) uses Rocket Chat because it's free and open source.
DISCORD) - Originally a gamer app, Umuzi loves to use Discord to help our community connect and collaborate. It's the best audio chat option we've found for low bandwidth.
VIDEO CHATS
ZOOM- Our call today was on Zoom. The free version will knock you off after 40 min which can be irritating and Zoom has had some issues with privacy issues. If you are concerned with privacy, Microsoft Teams (https://teamsdemo.office.com/) is probably your best bet, but more expensive.
JITSI - Good and free video conferencing option that works well if you or your team have poor connectivity.
MEETING PRODUCTIVITY
LEAN COFFEE TABLE- We really like this tool to keep us all focused on the most important things in a very democratic way. Lean Coffee Table enables distributed teams to collaborate effectively in real-time. Vote, assign actions, build agendas quickly and democratically, generate meeting summaries and facilitate & timebox with ease.
PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
KOAN - David Mentioned a great productivity tool to keep teams on task. Koan is the simple, collaborative way to manage goals and OKRs for your entire company. OKRs are Objectives and Key Results is a framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes. The development of OKRs is generally attributed to Andy Grove the "Father of OKRs", who introduced the approach to Intel during his tenure there and documented this in his 1983 book High Output Management.
SMALL IMPROVEMENT - Give employees feedback when they need it with this toolkit for ongoing performance management.
DESIGN THINKING TOOLS FOR REMOTE TEAMS
Warwick Vlantis, Umuzi's Design Thinking lead, mentioned these tools which help teams to collaborate, and share ideas, remotely:
MIRO - the online collaborative whiteboard platform to bring teams together, anytime, anywhere.
MURAL - a digital workspace for visual collaboration.
Sam Harris recently did a very informative podcast with Matt Mullenweg (bio below). This podcast has sparked our thinking on the new ways of work and employee experience and we would love you to have a listen in prep for our session. Click on the link below depending on your platform preference.
They discuss the benefits of working from home, the new norms of knowledge work, relevant tools and security concerns, the challenges for managers, the importance of written communication, the necessity of innovating in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, delivery networks as critical infrastructure, economic recovery, and other topics.
Bio: Matt Mullenweg is a founding developer of WordPress, the Open Source software used by 36% of the web. In 2005, he founded Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and many other products. Matt has unique insight into running distributed teams. Automattic is entirely distributed—with 1,172 employees working in 75 countries.