- Hi, my name is John Fletcher. I'm a lowly developer at Codecentric AG. Today, I'm going
to talk to you about effectiveness through inclusion in mixed remote teams. What do I
mean by "a mixed remote team"? Well, is it a mixed team of remotes? No, I mean, when
you've got a bunch of people on site at a certain location, for example, the Lead Developer
Conferences, based in London, and San Francisco, and there are places where you've often got
a lot of work, or tech things going on, and then we need a bit of support from other places,
because there are just not enough people there, and often sometimes they're in other countries
far away in someplace. You've got your remote developers. So I'm talking about that kind
of mixed team there. You know the story: you've been in this typical scenario where you've
got a meeting, somebody books a room, and puts a speaker phone in the middle and opens
a Webex conference, or something. Everyone is talking, and depending how far away they
are from this speaker, once they're more than a metre or two away, people on the phone can't
actually hear what they're saying anyway. And if there is no video, then the remote
developers can't actually see what is - see who is talking. At some point, they just basically
drop out of it for what is meaning said. They don't really get it all. That's okay, because
someone will just explain it to them later. You know? What you end up with is a two-class
society. You've got the first-class society, they're on site, with the client, getting
everything, and understanding everything, and you've got the second-class citizens,
the remote developers, and, you know, someone will just tell them what to do, and they can
just develop it. But it's okay. Because we are agile. We are doing remote Scrum, so that
is fine. Except that this kind of two-class is the exact opposite of the spirit of the
Agile Mast, of Agile work. Agile was saying, "Hey, we want to work together as a team."
I like the way that Alassian summed this up in an ad they made. That's it. That's true,
isn't it? Because, today, what we create is not measured by - or we are not measured by
what I've done, you know? It's what I do doesn't actually bring the business further, it's
the output of the team as a whole which is what it the business needs, what is bringing
the business forward. So, we need to focus on what the whole team creates together. That's
why, for me, in a project that its was in last year, I wanted - I said, hey, this is
going to be only first-class citizens in this project. We're not going to have this silly
situation where the people are halfway excluded because they're remote. So I was in a project
here in Frankfurt where I live. And the client in Frankfurt too, some of the team was here.
And then we had a couple of guys who were in Bosnia - Bosnia-Hercegovina. This is Milos
and Dan. These are not their official employee photos, by the way! These are part of a team.
One day, we had a particularly long, strenuous meeting, you know, a kind of review, a product
review meeting, along with clarifying a lot of questions and talking about things. At
the end of it, well, we were supposed to do the retrospective, and you know what happens
after you've just had epic long meetings, and everybody is tired, and then it's time
for the retrospective? You know what happens next? Someone says, "What about we just skip
the retrospective this time?" Well, the correct answer to that question is always, "No. Don't
skip the retro." In this case, we didn't run a full retrospective like you normally maybe
would, we just had a chat. Why is that so difficult for you? What was problematic about
the meeting we just had? We developed three rules for meetings out of that little "retro"
that we did there, by noting down what they were saying to us. I want to share those three
rules with you. Video meeting rules. You don't have to read the Post-it notes, but they're
posted on the wall behind my desk where I was working in that team. Enforcement of these
rules is everyone's responsibility, right? So the first rule is the 30-second rule. If
someone speaks off camera for more than 30 seconds, we stop everything. We stop the meeting.
We readjust the whole set-up, and we get everybody on camera. Nowadays, people have custom video
conferencing. This is in 2019. We said, hey, we are going to use cameras. We need to see
who is speaking. What would happen is that people would come into the room, like stakeholders,
for a meeting, and they wouldn't be on camera. They would talk. The remote people in the
room don't know who is talking at a certain point in time, and it's very tricky. See said
that's unfair. It doesn't make sense. Everybody needs to be on camera when they speak. What
we would do is we figured out that, at a squeeze, this is before corona, we could get three
people cuddled together in front of one laptop camera. The stakeholders were okay with that,
understood what we were trying to do, set up new laptops and tablets where need about,
and made sure it worked. It was already a massive step forward. What you will find is,
in a lot of places where your internet connection isn't good enough, so every 20 minutes, you
have a break, and will you miss a bit of what was said. Everyone has to stop, and it has
to be repeated. That is a total pain, and a total cost. Don't accept that. Do not accept
low-quality technical solutions for important stuff like this. We said, stuff it. We will
buy an LTE router, an unlimited data SIM card, 80 euros a months, and we had perfect view
in the conference then. You may not be able to plug your machine into some other connection,
but the point is, I would tell whoever is responsible for that stuff, I'm only going
to work with a remote team if you give me the ability to work with them on an eye-to-eye
basis, on an equal basis where we can be integrated, otherwise I don't want to work with them.
I want to work with local people. When you do that, you show the value of those remote
colleagues. To them, they realise we're important, we are being included here. Another option
some people do say one person is remote in a meeting, then everybody is remote, so there
is no big group, but everybody goes to their own laptop and participates from there. That
is possible. It might work in your scenario. I think it has pros and cons. That was our
30-second rule. Then we have the 15-minute rule. If a remote participant doesn't say
anything for 15 minutes, what does that mean if someone doesn't say anything in a meeting
for 15 minutes? I can tell you what it means in my experience. It means they've switched
off. They kind of have lost track of what was being talked about, and they kind of just
gave up and said, "Oh, well, it doesn't matter, someone will explain it to me later." Well,
that's not something that we want to happen, is it? We made a rule if someone doesn't say
something for 15 minutes in our team, then we stop the meeting, and that person explains
to us what we just talked about for the last 15 minutes. That's a great way to encourage
participation, isn't it? In reality, we applied that rule maybe a couple of times. And with
good humour. But just the existence of it, just the concept that we had that idea there
totally changed our participation in the meeting, and kept people on their toes a little bit.
But I also favour other less maybe scary ways of involving people. And involving people
in meetings is super important, not just for remote meetings, like talk like here, but
any kind of a meeting. It's really important, even when you're down at the pub, it's an
interesting question: how much are different people involved in the conversation? You see,
you might be familiar with Google's study, Aristotle Project, they called it, which is
the project they worked out that emotional safety is really important to team performance.
And, if that same study, they had their scientists watching meetings and counting how many times
everybody talked. They derived a statistic which was called "the equivalence of conversational
turn-taking", which is a complicated-sounding way of saying does everybody participate in
the meeting and say an equal amount, or is the conversation dominated by two or three
people? How is it in your meetings? How was it in the last couple of meetings you attended?
Since I learned that this equivalence of conversation turn-taking is highly correlated with high-performing
teams, I started really to take note of that, and is to whenever I'm in a meeting now, I've
sort of in two different things at the same time. On the one side, I'm paying a attention
a bit to what we're supposed to be talking about, and, on the other side, I'm trying
to make everybody participate equally, or in other words, get the quiet people to say
something. I've got a few tricks for that. I ask them a question. It's a great way to
do it. But, don't ask them a yes/no question. Like, "Tanya, do you agree?" You know what
Tanya is going to say "Um, yeah." Ask them an open question. Make them talk a bit. Another
one I quite like is sometimes people discuss shall we do solution A or B, and they're basically
the same, and neither one is really better for me than the other, so at that point, I
will say, "I agree with Dale." At that point, Dale hasn't said anything yet, so everyone
gets a shock and looks at Dale. Dale can tell us what he thinks. You can develop your own
tricks, or your own approaches, but take note of that in the future, and you will see that,
in those meetings, and in those teams where there is a high equality in participation,
that you have much better feeling in your meeting and in your team. Then we've got the
45-minute rule, just that we take a break every 45 minutes. That might seem quite short,
but it's pretty important if you're speaking in a language which is not your native language,
which is often the case for remote participants, and, you know, they're listening in, and trying
to pick up what you intuitively pick up when you are are there present on site. Then it
is nice to have a break from time to time. What do these rules do? What does this approach
do of wanting to include the developers, wanting put them on the same level? It made them feel
pretty special, made them feel good, and it made an impressive ambience in the team. The
project ran for a year, and we had no turnover amongst the developers in the team. No-one
wanted to leave. I like what Milos said to me at the end, it was a green field technology,
choose your own technology, great client, so basically, pretty much a developer, a dream
project, and Milos said I'm sad that the project is end, not because of the projects or the
technologies or anything, but because of losing the team. If you can create a team where people
say that, then you know you're going to get highly effective performance from them. Thank you very much.