We’ve all been there.
The numbers start to dwindle. Surely, you’ll go before that kid.
Nope.
Then, someone picks a girl before you. And then another one.
Now it’s just down to you and the kid with asthma.
They call your name!
YES! you weren’t picked last. Congratulations.
That was when we were 10. Now you’re 45, the company did a shuffle, and you’re former team is in a different division.
Now what? How do you find a team, when you aren’t the guy choosing sides?
You do the same thing you did when you were a kid. I don’t mean you puff your chest and try to look taller than Suzy McQuire. No, you figure out how to provide value to a team.
While working for a large non-profit corporation, I was handed a project that had consistently be a source of trouble for our department. The regularly scheduled monthly maintenance. I was given all the responsibilities and no resources.
The guy I took over from gave me some advice before my first briefing with the department reps who were most impacted by our changes,
Wear your asbestos underwear.
Everyone hated the maintenance window. The clients hated that we disrupted their work. The engineers hated that the clients weren’t supportive. Management hated that the maintenance often broke as many things as it fixed. And my manager handed it to me and said,
See if you can fix this?
I was kind of teamless. Clients didn’t really want me on their team. The engineers didn’t want me on their team, since I was not really an engineer any more.
What to do? Two things. First I started talking to everyone. I went to their offices. I explained why the maintenance was important. listened to their concerns. I figured out how to give them plenty of warning so the clients could let their management know. I made sure that everyone thought i was working for them.
Second, I put structure and discipline around our processes. The maintenance became very, very structured. And while engineers will say that they can’t stand management “interference,” they crave a structured environment.
And an amazing thing happened. Well, two amazing things. First, the maintenance windows stopped causing other outages. They became a model of efficiency. So much so that engineers from other departments started asking if they could use our maintenance window.
And second, the clients started to take pride in our maintenance windows. They started to ask for ways that they could help us.
In other words, when I didn’t have a team, I did my job well and the team found me. The two keys were engage with your customers, and do your job well. The same things that worked in grade school.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
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Your squad is deployed in a V formation and you have just been assigned to be the point of the V. What is the first thing you do?
I was the newest member of the BYU ROTC Ranger Challenge team. The entire team looked at me expectantly. It was the first day and I was beginning to feel like I hadn’t done the reading for class. Except that “class” was 5:00 AM in the Field House where we had just finished a series of pushups and sit-ups. There hadn’t been any prereading. They said anyone who wanted could show up at 5:00 AM and join the Ranger Challenge team.
The major continued to stare at me and the other cadets just stood there.
Ah. . .you dig in?
It was a weak answer and I knew it. The cadets let out a groan, and the major looked at them and smiled.
You know the drill. Drop and give me 20. It’s your own faults. How many times do I have to tell you, it’s your job to communicate.
We all dropped to pushup position and started. The cadet next to me looked over at me and said,
You talk to the guys on each side of you.
It didn’t take much at any time to earn the team a set of pushups, but this particular lesson has stuck with me for nearly 30 years. I didn’t pursue a military career. I chose computers, but those months in the ROTC had a huge impact on me. It was the first time I started to think about teams. It was the first time I realized a team wasn’t simply a collection of individuals who happen to wear the same colored uniform. Teams, if done correctly, are made up of individuals who depend on one another. That was the lesson the “V Formation.”
Ranger Challenge is a competitive team made up of ROTC cadets at each college. And of course there are events and competitions. One of the events was the rope bridge. In this event, cadets take a 1″ diameter rope that is 75 feet long. You string it between two telephone poles that are 50 feet apart. Then, each team member crosses it. The last one breaks down the bridge.
A good team could accomplish all of that in 90 seconds. A great team could do it in under 60. But, to be even a good team, you had to have a plan. We would lay the rope out in a specific pattern and then everyone had a role to fill. Everyone knew their jobs. My job was to grab the rope and hold it up as high as possible on the first telephone pole. The other tall guy and I on the team had this job.
Everyone had a job and everyone knew their job. That team went on to win the ROTC Ranger Challenge National Championship. They were a great team, because everyone knew they job and worked as a team.
When I joined Microsoft in 1994, there were 50,000 people who worked at Microsoft. From the outside it looks like a one big company. From the inside it’s a bunch of different divisions made up of multiple groups and different teams.
I was part of some great teams. Every team has certain needs. Just like a ROTC team had specific roles for each person, the Microsoft teams I was on had specific roles.
Oh sure, my training team had an Exchange guy, an NT guy, an Office guy. But, there are other roles that teams need. Teams need a leader, of course. But, teams need multiple leaders. They need an technical leader, often called an architect on technology teams. They need an emotional leader. The person they look to when faced with an extraordinary task, or emotional challenge. They need a social leader. The one who notices people’s moods, who knows that the best way to get favors out of the engineers is to bring them food. They need the “plucky comic relief.” The person who can lighten the mood with just the right one liner.
I heard an interview one time by one of the producers of the TV Series Star Trek Voyager. He explained that they wanted Kate Mulgrave to play Captain Janeway. But, if Mulgrave wasn’t available they were considering a male lead. He went on to say that if that happened, they would have had to reverse all the roles. The writers specifically picked the genders and the roles.
Just as the right people and the right roles make a team stronger, the wrong people in the wrong roles can destroy a team. We once hired a guy as our tech guy for a small startup that I ran. Everyone liked him, but unfortunately he wasn’t up to the technical requirements of the job. We eventually had to let him go.
It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.
A team isn’t just a collection of people working on the same project. A team has to have the right people and the right roles.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
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How many of you have to deal with network traces in your job?
Every hand raised in way that said, “Please don’t say this is a class about network traces.”
How many of you enjoy it?
The students could lower their hands quick enough.
Here’s my promise to you. If you stick it out for the next three days, when you leave this class you will love reading network traces.
The Microsoft instructor faced a sea of blank faces. But, it was clear that no one believed her. And Karen didn’t blame them. When she went to the Train-the-trainer course for “Exchange Advanced Topics” and head it was a class almost wholly devoted to reading network traces she thought, “How am I going to keep my class awake let alone engaged in this material?”
How do you make something distasteful, or boring turn out to be interesting? I tried it by abandoning the property page crawl. Instead, I designed the entire course around labs.
In Instructional Design school they tell you that your course should be 70% labs and 30% lecture. Most course in IT or computers reverse that ratio.
I figured that even if the topic was boring, I could keep them awake if they were in a lab. My course was three days and my PowerPoint slide deck was about 12 slides. I used them for the first hour and then abandoned them.
But, clever course scheduling will only get you so far. How to make the content understandable and more importantly enjoyable. Some people told me it was too much to ask for.
Again, I broke with tradition, at least Microsoft tradition. I didn’t gloss over or attempt to “dumb down” the concepts. From the very beginning we jumped into actual traces.
A network trace is all of the data between two computers. It reads like gibberish, and that’s how most of our students felt about it too. Network traces were useful when a user reported problems between two computers, specifically Microsoft Exchange Server and the Outlook client.
That was another change to the classroom; everyone was teamed up. One person owned the client running Outlook, the other had the server running Microsoft Exchange.
From the very beginning I wanted to build bonds between the students. When they went back to support, my instructors and I weren’t going to be there.
And then there were the labs themselves. We successfully logged into Exchange with Outlook and we made a trace of that. Then we’d go through what was happening. But, no one ever calls support and says,
Everything is working great. Just thought you’d like to know.
No. They call with problems, so the third lab, in the early afternoon of the 1st day we start breaking things. ‘
It’s no surprise that there are many different ways to break a computer, and I tried to push as many as could into the course. And a funny thing happened, the class responded. We started teaching it and the students loved it.
So, what made it so unique? Why was it the most popular class Microsoft ever wrote? I think it comes down to three important points:
1. First the training was designed to meet a immediate need. Only engineers who had been in support for more than 6 months were allowed to take the course, In six months you see a lot of traces.
2. It was all about doing stuff. There was no sit passively and consume PowerPoint slides. The students really taught themselves with some instructor guidance.
3. The class fostered a sense of community. The students really learned to depend on one another. The shared learning allowed them to feel dependent on one another.
The course was so successful that the firs time I taught it we got to the afternoon of the second day and the class got really quite. I thought maybe they didn’t understand, so I asked,
Is there a quest. . .
Wait! Don’t distract me. . . I get it.
The lightbulbs when on. It was an amazing experience.
Karen, the instructor I talked about at the beginning really did challenge her class that they would not just like, but LOVE network traces when she was done. She said one day a student waited after the final class was over,
Did you have a question?
When I came to the class and saw it was about network traces, I almost walked out.
Why didn’t you?
You gave us that promise that we would love network traces. I knew you were wrong. I decided it was worth three days to me to prove you wrong.
Oh?
It didn’t work. I was prepared to keep hating traces and I don’t. They are actually pretty cool. . .when you understand them.
I know a lot of people like that.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
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(Picture source: Scouting.org)
It was like watching your baby get up and walk and then go dancing with a bunch of strangers.
Okay, maybe that analogy doesn’t quite capture the essence. But, being a course designer, the first time someone else teaches your course can be a very nerve wracking experience.
And today it was more nerve wracking than normal.
Courseware designers can tell you how long it will take to create a class based on how long the class is supposed to be. Typical development ratios are 40:1 for a simple class, 60:1 for complex classes.
That means if you want an hour long class it’s going to take an Instructional Designer 40-60 hours to create it.
If you think about it, that sounds absurd. And our customers complained about our dev ratios all the time. Typically the conversation went something like this.
How long will it take you to create a one hour class on setting up an Exchange server?
About a week and a half.
Are you serious? For a one hour class? I don’t want them to be able to write code, just be able to setup and install Exchange.
About a week and a half, 4-50 hours.
No way. I can pull Bill Smith off the phones and he can teach the whole thing over a brown bag lunch.
True, but can anyone else teach Bill’s course?
And that was the rub. The courses we created had to be complete enough that an instructor could teach it without an expert in the room.
That’s what led me to today. I was sitting in the back of a classroom in Charlotte, NC as the instructor, a guy named Win, (Why Don’t We Take This Outside), taught the class.
And it wasn’t going well. Win was trying to explain how LDAP, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, could authenticate users in Exchange. He was wrong, and worse, if he didn’t correct his mistake students were going to be completely lost when they got to the next lab.
I always try to be present the first time an instructor teaches one of my classes. I call it “lifeguarding.” My job is to let them swim, but throw them a lifeline if they get in too deep. Win was in WAY too deep.
Hey Win, don’t you mean that the LDAP protocol won’t do that?
No Rodney. I meant what I said. This is how Lap-D will work in this environment.
Okay, but if you have a Exchange on the same server as the Domain Control won’t that change it?
It would. I knew it would, but I really wanted to avoid telling my instructor he was wrong in front of his class. My job is to keep him on track, But also, reassure the students.
Not really, Rodney. It doesn’t matter if Exchange the Domain Controller are the same computer or not.
Well, now I’m a little confused. And I think it’s a really important point. Maybe your co-teacher could take over for a minute and you an show me where I’m mistaken.
I wasn’t mistaken, but I needed to get him away from the students so I could explain to him where HIS mistake was happening.
We stepped out into the hall.
That’s not how it works, Win. If the Exchange server is also a Domain Controller then it’s going to process the request differently.
No, I don’t think it will.
Win, I’m not positive this is the way it works. If you don’t make this point, the students are not going to be able to complete the next lab. Trust me it works this way.
No it doesn’t.
What makes you so sure?
Because right here on page 143 of the book it explains it and it agrees with the way I’m teaching it.
That book?
Yes, the instructors guide for the course.
Win. I WROTE that book.
He eventually taught it correctly, but it took a while for him to come around. The other interesting thing about that class was that it was a Beta class. I took notes all the way through class and updated the final version. In addition to explaining the LDAP section better, I included the phonetic spelling for LDAP (el-dap).
Win called me when he got the final version.
Rodney, why did you include the phonetic spelling for LDAP?
Just so that people would know how to pronounce it properly.
Don’t you think it’s a little condescending to spell it out like that? I mean who wouldn’t know how to pronounce LDAP?
I didn’t. It was tempting but I managed to hold my tongue. He never mispronounced it again.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
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The training room fell silent in shock. The trainees were new Microsoft employee. They were in their 3rd week of a 4 week training course. The first two weeks had been all about Windows NT.
Now, they were finishing up their first week of learning about Microsoft Exchange server. The instructor was ironically named Win. He sported a long ponytail and seemed a throwback to the 60’s. While his grasp of the course seemed okay, his classroom demeanor was much different than the Windows NT instructor’s had been.
Mostly, he hated to be challenged.
No, he really hated it.
It might not have been a problem if the students in his class had been less experienced. But, these people were the cream of the IT world. It was late 1999 and Microsoft was the biggest computer company in the world.
We were the best and the brightest and we weren’t afraid to tell people. In exchange for long hours, and high stress, you had a chance to watch your personal worth shoot up along with the company’s stock price.
Win was an unlikely Microsoftee. In an age when the company was mostly young and male, Win was pulling up the company average age. He was probably at least 40!
He also lacked a certain curiosity that drove the Redmond folks to spent their limited free time diving into technical topics and software.
But, hey, not everyone had to be a nerd. And training was not a job that just anyone could do. It takes loads of patience to aim the firehose of knowledge at the students and make sure they are all equally drenched but don’t get swept away.
So, what was the problem on this day?
One of the students decided that Win was wrong. The details of the disagreement are lost to the ensuing years, but the results are not.
I don’t think it works that way, Win.
No, this is how it has to be set up.
But, it’s never going to work if you set it up that way. I think you mean. .
LOOK! I’m the instructor. YOU are the student. I’ve been teaching this for years. THIS is how it is supposed to be setup.
The student thought carefully before responding. Win was wrong. And not just a little wrong. What he was saying wouldn’t work. Not “might not work,” but flat out wrong. Looking around at the other students he decided that he cared more about them getting accurate information than not hurting the instructors feelings.
If this is the way you’ve been teaching it, you’ve been teaching it wrong. I used to do this everyday in my previous job. It won’t work the way you are describing.
He could see the instructor pause and turn to face him. Taking a step forward he said the last thing any of them expected,
Look, do you want to take this outside?
A look of confusion crossed the face of several trainees.
Are you. . .are you challenging me to a fight?
Fortunately the student was more level-headed than Win and the moment passed, but not before it was noted and repeated among discussions of classes gone wrong.
I wrote that courseware that Win was teaching that day. I wrote courseware for Microsoft Exchange for 4 years. During that entire time, Win was one of my trainers. I say “my” trainers, but only because they taught my classes. Had I been Win’s manager, I would have had to deal with his outbursts. And as hard as it is to find instructors, anyone who challenges one of his students to a fight in the parking lot probably isn’t ideally suited for corporate training.
My frustrations with Win weren’t over. Tomorrow I’ll describe the my own experience disagreeing with Win.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
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A hotel room in Bogata, Colombia looks a lot like a hotel room in Dallas or Charlotte. But, it’s not really the same.
What am I doing here?
I don’t speak Spanish. . . Well, that’s not exactly true. I’ve mastered “Hablo muey feo.” I speak ugly. It’s intentionally bad Spanish. I’m here in South America to teach a training course.
Fortunately the training is going to be delivered in English. The students speak my language much better than I speak theirs. But, it’s a new course.
Just being in Colombia is intimidating. This was the late 90’s and the rebels controlled the countryside. The army controlled the cities. But, there was still a lot of danger for Americans. The rebels discovered that while the US government won’t negotiate with terrorists, sometimes the big oil companies will. I was representing Microsoft, the biggest software company in the world at the time.
Before leaving Redmond, I’d talked to a friend and mentor, Sam Jadallah who had recently returned from a trip to Colombia.
What was security like, Sam?
I told my security team I didn’t want to know what plans they had.
So, if I get kidnapped will Microsoft bail me out?
Well . . . try not to get kidnapped.
Not the most ringing of endorsements.
The night before the first day of the three day class is the worst. I can’t sleep. I can never sleep. I didn’t drink much caffeine except when I travelled. So, I watch Spanish language TV, suck on another Coke and try to not think about the fact that I’m supposed to be up in 5 hours teaching a class full of people who paid a bunch of money to come to a class taught by someone from Microsoft headquarters.
I wish I felt as smart as they will think I am.
I can’t sit still. (Shouldn’t have had those 6 cans of Coke today. . .no yesterday.) The clock rolls over to 2:00 AM. Sleep is as remote as my home in Maple Valley, WA. We sent trainers out alone. I had the local Microsoft guys to help out if needed, but everyone was looking at me to know how to set up the class and run the course.
Relax! I’ve done this a thousand times.
This? What? Taught a class or sat up till dawn the night before the first day?
Yeah, both.
I lay back down on the bed and click through a new group of late night Spanish infomercials. One more thing that never changes.
I try to convince myself the course will go create.
Why?
It always goes great!
Yeah, but I’ve never taught in a foreign country before. And it’s a complex course. Suppose I get in the middle of it and forget an important concept? What if they don’t speak English well enough? What if I get kidnapped on the way to the training center?
That’s just stupid.
Finally, I surrender. If I’m going to be up, I might as well prep for the class.
I haul out the oversized instructor guide for the Microsoft Advanced Topics course and flip open to the first slide. I’ll review to make sure I’m confident on the concepts. And it works like a charm. It always does.
Oh, yeah. That’s right.
I’m good. I wrote this.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
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He was certainly entertaining.
The two days were very enjoyable.
The course was a waste of time.
How do you tell good training from bad? Especially in computers and IT, we LOVE training. We love to put the alphabet soup designations on our resumes.
A+
PMP
CISSP
MCSE
ITIL
There are millions of them. And sometimes they are even useful. I spent a lot of years writing training documentation and the big secret is that much of it is not particularly useful.
The longest course I wrote was Microsoft Exchange 5.0 New To Product training. It was 2 weeks long. In those two weeks, we took you from knowing nothing about the Microsoft Exchange email system and you came out being able to install and configure Exchange.
The training was certainly important, but we had to cover every option. There are thousands of options. We did was was affectionately called “the property page crawl.” Open up any program and look at the menu. Now, start on the first menu heading and expand it. Then, go through each page in order.
Just thinking about sounds tedious. It was. It was tedious to write and it was tedious to teach and it was pure torture to sit through. But, we really felt like we had to cover it so that later if a support engineer got a call on that feature they could open their book (yes, we still printed out the books) and look up the answer.
The truth was that the engineers were probably never going to open those books again. And if they are relying on a snippet they heard in class to answer a question, it’s probably such common knowledge that we could safely skip it.
But, every new version we would rollout our NTP course and it would follow the same course. We didn’t set out to write bad training. And parts of the training were valuable. But, much of it could have been learned just as easily by reading the help files. In fact, that’s where many course writers started when gathering information about a feature.
So, what makes good training? Every effective training I’ve ever attended or written has had two key elements.
Labs
There are many different learning styles, but most people learn by doing. Sitting and listening to a lecture is effective for about 20 minutes. After that, we start to drift. When I wrote courseware, I always tried to set the schedule so that students were doing labs right after lunch. I’ve never seen anyone fall asleep during a lab.
And those NTP courses, had extensive labs. We designed them so that students end up creating multiple sites and domains. They walked out having both designed and then implemented a complete Exchange enterprise installation.
Application
The labs were only useful if they prepared trainees for things they would actually have to deal with in their jobs. We attempted to make the labs as true to life as possible.
This led to at least one threat of a lawsuit. We had to create an fake company that we would use during our installation. Early versions of Microsoft Exchange used a company named Volcano Coffee. In one lab we set up an SMTP Connector. Today we’d just say, we connected our email system to the Internet. We picked volcano.com as our domain name.
The problem was that someone owned volcano.com. That wouldn’t normally be a problem except that as we sent email out onto the internet, the return address was user@volcano.com. So, any replies, or non delivery receipts would all get routed to the real volcano.com location.
This also might not have been a problem if the owner hadn’t set up volcano.com to forward all in coming email to his personal email account. Every time we held a class, he would get deluged with system messages and replies.
He found out that it was Microsoft generating these messages and I’m sure he saw $$. We eventually bought our own domain and changed future courses to use contoso.com.
When you look at training, decide what you want out of it. Some training is important because people in your industry are expected to have a particular certification. Other training, is training you want to take to actually learn new content.
This week I’ll be talking about experiences around training and courseware.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
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“.. but your housemates, and your chair will appreciate your continued use of them.” – Howard Tayler
After yesterday’s post (If You work From Home Do You Still Have To Wear Pants?) several people took issue with my answer that Yes, you do have to wear pants.
My friend David Rice runs an award winning theater called First Folio in Chicago.
Every work at home day is at least partially a jammy day at First Folio!
Others suggested that it was at least optional.
There’s a difference in working from home for a company and working from home for yourself. If you work for someone else, be they a big company or small, you should follow yesterday’s post’s advice. Wear the pants. Have a start and and end to your day. Keep engaged with your team.
Today, let’s talk about those brave and foolhardy souls. . .the entrepreneur. Elsewhere on this blog I’ve told the story of Howard and how he left the corporate world to become a cartoonist. He is in the enviable position of not having anyone tell him what to do. No one tells him how long he has to work. No one tells him he has to wear pants.
I worked for myself for a few years, and with all that freedom comes the sometimes crushing knowledge that you are solely in charge of your fate. If you choose to screw around, no one will tell you to get back to work. But, if you screw around long enough, you won’t have an product or services to sell and you’ll be back in the corporate world.
Those who are self-employed and successful at it are some of the hardest working people I know. It’s said they only have to work half days and they get to pick which 12 hours of each day to work. It’s a difficult thing to be your own boss.
I want to talk about a few things that helped me stay focused while I was self employed. First, have a start and and end to your day. Sure, the end might be 11:00 pm, but realize that you need a stopping point.
For me, it was important to get out and meet people. There are way too many distractions in my office. So, I would try to schedule appointments for early in the day. It got me up and moving.
When Howard first became an independent, he made an arrangement with a local comic book store. They let him set up a work space, and he in turn tweeted very nice things about them to his thousands of fans. Every day he had to at some point “go to work” by driving from his home in Orem, to Dragon’s Keep down in Provo. It probably helped keep him from being too distracted by his kids coming home from school.
And that’s another thing that helped me immensely. Wherever we’ve lived, we’ve always tried to carve out a space for me to have an office. Sometimes it was four temporary walls in the garage with a blanket for a door. When we were remodeling our current house prior to moving in, we carved out my current niche. It’s 4′ by 7′, but it has a door that closes and allows me to be away from eight beautiful distractions that share my house.
Finally, working for yourself, you have to be a bit of a task master. You have to be able to deny yourself today’s distractions for tomorrow’s reward. It’s tough for anyone. My ADD made it crazy at times. I’m happy in a corporate job currently, but can see the day where I’ll branch out on my own again.
And, if you are working for yourself? No, you don’t have to wear pants. . .but the people living in your house would probably appreciate it.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
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My company allows me a work from home day once a week. It’s Tuesday. I don’t have to fight the traffic for 45 minutes into Salt Lake. I can help get my kids off to school.
But, once everyone is gone and it’s just me and the phone and the computer, do I have to wear pants?
(My home office can affectionally be described as homey. . .and very small)
How you answer that question says a lot about your aptitude to work at home, or work remotely. While it’s important for a manager to know how to manage remote team members, it’s equally important as a remote team member to know how to work with your managers.
If you work from home, or you work at a remote office, one of the most important things to do is start your workday. I know that sounds weird. Have a time at which point you “are working now.” For me, it helps to send an email, or make a call or reach out to someone on Instant Messaging. Anything to show that I’ve started my day.
If you don’t, it’s easy to get caught up in the business of the morning. Get the kids off to school. And then, notice the kitchen needs picked up. Oh, and that stack of old newspapers still needs put in the recycle bin. And on your way out to the garage you notice the kids forgot to put the snow shovels away, that will only take a minute. Before you know it, the clock is pushing noon and you haven’t even logged in yet.
But, if you have a time that you will start work, say 8:30 AM right after the kids head to the bus, then, you can avoid the temptation to clean the garage simply because you are out there throwing away the old newspapers. (Okay, maybe not newspapers, who uses those anymore? But, you get the idea.)
Just as important as knowing when to start, is knowing when to end. At an office you get lots of clues that its time to stop. Your coworkers go home. Then, your boss goes home. Then the cleaning crew asks will it bother your if they vacuum and you realize you should have gone home a while ago.
But, if you are working remotely those clues don’t exist as much. Sure, the kids come home from school, but that’s like 3:00 in the afternoon. You’ve still got time. And it starts getting dark out, but my office doesn’t have any windows so that’s not a clue. And then the kids come and tell me it’s time for dinner.
Whatever your trigger, you need to be able to pick a time after which you give yourself permission to stop. Even if you are going to come back to your office later, stop at the end of the day.
And remember to take breaks.
Breaks at an office happen more or less spontaneously throughout the day. A coworker wanders by and asks if you watched the big game and why did Seattle choose to pass on 2 and goal with Marshawn Lynch in the backfield? You probably get up and go out to lunch. If you are hourly, you get told when to take a break. Remote workers don’t have these clues.
As a remote worker, you need to get up and stretch your legs. Get outside and walk around the block. Remember to take a lunch break. Even if it’s 10 minutes while you snack on the lasagna from last night’s dinner. The structure in your day will help you stay focused the rest of the time.
Finally, get dressed. My office has a very loose dress code. I choose to wear business casual every day. At home, I might relax that somewhat to jeans and a polo shirt. But, just getting up, showering, shaving and getting ready for the day, helps with the structure and flow of the day.
And yes, definitely wear pants.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
Follow him on
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Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com
Tell your friends about this!
Appointment Request:
WHAT: Roland’s birthday lunch
WHEN: Thursday at noons
WHERE: Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, 2592 S 5600 W Salt Lake CityIt’s Roland’s birthday. Come join us for lunch and make fun of him for turning 50 this year.
My team does some fun activities. My manager tries to hold occasionally events that help us come together as a team.
There was just one problem with this event.
Appointment Declined
FROM: AlexThat will be 3:00 AM here in the Philippines and Google maps tells me that I need a boat to get there.
Our “team” is scattered all over the world. How do you manage a remote team? How do you ensure that everyone is engaged? How do you ensure that people are working on the right tasks when you cannot walk by their office and say “hi”?
First, let’s talk about the wrong way to do it. Jeffery worked for me as a programmer one summer. He described his former working arrangement, where the programmers had all been working from home.
They monitored a lot, but it was the wrong things. They checked what time you logged into the server. They monitored traffic over the VPN and if traffic to your location slowed down, they would check to make sure you were working. Eventually they attempted to install key tracking software so they could see every key we pressed. We told them we’d quit if they didn’t take it off.
There was very little trust between management and the programmers at his company. And a lack of trust breeds distrust.
There’s a better way.
Rather than tell people how to do their jobs, tell them what you want accomplished. I’ve found that every time I attempt to tell my technical teams how to do something, they invariably find a better way than my suggestion. I’ve learned to tell them what I want accomplished and then let them figure it out. It’s a great solutions for two reasons.
First, I get better solutions. I always want to hire people smarter than me. I want the programmers, or engineers that I work with to be the very best in their field. Or at least, the best I can afford. And smart people come up with smart solutions.
Second, it makes my life SO much easier. I don’t have to be an expert on databases, or Java, or HTTP communication. I can hand the task off to the engineers and developers and let them work it.
But, you might be saying, “How do I know that they aren’t wasting time when I’m not around?”
I have to trust them. But, the funny thing is, if I structure their tasks to be results driven, I don’t have to worry what they are doing at any particular time. I just need to know that they will have their project done on time.
Ah, but what what if they could complete the task in 6 hours, and then they waste the other 2 hours?
I don’t care.
It sounds strange, but I have to justify a position by the results I get from it. If a programmer is writing good code and completing her assignments on time, I don’t really care how long that took. Now, as a manager, I need to know what are reasonable tasks. But, I will never learn that from a spreadsheet, Instead I need to talk to my team. I need to understand what they are doing and how long they expect it to take.
Management by Metric looks good on paper, and it’s easy. Print out your reports and reduce everyone’s job to a series of numbers. If the numbers are below a set amount, then execute remedial action.
Or, just talk to your team.
And that’s the beauty of a remote team. You can IM, you can email, you can schedule regular phone or Skype interviews to find out what they are working on and any challenges they are having.
Working remotely is becoming more common in our interconnected society. Teams are no longer defined by geography. The internet and high speed access means that team members can live anywhere.
So, talk to your team. And maybe send them a picture of the birthday cake.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com