Yahoo! caused an uproar on the Internet recently, when a memo leaked revealing that they were planning on ending all existing work-from-home arrangements by June of this year.

This change in policy has caused no end of outrage from not only Yahoo! employees, but also from those on the Internet and in the media who see telecommuting as the future of work.

The responses seem to range from those who see it as a huge step backward from an industry they expect to be pushing for more telecommuting to those who feel it is an attempt by Yahoo! to micromanage and control their employees.

Almost all seem to predict the end result for Yahoo! will be a mass exodus of the best employees and no one wanting to work there.

I’m not sure I agree with that sentiment.

While it’s entirely possible that the effect will be exactly as predicted and that perhaps Yahoo! is looking to micromanage its employees and weed out slackers, I don’t get that from reading the memo that was released. While all HR memos tend to be sugar coated, I tend to take people at their word unless they give me a reason to suspect otherwise. Let’s look at some of the actual text from the memo.

To me, this is the key paragraph,

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.

As someone who coaches Agile teams, the things they seem to be looking for are consistent with what makes Agile teams successful.

On Communication and Collaboration

The memo specifically calls out communication and collaboration. Let’s look at one of the values and a couple of the principles from the Agile Manifesto.

We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

When most of your workers are working from home, you require more processes and more tools to make collaboration happen successfully. It also becomes more of a challenge for individuals to interact with each other.

Business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project.

Again, it is possible to pull this off remotely with good tooling (and I’m not convinced that there are good enough tools out there or that those who are doing telecommuting are using them), but this principle is difficult to adhere to even when people are working in the same office, so why add the extra layer of complexity?

And finally,

The most efficient and effective method of
conveying information to and within a development
team is face-to-face conversation.

The further we get away from face-to-face conversations, the more information is lost. Tone, body language, and other non-verbal queues are lost and worse, when only part of the team is remote, it’s easy for those remote team members to be inadvertently excluded from on-site discussions which increases the knowledge gap between team members.

It is also much easier to build trusting relationships face-to-face.

If you want to build a culture of collaboration, high communication, and trust, then it’s easiest to do that in person and it sounds like that might be what Yahoo! is going for here. [click to tweet]

On Speed and Quality

The next section specifically calls out speed and quality. This has drawn a lot of criticism from those who have been working from home who claim that they are more productive and can get more done when they are not being distracted by their co-workers.

While many people are more productive individuals when they work from home (and some indicate some Yahoo! workers were not), I don’t believe Yahoo! is referring to individual speed and quality, but overall speed and quality.

In Lean software development, we often refer to ‘optimizing the whole’. That is, the efficiency of a system cannot be improved simply by optimizing the efficiency of it’s individual components. In some cases doing so can actually be damaging to the overall system. [click to tweet]

What often kills productivity in organizations is not how fast individuals produce stuff or how much stuff they produce, but how long they are delayed. The time an item spends waiting to be worked on usually ends up being greater than the time it is actually worked on. [click to tweet]

If you need assistance on an item and can turn to me and get it immediately, we as a team are more productive, even if the interruption makes me less productive as an individual. So if instead of getting the answer immediately from me, you have to write and send an email, or open a ticket in a ticketing system, wait for it to be prioritized, etc. We as an organization become much slower. While it can be possible to get good response times when telecommuting, it’s much harder and can never be as fast as having the person right beside you.

In regards to quality, if a decision is made in a side conversation at the office, that information may take longer to reach a remote employee, if it makes it there at all. This can result in costly rework. So while a remote worker may be more productive and producing more stuff, this gap may mean that they are producing more of the wrong stuff.

Conclusions?

Many of the issues I’ve raised can be worked around in a telecommuting environment, but it’s hard and you will still likely have more issues than an equivalent fully co-located team, so in the end each organization will have to decide if it’s worth it for the type of culture they’re trying to create.

While I’m not convinced that this was the best approach Yahoo! could have taken to the situation, I can certainly see why Yahoo! might feel this is the right move for them. They could have taken a more gradual approach, but perhaps they felt that delaying any longer would have led to more catastrophic results.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Today’s image by craigles75.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about motivation, and why we should be focused on building organizations around employees first and customers second.

Now I’m not trying to say that customers aren’t important, they absolutely are. In fact, I believe that providing exceptional customer service is the biggest difference between organizations that are successful and those that fade into obscurity.

However, I also believe that the only way to create an organization that is capable of providing the level of customer service needed to excel today is to make sure that your employees are truly the biggest proponents for your organization. And the only way you can do that is to put your employees first.

So how do you get highly motivated employees? Step one, stop demotivating them!

if management stopped demotivating their employees then they wouldn’t have to worry so much about motivating them - W. Edwards Deming [click to tweet]

That’s easily one of my favourite Deming quotes and it’s bang on. And so, I’ve decided to look at one of things that I have always found demotivating. The status report.

Here’s the situation. You’re going about your day, doing your job, and out of the blue you get an email from your boss saying something like, “Hey, would you mind sending me a weekly status report of what’s been going on and what you’ve been up to? KTHXBAI”.

Boom! You’ve just been assigned the task of producing a weekly status report! Now, from the perspective of the sender, no big deal, right? “I’m just trying to get some visibility on what’s going on and I thought a weekly email would be useful”, but let’s look at it from the side of the person on the receiving end.

First off, the request for a status report looks more like this:

and second, you’re already busy enough as is, and now you’re being asked to add another thing to the list of things you do and to you that thing doesn’t provide any value and it probably provides very questionable value to your boss. After all, you don’t even know if your boss is going to read it or that your boss will be able to get enough of the context around it to do anything useful with it.

And if we’ve learned anything from the Agile Manifesto, it’s that we value “Individuals and interactions over stupid status reports”, right? [click to tweet]

Ok, that quote may not be 100% accurate, but the spirit is there.

Dan Pink talks about three things that motivate knowledge workers, autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Status reports strongly undermine autonomy.

Status reports say “I don’t care enough to have a conversation with you, but I don’t trust you enough to not keep tabs on you.” [click to tweet]

And unless you trust your employees, they can’t truly have autonomy. 

The other message sent is ”My time is worth more than your time”. And if you truly believe that that is true, don’t expect to be building a highly motivated work force any time soon.

Today’s image by The U.S. Army.

On October 4th, 2012, I had the opportunity to give a high level overview of Lean Startup Metrics at the TiE institute. Here’s the video from the talk.

Heading in to Lean Startup Machine, one tip i’d love to give the teams participating is to use a “Yes, and… Test!” mindset. In fact, I’d love to see all teams embody the “Yes, and… Test!” mindset. [click to tweet].

The Improvisor in me loves to tell people about “Yes, and”. “Yes, and” is one of the founding principles of Improvisation. It’s the idea that you accept whatever offer your scene partner gives you and build on top of it. For example,

A: Let’s go to the mall!

B: Yes, and while we’re there we can buy some new shoes!

If you continue in this manner back and forth, you’ll have a scene that always seems to be moving forward. To continue,

A: Yes, and I’m going to buy shoes with roller skates in them!

B: Yes, and we can roller skate around the mall, while drinking smoothies!

By working in agreement, we continue to advance the story. Now, what would happen if we were to negate the first offer?

A: Let’s go to the mall!

B: No, the mall is closed.

A: …

Hmm we don’t seem to have anywhere to go from here, do we? Our only option is to throw more offers at our partner.

A: Ok, well let’s go to a baseball game.

B: No, our baseball team moved.

A: Hockey game?

B: No, they’re locked out.

By this time person A probably just wants to get out of the scene as soon as possible, since this scene is clearly not going to go anywhere.

In life outside of Improv, we see scenes like this all the time.

A: We should start doing x, it would really improve the way we work.

B: No, that won’t work here.

Sound familiar? Person B has killed the idea before it ever got a chance. Or perhaps you’ve seen this scenario,

A: We should do x, it rocks!

B: No! We should do y, it rocks!

A: x sucks!

B: y sucks!

A: I hate you and all those that like y!

B: Only idiots like x!

Ok, perhaps that’s a little bit simplified, but you get the idea. Politics, arguments, and usually an appeal to authority play out until someone wins and someone loses and in the end you still might have made the wrong decision. Great.

So what do you do instead? Say “Yes, and” to these ideas!

But what if you truly believe the idea won’t work?

Well, you don’t know an idea won’t work unless you’ve tested it and have the data to prove it. You have an assumption, and that assumption should be tested.

Also, the key to “Yes, and” is not that you go along and do whatever the person says, but that you accept that they believe what they are saying is true. For example,

A: Now that I’ve tied you to this chair, I’m going to beat you until you tell me what I want to hear.

B: No! I’ll never talk! When I get out of here, I’m going to foil your scheme!

Even though person B said no, they still accepted the fact that they were tied to the chair and going to be beaten by person A, so they still accepted the offer to be true (Yes) and then added something themselves (and). The opposite would have been something like this,

A: Now that I’ve tied you to this chair, I’m going to beat you until you tell me what I want to hear.

B: What are you talking about? I’m not tied to a chair. Stop playing around Billy, we’re going to be late for school.

Of course, it would have also been fine for person B to just start spilling their guts to person A, but having a negative reaction didn’t stop the scene from moving forward because their actions were still saying yes to the suggestion made by their scene partner.

To keep moving forward, we must believe that what the other person is saying is what they truly believe based on the information they currently have. [click to tweet]

Once we’ve accepted what they said to be true, we need to look at what assumptions are there and how we can test them. Now we can expand “Yes, and” to “Yes, and… test!”.

Let’s go back to our other examples,

A: We should start doing x, it would really improve the way we work.

B: Yes, let’s run a test to try it out. Here are some potential barriers I see with it working, if it passes these tests, then I think we should do it.  

and our second scenario,

A: We should do x, it rocks!

B: Yes, let’s test it out. I’m concerned that it can’t do some of the things y does, if we can test it to see if it does those things or if we have good ways of working around those things, I think we should do it, otherwise maybe we should go with y.

A: Yes, there are some things I like about x, that y doesn’t handle. Let’s test y as well and see if it can handle the things I like about x. If it can, let’s do that. We might also want to see what other options are out there.

In both of these scenarios we can now move forward in a more objective manner (the tests should be clear about what we’re measuring and what constitutes a pass or fail) and in the end, instead of just selecting one and hoping for the best, we are now in a position to make an informed choice instead of an opinionated one. The added benefit in this scenario is there is no winner or loser between A and B. Both got behind each idea and set the criteria that would get them fully on board, so neither loses any political capital.

Taking this approach greatly improves collaboration and the quality of decisions made in teams. This mindset is absolutely essential for teams at Lean Startup Machine. You have one weekend to learn as much as possible about what your customers want. Once you’ve done some interviews, the members of your team are likely to have many different opinions about what step to take next.

Too many teams waste time debating over different ideas. Save yourself some time, create a set of tests for each and go test them. [click to tweet]

You’ll have less stress between team members, you’ll learn more, and you’ll get better results.

Don’t believe me? Test it!

Today’s photo by TechYizu.

With Lean Startup Machine returning to Toronto October 19-21, I thought I’d write up a few posts to give people an overview of some of the not so obvious things you can expect from the weekend workshop.

As someone who has been a participant, mentor, and speaker at the events (and I’ll be at the one in October as well), the number one thing I see that people are not prepared for going into the event is exactly how emotionally challenging it is.

Everyone knows going in that it’s an intense weekend workshop. You’ll be spending a lot of time immersed in the ideas of the Lean Startup, so there will be some mental endurance required as you learn a lot of things in a very short period of time, there will be the obvious physical effort of being present and engaged for the entire weekend, but the emotional toll is tougher than all of that.

What do I mean?

Have you ever worked on a team where certain people didn’t get along or see eye to eye on certain things and you had to find ways to make it work? Ok, now compress that time frame down to one weekend and what do you think will happen? Yeah, it’s like that.

Lean Startup Machine can be an intense pressure cooker and you should know that not everyone sticks it out for the entire weekend. That said, it’s an amazing learning experience and I recommend everyone do it at least once.

So what can you do to prepare yourself for the event?

Let Go

I talked about this in my talk at the last Lean Startup Machine. This event is your chance to experiment and learn. Don’t worry about winning, impressing anyone, or being right. You’re going to be wrong, everyone is [click to tweet]. Let it go, go with flow and see where the current takes you.

Check In

Find a way to let people know where you’re at emotionally. I like the check-in protocol from The Core Protocols myself, but find something that your team can agree on that allows everyone to be open about where they’re at.

Check Out

Also from The Core Protocols, and this one may be even more important, remember to check out. Know when you’ve reached your limit and need a break. Find a way to communicate your need to check out in a non-hostile way, take a break, recover, and get back to helping your team. Many teams feel that they have to be working all the time and quickly burn themselves out or exasperate their teammates. 

Be Curious

Always balance advocacy with inquiry. [click to tweet]

We all love to advocate for our positions, but we learn more when we inquire about why people hold the positions they do and what led them there [click to tweet].

Remember, you’re not just learning from the mentors or your customers, you’re learning from your teammates as well.

Show Respect

Everyone invested their own time and money to be at this event. They want to learn and participate just as much as you do. Understand that they are participating to the best of their abilities, just like you are and want to get as much as they can out of this event as well.

Have Fun

Teams that find ways to have fun together do better than those that don’t. [click to tweet].

That goes for all teams, by the way.

Speaking of having fun, if you want to bring some fun to your team, check out Improv Your Agile or Scrum Stand-up. The course is $99, but if you sign up for our mailing list you can get it for just $49! Who doesn’t want to save $50?

Today’s image by Tech Yizu.