116. Success From Anywhere

This episode of Codeish includes Greg Nokes, distinguished technical architect with Salesforce Heroku, and Lisa Marshall, Senior Vice President of TMP Innovation & Learning at Salesforce. Lisa manages a team within technology and product that focuses on overall employee success in attracting technical talent and creating a great onboarding experience.

The impact of remote work

Salesforce is looking at various work configurations across remote and in-office options in different ways. She shares, "In the past 12 months, we've been thinking about what the future will look like. What do our employees want? What do our leaders want for different worker types?"

In addition to the fully remote and in-office workers are flex workers who "come into office maybe one, two, three days a week to work with their Scrum teams, or maybe even one day, every other week. You come to an office to work together when it makes sense for you and your team for collaboration and other ways."

She notes there's a lot to learn from workers like Greg, who has been working remotely for 12 years.

Greg notes, "It took me years to figure out how to work successfully from home and how to have home not encroach on work and work not encroach on home." After unsuccessfully working from the couch, he needed to get an office with a door. Greg stresses that remote work in the pandemic is not the same as remote work at other times. "One of my joys was going to a coffee shop, having a really good cup of coffee and sitting there without headphones on, just listening to people talk while I would write and just that background noise. And I really miss that. So I want to make sure that everybody who's been forced to go remote knows that the present is not a great example of remote work. It's a lot different, and it's a lot harder."

Lisa and her team have been talking with other companies who are fully remote and stress that the experience of working fully remote during the pandemic "... isn't normal. We know we all want to see each other. We want to get back together at times where it makes sense." Part of this is focusing on "the things that we can do right now that we want to keep doing in the future when things start to open up."

Greg Nokes asserts that a remote-first work approach differs in organizations where remote work is an afterthought. He gives the example of a group of San Francisco employees sending a lunch invitation over a messaging platform, "...and then everyone in San Francisco signed off and when they signed back on, I'm like, ‘What happened?’ They'll go, ‘Well, so-and-so said, where do we want to get lunch? And then we all talked about it in the coffee shop; we're all sitting in, and then we went to lunch together.’ And we're like, ‘that's not remote.’"

Lisa Marshall shares the need for intentional inclusivity. "We all know how horrible it feels when you're in a meeting. And when you're a remote person, and others are in the room, and it's very hard sometimes to get a word in edgewise, it's difficult to hear all the common things."

Her team is working on organizational guidelines, including team agreements on how people want to work together. One senior leadership team has decided their weekly team meetings will be 100% remote because they found they communicate better when they're all online versus some co-located.

How will offices look in the future?

Lisa believes the majority of the office will be flex in the future. "So we're looking at how do we want to configure our spaces to support the kinds of work people want to do in the office? What kind of different technologies can we use? What kind of seating arrangements around couches or different pods or other considerations for building in those spaces to be truly about collaboration versus only individual work?"

Lisa's team is also focused on trying apps and tools to see what works and start rolling the tech out to other locations.

Greg Nokes shares, "The last year has been a tremendous inflection point. And it's given us the ability to re-examine what work is and how we get it done. And I think folks that are just going to go back to the way it was before are really missing out."

What are the unique challenges engineering teams face in a distributed/in-person environment?

Dev teams are already agile. Lisa asks how they can adapt to remote work in a way that "doesn't burn people out from staring at screens all the time?" She also believes that release planning will change in response to remote work by breaking it up into "smaller increments virtually to do your planning, whether it's two hours a day and having those chunks of time to work together."

Fun is important, and recognizing that people can't work non-stop. But we're all pretty tired of Zoom happy hours. Salesforce recently had a paint party and magicians for parents with kids.

Equally important is protecting maker time, where developers need to be heads down to get things done without any meetings.

Any advice for new remote workers or new hires?

Lisa stresses the importance of onboarding new hires. Part of this is about having fun and building relationships through hanging out virtually together, creating an opportunity for new hires to ask questions about who to go to. "And if you don't build that in, it's really hard to just accomplish that because your work is going to get prioritized based on the tasks that you have." Greg also commends the idea of cross-team get-togethers as an opportunity for diverse opinions.