 So welcome to my talk, it starts with a smile, how to foster a sense of belonging and remoteness. Quick introduction into who I am, my name is Eleni Katsula, I'm the engineering operations manager at Calabra and for the last two and a half years I've been an engineering people lead, taking care of our engineers and supporting them in their professional growth. My academic specialization lies in international technology management and throughout my career I've been focusing on cross-cultural communication, conflict resolution, effectively a zone and so forth. Ever since I've had a passion of working with people from different backgrounds and you know different areas of expertise so this is why I also picked this topic. Now first let's look at why the topic of fostering a sense of belonging is so important. Well first of all it is a core value of the open source community. We do work together towards a common goal and being part of the open source community is a sense of belonging in itself so any open source company, consultancy, whatever you like should have the same values. It does increase job satisfaction of course because if you don't go into your job and if you enjoy it thoroughly and you feel valued and respected then that has its benefits as well and of course you see it practically day-to-day if you feel like you belong in a company and you are listened to you have a voice it does promote a better work-life balance because you know that when you need to take a break you can do that your personal life is equally important so you know you don't just live for the output you know for the project that you're working on and the particular things that you need to carry out in your job you're valued as it as an individual as a human being not just as a professional. From a company level of course if you have a sense of belonging within your team it can also reduce attrition. The market has been insane recently I don't need to tell you that especially with a pandemic and when a lot of countries were in lockdown one aspect that people could control or could change was their job you know if you're constantly locked inside your house and you can't pursue your hobbies to a great extent you can't go anywhere you can get fed up it has an impact on your mental health and we have seen that a lot of people chose a change of job just you know to get something new have an impact have a change have some control over it so the pandemic had of course big economic repercussions as well so the job market was in total flocks very volatile there has been a lot of movement and companies you know more than ever have been trying to keep their people and to have keep them happy and make sure that they feel like they belong they're part of the team part of a family if you like a part of a community and of course from an engineer's perspective or an employee's contractor's point of view it can add more meaning to your work if you feel like you're part of a collective effort you're doing something together you belong to a team it's not just you against the world it's it's less lonely and it's more collaborative okay so that sounds good in theory what does it really look like like what is the success criteria of having a sense of belonging at your company well the golden standard I would say is that people of all backgrounds seniority skill level identities genders you know they can be themselves and they are embraced and accepted of course everybody needs to be professional in a working environment but still there's a lot of room for individuality and that is both beautiful and important if you do have a sense of belonging there is a deeper deeper connection with one another you feel like you can connect with your employees more than just saying a hello a good morning a happy weekend you know you can really feel like you have somebody to reach out and that you're part of a team like I mentioned earlier you're not really dreading starting your workday of course we all have tasks that we don't particularly like that we're not really looking forward to right that's normal but overall if you like your job and if you like the company that you're working for it's less likely that you have the Monday blues let's say or you know dreading to go to work a very important aspects which is really at the essence of this is that you feel comfortable to express both your aspirations you know how you want to grow in your career what you would like to do what you would like to learn and also your concerns you know everybody has a voice but beyond that voice it's the trust that what you have escalated or pointed out will be addressed it will be taken care of so there needs to be a mechanism in the organization that actually supports them action items that come out of feedback and come out of no concerns expressed by expressed by employees and by contractors because you know just speaking up and having it get lost in the void it's pretty meaningless and as I mentioned earlier in introduction effectively people feel valued supported and respected which is very very important great how do you do it now as a disclaimer of course I don't claim to be an expert in all theories surrounding belonging I'm not a psychologist I decided to do this presentation because I felt like I learned a lot in this position and the last two and a half years I wanted to also do it as a tribute to everybody who has been on my team and who I've had the pleasure of working with it was truly an honor you know having them open up to me and connecting with me and letting them be you know part of my day-to-day and them accepting my help and support so I will show you what has worked for me what I feel personally is important but this can also you know be adapted to your own style this is just you know my point of view my humble two cents to this very important topic so let's start well first of all I put empathy as you can see there so empathy is kind of the ability to feel what the other person is feeling to understand both their pain their joy their stress all these kind of emotions just to have a connection to understand what they're going through this is the human element that I call the human element of the work where the hierarchy or you know reporting structure title whatever you want to call it it's it doesn't matter you're there for the other person you listen and you try to help them in the best of your you know the best way you can equally important is communication now I cannot stress this enough and if you've ever watched a talk about remote work this is the one you know biggest topic oh you need to communicate you need to have frequency you know video quality you know all such a thing this this has been discussed to exhaustion let's say what I would like to add here from my point of view is that you need to adapt your style to the communication that each person is comfortable with so of course you know video calls have better engagement you can read body language and all that true but if the other person isn't comfortable either looking at themselves on camera or just sharing their image for whatever reason if it makes them uncomfortable it defeats the purpose right so when you communicate you don't want you know the most data or you know you don't want to have the better picture or whatever you want the information to go through effectively and to make this process well pleasurable might be a stretch but you know not painful or not difficult for the other person so somebody might prefer to communicate through chat some might prefer to have a voice call others might prefer to have no a video call the frequency also you know I might prefer to have like calls every two weeks but somebody else might find it better for their workload to do it once a month or for a regular follow-up once a week I find that flexibility in the way you communicate you know according to the other person's preference is really crucial and it's not something that's often talked about so I just wanted to point it out another aspect of course is feedback it's very important if you work remotely often you know you don't really get much feedback you complete your tasks you move on to the next one I'm sure you've all been there like you submit a patch of stream and you wait and wait and never hear anything back and you're not sure like okay what happened you know it's always good to have some encouragement so if you work with other colleagues and you know you notice that somebody did a really good job either with a communication with the client or you know really good you know contribution upstream very well-written merge request whatever you wanted to call it you know if you ever notice something positive it's really good to give the other person feedback and you know either through the people lead or directly it's very very important equally people need to know if what they're doing is going in the right direction if they're approaching something correctly you know there's so many ways of approaching something in the engineering field right sometimes there's a right and wrong approach but sometimes it's just much more complex right and you do want some feedback along the way to let you know okay if you go down this road it might take you like a couple of months to you know get out of the fog or the complexity or you know anything like that I have tried this you might want to give it a shot or you know if you want to give some tips about efficiency or if somebody's stuck or you know if there is a particular behavior that is disruptive and the person is not aware of it it's always good to give feedback so it's super important also to know that you know when you get feedback it means that people care about the work that you do and they care about your growth and they care about you you know doing a good job and continuously improving of course there's the aspect of leadership that is very important and that can be quite challenging especially if you have people of different areas of expertise you know if you have a hundred people and 80 experts it can be quite hard to get leadership especially on the technical side but you know a structure that actually helps with that aspect of getting some guidance and you know leading the teams effectively properly giving them the right to support the right sense of direction it can be for example different priorities for R&D efforts or the clients you know regular progress reports or you know code reviews per pro program sorry per programming you know all these kind of things can be super useful and as a manager or team lead or whatever professional development is also very important so this is something that you need to look after if the individual feels like you actively help them grow and put you know mechanisms in place to support that and to encourage that then that is also super important to get a sense of belonging because if I feel like my manager or whoever my supervisor my team lead cares for me to learn and grow invests in it then you know I feel valued as well as an individual and as a professional at that company how can that you know sense of belonging and you know these ideals be achieved across the company now I believe that you need a strong sense of purpose like a collaboration we have as a raison d'être like to contribute to the open-source community and to help our engineers grow etc the corporate culture is a must here because the support and interest in individual needs to be genuine authentic if you fake it if you just do like a marketing gag or something like that or just you know an initiative now and then that's just you know well let's call it fluff it's pointless people see through that and you know it doesn't really add that much value what is important is that individuals are able to make positive contributions on a day-to-day basis as part of their job so that means giving people a voice giving them the room to be creative to the best of their abilities and to really feel like they are impacting both the business the technology they're working on the project that they are making a difference daily of course as an addition to that company-wide initiatives to promote interaction to have some fun activities or you know have some employee engagement can be super fun and super useful we do that too but it should be an addition to your business day today so you know theory is all good you know but I think it's always best to speak in examples so I will show you what we do at Collabra we have launched the engineering framework three years ago more or less and then we divided technical support and individual professional guidance so we made sure that an engineer joining our company or you know already at our company has maximum support in all different areas so I'll get into that a bit more in a bit more detail we have the people needs like I used to be which focus on professional development feedback regular one-to-ones on also well-being and you know the personal side of things this is not really a technical one-to-one it's more like how are you getting along you know how can I help this kind of things people leads also have cluster calls which is a group of various engineers from different grades domains you know that usually don't work together and it's a social call where you can just interact and catch up about different things that are happening at the company and or you know just fun conversations about hobbies it can really be anything like I remember I used to have one classical where it always kind of fell on a new moon and we had the sorry on a full moon and we always had the full moon update because one of our engineers is an astrophotographer so that was always really fun so you can really be anything you never know really what's what's gonna come up with those calls but it's a fun and you know social engagement that can kind of break the routine of working on a particular task and just you know get some more engagement and more you know interaction between colleagues which you know remote setting is quite important because it tends to be a bit lonely at times right then we have the business strategy leads formally known as domain leads if you've been active in the open source field I'm sure you know all of ours they're you know very active in the field so they are supporting our technical strategy together with senior management of course looking at R&D projects what is worth investing in in the future what commercial opportunities to pursue and you know how to shape our engineering team they also have quests which are strategic R&D efforts that we feel are important for the community are you know interesting new technologies to investigate and so forth for potential clients and we have the guilds as well which are technical meetings with a particular frequency usually twice a month where people of similar technical interests get together and have presentations about different topics or get to discuss their progress so this can be we have for example integration guilt multimedia guilt rust a kernel hardware enablement you know if you name it and any any particular group that has a specific interest and it's good to you know Leah using catch up that's what you do in guilt and that's been super helpful as well so that is engineering framework in a nutshell another aspect that's very important that I mentioned before is 360 feedback that we do so we encourage to get feedback and give it back as well so a good approach is to always ask for feedback first and then you know give feedback to that person we have done extensive training on feedback across our whole team we continue to work on that we continue to train our engineers on how to give feedback and how to be open and you know have it part of our culture it's very important to have a mindset where you support people's growth and you know when feedback comes from a place of I want to help you I want to see you grow both in your career I want you to you know get out of this particular problem area that you're having right now you know this is for your benefit I am coming to you from a place of improvement in a collaborative spirit not critique like oh god you did this I don't want to work with you again bye bye I'll do it myself no that is disruptive that's not part of the culture also what we do a collaboration to you know foster a sense of belonging is to promote our engineers being good open source citizens how does that look like we provide paid travel and time to participate in different conferences such as this one and you know of course to other open source events like hackathons and things like that we do have an upstream policy because we believe it's super important that you have time to maintain your own projects if you wish to do that or to you know focus on upstream activities that might not necessarily be related to your current commercial project that you are assigned to so that is why we put this policy in place whenever possible we try to weigh incoming commercial opportunities against the value to upstream and you know to our consulting business accordingly and of course as I mentioned before we do invest in strategic R&D across all of our domains you know significant investments of tiling material in areas that we believe are the future of tech that we believe are worth pursuing and that we believe will help upstream and will you know make significant improvements furthermore we like to display appreciation through the kudos system that we use on matter most so you can send a congratulatory message that reaches you know the whole team which is always very nice we promote autonomy of employees and contractors that means we trust people to manage their time to deliver their tasks in their own pace to communicate when they're stuck or you know if anything comes up there is no micromanagement and that's very important we are proud of our engineering team and you know the people we have hired and the professionals that have you know made such incredible contributions within our team so that comes with the trust that they can also be autonomous and reach out whenever they need assistance so that is also very important to sign of respect for the individual and as I mentioned earlier some health and well-being initiatives are also active you know when it came came to the pandemic mental health was a big issue so you know and provided support globally and we did a lot of fun events as well in addition to lectures and professional presentations by specialists on different medical issues and most recently we also had the paparazzi challenge which is super fun where all our employees you know were encouraged to go out for a walk you know and just snap pictures of something nearby you know and it was really nice to get to see you know nature from around the world it was really beautiful and it really helps you connect as well so it's just an example now I would like to share from my experience what you need to be cautious of as a manager when it comes to fostering a sense of belonging and you know using all those steps that I've mentioned so far in your approach so obviously you've seen caring for and supporting colleagues is very very important but you need to be aware of setting healthy boundaries within your professional capacity what I mean by that is yes you're there to listen yes you're there to help you know it doesn't remove anything from how much you care if at some point you know you say I understand would you like to talk to an XYZ professional about this right I'll give you a simple example I am not a psychologist I'm not a psychiatrist so when it comes to a medical issue I will show everything but I will refer them for specialist advice because that goes beyond my own professional capability what I have found over the years is that you need to shield yourself from absorbing the struggles of others that is you know a risk when you are in a path and anybody who has the same profile as me will know this right and it's there's nothing wrong with compassion and to the contrary it's you know amazing in its own way and super important but at the end of the day when you and your work day you shouldn't absorb all that tension inside you because it can really be disruptive imagine if you have a team of 20 30 40 people everybody will have you know something in their personal lives going on you know something they have talked to you about you cannot you know take that in it can be quite detrimental to you so you know these healthy boundaries that I mentioned can be super helpful and of course you know one challenge that we always have like if you try to be somebody's friend and you know support them and understand them and is that you need to be mindful of the responsibilities that you have both towards of the individual and towards the company right so there's always a business that has certain guidelines policies you know so you need to be able to weigh both and and be fair within that role so you know summing it all up what does it come down to you know to get a sense of belonging in remote teams well I'll be honest with you for me it's always been openness you know I am the way I am you know I don't fake anything or you know I just I'm honest I'm transparent the best way I can be and you know I think it's very important to have a simple and authentic connection to people I'll give you an example I'm not known for my athletic accomplishments so I quite often I talk about you know maybe some mishaps or some adventures in my athletic endeavors for example I'm particularly proud of one incident where I managed to make the whole yoga class fall down which is love it so you know these kind of things just be if you're goofy be goofy you know if you're quirky be quirky you know why not and you know we're all we're all different and that kind of connects us right you know don't take yourself too seriously sometimes I think that that helps don't shine way from being vulnerable that is something that I've learned you know sometimes you think especially if you have a particular position or you know if your team lead or whatever oh I shouldn't show you know this side of me you know today I'm not feeling very well I'm a bit sad you know something happened you know I better a very disconnect you know I have found that being vulnerable in front of your team makes you look more human it helps with genuine connection and it's truly amazing what you get back I was positively surprised by the responses that I had from my team when I was going through a rough time and how much you know it how much satisfaction how much appreciation that gave me so I think it's super important as I mentioned before of course active listening is very important and not just taking down notes or checking boxes and then nothing happens but truly be there to the best of your ability whatever you can make sure that people have something fun and interesting to work on of course you know we don't always have control over the incoming work but whenever the opportunity arises you know keeping the back of your head to provide something you know enjoyable for the person to do especially if somebody's been on a project for a really long time and they want to change of pace or change of scenery it's good to try and accommodate that so that they don't get bored or demotivated and I think it's also very important to have a fun and warm working environment so it's not hostile it's welcoming and people in general feel comfortable at their own pace at their own level of communication as I said their own level of involvement as long as they're not you know disregarded in any way that they feel comfortable participating in the way that they want and of course most importantly smiles this picture I love it is from one of my cluster calls where to be honest I couldn't come up with an agenda and I just said you know the theme today is to wear a hat any hat you have a headset counts well and that was super fun so you know that always gives me joy to look back at this picture so thank you very much for your attention and it has been a pleasure sharing this presentation with you I'm happy to address any questions and you know if following this talk you feel like hey collaboration like a great place to work for your luck we are hiring so feel free to check out our job posts on the career stage thank you very much