 So welcome to the second edition of Lean Practices for Remote Teams. I know that for some of you who were here last week, you were wondering why we are shifting gears by shifting names. But I think it's taken us a little bit of a while to put a little bit of structure and shape to the conversations that are happening over here. To do a quick recap, last week we spoke about inclusive hiring and remote teams. So that conversation interestingly went on to touch upon various aspects including how do you look at performance? How do you do accountability with remote teams? How do you trust that someone is actually working? Which also brought us to some interesting questions such as does physical presence equal to productivity? And I think we had a lot of interesting discussions around this. We had a few follow-up questions such as issues around mental health, issues around gender, etc. We will cover these in the next few episodes to come. This week we are following up from a few questions that came up last week and I think I am very grateful to Rabimba who is one of the presenters today where we got up this discussion of saying what does it take to be an effective remote worker? I think that when Halgi ran a poll on Twitter sometime ago saying what are your biggest challenges with respect to transitioning to remote work, we realized that a lot of people came to us and said how do you develop the discipline to work remotely? What is actually involved? How do you set up a routine? How do you draw this boundary between work and hope? How do you separate your children from your computer? But I can't separate mine but that's a different story and maybe we'll have a conversation around that. But I think that this has led us to today's session which is how do you be an effective remote worker? I'm not going to take too much time but just to tell you a little bit about the host for this session, Haskeen.com is the place where we boot festival is happening. Do take a look, we have a number of interesting events and conversations lined up for the next few weeks which will be coming up on Monday and talk to us here more about this. Today's session, the way we have structured it is that Rabimba will make a short presentation regarding his own experiences of being a remote worker. The good things that he's learned, the terrible things that he's learned and how he's navigated between the good and the terrible. We have Ashok Hariharan from last week and we have Indrani this week. Welcome Indrani and welcome Ashok who will be respondents to Rabimba. They will respond to his presentation and then we will open up for questions. We're also live on YouTube. If you're watching on YouTube, do post your questions in YouTube chat. We'll take it up and put it on Zoom. As for those of you who are on Zoom, do post your questions on the Q&A tab. We will take it from there and we will respond in the Q&A tab. Over to you, Rabimba Ashok and Indrani. Rabimba, over to you. Please do introduce yourself and then we'll take it forward from here. Thank you, Zainab. Let me share my presentation. Hi everyone. I'm going to talk a little bit about my experience working in remote and I'm also going to tell you a few stories of what happened, what I thought was a dream situation which I quickly realized it was not and how I navigated through all of that. So in short, this is me and this is specifically in different offices where I just visited kind of to take this picture but I never really worked on those offices. Starting with my work from home journey. Now starting from me, my journey started after my bachelor's after I did my BTEC and I joined Cognizant Technology Solutions back in 2010. I worked in Cognizant for three years and at that time work from home mostly meant very emergency situations or situations where you just came back from work and something happened and you had to log into your work computer to sort something out. Specifically when I said log into your computer, it literally meant to do something for some kind of timeline to actually log into it physically in some way. So that was kind of the work from home experience I had. Then later after three years, I went to Texas to complete my matches and PhD and throughout that journey I worked with IBM PGA Watson in the SIP Lab for six months and then twice more in IBM Elmerin Research and there I got my first test of actual work from home and I will tell you a little bit story how my transition differed from Cognizant. So my first day at Watson when I was there, my manager was introducing me to the most important asset of an office which is the coffee machine where the coffee machine is located and I was asking him different questions and then I was asking him that, okay, if I have to stay more, what should I do? How do I request cab? So IBM Watson is in such a remote area, unless you have a car or you are availing the company bus or shuttle, you cannot go there. He said that, no, I mean, why do you want to work more? He said, if I have to, then what do I do? He said, okay, take your laptop home, you are anyway going to get it home. So work from there and then one fine morning it was snowing and my manager literally just pinged all of us that, okay, guys, you don't need to come here today. The roads are not safe today. So we'll all just work from home for three days. And that was really kind of revealing for me that, okay, we can actually just stay home and also work and like do proper whole day work. So that was revealing for me. I did that in IBM, but that still was mostly your office and a few days work for home for different purposes. We could also do that if we wanted to. Then back in 2017, I started working with Mozilla, part of my master thesis at that time, and I completely worked in remote from my university, which I was in Houston, and I was actually, I didn't even use to go to university, I was completely working from home, just using a laptop and logging into different services. That was my first case, completely working remotely without anybody, any supervision apart from group calls or Slack chat. So how did it turn out from? As my manager used to say, working in remote is hard, but it also is rewarding. How? So first discipline a few myths that most people normally have. So remote workers are selective. What I felt is that your peers are not your guardians. This is back from my experience in India. I always feel that okay, I'm working and my peers are working and from there maybe it comes to that that if you are not at office, if you are at your leisure, maybe you're not working as hard. If somebody actually understands their work goals, when the work has to be done and keeps on a regular update with their mentor or manager, they don't really have to be labeled as a slacker because they're working exactly as they supposed to. If somebody is slacking, they can slack in office as well as at home. That really doesn't change based on your geographic location. The second myth is that if you're working at remote, you often constantly, which sometimes we get into that mode, but we are not supposed to work constantly. For me, what I figured out that if I had to, I had to find out a routine for myself based on certain deliverables, certain projects needed more attention from me. For certain projects, it wasn't that high priority and I could work more on other different side projects. For me, what worked was that talking to a manager and mentor to actually get expectation of the project and the deadline. They also had to trust me that they don't need to micromanage. They had to trust my ability to deliver on time. I figured that communication is the key here and that kind of helped me to allow. This I really did not face, but I have heard it from my different other colleagues working in other companies that remote working makes company culture different or it makes it suffer. When I was a graduate student and what I felt was that the coffee chats and working from just talking to your friend, talking to your other different ideas, they actually give you a lot of interesting avenues to work. But that's not the only way to drop your brain. For most of the athletes, team outings and working with certain yearly meetings was awesome. We had yearly meetings, we had team outings which were done maybe after six months where people literally from different countries used to come together and work for seven days together and then go apart and then again work on their own time. That helped us build community pretty well. And this is something I initially struggled pretty badly. Remote workers are available all times of the day and that's very easy to get into this pattern, especially if you're like me who at that time was very new to the team, very eager, very good to show off or kind of wanted to jump into any conversation. It's very easy to kind of blend in and just go into that more that you want to commit anywhere you want to. That is really a bad way to organize your time and from my past experience that actually hampered my work. I can share a little story. So since I was a very eager and new person in the team, I wanted to kind of prove myself and for such almost two months, what would happen is that most of our communications would have been in the Slack channel and the team was literally distributed across four, five time zones and there would somebody always be online somewhere posting something in the Slack and you would need a small team but you have exposure to most of the projects, you would feel that need that, okay, maybe I can help you and maybe I want to learn that, maybe I will get into that conversation, most of the conversation going into GitHub and GitHub issues and what I eventually ended up doing was over-computing on a lot of things. Essentially after two months when I realized that I'm not doing anything perfectly enough, then I realized that no, I have to scale down and even my mentor actually told me that no, you should not be available all the time. There's only a rhythm for you, use the Slack, silence the notifications and build a rhythm. So the first thing that kind of bit me was how remote a team can be. Out of our 13 people team, this was kind of the whole situation for us. There were people working from China, from India, from London, from Europe, from Brazil, three people from US, all from different time zones and it was kind of a really diverse team and we had our singular times where we'd convene for daily meetups, track meetups, asynchronous meetups but even then somebody somewhere would post something that okay, I'm working on this, they would just keep on posting and other would have jumped in when they found the time. I always thought that maybe I should reply so that's what kind of initially troubled me a lot. Till I found out to build my own schedule through that. Okay, so this slide normally would have said communication and collaboration is the key. So tools can help make or break your experience and I really found out that the tools that worked for us was for communication be extensively used Slack and ISE. Most of the video chats were done in Zoom and video and for co-collaboration it was with help but what really saved me was Google Docs where we kind of kept all the meeting notes and everything together and also Google Calendar which literally helped me navigate through the time zones and for your organization this might be different tools but fix on a tool that you're really comfortable with because they really helped the remote working experience. When in doubt, I found that over-communicating is always better than under-communicating I would share another story on this one. There was once upon a time a feature request I was working on and since that was an open source project Facebook team was also working on that similar feature on that specific product and I was stuck into something but since I was shy, I did not reach out to my mentor and I kept on struggling with it almost more than a week and fortunately the other members knew that I was working on that project and I was working on my personal repo and then one day somebody from the Facebook team which helped me and said that I saw you working on that PR but you never pushed that I see that in your GitHub people so do you want a code review or something and I jumped into it because I'm struggling in this one and I think this is not good enough like where to implement that and he helped me through it and later I realized if I would have just gone to my mentor I would have stayed almost more than a week worth of supper and time for myself something remote working has taught me is when to actually call and when to chat it's very sometimes just being somebody on some of the problems and just not come call at all but I felt for certain things calls as more personal things for example chats don't come with intentions it's very impersonal thing if I have to give a constructive feedback to somebody I found it way better to actually do it over a video and where my intentions were very clear and my empathy also can come between that even if somebody is giving me feedback I realized it's way better for me to actually see that feedback in video this is certainly not the case when it was a code feedback but it was the case when it was for anything else so verbal and emotional cues are very important when you are working in remote because you don't know how your communication will get across to somebody so just keep these things in mind while communicating with each other that's what my experience told me there are certain tricks I had to learn to make myself more productive initially it was very tempting to just in the morning take a cup of coffee flop in a pillow behind me and take a laptop and start working from the bed and very quickly, not doze off but very quickly just divert take your mind somewhere else and I was just not being productive I found that from myself having a table and actually a place to work boosted my productivity it wasn't that I needed to separate who works like environment but just having a table with a monitor was good enough for me to boost my productivity so that worked for me it might not work for you but find a situation which was more comfortable and as well as productive and that will help boost your productivity Google Calendar was literally a lifesaver for me working with a diversified team it helped me navigate through the time zone differences and all the meetings that were piling up and it still helps me a lot but I really started using Google Calendar after only my 10th week in Australia trust is very important for a remote working environment because trust is what your manager should have on you so that they can trust you to deliver on time so for me what happened or what I realized is that if we make our activities more visible then it's way easier for them to trust us so I'd say that make your activities visible it was easier for me because everything was going on in GitHub anyway but otherwise just keep on working and keep on communicating with your manager or mentors when in doubt always post in a group channel or just reach out and something I really learned the hard way don't over commit part of the problem when my work life was leading into my personal life initially for two months where I wanted to prove myself everywhere wanted to jump into every project I started over committing a lot and only later I realized that either I am not bringing the job to the perfection I wanted to or I'm burning out I'm doing all that you just finish up what I committed and then I'm just burning out and don't have enough enthusiasm for the next project so take it slow and only work on the things you really want or really have been assigned to you talk with the managers and mentors to manage your expectations in that way working remote is also very rewarding for me it was rewarding in a lot of ways gave me time to do a lot of things so very two simple things were the first picture was normally it doesn't snow in Houston at all Houston weather is kind of like it's pretty hot and humid I was fortunate to have snow once this is around 2018 January and normally I would have missed that if I would have worked from somewhere office in some other places or even in Houston maybe on a specific timeline and this is when it just happened for maybe one hour and it just locked my laptop off and went there and enjoyed the snow and then I got this comeback remote working gave me this flexibility also you have time to pursue your passion for example this drink this is something I made before my thesis so that I don't fall asleep so this is really coffee brewed with coca-cola which I would not suggest you to make but this kept me awake for my this difference thank you I I wish you all very best of luck and happy remote working and happy working from home in this challenging time and I would happy to take any questions and any feedback and I'd also love to know if you have been doing in your work from home remote working still now, thank you thanks Rabim if you could go with your sources and also a brief introduction of yourself sure, hi I'm in Rani, I work with Petya Binsider we are a discovery platform you would find all curated experiences and events on at insider.in and there that's where I work Rabim that was a beautiful presentation and most of the points that you mentioned I you know, I agree with you and it kind of resonates with all of us trying to do the only differences you have been doing this for a while we have all come to this because of the pandemic so that's the only difference because so as an organization we are a very lenient organization, we have time to time work from home people can work from home once or twice a week event it's all fine I think the only problem is or only panic situation is this is a forced lockdown this is a forced work from home and people generally when you are forced to do something you start panicking and you want to do the opposite and that's the that is the most important factor of working from home forever versus working from home in these times so as an organization the day it was announced the day lockdown was announced we had a town hall and entire 170 plus people we all got together on Hangout and you know there were few things at an organizational level it was laid out just to ensure that everybody has a routine and doesn't know don't start running like headless chickens and don't know what to do next what to do tomorrow, what do I do so we have diverse teams from a sales professional such as me if I don't go out my meetings are mostly not done because I'm selling events my events are not happening what do I sell next so questions like those are operations who their primary job is to go run the events on the sites they don't know what to do next so essentially the job was to first figure out what each team would be doing what as an organization insider would be doing and then how to make sure that everybody comes together and still works as a team even remotely all of us are working from various parts of the country I think except for the three offices that we have people are working on Calcutta people are working from Kerala and many more states people went home on time thankfully lot of people did so the first thing is like you said setting up a routine it is so so important because we start working from home now in this situation what happens is you do not even have house but help and in India people we are all used to house helps we don't know how to function if our house help is not there so yeah to figure out that because it becomes difficult also you know it is not really easy for a person who only knows ok to get up at 8 in the morning freshen up food is on the table you eat and you have your book your cab or you drive down to your office you go you function and you come back and your dinner is again ready but now you have to do everything on your own and their time management goes for a toss so what we as an organization it was 11 to 7 is the time before 11 you are not liable to pick up the calls after 7 you are not liable to pick up any calls so every day religiously at 11 o'clock all the teams not all 170 people together but all the teams we all get together so a 5 member team or a 10 member team or a 20 member team we all get together on a call we chat about what we are going to do today so that the you know target for the day it takes we are not we don't know we don't leave the teams hanging that ok we don't know what you have to do you can just chill through the day so so that is when the first routine was set by the organization and the second came at personal level so I will share what my me and my friends did and how it helped me personally so the second most important thing I think from your presentation I is setting a workspace right it is so very important because if I if I just sit on my couch and work I will slowly slide down and I'll become lazy and maybe I'll ok through in the afternoon after my break after my lunch I'll be like ok let me take a 5 minute nap and then it will become an hour that's not healthy at all and it doesn't set precedence for the coming days so setting a workspace so what I did is I have set up 3 different workspace so that you know I didn't get bored so I live alone so it's a little hard for me on a daily basis not to see or communicate with anybody else face to face but yeah setting up 3 different workspace and setting up my own routine what time do I get up what do I do do I exercise or not do I read or not do I write do I take up a course so I took up a course on Udemy which I have been thinking of for the past 5 years I never did right so it did give me that opportunity of that extra time that I would spend you know in going to office and coming back those 3-4 hours that I would spend so that's a plus now the negatives are I'm a sales professional and it becomes a little hard at these times to sell things that we are newly developing we are developing digital events and then to sell them you know to a client on a call it gets a little not difficult it gets a little boring you know when you're there in person you can animate and you can you know present yourself more how do I say it you know you can essentially you can put the energy and then sell that event that you're selling because what we are selling is not you know I'm not selling a pen I'm selling something more you know personal I'm selling something which is more inclusive so that was a you know bummer that was the first time so I realized okay now I can't meet my clients I can't meet anybody whatever the next whatever next number of days and how do I you know channelize that into something more strong and something more meaningful so I write and I started writing poems every day so every day a poem that was my challenge that you know I until this lockdown is over I'll write I'll read so I read every day I write every day I have 11 to 7 work I have my colleagues to talk to I have my family to talk to so everything is in routine so and another point that you very very rightly presented was communication is the key everything needs to be communicated I I don't know if I'll say video call is really important but even a call to talk to the team members instead of putting it on Slack because it could come as class that okay why is she behaving like that but I could I wouldn't have meant to learn so it's very important to communicate to basically voice communicate rather than just mail send Slack we also use Slack by the way so that has been my journey lot of my colleagues are facing a lot of issues because they are not able to manage their daily routine at home or somebody has a mother to take to dialysis so those are you know things that we share with each other on a call so that you know the other person has something more to talk about than work and doesn't feel alone in their grief this is grief basically the first thing is to accept that this is grief and this has come out in a very very very how do I say very strongly upon the whole world and we are all in it together but at the same time it's how I take it to each his own is what I like to quote here and yeah I think taking a day at a time and ensuring that I know what I'm doing I know what my co-workers are doing and being you know just making sure that we are productive on our own so the thing is trust is a very easy word to just throw around but it all depends on how I can discipline myself so if I discipline myself I don't think I need to prove my work it'll be visible on what I'm doing and wherever I am I am in office or you see me or not or I work from home and I don't come on video calls with my video on or whatever that is so yeah I think discipline and routine has been my strongest pursuit or not only mine or the people around me I think that's how we have been able to work around with the pandemic and work from home for a longer period than just once or twice a week thanks Indraani that was really useful and also quite candid thank you so much for this any immediate responses to this before Ashok presents his perspective as an employer yeah so certain of the points I can relate to for example the human element or the human perspective of working at remote that portion I kind of always so the whole presentation I geared up towards my experience and of course that was towards as a engineer's experience but there are other parts for example when when Indraani said that now Indraani realizes that you cannot go to talk to other people you cannot present something that okay this is what we are working on like this is a project and everything becomes really hard when you take the human element out and that is not something we have been trained to do or we are not even attached to getting these kind of behaviors online so that whole portion is hard and I know like a certain portions of that because I used to I sometimes do a little bit of developer relations or developer advocacy work part of what I do with Mozilla so talk about the same things I have been personally developing or working on talk to developers that are in different conferences that okay so this is a new piece of technology this is how we are implementing this how you can use that this is similar very similar to that that you have a human element you are talking to them learning their pain points and also projecting that okay this is something cool maybe you have a look at it now with pandemic and also for academic publishing a lot of conferences are getting cancelled and how do you actually get your point even for academic talk or even for a different talk how do you actually engage your audience it's a very different thing to work from remote but it's a very different thing to actually engage your audience in an online seminar or a online talk for maybe 40 minutes or maybe even 30 minutes we tend to get distracted very easily when we are in front of a laptop or computer compared to when we are in a conference room with a lot of other people and the only thing we are looking at is the presenter so these are open challenges and I think for possible future this has been a challenge for online similar kind of events for long and I think there are different ways we are experimenting and even I am experimenting that ok maybe we should do this or we should do that one of those experiments at least for the presentation part was that use a virtual reality room where instead of giving them a laptop screen to look at if they have means by means you have like a google cardboard and your phone you will be in a VR environment so way to actually insulate you from your home your distractions and there again you have only your meeting going on or the conference or the talk even that is not perfect apart from technical aspects as a social aspect that still isn't perfect because you can just go out of the VR whenever you want to but these are kind of the open things everybody is trying on but I completely recognize that challenge something I could relate to was when you first told that you had to define a specific hours let from 11 to 7 and you are not supposed to I mean you are not you don't have to take calls before or after that for me actually I realized it works for me completely opposite so I also I had a flatmate at that time when I was working but we used to stay in our separate room but we have to do our home course and cook for us and so do our home course and cook our own food and everything for me so working for the most flexible to give me that chance so it was that morning if we have a meeting every Monday at this time I know that I have to anywhere wake up before that meeting or in most cases that I wasn't ready with what I was doing so I would just work a lot before that and then do the meeting then I will take a break cook my breakfast or cook my food just watch maybe some sitcoms even and take some break maybe even like 2-3 hours break then again go to work and then keep on working for quite some time and I really realized this will vary from person to person this only worked for me because I was staying alone and I don't have much other home responsibilities this will definitely not work if somebody has their parents to take care of for example Dysarm in India and this plan won't work for me right now but like I said that I think that flexibility matters and it gives you more chance to navigate to how do you actually find it Ashok Ashok you need to unmute yourself Yes I just unmuted myself so my name is Ashok Hariharan I run a company called Bungali Consulting which operates in the legal and legislative tech space and we have been operating as a completely remote operation since inception so it is I am remote everything is remote even the servers everything is in the cloud so that's the business model that I have from the inception and it came about more in terms of my own convenience because I don't like commuting I don't like going to an office but it's kind of worked for me so I just want to talk about the aspects of that with respect to what Indrani and Rabindra have said so one is that this current situation that Indrani is not an ideal situation it's basically a business continuity plan that people have been forced into their offices and that's what it is it's not really remote work it's business continuity it's perhaps more in terms of remote work more in terms of the ideal scenario he was doing remote even before the pandemic and that's what he's doing now so the context are really very different in both so just in terms of me as an employer I just want to talk a little bit about how I interview someone so when I hire somebody to bring somebody on board and then during that I will touch upon some of the things that Rabindra has mentioned and some things that Indrani also mentioned so when I interview someone typically and this is not a rule that I had from the beginning I made mistakes I hired the wrong people I had to fire them I went through the whole cycle because working from remote is not like working in an office so when you advertise your position what you write in there is very important in terms of who you're targeting so basically distilled from my experience what I can say is what I typically ask is what is your intention what is your motivation in working remotely why do you want to work remotely why do you want a job that does not have any office perks that does not have the proverbial coffee machine where you cannot do office gossip and stuff like that so I'm interested in those kind of answers why is somebody wanting to work remotely so in my experience typically this is all pre-pandemic now pandemic has changed everything but prior to the pandemic this was typically older people people who had experience of working in an office they had worked in corporate setups and for various reasons personal or otherwise because they had kids and some people had worked 10 years and they wanted to pursue their own interests and they just needed a supplementary income just to keep their interest going so they were looking at part-time or semi-full-time so that was the kind of profile I found people who are willing to work remotely so I found that these kind of people they were a good fit for working remotely because they had a mindset that I want this job but I want also the flexibility of being able to sit at home and work so I found that this particular kind of profile seemed to suit me well there's also the culture fit so people who work in offices they kind of expect certain things they want the coffee machine they want the kind of environment where they can go and they can have their lunchroom I would make it evident that the interview itself that this is completely remote I don't do any of that there's no retreats some people thought this is one of those not remote work but work from home where you do monthly retreats I said we don't do retreats you just work from your place wherever you are it doesn't matter what I ask is how is your setup at home that's very important I think even Rabindra touched on it so that is something I ask even at the interview what kind of setup do you have at home do you have a laptop do you have internet access do you have a separate space to work in and more often than not the particular profile I mentioned those people had already been working remotely and they had those setups so one very important mindset that you need to have to work remotely I found is separation of domain there is work and there is home so if you look at offices they want you to make the office like a home they want you to spend as many hours as possible in the office not all organizations are like that but that has been a very popular trend among companies in the office so they want you to stay at home so what that has resulted in is people getting messed up because they can't distinguish between work and office very clearly and that can be a big challenge if you are working remotely if you are not able to separate what is work and what is home and you are at home so it's very important to have a space in your home as Rabindra mentioned a corner maybe if you can't have a room a desk and a table for me I need a desk and table I don't work on the sofa or on the bed so just to have a separation of domain so work is distinct from work is distinct from home and if you are single then it might be easier you don't have to deal with kids or you don't have to deal with your spouse in terms of separation but that is not the case for many people so you need to have your spouse on board saying I'm flexible but this particular time in the next week I'm going to be working so in those particular slots I cannot be disturbed or at least give me one hour duration so I can work those kind of things it's all flexible it's different for everybody but I think something like that people need to understand that they need to have that plan in mind and what does it mean separating work from home home is a domain work is a domain they are all distinct and I found that the weekend is extremely important if you are working from home even more than the office so the temptation inadvertently when you are working from home even the weekend it's hard to distinguish between weekend and weekday mentally even more so now in the pandemic you can't distinguish whether it's a holiday or it's a working day because we are at home always but even prior to the pandemic working from home at least for me when I started that in terms of conditioning myself the weekend is distinct so I still do work on the weekends but that's because I want to mentally be very clear that this is the weekend this is not work time any work I do is just for pleasure so that has to be mentally very distinct and I think employers also need to be aware of that so at least with my team I never ask them anything on the weekend it's completely offline I don't do anything in terms of communicating asking them for status so those are important points in terms of time zone and location I did that experiment we had a guy from Argentina doing design work for us that was few years ago and it didn't really work because Argentina has it's like 12 hours away from us so when he was at his best I was at my worst because it was the end of the day for me because people have different behaviors depending on the time of the day evening you're different then in the morning then in the afternoon because your mood changes you wake up you have a different attention span so on so that didn't work for me so I simply hired people in the same time zone at least for me so because our team has fluctuated from 11 people to 7 people to 4 people depending on the number of projects we have and so on so at least in terms of time zoning for me I just got people from the same time zone so maximum maybe Europe maybe the European time zone is kind of compatible because they wake up a bit later so I could try to work in terms of you know timings better at time zone but North America, South America no even going east did not work we had a guy from Vietnam doing some design work again that didn't work maybe time zones could work with people doing a lot of back in work which does not require you know immediate interaction of feedback so I don't know I didn't went to there I simply got people from the same time zone that I was in in terms of tools so at least in our experience video calling we never did we never did video calling so to me it was just a waste of time let me be honest the only time where I did video calling or we did the face to face interaction was when we were hiring someone so at least for the interview for many I made it a point to see them in person at least for the interview you know when I want to interview them we meet in the cafe I don't have an office we meet in the cafe or somewhere I want to see who this person is and you know what is their intention or motivation behind doing remote work that was important to me it was more than any other question so there are people in my team I've never seen them I have a copy of their fan card which is required for legal purposes because I'm sending them money but I don't know what they look like nobody looks like what they are in their fan card so I don't know what they look like if I see them in person I wouldn't know because I never did video calling the reason being it's easier to do Slack I found it easier to do things of chat and I also found that at least in my experience even seeing how other offices operate people tend to be a little bit more judgmental based on how people look or how people talk accents things like that so those things didn't matter as long as somebody had good written communication which was one of the things I looked for when I hired people how they were able to communicate in writing I focused on that and also with things like Slack there is a lot of you can search the conversation there's traceability it's much easier for me and for other people in terms of conversation how do you refer to past conversations it's easier to do it on Slack rather than on voice calls because people tend to forget we are being blasted with video all the time and we don't even remember what was the last what's that video we saw I'm not a big believer in video calling at least for me it didn't really work so basically Slack Trello for weekly tracking of who is doing what and google docs those three were the three essential tools so to speak and in terms of order of importance Slack was way more important than voice calls and voice calls were way more important than video calls the voice call funnily enough I had somebody on my team and they wanted me to call them once a day because somehow for them they which was very strange to me I said I don't think it's necessary for me to call you every day but they had worked in an office for many years and they were kind of very conditioned to somebody calling them and saying I don't know just so I used to do that for some people but in most cases there was no daily stand up there was no daily call or whatever so I think with zoom in terms of organization having 200 people on zoom that is just your office culture being transported into the online space I don't think it's compatible I don't think people can do that at scale you will get some kind of new disease called phase time poisoning or something there is so much far too much cream time at least for me it didn't work so that is a point I wanted to make in terms of socialization I have a pretty different view from what you all stated so to me this whole concept of office socialization this business of company culture is really a facade so I don't know what company culture is we are a completely remote operation I don't know what company culture is we don't have company culture because we are doing work we know what the client wants and we have things we do all the time so people have personal lives and I have a personal life so and we are not in the same room so people have friends of their own they have a society which is outside the office they have a family outside the office and they are dealing with that sometimes there is some seepage and somebody one staff whose wife had a rather complicated work and he had to take some time off so he called me at that point and he told me I had this complication that's fine you know so I have done what he needs help but I am saying this thing of office socialization is just office gossip and that is comes back to the point that Rabindra mentioned that your peers are not guardian while the whole concept of people working in offices is being judged by your peers and how do we get ahead how do we get ahead so at least for me it was very refreshing doing things being completely remote that element is eliminated there is no office gossip we have the company's like channel it's never had any politics stuff there never had anything about movies or tv or whatever it's not because there was a rule but nobody spoke about it because they didn't know the other person so well it was simply about work they were doing their 4-5 hours a day it was transactional so I know it sounds as if there is no humanity involved in that but my point is when humanity is required I am available for a voice call other people are available for a call but in other aspects people have humanity in their own spaces and when you work in an office you don't have time for that humanity so here with the flexibility you do your own stuff you have time to deal with your family you have time to deal with your kids you have time to deal with your friends they are your support network it's not the office gossip or the office Netflix discussion or what's happening in sports that's not it that's not that's not our objective at all so I know it sounds a bit radical but at least that's my view I think for working remotely you need a different company culture you need a different view on what company culture is your coffee machine may not be important anymore because there is no coffee machine there is no taking the trip there talking to somebody that's not there you are doing that in Facebook with your own friends or whatever that is there so you have space to do that at least it was not enforced or anything there was no rule but people were simply more focused on their work and maybe that again comes back to what kind of profile you are hiring maybe you know what could be a challenge for somebody going fully remote is how do you onboard young people from university so you have like induction programs which are all oriented to people working in an office but is there an induction program in terms of how do you onboard somebody fresh out of university and your whole team is remote how do you do that so I think those are big challenges that people have to think about if they want to go fully remote from the beginning or even for existing firms because of the pandemic they have gone remote and maybe they intend to go remote I am very skeptical where that organizations will continue to stay remote whether the pandemic is not there that's my view because the whole structure is not compatible with working it's just a business continuity plan but I think something very different will be required in terms of simply how do you onboard somebody new into completely remote working environment all the current induction programs they don't make any sense in terms of the other points so what Indrani mentioned in terms of 11 to 7 I kind of agree with what Rabimba said that I think because he is working from an organization which understands remote that timing is very strange to me it's basically taking the office timing postponing it bringing it home what if you have a home thing between 11 to 7 what if your kid is doing online schooling and there is a class that requires your intervention what are you going to do from 11 to 7 so there are questions like that it's not flexible again and personally for me after lunch I take a nap I just go and lie down for half an hour that's good for me in my team also to do the same it's good for health to do that I don't think it is the wrong to give advice like that because in one aspect it seems to go against the idea that employees are going to be less efficient if you do this I do believe that for the company working from home is less efficient because you don't have people in the kind of industrial environment everybody being controlled but in the longer run maybe if you do the cost over a longer period of time we don't know we don't have those numbers we don't have numbers of organizations who were doing the industrial office setup and then they went to remote we don't have those types of comparisons but I do believe in terms of employee well-being you're going to see that what people what people were doing in 8 hours or were pretending to do in 8 hours they would be doing it in 4 hours so I do believe in terms of employee efficiency it is better but maybe from the industrial efficiency for the organization it might look worse at the beginning but at least to me from my own experience with my staff and the way the company has gone and you know it's not like we did small business we did hundreds of thousands of dollars of business everything remote even business acquisition was done remotely mainly because of compacts mainly because we operate in a very niche space so it's possible to do even business acquisition completely remotely and it's been a very interesting experience to me so quickly I'll just add or rather correct what I meant so when I said 11 to 7 we don't have office timings in general office when situations were pre-pandemic we didn't have office timings right so we don't have punch in punch out we have none of that in most of our tech techies they work from home for months I have not seen a couple of colleagues I think ever since they've joined but since the nature of our business is completely social because that's what we build right we build engagement we build we do events we do events at clubs and pubs or we do festivals we do music concerts and there you know there is a certain timing so if I am a sales person I am looking into sponsorship I cannot call a brand after 8 in the night I can't so I need that time I need to know okay I know that after 7 I can't call a person and invade in their personal space so I have to you know make sure that I call in that office hours because I have to respect their timings as well similarly for a business development person in my industry their life would only start after 3 in the evening because their clients might have partied or held an event at a club till 2 in the night they would sleep of the day and then they would start say productive they would only start at 3 in the afternoon that bleed into the evening or going for a beer with the you know with the organizer so because the nature of a business is such constantly remote working does not work for our industry and I think timings were during pandemic were provided only because lot of employees didn't know what to do they didn't know how to start their day or end their day so it was mostly to help them but I know my colleagues there are colleagues just because there are events right we always have events we are now doing digital events so evening weekends they are hosting digital events so they would start their days again late and then work in the evening so I think that flexibility is there the timing is just a notion for everybody to you know people who do not know what to do during this time and how to function themselves or how to put themselves to discipline I think it's just a you know a method to madness that's all Thanks Indraani Ashok do you want to touch briefly on the business development aspect in the sense that is there a boundary when you have to reach out to the opposite person that you know one country's experience can reach out to a client that's way in the morning to like you know talk about business development Yeah you know like you know in terms of some businesses you have to meet people in person simply to Viltra you know they don't know me they've just read about you know they've just read about the technology or you know they've you know read up something on the internet and they are trying to get in touch with our company or and in those cases sometimes you know after after 3-4 interactions or email or Skype I do you know all our clients are overseas so you know that implies flying out and meeting them in person so that is the way business is acquired so you have to meet people in person at least in terms of business acquisition so at least 50% of the business that we got is required me to go and meet people you know so the other 50% was just them those people telling somebody else and they said this guy can be trusted, this company can be trusted you can deal with them so that is the case I'm talking about in terms of cases which require human interaction in terms of the whole business acquisition part you know I just want to make a point on this web VR that he mentioned about this virtual reality office you put on something on your head and then you you know you have like a kind of virtual office space where you go and meet the boss I mean to me that is very scary you know more than anything so that is mixing up of domains again you're at home and you put on something on your head and you're in the office again so to me that is scary it's like bringing LinkedIn inside your head you know so something like that thanks Ashok in running any closing comments and then maybe Rabindba if you have any closing comments and then we can all get on to our Friday evening if there is a Friday evening I don't I mean I for me see like I told you so for us as an organization this happened you know on a regular stretch period of time because of pandemic otherwise we have like I mentioned we have a flexible time I myself work if I don't have meetings I work twice twice a day I work from home and it's fairly okay because I can still go out and I can still meet people I can socialize but at this moment during pandemic it is actually a challenge for people also businesses like us where we always keep interacting and our whole business is built on that social gathering social engagement and that is kind of affecting a lot of people that I know a lot of my colleagues a lot of my peers but having said that since we started building digital events it's actually it has become easier we all have good amount of work at our hands and it is if we have digital events if that is the next way to go I think remotely wouldn't be bad at all because everything is anyway digital right so you don't really need to meet people face to face person to person to conduct anything but yeah I mean that's very industry specific very myopic kind of you because I come from a very specific industry but otherwise yeah I think a routine and discipline yourself everything else I think just falls into place that's all so just two quick questions before Abhimba you can give your closing comments Inrani I have two quick questions one is how was performance measured and you know how was their accountability in terms of like what was measured in terms of output before this pandemic situation if you're saying that you know flexibility was involved and the second question is that it's very understandable what you're saying because I come from the same industry you know the physical events are gone and your colleagues are wondering like what's next job expect to do and in your case it might be a truth because it's a fairly large team is there been any effort or attempt at mental health or counseling or something that has come in and if you can share a couple of points that might be helpful to others out there sure so I think two weeks or I think the first week itself HR hired a mental health professional who is reachable person to person we also did like there was a for the lead there was a separate session there was an open session for everybody to join in and if they wanted to do you know like basically a session where everyone can talk about their problems or she would address but she is available to us at any point of day I can book an appointment I can talk to the professional and you know basically rent or share my fears or grief or whatever but yes there is a system in place and it has really really helped the session in fact the session happened last week where all of us are together and everyone spoke off nobody was care to not let their fears out with each other so that was really beautiful to hear who's facing what and how everyone is coping with it so yes we do have a system in place in terms of performance we like I said so every day we have like a small 10 minutes chat with within each team we know what we are doing every day every Monday there is a weekly larger discussion with the management and the leads so I think everything is fairly mapped at the moment to start with we didn't have a lot to do so all the work we started putting on wiki so we created an insider wiki where we started putting out everything that we are doing so it was it is available to everybody everyone can see each other's work there is a lot of cross departmental work that is going on if HR doesn't have a lot of work they are helping sales or if sales doesn't have a lot of work they are helping DD so this is how we are all helping and each other except for the fact that I can't code so I can't help the tech guys rest I think all of us are trying to just see where we can fit in if we don't have enough work in a day I think that plus we are doing a lot of demos so everybody gets a chance to be a part of the demo so if you are doing a stand up demo before putting it out in the market so we get a session with a comedian so those lighter things are happening we do we organize weekly games for employees so I think so far it has been actually it's been okay you know it's basically accepting and smoothing forward that okay this is the way to go and if there comes a day that you know digital events become larger than you know on ground events I think we could really work remote we have been performing really well I think as an organization thanks Indrani sorry Ashub this is the last question to you and I don't know if we address this in the previous in last week's session but in your case how would you measure performance and outsource for remote workers what are the metrics you would use so you know at least you know for us we have this Trello we have this Trello board where every person has a like I don't know if you have seen Trello but it's got these kind of boards where each person on the team has a board and you know there are tasks for each person for the week I don't want to call the task because it's a very loaded word just in terms of what is the work that they're expected to do so I have a whole bunch you know the way I was putting it was I just put a whole bunch of things not just for this week but you know even for the weeks going ahead and then people can choose so I'm assigning priorities to this and then I let people choose based on the higher priority ones which ones they want to work on first and they can see what the others have chosen because some of them are linked so the idea you know so the idea with this is it is very it's like very easy to see what pace the others are going at and what pace you're going at and it's very easy for me to see what pace everyone is going at because some of the tasks were kind of similar some of them you know I can judge because I'm a technical person myself that you know some need more effort and some need more help maybe two people need to work on that so that was an easy way to measure in terms of outputs how somebody is able to do this with a particular frame of time so you know the thing is it shouldn't be too big a task it's something that can be done in a few days you know let's say four or five days so then it becomes much easier to measure how people are doing things so it implies a lot of responsibility on the part of the person doing that so you know that is something I believe in it's not telework it's more like smart work so you know you have your tasks and you know what you're supposed to do and you do it so then sometimes people will come back to me at the end of the week and say this thing requires more effort because X, Y, Z there's a technical problem particularly when it didn't work or the tech is not so it's in beta and that's why it's not working just at that point you know whether somebody has gotten themselves into a corner or whether somebody didn't do it for other reasons they claimed they did it and they didn't do it I should say that was a very rare problem where somebody claimed something and it didn't turn out to be the case so at least for me on a weekly, on a week by week basis it was pretty easy to do it because the full history is there and even for even for the people working on the thing they have an idea chronologically how progress has happened for them they started with a small cog of a product and then it's become something bigger so just a simple thing nothing very sophisticated but it was fine because we are not a big team so at least for me in terms of measuring what people were doing of course people work at different places not everyone is at the same level technically so there's always going to be a difference you have to be aware of that it's not something to judge people about but some people are learning some people are already ahead because they had more experience so those things apply that's the way at least we are measuring it in terms of performance I would just like to add one more point that I think we figured as an organization itself when we work in offices there is a notion called dependability and we tend to we don't take ownership so we say okay I have not completed this because XYZ person has not given me so this time actually helped us the first two weeks we actually had a lot of time to documentize things, put everything on paper whatever we are doing so I think we have reduced so much dependability and we've become more self-sufficient than what we were before pandemic so I think that is one thing that has really helped and I think it wouldn't have happened if the situation wasn't there or we still have dependabilities but that is discussed at the beginning of the week and we know this person this will be done only when this person but it's very defined now unlike previously when everything was everywhere all over the place I think that it has helped when you know that everyone is working remotely at and singularly you tend to kind of create your own zone where you look for solutions you know what you want you can really vary on our paper and say okay this is what I need and this is how I can solve and this is what I can't solve and I would need an expert to do it so that has also been something really positive about us working remotely I think Thanks Indrani Rabindra any sort of input from your end on how performance in the case of remote work that you can work with so mostly so I would say again this might not translate completely on the situations right now just like Ashok Ashok has been working from remote for very long time and I have gotten also used to it before pandemic so it's pretty streamlined so most of the work I have done it's you have a task and you need to do it and you have certain deadlines or expectations from your mentor or manager that okay we should be able to do it by this time and if we didn't use Trilobold actually our team didn't use Trilobold other teams used but we didn't need to because most of the times every feature we worked on where it has issues and that provides literally a good timeline when somebody is assigned to that task and when somebody is pushing a PR so that is kind of exactly what Trilobold does instead of putting it in a Trilobold we have a big accountability of somebody okay somebody said I'm going to pick it up or I'm going to do it and we know when somebody is picking up somebody is doing that work so you kind of know when exactly when the work is being done and you can just that is not exactly the same case when it comes to other functions for example for any kind of development activity for conference talks it used to be the performance indicators or events it used to be the performance indicators that how many people attended your talk or how many people interacted with you or how was the talk reception in general now when it comes to online just the viewership matrix is probably not always the best direction for that and also for podcast or if you go for a blog post how do you exactly measure that to or compare that to the previous one so that is something that is like we're still figuring out and so regarding performance I think that's mostly how it was working before pandemic and I'm pretty sure it's working in the same way until now but I also want to touch based on certain other aspects which Inrani and also also brought in so one of those is the event aspect so holding events and those things but also the other aspects also brought up that okay the VR aspect and it's kind of scary so I was in a situation I was in a unique situation because the team I worked with was the VR team so we created some of those solutions so obviously we just did that on our on our own meetings to see how it works but during pandemic and since the conferences are getting cancelled so I typically kind of paired up with Mozilla and that was kind of the first big conference like a lot of people where if you including the presenters presented and interacted through online and one of those online venues were peers so you had an option where you could just pop in a headset and go and create your own room you can really create your own environment it doesn't have to be predefined environment you can create your own environment and others can join and you can watch something together and the reason we went that's the origin the conferences are going that way is that it's not exactly same for working from home then you're working you have a task you're working on it but the part for an aspect of working an aspect of being in a conference is not only the talks but also the communication after that talking with the presenter or talking with each other even you get to know people you get to know people and also you meet with other people that is becoming hard when everything moves online so I think with pandemic this is a very different scenario even different scenario than what used to be our normal work from home because a lot of the transitioning people are from industries which did not used to function properly or were not designed to function completely online and now they are coming up with different ways of experimenting with ways that how can we actually translate all of our work being online one of those even in this conference and I think in terms of exactly another similar situation where they are kind of building their own way while you are in that okay this is how maybe we should work this is how maybe it will work better I think has also been doing the same and I think for now it is pretty open and pretty challenging and I think we will keep on experimenting and seeing how we can move forward to like solving all these I really don't think that just a video call or just having like 200 people type zoom conference is definitely not the way to go forward that is for sure but I still don't think just a video call conference or video call or just going to youtube live is going to solve all these we are in this for a long haul and I think we will see how that goes for working for remote I think we will eventually come to a mix of that when we realize that some of the work and some of the people actually function better when they left their own device and they can work with the flexibility and some people are they are more productive in a more insulated environment like office so they might be for example the employee was talking about who wanted a call if they are just like get a kick on themselves so they have got habitude to that habit so I think we will eventually settle in the mix of that post pandemic maybe but yeah thank you so much Indrani Ashok and Rabim I think this has been a fairly simulating conversation Ashok as usual the provocations and the thoughts were very very valuable I have made notes I put some notes on twitter and I think definitely the favourable benefit to a lot of people who are watching for those of you watching online do visit hasik.com slash reboot fest slash the release of this video and about the summary blog post that will come up next week having said that I think that I just reminded before closing that this week when you were speaking to Micah Lee about zoom and the security lapses at zoom Micah made an interesting point saying that you can harness paranoia to actually do good for security I think we can also harness the lockdown to actually do good for employee benefits and employee welfare I think it's an important part that Ashok has left us with in terms of the industrial culture as well as and how that paradigm of industrial work culture is different from the culture that we have now in terms of employee welfare and employee benefit so on that note we'll close here and thank you very much hope all of you have a very good Friday evening and thank you once again to all three of you this was a very very useful chat thank you thank you thank you bye