What Engineering Leaders are Doing to Boost Their Teams’ Well-Being and Productivity While WFH
Since March, much of the workforce has shifted to a remote work environment in accordance with social distancing recommendations. According to PwC’s Workforce Pulse Survey , companies’ COVID-19 safety measures are now table stakes. Working remotely may be a reality for the foreseeable future, as many employees are not confident that safety measures like mandatory testing, shut-down protocols, hygiene policies, and contact tracing, will keep them safe. Only 36% of the developers Coderbyte surveyed said that they are eager to return to the office.
Regardless of what the future of work holds, engineering leaders are adapting how they and remote development teams. For those that have been furloughed or laid off, now is the time to reinvent habits and skills for a new economy.
I talked to six uplifting engineering leaders from Lambda School, Friendbuy and others to understand their perspectives and recommendations on how to keep moving forward during this radical shift in the way we work.
Engineering leaders
Increasing productivity and maintaining focus while working remotely
“There are many things that I take advantage of in order to stay up-to-date with engineering trends. It’s about having a mindset of learning and constantly improving. I’ve found that when you have that attitude, your brain automatically picks up information when you least expect it. For example, when browsing LinkedIn for potential candidates or scrolling through Twitter, I might come across an article on tech or process improvement or notice what the people I follow are liking or retweeting. I’ve been fortunate in my career to have built strong relationships with some of the best engineering minds in the industry. I’m frequently in touch with them and we discuss engineering related topics often. I t’s become a great source for me to dig deeper into things that I either find interesting or help me solve a problem. Other than that, I follow the podcast. I regularly visit the engineering blogs of companies with strong engineering cultures to see how others are solving their problems.” Engineering Daily — Nimish Parmar
Improving morale and maintaining culture
“Home Partners is driven extensively by social interaction and networking between employees. With social distancing and the complete work from home roll-out, our company took several steps to ensure continuity of such culture:
“We believe that company culture is a set of beliefs and behaviors that we embody every single day. In that regard, nothing’s changed. However, we’re communicating and collaborating a lot more across the board to make sure that we’re upholding our values consistently. We host virtual happy hours within the company regularly. We’re also trying out virtual events via — Nimish Parmar
Installing feedback loops for continuous improvement
“As an engineering leader, it is very important for me to gather feedback from my team on how they are feeling about their work, peers, manager, etc. With the transition to fully remote work, it has become a bit difficult for managers to understand the vibe in the team because you may not get to meet with your team members outside of explicit meetings. We no longer have hallway conversations and there are no morning greetings or team lunches or coffee breaks or one-off conversations. Chat/text based conversations are often not enough to understand the true feelings and may lead to misunderstandings. Therefore, a manager needs better ways to understand the general vibe in the team. I have started relying, now more than ever, on team surveys, feedback, and sprint retrospectives to understand my teams’ health and take proactive actions on issues reported by the team. While team surveys and sprint retrospectives have always been part of my management strategy, my reliance on them have increased a lot more in this transition to fully remote work. I use for team surveys/feedback and sprint retrospectives, respectively.” officevibe.com and retrospect.team — Himanshu Gahlot
“ One of the best investments I’ve made for my team during quarantine is to allow them more time for their personal and professional growth. I rolled out a growth plan program for my team where I conducted individual sessions with my reports to understand their growth needs, chart out a plan of activities they’d like to pursue, and plan how they could accelerate some of the growth items during quarantine with additional time available. My team, while delivering on the business requests and regular project work, is now also able to focus on skill development personally driven by them.”
- Anshul Agarwal
Advice for developers looking for jobs during the pandemic
“One of the most important skills that companies seek in software engineering candidates is their algorithmic and coding ability. Job seekers should continue to refine this skill. This can be achieved in various ways, including but not limited to, enrolling in relevant online courses, sharpening their coding skills through / , reading relevant books, and so on.” GeekForGeeks , learning skills which are most relevant for today’s job market by enrolling in online bootcamps like Lambda School — Himanshu Gahlot
“There’s no sugarcoating it. Getting let go, laid off or furloughed sucks. A lot! So I’m going to stay away from cliches and keep it real. These are unprecedented times, but at the same time, if you’re an engineer, you have everything it takes to succeed. There might be many reasons for not being fully employed right now, but there’s a high probability that most of them have nothing to do with you or your capabilities. The whole world has been turned upside down. Companies and businesses have to rethink their entire business models. There are countless articles out there to help you prepare, but here are some practical tips from me:
Predictions about the future of hiring
“Since many companies are going fully remote and most others are planning to provide this as a recommended option going forward, software engineering processes need to adjust themselves to become better compliant with remote work. A few companies like Gitlab and Basecamp have been operating as fully remote companies. They have published extensive on how working remotely can be made really efficient. I think, going forward, more companies will start adopting the best practices outlined by these companies. There is still a lot to be seen and learned in this new way of working which will be uncovered when different kinds of companies (e.g. differently sized, different kinds of products, mobile development and testing vs. simple web based products, etc.) start figuring out best practices of remote work that suit them. Fortunately, software engineering is one of the most suitable jobs for remote work, so it would be interesting to see how it tries to achieve the same or better level of productivity as the pre-remote era.”
- Himanshu Gahlot
“The pandemic has proved that technology can keep businesses going even if people are not physically present in their place of work; also, that many sectors and verticals can adopt technology to progress. Thus, the demand for software engineering is going to skyrocket, and remote working will definitely become a more prominent practice. Face-to-face interviews have been replaced with assessment tools leading the process, followed by a video chat to formalize the process. The need for assessment and psychometric tests have become even more important now and are in high demand.”
- Kushal Patel
“The biggest change will obviously be in how teams collaborate. Humans have a tremendous ability to adapt. I wasn’t a huge fan of working from home pre-COVID, but after being pretty much forced into working remotely, I feel like we at Friendbuy have adapted quite well. Besides the Zoom fatigue towards the end of the day, it’s been quite effective. We strongly emphasize the importance of collaboration and communication. Our Slack channels are ever more active. Our communication style has become frequent and impactful.” — Nimish Parmar
Additional resources
At Coderbyte, we’re committed to helping forward-thinking technical talent acquisition leaders make an impact. We’ve put together a COVID-19 Report & Best Practices Guide based on surveying hundreds of software developers to better understand perceptions about remote work and company culture.
What Engineering Leaders are Doing to Boost Their Teams’ Well-Being and Productivity While WFH was originally published on ReadWrite on July 22, 2020 by Daniel Borowski.
