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Metail provides a yearly training budget for all employees consisting of both time and money, but we found that many employees were not making the most of this opportunity. We decided to look into why this is and work on increasing the uptake. One idea we had was around hackathons – pairing people together to do small hackathons together sounds more fun than just reading a book by yourself!

One-to-ones help uncover trends

From my one-to-ones I found that the main reason people were not using the training days was because they weren’t sure what to do with them. If people were going to a conference or working toward a qualification or certification it was easy to identify the time spent on that as ‘training’. But what if you are already qualified? or there isn’t a conference on this quarter? or you want to spend some time testing out new technology?

Crew Hackathons

I came up with the idea of running some small hackathons within the crew and suggested we could use training days for these. The idea is that people will pair for a couple of days to create something new. This aligns with our company values: being in this together, actively learning, trust to deliver, and making a difference. But I also wanted to push the joy/excitement axis up a bit as well (see previous post).

Because people never want an extra meeting, we decided to schedule this as a special retrospective session. We kept the happiness axis exercise and collected a few actions based on that, but we spent most of the hour running a hackathon proposal exercise outlined below:

  • Everyone tries to write down a couple of ideas for 2-day projects they would like to work on, and spends a couple of minutes to get others excited about it.

  • Vote proposals. Everyone has 2 votes to pick a project (other than their own). Only projects with 2 or more votes survive.

The projects do not need to be directly related to work, but we should learn something from them. The idea is to spend one day together working out designs, and another day creating a prototype or something usable.

I explained the exercise a week in advance, so people had time to think of projects before the meeting.

Deciding on projects

The exercise went well and everyone seemed quite excited. It turns out that a few people had similar ideas, so we grouped some projects together. We then drew a matrix so everyone could cast their votes. This is how the whiteboard looked:

Hackathon Matrix

The top row of the matrix has the people initials, with the number of available training days written below.

We (a team of seven) decided to work on 3 projects. The projects with more votes will have a couple of hackathons associated with them – this is particularly useful if we can’t get together all at the same time. We can also start thinking at this stage if we are going to need any materials, e.g. books, that we need to buy before we get started.

Scheduling the hackathons

We have the ideas, the people, and most importantly, the excitement, so now it’s just a matter of scheduling these hackathons. If a person is working for the full 10 days in a sprint, they instantly become candidates for any of the hackathons they showed interest in. If we can find someone else interested in the same project who has enough training days available, we pair them together and schedule it in the sprint.

Some of these projects have more than two people interested – in this case we have a 1-hour meeting with everyone interested in it, to come up with a plan and decide how we’ll split the work. For instance, if it was a project that involved four developers and two different platforms, one group could work on one platform one sprint, and the other group could do the other platform the following sprint.

Conclusion

Small hackathon exercises can be helpful for people that don’t know what to do with their training days. Other people can bring ideas that suddenly open the curiosity box, and we can turn the learning exercise into a shared experience. Just as it is, it’s a valuable experience. But some of the projects can even turn into something bigger that brings additional value to the company. I think it’s probably worth running this exercise every quarter, to disconnect from your main duties and refresh a bit. If you can’t find the time to run this, just pack it inside one of your retrospectives. You can always use the happiness axis for a swifter retrospective, and move straight away into finding topics for the hackathons.

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lap top, headphones: remote work important tools

fully remote working: my work station for a whole week

In the first week of December I ran an experiment: our entire team was made to work remotely from the two main offices. The aim of the venture was for everyone to feel exactly what our remote employees feel every day. As a result, we hoped to improve team communication, both within the team and external to it.

Our team is probably one of the most distributed engineering teams in Metail. While most of our engineers are in the Cambridge office, a few work remotely. We’re lucky enough they are in the same time zone as the headquarters. Nonetheless we still suffer a lot of the pains that distributed teams feel, especially when the rest of the company is more used to working between the two offices, based in Cambridge and London.

Our hypothesis was that we would probably miss out on a lot of incidental “water cooler” conversations. We also guessed that communication with the rest of the organisation would be somewhat difficult.

Before Kick off

Before we rolled out the experiment, I had to lay some groundwork. Firstly I checked with our crew director (we work in teams called ‘Crews’ at Metail) and the other engineering managers that this wouldn’t impact anything crucial. We communicated widely across multiple channels that our team would be entirely remote during the week before the start date. I also spoke to the team to hear their concerns. It certainly helped to draw up a few guidelines. This is in summary what we came up with:

  • We use Slack by default and Skype as a backup
    • We say when we are at our keyboards and when we’re not
    • Everyone is to use headset and have their webcams turned on.
  • In general we try to ensure that we are over communicating
  • If there is a problem or someone can’t be reached, people are to come to me (the engineering manager) or our crew director.

There were a few practical things to take care of as well. We made sure our contact details were added to all the meeting rooms’ Skype accounts. We also checked we could all access internal resources via the VPN. Just to be sure, we ran a couple of trial calls to make sure Slack and Skype would work for us (they did!).

So how did it go?

We were able to anticipate the problems we hit; there wasn’t too much of the unexpected. It was much harder to run work past people on a casual, in person basis. Attempting to do so required both parties to mic up and jump on a Slack call.

Meetings with the wider company is where we struggled the most. We noticed people in Metail occasionally talk over one another and because of this it was hard to participate in guilds and other group meetings. Usually it meant one person in the office would drown out another who was further away from the room mic. We also noticed that if there were multiple people in the office participating in a meeting, remote workers often ended up ignored. In some cases it was difficult to observe body language that would normally be cues for a person to start talking. From time to time it was hard to hear people in the office. Sometimes this was because of problems with the audio equipment, other times it was because of background office noise.

We encountered a few minor technical issues as well. Some of these things were easy to fix, like tweaking rules on a firewall. Others were harder to diagnose, like why a developer was seeing Jenkins time out during load, preventing him from being able to see when builds were finishing. A couple of times we had issues with Slack where one person in the group couldn’t see another but these were easily fixed by leaving the call and re-entering it.

Generally speaking the engineers found it easier to focus on the work they were attempting to do. On the other hand it was pretty difficult for myself and our crew director, being the main communications interface between the team and the rest of the company.

I also discovered that my house gets really cold during the day if I don’t put my heating on! I made a special effort to be a little more social, going out to dinner and to the pub for much needed social interaction.

Conclusions

On the Monday following the experiment we ran a retrospective where we recorded our experiences. On the whole, the world didn’t end and the company kept working. We recognise that it was a pretty short experiment, lasting only a week, but we still found it valuable. One thing we noticed was that we certainly affected how the rest of the company interacted with us by communicating that it was coming up. I can now say I have a much better understanding of the pain our remote colleagues go through every day. I’m definetely going to be reminding people in the office about it in the future.

Learnings

If you engage with remote employees or are planning to in the future, here is what I’d recommend:

  • When you are having a meeting with remote people and it’s possible for everyone attending to have mics, then do so.
  • Let remote employees know if you are starting a meeting late.
  • Respect meeting etiquette and allow all attendees to fully express themselves. Don’t interrupt until they’re done speaking.