We all are going through stressful times that we have never seen in our lifetime. The entire world’s social life is stalled due to the Coronavirus pandemic. In these depressing times, where you can’t step out of your house, your loved one’s health is at stake, and for people like me who depend on white-boarding, in-person brainstorms, and discussions, this social distancing norm was like a shock! You may be wondering, how did we deal with this to empower the team and keep everyone motivated in such an environment? Before I answer this question, let me provide some context on our team formation.
Our team is a globally distributed team located around the world in places like Delhi, Bangalore, Chicago, Minneapolis, Toronto, Atlanta, Boston, and California. The team is organized into multiple PODs, with each POD having a scrum master, Product Manager, engineers, quality engineers, and designers. Leadership POD is distributed across the globe too. As people are working from so many remote locations, communication is extra challenging when travel is not allowed and offices are closed.
During this difficult time, we are not only delivering things on time but exceeding expectations and achieving new milestones. This is made possible with the sheer determination of the team, the full dedication of each team member, and a realistic strategy. During this unforeseen time, we were able to complete our PI planning connecting 40+ people, remotely collaborating from all of our locations. Each of our PODs met the aggressive sprint goals and produced a quality deliverable to the client without any hiccups. The team remained strong and agile. Here is the team’s response to what comes in their mind when they think about their morale, performance, and productivity in the context of COVID-19/WFH situation:
Now let me explain how we are able to steer through by keeping ourselves strong and united. Since the inception of the project, we focused on automation and framework design to lay a strong foundation. We quickly worked on creative ways as we faced the COVID-19 crisis and started adapting collaborative tools and processes. The first thing we did was to publish best practices for the team to follow while working from home.
According to our CEO Nigel Vaz, the safety of the people is always the top priority, 2nd priority is our client’s value proposition, and third, comes to the project execution.
We had to balance between these three to deliver work. We stayed calm and started following these five key initiativesthat attributed to the success story of us standing tall during this crisis.
1. Communicate and Connect More Often
We took multiple steps to get in touch with each other through Microsoft Teams. We created multiple touchpoints during the day so that blockers are known to everyone. We also created cross PODs knowledge and review sessions so that team interacts more often and find the solution soon. We also leveraged tools like Mural for collaboration and PI planning. As everyone was working from home, we decided to have more overlap across regions while maintaining the work-life balance. All these steps increased productivity and velocity significantly.
2. Focus on positives! Appreciate and Celebrate Achievements
We encouraged team members to speak up, try out things without being scared for failures as Ben Dattner said, “at your workplace, and in any sort of group environment, do your part to help create an atmosphere in which people aren’t scared to speak up or make bold moves. Rather than rehash past missteps, spotlight successes and steer conversations toward finding solutions.” We celebrated each milestone and encouraged each other for good work. We noticed that by highlighting the positives and achievements, the team produced extraordinary results cumulatively. The team started focusing more on design, frameworks, design patterns, and quality execution. We saw our engineering maturity level jump to a new level as a result.
We started the Reward and Recognition campaign. It brought an opportunity for the team to recognize each other and build the confidence to strive even higher. Reward and Recognition are at the core of Publicis.Sapient values to help people thrive in the brave pursuit of next.
3. Support Each Other
By having cross-functional knowledge sessions, peer code reviews, and being there for each other, we were able to motivate and support each other. With the help of one another, we all were excited to stretch beyond our comfort zones to accomplish things we otherwise would not even try to do. We made sure to not create confusion, chaos, or stress due to unavailability of support during the crisis, rather we followed a calm approach of thinking patiently and help based on limited options. We escalated things as needed without panic.
4. Build Automation & Frameworks
We have adopted microservices, atomic design-driven architecture supported by a state-of-the-art DevOps and deployment architecture that automates and empowers all integration and build processes to run automatically with almost no human intervention. Design patterns such as Sidecar pattern, 12 Factor, and Loose Coupling empowered the team to focus more on developing functionality rather than day to day integration, build, and deployment issues. We developed horizontal frameworks to serve common functionalities across microservices such as logging, Authentication, and Configuration management to increase code productivity and efficiency. TDD and BDD approach also helped on automating the quality of the code.
5. Discover and Leverage Collaboration Tools
Publicis.Sapient provides and offers a lot of tools for collaboration and teamwork. Publicis.Sapient is always open to exploring new tools that can bring efficiency in our execution. We leveraged Microsoft Teams for communication and meetings. We explored, experimented, and successfully adopted Mural for collaborating on planning and visualizing audience engagement in real-time to create a fun and interactive experience. We are now very comfortable working remotely and by using these tools we feel that we are working next to each other. We have found the best ways to use these tools. For example, rather than sending emails, we use Microsoft Team chats. We started different channels for different PODs for the team’s day to day communication. We also efficiently used Jira and Confluence for stories, tasks, risks, and dependency tracking and documentations.
Our CEO and leadership team across Publicis.Sapient arranged townhalls to provide answers and help. The company published regular newsletters and articles about guidelines on work from home. Below are some helpful articles on managing through COVID-19 and working from home.
- WSEAP_How to Manage Anxiety During COVID-19
- WSEAP: Coping with Stress During Disease Outbreaks
- WSEAP: Talking to Kids About COVID-19
- WSEAP: Preparing for Child Care and Work Disruption During COVID-19
Our internal Learning Team has put together a comprehensive “Work from Home with Success” resource guide to support our people.
In summary, we handled the situation by applying best practices on team collaboration and communication. While our corporate office handled the guidelines, resources, and support, we started some key initiatives on the ground so that our team remains calm and committed. With these key initiatives, we were able to improve the morale and productivity of the team, and as a result, our timeline and roadmap milestones were not impacted, rather accelerated due to a more collaborative environment. Together We Sustained, Strived and not only Survived but Stayed Strong!
Best Practices For Work from Home
- Make sure everyone has appropriate access to cloud console, DB, Tools, etc.
- More regular checkpoints throughout the day. At a minimum, have a morning call and a wrap-up call toward the end of the day.
- Have a healthy backlog so the team has a clear direction on what to do to complete a story. 1. Enforce Steps of Doneness in every story 2. Identify every subtask at the beginning of the sprint
- Encourage team communications — shout out if blocked!
- Be flexible to help each other across pods
- Cross learnings — peer code reviews & Cross-functional testing need to happen more regularly to increase code knowledge and quality
- Encourage the team to spend quality time with family and organize the routine for the day
- Leverage Tools
Tools & Automation Drivers
PS : I initially published this article on April 9th 2020 here.
