Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

Folks in our group love working at home and  remotely. But, there are some challenges, too. Here are some notes on pitfalls to avoid, courtesy of the real-world experience of our design group. Some of these comments from our team seem to contradict the positives I posted yesterday, but in fact they're flip sides of the same coin. Global collaboration is easier, but local collaboration takes more time than it used to or requires in-person drive ins; more flexible schedules can help relieve stress, but can also mean fewer boundaries that say when to stop working.  If your design team works remotely from one another some or all of the time -- or is planning to -- these are good notes to read.

Beware Reduced Camaraderie

While most people in our group say they can do project work well remotely, many really would like more in-person team interactions. We try to do get togethers every quarter, but don't always make it happen, especially in the summertime.

• "Occasionally, it's just best to meet together. That also builds better team spirit."
• "I prefer some face-to-face interaction; quarterly off-sites where teams can meet face-to-face are a must."
  
• "I must admit I feel a little disconnected with everyone when we haven't had an all-hands in a while."
• "Togetherness" from a UE perspective. I have to plan and really make an effort to connect with fellow UE people. We have started an interactive design meeting to mitigate some of that and stay in touch with regard to projects etc. (That's good.)"

Advice: Work hard to find ways to keep the team spirit, like periodic in-person meetings of everyone possible.

Beware Reduced Serendipity

While folks collaborating remotely indeed discover many new ideas and connections when working together, something needs to be done to make serendipitous connections more effortless, like the informal "aha" moments one gets when catching up at a coffee station.

• "No coffee-nook conversations that uncover unexpected synergies."
• "You miss opportunities that you may have had if you ran into someone in the office."
• "Lost informal collaboration: You miss overhearing informal conversations among co-workers that you might be able to contribute to or that you might learn from. "
  
• '"Hallway" conversations are almost entirely missing. There should be some electronic way of fixing this. We're going to try with blogs and the "shoutbox" feauture of wikis"
• "Development - It's harder to discover and learn from other UEs. They're not just next door and we can't just grab a coffee or lunch. Again, I might hear something through the grape vine and seek that person out."

Advice: Make sure you have ways of reintroducing some serendipity.

Remote design sessions can be very tricky

Let's face it, it's pretty hard to do group designs if you're not together.in one place. Many of our teams are clustered around a campus, so it's easy for them to come together for in-person design sessions, and then disperse to do heads down work.

• "One thing that is very challenging in my work is design sessions [across geographies]. I've had a few of these and one I have done via video conference. Which worked only because the other participants had a video conference room to go to. This is continually a challenge especially when close, face-to-face collaboration is ideal."
• "It's hard to work on complex, visual brainstorming over the phone." [Tip: One help is to use visual vocabulary and also shoot JPEGs back and forth during the conversation. And, we probably need more plain ol' webcams!]
• "Connecting as a creative, collaborative, dynamic team. Communication... requires additional effort by all parties to communicate clearly and actively. growth of "group mind" is hindered. Zeitgeist through a gauze."
• "Getting together either on a project or with UEs when the situation requires or benefits from face-to-face. If I know we're going to be brainstorming/drawing, then usually I prefer to meet in person."

Traditional meetings can be awkward

Ugh. Meetings. The gist of the feedback from my group is that concall meetings remotely are fine, but it's difficult if most people in the meeting are together in a room and you're the only one calling in. This problem also exists even between local campuses, of course. There's a "tipping point" aspect of working remotely, that thankfully Sun is at the cusp of right now. And, we do have some tools to overcome these issues but we often don't use them.

• Meeting dynamics: in-person vs call-in balance:
  
• 'One other "difficulty" regarding remote collaboration is that when there is a large group (even small group) in a conference room and one or two lonely people on the phone, the phone people often get ignored, forgotten, or can't really hear very well. Again, I think these are issues around training and not a downfall to the remote collaboration itself. For example, I've found that when the meeting host is one of the phone people, then all the phone people are more involved and also can always hear well - the host makes sure of it. The group really just needs to be more aware of the remote participants, speak up and into microphones, and be will to speak their actions as appropriate (e.g. I'm pointed to the xyz on the whiteboard . . . ) '
  
• "[If only I am calling in] sometimes it's hard to interrupt and get a word in. In in-person meetings, you can use body language to signal that you want to say something. In phone meetings, you sometimes have to jump in. And sometimes one person who likes to talk a lot might dominate the conversation because they can't see that others want to contribute or want to ask a question."
• "Teams that are not working from home that forget you're on the call."
• "All day back to back concalls can be tough. An in person meeting is more productive for these."
  
• Multitasking can get you in trouble:
  
• "The ability to multitask on calls can be useful but sometimes counterproductive."
• "Sometimes some individuals aren't as engaged as they would be in person. They/I do email or other projects multi-tasking their way out of consciousness with the call. I don't think that's a problem with remote teaming though, just a discipline about staying engaged and about have the right people and only the right people on the call." [BTW, I strongly recommend against doing email during a meeting unless it's an emergency or you're sending something to support the meeting.]
  
• "More often than I care to admit I over- multi task. If something or a topic isn't exactly relevant to me, or someone digresses, I do tend to check email and work a bit on other things. This is a skill, I think. It serves me well usually but sometimes I fall flat on my face when I should have been paying closer attention."
• "Related is another issue that I think grows more common than it would if teams were in person, that is, the occurrence of too many weekly meetings. I think people more easily accept unnecessary conference calls to their calendar because they know they can simply partially engage while doing other work. "
• Organize your meetings
  
• "There is much greater need to have strong facilitation and communication skills. And there is a greater need for diligent meeting planning, minutes, agendas, etc.."
  

Work never stops

If your team is dedicated, sometimes they have trouble stopping. (Personally, I've always worked across time boundaries in every career, especially when I was a journalist.... but even I try to disengage completely every other weekend just to recharge. And most of our group is good about disengaging so they get some good downtime.)  Some comments from the team:

• "It can be difficult to balance life and work when access to work is so present."
• "Personal problem: I work too much. It's just too easy to knock off some email or finish up that report. I work during lunch."
• "It's definitely harder to balance your personal and professional life when they're so intertwined. Getting away from your desk at 5:00 or not logging in after dinner can be impossible when you got a project hanging over your head. Alternately, when the dishwasher explodes, you can't ignore it."
• "Work-life balance is difficult at times. If you can work any time, then sometimes you do. (of course you're the biggest culprit of this of us all!)"
• "Sometimes it's hard to get away from home-life stuff also (feeding the kids, lanudry, etc.), but that's where the flexible hours comes in."

Advice: Make sure folks have personal rules about when to disconnect. Set up systems so that new projects go into queues rather than into individual email boxes; that way individuals won't feel like they're on deadline 24/7..

Being your own system administrator

In most cases, believe it or not, users do absolutely no system administration at Sun if they're located on a Sun campus. That's because we have Sun Rays in almost all of our offices. The Sun Ray is a network device, so (1) there's not much that can wrong with it and (2) there's pretty much no administration needed.  But at home, people still have a mix of different systems including PCs (running JDS/Linux or Windows or Solaris), Sun workstations, some Sun Rays, and (in our group of designers), some Macs. When these systems or the network breaks at home, it's a problem for the person there.

"I can't just grab someone to physically help me with a tech problem," writes one person in our group. "You're at the mercy of your ISP," says another. Even at Sun, not everybody is a technical expert, and so it's important to have a strategy for dealing with system downtime if a large set of your group is dependent on gear at their home.

You can't pop down the hall to find someone

I don't think this happens much, but a couple of the gang wrote about distributed groups can sometimes make it hard to get ahold of people. "If someone really doesn't want to talk to me, they can avoid me. (I can't camp out at their door.)," says one person in my group. Writes another: "Sometimes connecting with coworkers can be challenging when there isn't an office to find them in--especially if they don't want to be tagged."  Hmmm... my advice is to send a note to their boss asking where they are; I'll bet they'll surface pretty quickly. :-)

Tools could always be better

Beware Disruptions

Just as many find the home office more secluded and focused, conversely some people in our group strongly prefer to work on campus because they like a separate work environment, or find the home environment distracting (for instance, they have small children).

• "Home disruptions can be a challenge, such as small children who don't yet understand the boundaries, doorbells or phones ringing.  Also, it can be difficult to feel plugged in to a group or project without face-to-face time.  "
  
• "Never had to deal with a bunch of neighbor kids running past my door when I had an office. "
• "Sometimes my dog woofs in the background once or twice on conference calls, which is embarrassing."

My advice on this one: Don't be afraid to insist on working on a campus if you find you are more focused there.

Next time: Best practices for designing from anywhere

Tunes: Dracula Soundtrack: Swan Lake

Technorati Tag: Design

P.S. Here our Chief Information Architect's at-home workspace. Cozy, eh?