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Shifting to Asynchronous Communication in Software Teams
As some companies begin to go back to the office and embrace hybrid working, they are at risk of alienating those who wish to remain remote, which is looking to be a considerable number of workers in our industry. James Stanier suggests using more asynchronous means of communication and spending more time writing to each other rather than speaking in meetings.
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How to Work Asynchronously as a Remote-First SRE
The core practices for remote work at Netlify are prioritising asynchronous communication, being intentional about our remote community building, and encouraging colleagues to protect their work-life balance. Sustainable remote work starts with sustainable working hours, which includes making yourself “almost” unreachable with clear boundaries and protocols for out of hours contact.
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Adapting a Zero Bug Policy to Solve Bugs
Applying a zero bug policy made it easier to prioritize bugs and increased team visibility and responsiveness towards bugs. As it’s a radical change, you will need to adapt it to your context regarding decision-making and time to fix a bug.
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Dealing with Cognitive Biases in Software Development
Cognitive biases help us to think faster, but they also make us less rational than we think we are. Being able to recognize and overcome biases can prevent problems and increase the performance of software teams.
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How Organisational Culture and Psychological Safety Fosters Our Creativity
Organisations need to create the right conditions and culture for creativity to flourish so as to stay relevant, compete and thrive for the future. An addiction to burnout and fixation on productivity can stifle creativity. What’s needed is psychological safety, inclusion, experimentation, growth mindsets and allowing thinking time.
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How a Safe-to-Fail Approach Can Enable Psychological Safety in Teams
Companies can establish a culture of psychological safety among their employees, a culture in which failing is not frowned upon but rather is accepted as something that can happen to anyone. Safe-to-fail should be part of the corporate culture. A shift in the way we envision success can lead to a better understanding of where failure lies and provide courage to overcome our fears.
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WhatsApp Adopts the Signal Protocol for Secure Multi-Device Communication
WhatsApp is testing its new architecture aimed to enable true multi-device message synchronization while preserving end-to-end cryptographic security. To this aim, WhatsApp is adopting the Signal protocol.
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Assessing Remote Employee Experiences for Hybrid-Remote Work-Settings
Employers and employees have begun to prepare for their return to the office. One of the options is a hybrid-remote work setting which aims to support individual preferences when it comes to where, when, and how to work. According to Kaleem Clarkson, assessing your remote employee experience can help to make decisions on workplace flexibility policies.
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Collective Learnings about Remote Working during Covid-19
The response to the pandemic showed how to make sure people are productive and included in a hybrid environment, and it's all due to the learnings we carried on from March 2020. Many organisations demonstrated how it’s possible to work in an inclusive and productive way even if people are distributed around the world.
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Distributed DevOps Teams: Supporting Digitally Connected Teams
To establish a digital connection within a globally distributed team, an organization provided the team members with both collaboration tools and supplied an extra monitor with a visualization board. Collaboration using the online chat and white board initially posed challenges, as the board was tweaked towards the teams’ needs.
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Engineering Your Organization through Services, Platforms, and Communities
Organizations need to be able to sustainably deliver value to their customers and business; that is why they exist, said Randy Shoup at QCon Plus May 2021. To do so, they need to be able to effectively and efficiently leverage the “resources” they have at their disposal- their people, teams, and technology.
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How to Improve Your Team's Communication and Psychological Safety
Mapping your team’s typical communication style can help improve communication and psychological safety, reduce friction within a team, and make conflict more productive. When we understand how we communicate and how we like to be communicated with, we not only have a better understanding of ourselves, but also of others, and this can play to our and their strengths accordingly.
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Remote Working Risks Increasing Toxic Cultures
In a study conducted in May 2021 of 133 US companies, 29% of the respondents said that team spirit and working relationships have suffered from working remotely, with 11% leaving or planning to leave because the company culture has become toxic. Toxic cultures result in demotivated and disengaged employees and have a significant negative impact on organizational outcomes.
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The Impact of Radical Uncertainty on People
Humans look for certainty as that makes them feel safe. Suddenly becoming an entirely distributed team due to the pandemic disrupted people. According to Kara Langford, radical uncertainty can cause people to believe they are in danger and lead to health issues. People will respond differently; uncertainty has also shown to lead to fresh ideas, innovations, and social good.
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Variations on New Normal for Workplaces
Over the last year office work has shifted to almost completely remote, and as vaccination programs roll out around the world it is shifting again. There is a lot of speculation around what the new normal will look like. Employee well-being, flexibility in working arrangements, availability creep, virtual and augmented reality are all factors impacting what work could look like going forward.