Managing high performance teams in a Pandemic

Here is the Wall Street Journal article that featured how the AI team in UiPath adapted to the new normal. Below are my quick thoughts on the changes, over the past months -

Amplification of core values – “Radical candor and Authenticity” - That’s the sticky note on my monitor to remind me of the things that are important in a pure virtual setting that need to be amplified. These were the values I lived by in an in-person setting but was executing them in a number of indirect ways/cues etc. UiPath as a company has core values too, and those core values that we live by as individuals or teams, need to be explicitly amplified in a virtual setting.

Work as usual- My team was almost always half virtual, having distributed teams across the world so the change wasn’t that hard for us. But we used to have in-person travel regularly to bring those folks in or visit them to keep everyone on the same page. With everything going virtual, I am seeing way more one on one meetings to address and avoid that “left behind” feeling from creeping in.

Humor, personal recognition on Zoom - Personally one the things I used to do for effective communication was joke around a lot in person while I used to be much more formal on calls. With everything going virtual, I have had to incorporate humor in the calls to retain the same level of informality and learning. Another similar thing was personal recognition, I would walk up to my team members and tell them what great work they were doing in subtle and respectful language without being disingenuous and let them know that their work was appreciated. Recognition has and should become a part of zoom calls with the team members.

Detecting, Learning and checking-in the work – As a manager my job has become much harder because knowing deeper details of a product, technology, feature or process are critical. In the office, I would just walk over to my team members and learn more by asking them questions about what they were working on and drilling deeper with follow-up questions. That’s not happening anymore. So I have to scour through a lot of information on sharepoint, Jira etc. to get to an informed viewpoint on the state of affairs in a product line or business. One of the way I have countered that is by having more slack conversation threads with individuals and the conversation keeps on building, but the twinkle in the eye of an engineer as they proudly explain their code creation is totally lost. I have periodic check-ins with my team members (which appear on-demand to the team members) with timing reminders for myself to do those. But I don’t want to put recurring meetings on their calendars because of zoom fatigue or making them feel the pressure to prepare for a meeting with a VP.

Time offs and digital silence – Team or individual burnout is easy to detect because the performance drops and the errors start going up. In person when this would happen it involve suggesting a vacation, offsite, morale event, social events and a combination thereof. In a virtual setting people are not getting that real “time off” being connected digitally, so one of the things we have done in the team is that when someone is on vacation we make sure to impose a digital moratorium - no slack messages, no urgent email replies. Also high performance individuals feel working from home that they are closer to a vacation than a work environment. Many of my team members used to be in the office for 12 hrs a day. So one thing that was evident was everyone was taking way lesser vacations , also compounded by the fact that there aren't the same vacation options available. So the thing we encouraged was to take digital vacations – not connect to the company network and do what ever you want even if its sitting at home binging on Netflix. 

Socially distanced meetings – as a team there are somethings that just cant be done over the phone. Brainstorming new ideas and creative solutions is one of them. I speculate that the world productivity is going to take a hit where large teams of people were involved in creating new products and services. We are lucky to live in a city like Seattle with beautiful parks and generously open outdoor spaces. For a core team of individuals we meet in an outdoor setting to discuss our products, tech landscape or our lives in general. I personally have started to show the gratitude and thanks to my team members who are continuing to spearhead our product development at the same pace as pre-covid and even faster in some cases. I guess you shouldn’t wait for Christmas for gifts. 

Inability to read the body language – I used to rely heavily on body language to know when a team member was feeling down and take him/her out for a peptalk or just listen. Virtual venting sessions (that go as long as the person wants and have gone for 2-3 hrs in some cases when we were making team changes) is the closest thing that has come to addressing that gap  and I am trying to develop an ability to get those subtle cues from the voice of my team members.

Zoom fatigue – last but not the least we had too many zoom meetings happening and some team members started feeling the zoom fatigue. So we have shortened some of the hour long meetings to 30 mins and if the discussion needs to continue we make an informed and agreed attempt to extend to more than 30 min time slots.

Staff meetings morphing into the short informal no pre-set agenda meetings - At my level, having managed more than half of all new product lines in UiPath at some point last year, a lot of work is about motivating the people to have lofty goals, find/validate the product market fit, reduce that to bite size chunks of actionable areas and back that up with impeccable execution across functional teams to slowly build out capabilities in a product line. One of the traditional ways to do all this effectively was weekly in-person staff meetings and bring together product directors in various stages of execution, so that they learn from each other experiences and are motivated with a healthy sense of competition and camaraderie. With all of that becoming virtual, now we have staff meetings with no preset agendas where people come to talk about what’s on top of their mind. No speaking turns, so people feel free to chime in. So we have been able to retain that learning and growth mindset in a virtual setting too.

General behavioral changes- Psychologically people grow distant and sterile if they don’t get that physical proximity experience. Personally, I have noted very interesting patterns develop as I am not interacting socially. I have becomes much more louder in-person and it is funny to be reminded that I am not on the phone. Other thing I noted that after being remote majority of the time, the limited in-person interactions are much more amplified emotionally, tonally and my hypothesis is the brain is trying to get the max out of that limited in-person experience. Having worked in large teams of some of the smartest people in the world (I have ivy league MBA direct reports and my previous teams had hundreds of top PhDs ) I rely on a keen sense of self awareness to know when I need to listen and when to chime-in. The remoteness and these psychological changes (of amplified emotions or others) due to 100% remote work, interfere with that keen sense of detecting, learning, interacting at a subtle level and definitely are a performance drag ( especially if you are building some of the most cutting edge AI products in the world, every last bit of performance and mental acuity is the difference that makes or breaks ) however small it is.

Work Buddy - One of the things that has helped me personally immensely in this pandemic is the privilege of having work buddies. Lets be honest, work is never going to be always great, especially when you are working in a hypergrowth and highly competitive environment. Having someone that you can pick up the phone and talk to, without any filters and vent is super important. Ideally this is a person who is not part of your org and can be trusted to keep the conversations private and confidential just like in a Attorney-client or Physician–patient privilege setting.