How to Build & Maintain Successful Highly Distributed Teams | PGC Digital #1

hi everyone my name is Michelle del Rosario and I'm a principal software engineer here at Zynga where we make games that millions of people have to play every day and today I'm gonna talk about how you can build and maintain successful highly distributed teams so what do I mean about successful in this we're gonna define as high-performing and communicative teams and this is gonna be very paramount especially when you're working across a large distribution of different offices so where does the charge you come from I'm happy to say that I've been developing a brand new mastery game of my team of over 70 plus team members and this is across many disciplines in five plus different studios including our outsourcing and intrigue in different time zones which you can imagine this is a lot of different organization and coordination to do among this team of this magnitude and I'm happy to say that we've refined the system over the past two and a half years and I've been able to leverage these learnings in our women leadership employee resource group flown at Zynga as well as our engineer

Leadership Forum for our senior leaves and our University Relations partnerships and the great news about the strategy is that when we were all transitioning to work from home this was not a huge stock we had already been operating as a distributed team for quite a while among these different studios so we're from home wasn't too big of a shock although I will talk about some of the challenges that we did encounter a little bit later so let's talk about the price you'll have to pay for a distributive team and I'm not talking about the raw dollar amounts I'm talking about a value that is even more important which is your investment into your team and their success and we're gonna start with the books we're gonna start with the P which is productivity how you can help establish good work environments and resources as well as scheduling and milestones the R of responsiveness setting core hours and being flexible with the arrangements the I or interaction of social so that you can establish a connection within your team and they don't feel isolated the C or communication so you can have consistent and relevant updates as well as a way for receiving and giving

effective feedback and finally but most importantly employees the e so that you can help grow their morale their visibility and ultimately grow them into leaders that can be soft on amiss as well as proactive and help getting your team to go where they need to go so the first half here is going to talk about some of the mechanics and the second half is going to be more of the human touch so let's jump right into it productivity I mentioned earlier about establishing an effective work environment so there's gonna be some quick basics at you you're going to want to help your team find a dedicated room for them to enhance their focus and enforce their work integrity so that they can actually make sure they do the job that in the core hours and this goes out saying but they need to have essential equipment such as a laptop peripherals quality chair and desk and I mentioned the quality in your desk because it gonna be sitting here for a while so you don't want you know a uncomfortable chair or desk that you're finding yourself having economic issues next you're gonna have to have the software such as a VPN email slack JIRA

and whatever development tools you use and I put a plug in here for national lighting because I mentioned earlier that you do want to make sure people have good core hours and natural lighting can help boost their mood as well as reinforce what our natural stopping points so that people don't they can become easily engulfed in their work and this might be good for a short-term productivity but over the long haul it can lead to burnout and that's not great so natural lighting can help people manage your time next you're gonna want to set some clear tasks and check place as well as the milestone dates and this is great for games because we can have playable progress where you can check in on iteration and then this informs you height can change the direction as needed I do want to stress here you should allow some fungibility pending circumstances sometimes our estimates don't match up with the reality and that's okay as long as we can reassess the priorities as needed and then make sure we target them you dates and I mentioned earlier about the work environment you also have to provide resources and support to do the

job for your employees and ergonomically I mentioned earlier but also access to information such as Wikipedia wiki's your experts and channels for your employees so you'll find the people they need to reach out to so they could do their job effectively now let's talk about responsiveness I said earlier about core office hours and for us again in this North American kind of time zones of three different time zones we have our core office hours as 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. PST and this helps us because you're able to talk with the bulk of our team during the set hours where any other hour we we might be come on too late or too early for other people in the office to go to each other I also want to encourage you to make sure your team takes intentional breaks I mentioned earlier burnout is real and again sounds great in the short turn to have people working really hard because they're always at work slash home and they're in a remote situation but the intentional breaks are needed for people to recharge as well as have a fresh mindset when they come back to

work and along that vein of intentional breaks encouragement flexibility and what I mean about this is now that we're the majority of us are in a work from home situation there are some additional challenges that people are encountering within their homes such as managing shared responsibilities among children or pets and this is okay we expect this to happen because there is life right so you need to make sure that people understand it's okay if I'm going to take some away time for 30 minutes an hour as well as they just signaled that they're gonna be away during these certain time periods and then signal when they're gonna return and this is great and it works for us because then we know when people are available and we know when we can reach them that said sometimes thoughts may be non-negotiable and the big key here is probably a team meetings when you need your key stakeholders there you want to maximize your meeting time with specific agendas and actually items in advance so people know what to expect me to come into the meeting as well as follow up with captured meeting minutes and the follow

items so people know what to do after and this is especially helpful for people both who went to the meetings people who were unable to attend the meetings so they know what to do after the meeting has had occurred now let's talk about some of the human touch here and a foot interaction here slash social because it is really easy to feel isolated or your team is so isolated there away from the office there are fewer emergent lowness for water cooler talk does it happen and unless you're Deborah Kerr direct reports are really good about making time to do Deon's with each other and keep that kind of screamin touch it can start feeling a lack of connection within the team that can make them feel and that will so as the boss you should be proud opportunities for your team to socialize and for us we've done things like virtual happy hours or events and this would be jump run is in call where's some silly classic I got a bunch of pirate hats like my grandma's or refuse filters to you know check out like us in

a box so something fun in my party other ways for you to encourage socialization is to have delegate chance for woody so grateful imps to think about our off topic or for us as Ingo we are dog parents so a dog channel where you could post all your Instagram pictures of your dogs or even new games to talk about things like animal crossing or present evil so these are just some of the ideas for you to consider so that people have a community and they can go talk to each other and I want to put a plug in here for your employee resource groups as well as your benefits of homeless programs because this is probably like one of the easier well it almost easier but probably one of the more obvious things you can think about is as community building as well as enforcing and encouraging good work-life balance but most of all you should be reminding your your dark reports of their value to your team the project for the company to help foster that connection feeling and speaking of the team let's talk about how you going

to communicate with a team I mentioned earlier you want to have consistent and relevant updates and some of you may already be employing scrum in your long development cycle we also use this and you'd like to do a combination of both in-person and slack reminder integrations so on Mondays well I'll jump on is in call and we will all give our updates and talk about blockers and then on Wednesdays and Fridays we have a slack reminder pop up and tell us hey it's time for virtual scrum so we could just write in Suns or to you what we're working on in a slack channel and then be on our way I really want to highlight the importance of blockers because if you don't encourage people to mention when they get blocked in a remote environment it becomes even more detrimental for people to fall down if they get far behind and also you don't want scrum updates to become one word or such as bugs which doesn't help anybody with anything also we of days encourage your employees to think about proactive my eyes when I

meet my project fYI says encourage them think about what is someone going to ask them I want to know about in their future development so they can go ahead and give that update and be more effective in the communication and this in turn will help reduce interruptions of them during their work so that people don't have to go interrupt them to forget what they're doing you want to also encourage questions I mentioned earlier it's easier people to get stuck and spend their wheels so if you can try to anticipate difficult areas your own employees might encounter and then offer guidance when possible or resource if I'm gonna do the job and again reinforce that it's okay to ask questions there doesn't make you any less knowledgeable or any less skilled it just means that there's something you need to learn so and there's nothing wrong with that and then provide opportunity for people to actually communicate with you so you can have process improvements we've done this really effectively within our teens we have seen your leaves as well as leaves in the different disciplines and so our leaves will talk with the people they're leading and then bring that up

to the senior leads who will invite and listen for the input from all these different voices and we use these voices to in informal check-ins to make sure that we can actually improve our processes that we have a better development process for everyone now we talked about the team let's talk about your one-on-one communication so it goes on saying face-to-face video on is crucial for an effective one-on-one not only does it allow you to seem more human but it also helps you read those nonverbal cues that you wouldn't otherwise get you didn't have that or if you're going through just cold emails which you should never do by the way you should always have a direct connection with them they're good chat if possible now some of you may have seen this but if there's going to say again effective feedback needs me specific can you describe what the issue is as well as descriptive using facts not your interpretation of what happened in this is wicked and timely so it needs to be hopefully sooner rather than later six months down the road doesn't help people figure out how to improve

themselves and I'd also want to highlight here the importance of an appropriate amount of feedback when you give feedback you might have a lot you want to say we'll keep in mind how much you're dirt-poor can actually absorb and space it out within again a timely manner also wrap up your feedback with your willingness to discuss it further I think this is critical and most you'll forget this because you want to make sure it's a dialogue and not just you just talking at your employee so give them the opportunity to ask clarifying questions follow up and the solicit their thoughts about what they think about feedback now on the upside I mentioned earlier you want to get feedback to help refine your own processes so when you do receive feedback make sure you do these things you want to acknowledge it you get the feedback and then confirm your understanding of the feedback repeat it back to the person giving you feedback to make sure you really understand what they said told you and then share how you're gonna utilize that feedback if you don't know at the moment beyond so just say hey this is great feedback I'd like to think about some more and I'll follow think about what you can do with it and then actually go do the thing you

said you're gonna do and follow up and I want to talk about employees here so I mentioned earlier most many for you to have these highly effective teams you need to manage your employees well and this involves managing the morale or the recognition we've done a couple things such as health surveys as well as just being you know aware of our team and inquiring how service can be okay for getting metrics but I wouldn't rely on that alone you do need to actually get in the base and talk to people face-to-face or at least direct message them we also use employee of the month or kudos our All Hands to help get recognition and improve that morale be aware some people might not like all that attention so if you feel like you know someone might not like that we Jocelyn first about it and then see if they're okay if you do that kind of kudos you want to help people show so you want to increase their visibility and some of the ways you can do this is encouraging them to contribute to the team they can do this with Tech Talks or sharing that

knowledge with wiki's they can also lead in different events so you really want to make sure you help publicly praise their contributions the key stakeholders not only does this help you tell them that you are aware of what they're doing but it also highlights their contributions to other people so that they are aware about your reports with you and I mention the leadership opportunities earlier you could by inviting a jerk reports to leave features or meetings and updates not only does this build their leadership skills and also contributes to the film's ownership which makes them very highly engaged and this morale invisibility all funnel into growth and the way you can even enhance the growth further is understand your employees career aspirations talk to them about this in one-on-ones and then when you can align project demands with matching tasks making sure that you can actually give them the opportunity to grow and expand their skill set and this little also none except much for success now you might be saying Michele that's a lot of information all I want stuff about the price you have to pay to have highly

effective teams and I'm gonna distill listen to a couple of key categories for you so the key strategy here for you to ultimately maintain are one you're going to cultivate the productivity autonomy and leadership skills within your team as well as open up access and channels for open communications so people can give you feedback and you can deliver feedback next you're going to advocate for your team's visibility and recognition and this is paramount to having them maintain good morale as well as engagement and follow-up that application with growth opportunities for the assignments and role so they can become those leaders I mentioned earlier next you're going to reflect on the team feedback and performance that you're observing and use this to refine your process even more because let's face it the process doesn't start off perfect from the get-go our process might need tweaking for your situation so we're finding as you need and finally you're going to engage both your direct reports

and your key stakeholders with these strategies as well as maintaining consistent effort because you can't just do this once and then call it done it's an ongoing effort you need to keep maintaining this and ultimately you might have noticed I like acronyms so this spells out care this is going to help you take care of your team so they can be successful and you can help maintain that excellence and with that my name is michelle de rosario my personal sophomore here at Zynga and thank you for listening talk if happy to take any questions we have I'm back to Michelle that was brilliant I'm going to give you a round of applause as I have everyone else like I've been saying I'm sure everyone would if they could but we can't hear them so yeah but it's always nice to have some feedback but yeah I thought that was that was excellent I think it definitely as you say shows how to get the most that you out of your team whether you're growing or whether you have that that bigger team now but I think right now it's obviously more important than ever as we move you know for oh there you go we've got some

clapping in the chat but it's just I think it's important now when we're all working virtually and as I want to say to everyone before I ask my inevitable question because I've always got questions if you do have a question pop it in the Q&A you'll see that tab below and I will get to it and ask Michelle any of your questions but one thing I wanted to ask while I've got you is you know obviously things are changing at the moment you know with everything that's happening around the world do you find if you found that the teams have taken a lot of time to adapt has it been a big adaption for you and maintaining that team morale or has it been somewhat seamless so great question it's been a little bit of everything so mostly seamless because as I mentioned earlier we've been operating in this kind of distributed manner for quite a number of years now I will say the biggest challenges is while we may know

operationally how to handle ourselves that work environment part is really critical from before because I'll say here I have a little dog at home and she's my pride and joy and oh my gosh does she want so much attention and I was not used to that even though I've brought her into the office a couple of times it's a different environment for her to be like oh you're home on time let's play so I imagine people have this with their pets as well as their children too right they want attention so managing that and I mentioned this earlier which is you really want to make sure that you can dedicate time to your family as well as to your work and as long as you can signal when you're going to be out or they make that time for your family because you don't want either one to suffer it really is critical to have good work-life balance people more so when you're in this virtual environment yeah yeah I mean I think that's that's totally right as well you know it's even even now as I sit here and as I'm sure we also hear I'm sure many of us will have other distractions going on around the house and it's about you know

getting that blend of attention in different areas we have had a question from one of our attendees remain in Anonymous which is totally fine and you know that's that's the beauty of this but a good question I think is like so how would you Michelle advise broaching the topic of crunch and burnout to an unsympathetic boss thank you for this question first of all so how would I approach this topic of burnout with an unsympathetic boss I wonder do you have anywhere else in the team who is on the same level as this boss who is sympathetic to your plight and you can talk to that person because as I mentioned earlier you want to have some advocacy and if you feel like one person can't be that advocate for you try to find someone else who can either one convince that person or be an advocate for you because it the more people are advocating for this the reality is that it'll give even more different viewpoints for this boss of yours to hopefully you know consider a little more deeply and think about what they could do I would also say when you broach this topic make sure you you are

very clear like I said with a feedback about what is the situation what are you even noticing use the facts like hey boss we've been working 12 plus hours and we're not getting sleep that's just facts right hopefully you're not doing that but if you are like be real about it right and then you also want to make sure that you try to defy some solutions like hey we're working really long hours can we split up the day somehow can I have some time to do this other thing and this will make it easier because when you just come with problems all all the time to the boss well that's great you're giving your feedback it makes it very difficult for the boss to figure out well how can I solve this because they might give a solution that they think is suitable but it may be completely unsuitable for you so if you can give a suitable like answer that you would be looking for that helps them narrow down okay well maybe I can't give all this but now that I have an understanding of what they're looking for what about this solution and it really is just that collaboration I try to get the ground that you both will stand on so it's a but yeah it's it's about

collaboration but I but you know I think from what I take from you it's also about as hard as it may seem taking the emotion out of it and keeping it directly to the facts and you know yeah keeping that professionalism to it nonetheless right and again keeping the collaboration of trying to figure out solutions right you're both trying to work to a solution together you can't just dump it on someone and be like oh I hope they solve it the way I want they don't know what you want yeah yeah that's good it's yeah we're not looking for problems we're looking for solutions so I think yeah that's that's great and we've had a few more questions come in now and another well I'll get to where Neil's question first because I can personally help with some of that Neil asks is the PowerPoint available for share now I'll let Michelle answer as to whether she has it for share but one thing I will say which I'm sure is something that you know it relies well it certainly does attribute to every single speaker is will obviously all of these talks will be going up online within the next coming days and as part of that you know the slideshow that was

shared as part of the screen will you know I think is part of the available videos so I think that that hopefully answers that even if there is no additional sharing so we're yeah yeah I don't see you anywhere she was sharing but happy to follow up with you just offline in case yeah so they go Neil you've got Michelle's contact details right there as I can see so yeah feel free to ask but we'll obviously have these four available very soon as well including everything else from part one this morning and all of our other tracks so one of our anonymous attendees asked can you give some more information about the 70 plus team working on the new match three game which titles etc now I'm sure a lot of that will be under some kind of NDA and everything but you know let me show us answer I am super excited to talk about it I'm not at liberty to share too much more detail the most I can say and I know it's not super satisfying but you know keep your eyes out like we have some exciting news

coming soon so I'm sure you'll know when it comes out very soon so there's a little Keys there and you know it's good to know that everything is still moving forward I suppose despite everything else that we see in the world so that's that's really exciting so yeah keep your eyes ears and everything else peeled anonymous attendee and Arjun has also asked there are some members in each team who are well our John's put too lazy to send out regular updates on slack any advice I suppose that can also be attributed maybe to some people who aren't as tech savvy as some of the members of the team I mean as opposed to you know if I'm not being too much at liberty is I suppose it's how do you work with those members who maybe aren't giving as much feedback as you might like so that is a great question and not knowing the full situation that you're describing margin I would say you want to make sure that one you if you haven't

already reached out to them and talked to them like hey is you know can you tell me about your updates while you give these kind of what days like this and really just specify like what it is you're hoping to get out of them like I really appreciate if you would spend more time to write about what you're working on what blockers you have and whatever you're looking for from them right and if if to your point about cocoa lazy they're just not doing it maybe they don't see it as a high priority and so reinforce I was like this is really high priority for us to understand how we can help you like making sure it's like it's not just like give us information because we're just like like you know micromanaging you it's also because it's helping the team somehow and when people understand that it helps in a bigger picture I think they're more likely big oh okay cool yeah I hope that doesn't sound bad yeah there we go oh I should remark some of these as answered so next question from an anonymous another anonymous attendee or maybe it's the same anonymous attendee is there this will they say hi

Michelle thank you for your presentation sir and then also one question regarding the work everyone is doing do you track hours Becky are you monitoring hours so we don't monitor them like you know hardcore like oh my gosh got to you know put every little hour clock in clock out we we do use JIRA we actually use hands off pre you see where we would say hey we asked me it's gonna take like you know week to do this thing and then you check in this is where the milestones comes into play after people give their estimates you set those milestone day so you can actually check what's going on and this helps not only keep people accountable but also again give more information about what's going on like the communication so that's what's worked for us where we we ask for your estimates and then we're not going to micromanage every little hour of your day but we are just going to see like you committed to having this done by some timeframe let's go check out that time frame and we're understanding that some things take a little longer something emerges that you didn't anticipate or didn't account for and that's really fine as long as you can

you know reassess that and reevaluate it's gonna take another like you know five hours or something and then just go do it do your best to get it in so I suppose is yeah it's more about having targets rather than literally micromanaging every moment of someone's existence I suppose that pertains to what you're saying about work culture you know I'm sure I mean having been in some of those environments in the past it doesn't do much for work morale when every single minute is being monitored but you know of course you want to make sure that people are delivering on the targets and the work that's been assigned to them right and in some times if they can't deliver like if it's like hey I thought this thing was gonna just be okay for me maybe sometimes if we have capacity we'll try to get someone else to help them - right yes yeah any other day we all and make really good games so it's just a team effort yeah totally and we've had another question which is how do you decide the number of people in different teams is there any you know where anything you can share on on that um I guess could I get a little bit more

of a follow-up like what is this question asking more about so I will allow them to post a little bit more in maybe into the chat but yeah what I have is how do you decide the number of people in the different team so if it was me asking that question I suppose I would be wondering you know do you work on a certain team working on something is always a certain size or do you shift depending on the priorities depending on how much work needs to go into certain areas you know do you have people who are like floating between departments I suppose ah okay in in that case so part of it is kind of obviously gated by our headcount like what are we able to assign for how many Ed's we can have the next part is maybe we get people as long as right they gave me some for the central tech integration will loan out or will receive a loan from another team for a month or so and then we go back right and the great news is like we can still

interact with that person if we need to get follow-up but hopefully they just help speed up the process on that one integration then we can move forward right I don't think we really have a specific like on terms of we can only have this many people but when we do expand it's because we have a idea I would say a really well-defined plan about what needs to be done and how much hours or how many how much effort and people are involved to make it work and that's how we can help open and close head counts as needed fantastic yeah I think that that really helps what I think that gets us through all of our Q&A s and quite nicely brings is a set time so thank you so much Michelle for coming and being a part of it I really hope you enjoyed being a part of this digital experience for our first pocket game and connects digital yeah I'm happy to be here thanks again for having me and thank you everyone for taking the time to come listen I'm really glad to be here and I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference