remote work

In his first emails to Twitter staff, Musk talks about ending remote work and battling verified spam • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in elon buys twitter, Elon Musk, remote work, Social, TwitterNo Comments

More than 10 days after taking over Twitter, Elon Musk addressed the company’s employees for the first time in a series of emails. He talked about ending remote work and making the fight against spam a priority. According to a report from Bloomberg, the new CEO asked workers to be ready for “difficult times ahead.” At the same time, he asked them to mandatorily work from the office unless an employee received a personal exemption. The report also said that the employees will have to put in at least 40 hours per week working from the office and these policies are effective immediately. This is not really surprising as, during a Q&A with Twitter staff in June, Musk said only “exceptional” employees would be able to work remotely. Around the same time, he ended the remote work policy for Tesla employees and asked them to spend at least 40 hours a week in the office. During the first few days after taking control of Twitter, Musk fired top executives, tweeted about introducing new verification and subscription plans, and laid off half of the staff. But he just got time to address the remaining employees. All this while, the staff was living in uncertainty about the direction of the company and how their roles would change. The billionaire has set aggressive product deadlines after promising to bring a ton of features through a bunch of tweets. Now deleted tweets from employees suggested that they had to sleep at the office to meet some of these new product deadlines. Earlier this month, Musk also eliminated company-wide rest days that were introduced during the pandemic. In 2020, Twitter was one of the first companies to allow employees to work remotely forever. The Bloomberg report also noted that, in a separate email, Musk asked Twitter staff to make it a priority to battle verified spam, bots and impersonation. After he announced the plans to introduce new verification through a paid program, a bunch of legacy verified accounts changed their profile to imitate Musk. In response, he said that any verified account indulging in impersonation will be banned. On Thursday, the social network debuted its new Twitter Blue program for $8 a month allowing people to buy out verified check marks. Soon after the roll-out, a bunch of accounts started impersonating brands, athletes and officials across the world. In the terms of the new subscription plan, Twitter has specified that new accounts can’t sign up for this offering yet. The company has taken this step to possibly reduce spam. It is also preventing existing verified accounts from changing their display names. “Twitter Blue subscribers will be unable to change their display name after receiving a blue checkmark. We will be implementing a new process soon for any display name changes,” the terms read. So overall, the company has had a messy start to the Musk era with an extremely rough rollout to an ambitious subscription program.

3 tips for managing a remote engineering team • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Column, EC Column, EC Future of Work, EC How To, remote work, remote working, StartupsNo Comments

Kuan Wei (Greg) Soh is a technology entrepreneur and angel investor who enjoys building world-class technology teams. Previously, he worked in financial services, the hedge fund industry and at high-growth startups. Remote work is not for every business and it may not be everyone’s cup of tea. When my co-founder and I decided to build a distributed engineering team for our startup, numerous questions raced through our minds: Will they be productive? How will decisions be made? How do we keep the culture alive? Today, we manage a remote team of about a dozen engineers, and we’ve learned quite a bit along the way. Here are some tips we hope you find effective. These are probably applicable to earlier-stage startups and less so for larger organizations. Pair programming In an office setting, employees have ample opportunities to interact with colleagues, and these conversations organically create a sense of authenticity. But in a remote work setting, there is no such privilege. Some of our founder friends have used services to monitor or micromanage their employees during work hours, but we feel this is unproductive and antithetical to building a positive culture. The introduction of pair programming, an agile software development technique where two engineers simultaneously work on the same issue, fosters collaboration and creates opportunities for developers to have conversations as they would in an office pantry. We try to pair two programmers for a sustained period of time (about 10 weeks) before considering a rotation or switch. Some may argue that pair programming is a waste of time on the basis that if each individual can produce X output, then it makes sense to produce twice that output by having each of them work on separate problems. We find this view limiting. Firstly, pair programming results in higher quality, since two brains are generally better than one. When engineering systems are incredibly complex, having a thoughtful “sanity checker” is almost always a good idea, as this prevents mediocre decisions and helps thwart downstream problems, which can be time-consuming to resolve in the future. In my experience, it also leads to faster problem resolutions. To elucidate this point, if problems can be solved in half the time, then in the same time frame, the output of two programmers working as a pair will still be 2x.

Former Yext CEO launches Roam to provide a virtual HQ for distributed teams • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in Enterprise, funding, IVP, remote work, Roam, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Roam, which bills itself as a “cloud HQ” for distributed, remote companies, today emerged from stealth with $30 million in Series A funding led by IVP with participation from undisclosed angel investors. The tranche, which comes after a previously unannounced $10.6 million seed round and values the company at $95 million post-money, will be put toward go-to-market efforts in the U.S. and abroad, CEO Howard Lerman said. Lerman previously co-founded and led Yext, the publicly traded brand management company that uses a cloud-based network of apps and search engines to keep company information up to date across the web. When Yext’s workforce transitioned to remote work during the pandemic, Lerman perceived that employees lost “spontaneity and serendipity,” spent more time in meetings and began to lose visibility into what other meetings were going on and what their colleagues were doing. “I had this flash of insight — what if there was a bird’s-eye view of all the Zooms going on at a company at the same time that everyone could see? And better yet, what if people could move between and among them so they could participate as necessary and then quickly be on to their next thing?” Lerman told ZebethMedia via email. To Lerman’s point, shifts to a mostly remote workforce don’t occur overnight. One survey suggests that nearly half of employees — 46% — find remote work, at least in the early stages, can make it more difficult to maintain professional relationships with key stakeholders. That inspired Roam, which provides what Lerman describes as cloud-based “flex spaces” for workers at home, in offices and in the field. Roam’s Map View lets workers see what’s going on and have “project presence,” Lerman says, as well as chat with colleagues via text or video chat. Lerman didn’t reveal much beyond that — it’s early days for Roam, which currently has around 40 corporate customers. But he argued that the platform as it exists today can save substantial time compared to typical remote setups. Image Credits: Roam “I found my own personal meeting minutes dropped by more than 40% when I switched from Zoom to Roam from 4.5 hours per day to 2.6 hours per day. My average meeting time in Roam is eight minutes, an astounding number when you think about the prescheduled world of 30- and 60-minute Zoom time blocks,” Lerman said. Shorter and fewer meetings can lead to cost savings through improved productivity. One recent study out of the University of North Carolina found that unnecessary meetings waste about $25,000 per employee annually, translating to $101 million a year for any organization with over 5,000 staffers. Roam isn’t the first startup to attempt to tackle challenges around remote work with a cloud-based workspace. In fact, there are dozens of virtual HQ platforms, some venture-backed and some bootstrapped, mixing gamification and productivity into a service. In August, Kumospace raised $21 million for its platform that leverages lo-fi graphics and game-like mechanics to create a sense of togetherness. Gather is another big winner (despite layoffs) in the space, having raised $77 million in total from investors, including Sequoia, Index and Y Combinator. It’s not just startups. This summer, Microsoft launched Viva Engage, an in-house social media app for employee engagement. Other companies are piloting VR and apps such as Oculus for Business or Horizon Workrooms, aiming to boost collaboration with immersive meetings for remote workers. But Lerman believes strongly that Roam is differentiated, having invested the entirety of the seed round himself. He points out that as many as 77% of U.S.-based jobs are now either remote or hybrid, according to a March 2022 Gallup poll, representing a huge potential customer base. Indeed, after more than two years of remote work, many employees have no interest in returning to the office. Not all businesses are behind the changes, but there’s no denying that the pandemic rewrote the rules around the workplace — to the benefit of startups like Roam, potentially. “We are in the midst of a massive platform shift from in-office workplaces to various remote and hybrid models. In pre-pandemic 2019, [only] 40% of US jobs were either remote or hybrid,” Lerman said. “The pandemic has significantly accelerated the rate of distributed businesses and the need for a cloud HQ. No matter the size or how well they are faring, the future of work is a top issue for nearly every company right now.” Roam has 15 employees and plans to hire five more by the end of the year. Lerman declined to reveal financials, including revenue figures, when asked.

How to effectively manage a remote team during wartime • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 31, 2022Posted in Column, EC Column, EC Europe, remote work, russia-ukraine war, Startups, Ukraine startupsNo Comments

Alex Fedorov is CEO and founder at OBRIO, an IT company with Ukrainian roots that develops products in mobile applications, web products and SaaS. Business owners always say that each company has to live through a real crisis before it becomes a real business. All big companies we know have experienced a few big crises during their lifetimes, and they are still in the game. There are a lot of studies about crisis management on the web, but none of them tell us how to manage a company during times of war. Our company had never seen a real crisis before February 2022. However, even before we did, I always told my team: “Every company has its time in the sun and a time of crisis.” When the Russo-Ukrainian War began on February 24, all Ukrainian businesses faced a crisis. I’ll use our example to explain how we dealt with it. Here are six tips for effectively managing a team during a war. Establish an emergency communication channel In such times of upheaval, people will require a lot of up-to-date information about what is happening. When people don’t know what’s happening, there arises a vacuum that can be filled with rumors or distorted news. To avoid this, you must establish a special communication channel that’s active around the clock. Slack notifications, for example, can be automatically turned off outside of working hours, so make sure you utilize a channel that your team uses most often so they are less likely to miss important notifications. This might seem like an easy and pretty obvious step, but it is the most efficient way to help your team when they’re feeling lost or disoriented, which is only natural when there’s a war raging around them. Communicate with your team twice as often Training to manage stress, anxiety and personal finance will help your employees build the needed knowledge and respond to tough situations. Great leaders communicate with their people, and we must all remember that “overcommunication is good communication.” For us, this saying has never been more correct. Communicate as frequently as there are updates on the issue but not less than twice a day. Additionally, follow your usual rules for team communication: Be honest, empathetic and humane. Finally, when there’s a serious crisis, most people’s critical thinking faculties can be hindered. In such situations, you may have to over-explain things to your team more than usual. Do not shirk this responsibility. If your team needs its hand held, be there to hold it. It’ll pay off in the long term and help you stay in control from the early days of the crisis until things calm down. Stop investing in R&D and get people back to work ASAP As a leader, you must save your business, as it is something people rely on in times of uncertainty. The first thing to do here is to save as much cash as you can in order to stay in business as long as you can. That often means cutting back on non-essential spending. This can be a tough decision, but it is a sacrifice you may have to make. After our team was in safe locations, the best way forward was to get them back to work and help them calm down. It sounds strange, but this is the best way to direct the anxieties and nervous energy of war. At work, where everything is known, prescribed and straightforward, people find calmness and a continued sense of purpose. In my experience, the first wave of crisis is the most difficult because of the high levels of uncertainty. However, once you get over that phase, there will be fewer variables, which is when you return to investing activities if they are still feasible. Use your standard remote-work policy When the war broke out, it was very difficult to manage the team and reestablish our business processes. So we waited to do it after our team was evacuated and relocated safely. Proven remote policies were a lifesaver when our employees were not in their usual environments. Nobody discounts the value of team spirit, so invest in it more since people will need each other’s support at a much greater degree during times of great strife. Among online team building activities, AR activities proved to be an amazing mood enhancer. Conduct special training to support your team Crises, thankfully, are rare, but that also means people often do not have enough knowledge to handle the loads of unusual information they’re bombarded with in such situations. In such situations, you should: Educate people by conducting special training with the help of experts. Training to manage stress, anxiety and personal finance will help your employees build the needed knowledge and respond to tough situations. The Ukrainian Center for Strategic Communications has created a guide titled “Psychological support during the war,” explaining how to spot and assist with mental health problems. Invite successful and respected people to share positive thoughts on the situation and perhaps explain how they’ve faced especially tough times. Authority bias is real and it works as a morale booster when a team needs direction and a sense that things will turn out to be fine. Share relevant positive news to cheer up your team and create a vision of a better future. Tie business goals to social initiatives When war broke out, people wanted to help. This was good, but we realized it can affect focus on work and could eventually lead the business to an even more profound crisis. In such times, put your over-explanation tool from Step 1 to work and educate people on how your company’s success benefits society. As a result of what your team accomplishes at work, your company can invest more resources in charity initiatives when growth or profitability is maintained or improved. As a consequence, your team can do more and have more resources to do something significant for society. This should have no effect on your existing

Remote work is here to stay. Here’s how to manage your staff from afar • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 30, 2022Posted in EC Future of Work, EC TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, Enterprise, mural, remote work, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, workboardNo Comments

Over the last two and a half years, remote and hybrid working has become the norm — a majority of employed Americans have the option of working from home for all or part of the week, and 87% of workers who were offered remote work embraced the opportunity heartily. While some companies are pushing for a return to the office, today’s strapped labor market is giving employees more power to push back for remote, or at least flexible, jobs. This isn’t just a pandemic response anymore — it’s a way of life, and it has the potential to make some businesses better. People who work from home have been reporting an uptick in their productivity levels without the distractions that come with an office — Oh, it’s Beth’s birthday. Cupcakes in the kitchen! But both employers and employees have reported some downsides to remote work. Isolation can make people feel lonely and disconnected, leading to mental health issues. Learning and collaboration have taken a hit without the human element of being in the same room. And it can be difficult to create and maintain a company culture remotely. Luckily, some seriously smart people have thought hard about how to address these challenges and make it work. We put a few of them onstage last week at ZebethMedia Disrupt, and while you can watch the whole video, here are some of their best insights. Be hyper-intentional when coming together IRL Two and a half years into the pandemic, people are “actually clamoring to spend more time together,” said Adriana Roche, chief people officer at Mural, during a panel discussion at Disrupt. Ironically, one of the main solutions to the woes of remote work is finding ways to bring staff together IRL. That might mean a couple of times per week in the office if everyone lives in the same city, but if the team is fully remote, companies have to be more intentional with how they plan monthly or quarterly off-sites.

How to raise funds when you aren’t in the Bay Area • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in EC TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, EC venture capital, fundraising, remote work, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, VentureNo Comments

Perhaps sitting perched somewhere in sunny Miami, Florida, is a founder wondering the best ways to fundraise for a company when situated outside a traditional tech hub like the Bay Area. They need not worry. Last week, Mike Asem from M25, Elizabeth Yin of Hustle Fund and Accel’s Rich Wong answered that question at ZebethMedia Disrupt. The consensus of the venture capitalists was that remote work accelerated the trend of VCs looking at emerging markets, founders and companies throughout the nation. That and social media — specifically Twitter — have made it easier to connect with people. To some, sliding into an investor’s DMs can be just as legitimate as diving into one’s network for a warm intro. “We noticed a couple of years ago, in looking at our own analytics, that most of our deals were coming through Twitter,” Yin said at Disrupt. “If I look at my portfolio, my companies who are active on Twitter actually do have an easier time raising money because investors feel like they know them.”