Can asynchronous UX teams deliver in the ‘hybrid’ world?
It’s the start of Q2 and 13 months since we switched to full remote, asynchronous working. In that time, the Cyber-Duck team has grown by 40 people — that’s two thirds — revenue’s up by more than half and profit is up by 65% against last year.
Note: This article was originally publised on LinkedIn — April 2021
I am proud that we have been recognised as a UK top 25 Elite Digital Agency by the Drum and accredited by Best Companies as a great place to work.
Exactly a year ago I wrote about how we can say ‘f*** off to COVID and build stability and growth’ this is exactly what happened and I am so, so proud of our team.
However despite the growth, it is not the primary reason we wake up in the morning. At Cyber-Duck, we’re always fighting for a more usable and accessible web, powered by technological innovation. And we’re committed to a diverse and thriving culture (see our Mother Language video below) that also gives back to our communities. I believe it’s these factors that have helped us win clients like the European Central Bank, Compare the Market and Sport England.
As I look back over the past year, so much has happened since the pandemic began. More than 50% of British adults have had their first vaccine. Joe Biden got elected and his presidency is hitting its stride. Bars and restaurants are opening in the UK today. The future is definitely looking brighter. But as normality returns, what changes will we keep? How many digital folk will return to our offices? And what learnings can we take from the time we’ve spent working apart?
Before we can explore that, let’s take a quick look at the changes we had to make.
We threw away the manual
No one could have predicted the pandemic. It was truly a black swan event — the kind you can only see in the rear-view mirror.
So when the pandemic hit, we tore up the rules and adapted. With no books or thought leaders to guide us, we had to rely on our experience and our guts and focus on what we could control. As Epictetus said, “The more we value things outside of our control, the less control we have.” I summarised the 6 things we’ve learnt about WFH in Dec 2020.
We redefined what ‘open’ is
During the pandemic, we understood the nervousness of both our clients and our team. Clients were concerned about their businesses and how they could work, both internally and with key partners like Cyber-Duck. Our team were anxious about their own situations and how we would collaborate.
We had no idea how long the pandemic would last, so we created new workflows and communication loops to reassure the team about the agency’s stability. Here’s what worked:
- We amplified transparency — We’ve always been open and honest with the team, with two monthly meetings to discuss business pressure points and financial matters. We immediately doubled that to four meetings a month where we went into far more detail. We created a weekly meeting that covered profitability, our sales pipeline, enquiry level and hiring as well as the normal project updates. Now the team are familiar with senior management decision-making. We’re going to keep doing this regardless.
- We created virtual social spaces — Without a water cooler, we had to create spaces to keep everyone in touch, like weekly virtual pub sessions, quizzes and a virtual Christmas party. We also have a cultural segment in our weekly company meeting where one of the team rounds up our favourite movies and films. Socials are important. But so are our communities. In our weekly meeting, we also set aside time to discuss key political and social issues such as Black Lives Matter and women’s safety. We highlight how we’re giving back to the community through mentoring and hackathons.
- We reinvented client communication — Even through a pandemic, as Mark McCormack said, you know that if you’re not speaking to your customer, someone else is. So we had to reinvent how we communicated with our clients. ‘Every hand you cannot shake must be a Zoom call that you make!’ became a new mantra. As we were winning new clients, hiring new account managers and welcoming new client staff, we needed to onboard clients to our process, our way of working and explain to them how our tools work. This isn’t easy. So we invested more time in communications. We ran lunch-and-learns with clients and used onboarding checklists and training manuals to ensure that clients’ time is maximised and managed. And we introduced them to advanced collaboration and project management tools like Miro and ClickUp, to give them transparency and insight into their projects.
We listened
As the pandemic hit, we watched and listened. We saw how the virus was spreading, so we closed our offices three weeks before lockdown. We heard from our clients, who knew that digital was going to be more crucial than ever for them. We saw shops close down, schools shut their doors and transport grind to a halt.
We also listened to our team — and we’ve kept listening. As the pandemic developed, it became clear that our new ways of working were becoming a ‘new normal’ and that work won’t completely return to how it used to be.
- We looked at technology — We noticed key behaviour changes as everyone jumped on Zoom and Teams, and began video-chatting with their families and friends. People turned to digital to spread knowledge and connect. Much of this is now here to stay.
- We put people first — The health and wellbeing of our team and clients was paramount. Managers took time to check in with their teams. We offered extra support whenever it was needed. And we enjoyed seeing each other’s home lives as our children and furry friends disrupted our Zoom calls.
- We kept learning — As education shifted online, we switched from events to webinars, learning and sharing knowledge with clients and our community, such as how to run remote ethnographic research. We monitored our tools and process to check they worked well for our remote team and we adapted where necessary.
- We surveyed our team — As we move beyond the pandemic, we asked our team how they’d like to work. The results were clear, if not surprising: working from home has given people more focus and better work/life balance. We want to keep that. At Cyber-Duck, we’re investing in our offices, but the spaces will have to change to support more collaboration and fewer desks. We’ll also need better sound insulation — we’ll all be remote-first, so we’ll all still be on Zoom.
- We’re planning a hybrid return — Based on the survey, 42% of our team want to work mostly from home going forward, 32% favour hybrid working and only 6% want to be mainly office-based. Half the people who’d like to be based remotely would like to work from the office a couple of times a month, while most of the hybrid or office-based staff want to come in one or two days a week. So there’s some logistical planning to do. All our meetings will need to be remote-first. Our team feels more productive working from home, but values on-site team building and wider meetings. And the team wants flexibility, while recognising that communication is vital.
We adapted our workflows
Over the past year, we’ve had to juggle work and home commitments, with some of us having up to 20 Zoom meetings a day. Beyond the Zoom meetings there are countless of other distractions from emails, to Slack to WhatsApp messages. That’s not sustainable. So now we’re asking, is asynchronous the future of digital production? It could be. And here’s what else we’ll be doing:
Asynchronous workflows: The answer to Zoom fatigue
“You’re on mute!” We’re all wrestling with Zoom fatigue and video conference burnout. What if we changed how we work? Asynchronous workflows mean shifting communication from meetings — where everyone has to be there at the same time — to documenting actions or conversations through wikis or Slack. And if you use tools like these smartly — not too many of them, but with plenty of channels — they can free your team to meet their other commitments, too. As Google’s Diane Chaleff wrote, “I have colleagues who sign on early in the morning for calls and plug into their workstreams, but then sign off for an hour or two to take a walk or make lunch for their kids, before signing back on in the afternoon.”
Win ‘through the calendar’
If there are situations where knowledge is missing, we use the Office365 calendar scheduler to block people’s time and run a quick stand-up meeting with a colleague (normally 20 mins max). We ‘delineate’ calendar blocks as either ‘solo’ or reserved time to work on tasks (these are normally 1 hour plus) with no distractions or ‘agenda’ driven slots with multiple people and directly responsible individual (DRI) who prepares for and drives the meeting, sending out a document in advance within the calendar invite. Using calendars to schedule people’s time is better than managing to do lists. According to Nir Eyal and his new book ‘Indistractable‘ the calendar is the new to-do-list. Eyal says: “Instead of running your life with a to-do list need to run your life with a calendar,” In the book Eyal talks about ‘timeboxing’ or specifying how much time you need to work on a task in advance based on your own estimation
Build a knowledge base
We absolutely love Notion which is a fantastic wiki system. When you’re not sat next to your colleagues, it’s harder to ask for help — and those interruptions can be distracting. So we’ve created a wiki on Notion to serve as a knowledge base. It captures all our key processes, documents and templates, with built-in planning calendars, Kanban boards and more. We even use it as a way to build account plans and serve as knowledge base for projects linking to other project management tools we use like ClickUp. On top of that we use Notion to support our CRM system by putting in lead generation plans. This does not replace Pipedrive which is what we use for customer relationship management but helps to draw out plans with other partners around mutual lead generation. Our use of Notion is very broad! We even use it to manage the business plan combined with a Slack integration. Our directors get real-time updates on when objectives are dealt with and tackled. Brad Frost, the author of Atomic Design, and one of the worlds top Web Develop said that is ‘slowly falling in love with Notion’ and uses to manage his personal life and even meal plan. In short, it is a great way to manage your business and develop a asynchronous culture!
Hire a new type of manager
Productivity and distractions is not the only challenge that we have during the pandemic. According to a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article last summer, 42% of global employees experienced a decline in their mental health during the pandemic. The new workflows, new types of communication and new challenges require different management styles to what existed before the pandemic. At Cyber-Duck, we’re investing in a new kind of manager who is not only productivity focused but also orientated towards having daily conversations with their team about how they are feeling. In our post-COVID world, they will be software natives who can master modern tools for productive communication and interaction. They have fast learning curves, outstanding soft skills, strong process and deeper technical acumen: all critical for managing remote, hybrid teams spread across multiple timezones. But most importantly our managers are focused on the team well-being, checking-in daily and seeing what the team needs. The new type of manager will also be aware of all the points we are raising in this article from Zoom fatigue, to utilising Wikis all the way to ensuring their team are not over-burdened with Zoom meetings.
Get moving
And finally, advice from one of our clients, Sport England: Find time in your workflow to get moving. We used to commute, stroll around the office or stand up at our stand-ups. Now it’s just a few steps to our home office setup, and it’s too easy to become desk-bound. Whether it’s stretching at your desk, playing football with the kids at lunchtime or taking a walk around the block for a breath of fresh air, every step you take gets your circulation going and boosts your energy. If you think that walking meetings are unproductive — think again. According to Wired Magazine article about walking meetings Steve Jobs regularly had walking meetings, Zuckerberg makes acquisitions on hikes and Twitter’s Jack Dorseystart his meetings by walking to a coffee shop! By classifying your meetings into tiers e.g a ‘data driven meeting’ versus a ‘decision making meeting’ it is possible for teams to plan in advance if the meeting can be on the ‘go’ and audio only or a meeting that literally requires people to sit down in front of screens. With a bit of meeting creativity, planning and asynchronous knowledge planning we can all redefine the right balance of moving and productivity. One tip around trying to build in moving meetings is to spend time on Sunday evening or very early on Monday before office hours to plan your week so you can read the data before a meeting (by building time in the calendar) and then “meet on the go”.
Conclusion
As our return to the office approaches, I’m feeling positive: the business is bigger and stronger, and I can’t wait to welcome our team and our clients back to the building. But most of all, we’ve come through this together and we’ve learnt so much along the way. So here’s to hybrid working, asynchronous collaboration and a brighter, post-pandemic future. Just make sure you bring your noise-cancelling headphones for all those Zoom calls.
