Communication Is FAILING Your Development Team

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what is up I'm just leaving the office it's 6 o00 Monday December 23rd and it's holidays we did it we made it for now um I got a topic from Reddit which I thought was an interesting one I did a brief scan through the comments but I was just walking from the door of the office to the car so um I didn't have a chance to read through too much I just wanted to get an idea what people were talking about but the topic is around um I said managers what is and what I think it was like what is and what isn't working well with communication in your team maybe it wasn't even what is working well but I figured that might be kind of interesting to talk through um maybe look at a few different angles on this in terms of like from

what I was seeing in the comments there was a little bit of talk around like Pro processes and stuff like that the teams are doing so I think that'd be kind of interesting to to chat through um maybe I'll do a bit of a comparison to what I've seen before what I see now kind of thing um and I don't like as I'm kind of thinking through this trying to do a bit of a mental jog here like I don't think I have anything that I'm like ranty about in this regard um so it's not going to be like me yelling about stuff that I'm unhappy about but I think there's I think there's you know there's always room for improvements uh I can certainly say that things in the past were never perfect but you know maybe some things that I thought worked really

well versus now and maybe the other way too so chat through that but I want to look at different aspects especially because um remote work and I wanted to talk about some remote work pieces because I think that probably for most people that are listening and watching that's pretty relevant and um I know the the question on Reddit it's not being held up in front of you or anything but this was like Hey managers talk about this um so I am a manager I will talk about this but I don't want to frame this in a way that's only useful or you know relevant for managers like if you're a software engineer I you know I'm hoping that this discussion is like feels relevant so with that said before I start blabbing even more just a reminder that uh if you want your questions answered

leave them in the comments if you want to keep them Anonymous and add more detail just look for Dev leader on social media that's my primary uh sort of uh personal brand that I use um and then I am kind of rushing home because I have a live stream at 7:00 it is a Monday and it's 700 p.m. Pacific on my main YouTube channel which is Dev leader I do a live stream and it's like an AMA format uh I always have a a canned topic which is from my my most recent newsletter article which is at weekly. deev leer.com read that for free if you're interested now let's talk about communication so I think I wanted to start off with some remote stuff there was another um Reddit thread I saw that was like it's going to seem like it's completely irrelevant to this

but they said hey for uh for remote teams like how do you make people feel included if you're bringing in Donuts right kind of interesting because you want to be able to be inclusive with people in the office and do things and celebrate things together bringing in treats is kind of cool but when you have remote people it can't really do the same thing unless you're sending them Donuts right so um the reason I thought this was kind of an interesting thing and we're not going to focus specifically on that is just like there's different ways that we communicate and do things when we're in person versus being remote and um the reason I thought that was interesting was like if you're if you're very used to one even mode of communication let's say right how you talk to people at the office how you're

relaying information status updates whatever it happens to be if you're not thinking about the fact that different people communicate things different ways have different um you know preferred modes of communication whether that's chat email calls whatever um the fact that if you're meeting in person in a meeting room you have different Dynamics mix then if you have uh people that are just on a call and when you mix those things those look different so what I just wanted to do is take a moment to kind of highlight that right it might be very obvious to some people perhaps and I think maybe with so much more remote work these days maybe that is significantly more obvious which is great um but I do think that there's still like a lot of room for opportunity um in especially in situations where you have like you know

a a core group of people right and it doesn't necessarily have to be at the headquarters but if you have a group of people that are able to physically be in the same room on a meeting and then you have remote employees I do think it's really important you find ways to ensure that remote employees are included because especially before um all the lockdown stuff and the remote work uh um come on man you got to move over too no he taking his time um before that like when I was working at Magnet forensics we had uh a remote office it wasn't like it was a different time zone or anything but we had a remote office and even though they were sitting together right we were sitting together and we were the bigger office so it very often felt like like you know it

was it felt I think to them like it was easy for them to be excluded right there's side conversations in the meeting room and like um you know that's the the main group of people and now this office and this is still with the group of people in another office they start to feel excluded so I again I think with a lot more remote work this is I don't want to say it's totally gone but I think more people are aware of this because you're spending more time communicating with people that are truly remote so um I just wanted to bring that up bring it to your attention oo that sounded good um it says there's only 26 minutes to get home I don't even believe this um I got in the car and I thought I thought like I don't know like I lost

service or something because it said there was 30 minutes to get home 31 minutes to get home and I'm like that's made up like obviously the traffic data hasn't loaded but I think it's because maybe a lot of people are already on their holidays oh man definitely not driving behind that person holy crap that was not safe they basically were they switched Lanes in front of me to go over the next Lane but they cut the person off so they're driving way below the speed limit and switch lanes and cut someone off so uh I said hey we're not doing that too because by definition I was driving behind them so I had to be going their speed or slower um so anyway not doing that so with with communication one of the things again I'll move on from this in just in a in

a moment I just want to repeat it is that how you're communicating different things with your team and if you're an engineer on a team right be thinking about how is this communicated if you're if you have like local employees versus remote employees and make sure that things or that people sorry not things that people that are remote are included okay and this often might mean that you have to overc communicate things that might mean extra work it might mean sending the same type of message uh multiple times right maybe it's in your chat right so you might send it on teams and then the people that are working in your time zone are like they're totally on it they see it and then maybe you send out an email communication to the broader team that's that's more asynchronous right and then people can follow

up in different time zones like find ways to communicate effectively but make sure that remote employees or people in different geographies are included incredibly important okay um something that I thought was kind of interesting when I scanned through this question which was about you know what's what's not working well for managers and communicating with their teams is people were talking about the processes that the team have in place by the way um I feel like I go between saying processes and processes and I was told that like because I'm Canadian I was told Canadians say it one way and Americans say it another way but because I say it both ways I don't know what I say naturally more so than like one way than the other so I'm curious if if it's Americans to say process or is that Canadian or is that just

bull crap I don't know I've heard it's a thing I know a boot what's all that a boot that's Canadian right I say about I know it's not a boot but apparently about sounds funny so sorry for being Canadian but processes for teams and some of the comments were about uh the effectiveness of the processes and I thought this is kind of interesting because they were talking about communication like what are the processes or processes on a team have to do with communication and what what was being highlighted was things like retrospectives and um I mean if I if I don't Focus specifically on um the implementation right some type of mechanism to help with continuous Improvement it seemed like some people were saying like they work at larger companies and it seems like people are just going through the motions of like oh like

we're supposed to do retrospectives we're supposed to do standups or sync meetings like I'm just doing this ritual because we were told we have to do it and they're not getting the effectiveness out of it and I thought this was kind of interesting because I feel like in some situations I've observed this um for for those of you that don't know before I started working at Microsoft I worked at what was a startup That Grew into a uh I don't know medium-sized business large business certainly not big Tech um and we kind of we made all the mistakes with you know the agile processes and stuff right we we had planning meetings with like all of the engineers we were doing planning poker for the um the story points and uh and it was terrible but like we we did all these things to try

and learn about like what worked well and I've talked about this before on code commute but um there were teams that still like by the time I left because the company had grown there there's more than one team there was still some teams that did planning poker with story points and stuff and I I suppose they still found value in it I know that for the teams that I managed we absolutely moved away from that because there was Zero value in the story points there was a lot of value in discussing the work that we were planning so we could understand it have conversations about it but we we moved away from from story points and uh sort of the reason I'm bringing this up is like when people are talking about whatever processes or processes you're using for your teams if they're not effective

like change them I know it sounds ridiculous to have to say that out loud but like true like I mean it like change it like how is it being enforced like there's probably a reason you're doing some type of you know ceremonial meeting right so maybe you have a planning meeting maybe you have a retrospective maybe you have some type of standup or sync meeting there's a reason that your team is doing it it's not that the idea is just like a stupid thing that came out of nowhere there's a reason for it so like what is that reason okay let's take something like a standup so the reason probably that you're doing a standup is so that one people have awareness of what's going on in the team and two that if you're blocked or you're having troubl that people can jump in and

try to make sure that you're unblocked okay so those are two probably pretty straightforward reasons why you might be doing that you might have other reasons that's totally cool I'm just giving you an example so if you do a standup like that and let's say it's every day and basically no one ever talks so no one ever brings up when they're actually blocked on things like if the goal was to surface that stuff that meeting is not effective for you it's not doing what you intended right if people are genuinely getting stuck or getting blocked on stuff and it's not surfacing like what's going on right like why are you still doing the meeting now maybe you still want to do the meeting but you need to correct it right like if it's not serving the purpose do you adjust what the is happening in

the meeting or do you drop the meeting or do you drop the meeting and replace it with something else right like a different format or a different Cadence but and I've given I've given this feedback to like especially I found this at Microsoft um not because of Microsoft in particular but I think mostly because my teams I end up getting uh new employees and some of them I've had like very Junior employees which is great I I've always worked with some amount of my team that were that was like interns or Junior employees so certainly not a complaint but one of the side effects is that sometimes they don't feel like they have the confidence to propose ideas and they kind of speak up about things so I need to have conversations about this stuff and say hey look as the engineering manager on the

team like I have technically no problem in looking at a situation and saying well here's what I think should happen but I don't do that because I think and I mean this genuinely I think that a team needs to come up with what they want to be doing in terms of driving processes driving how effective they are because if I just mandate it it doesn't matter if it's an amazing idea it doesn't matter if it is the right thing to do because I've proven it mathematically or something I know that's a ridiculous thing to say but it doesn't matter because if the team was not part of creating that and then we start to try and have a change to go do it people will have some builtin amount of like resistance to it now I don't think that I come across to my team

members as someone that's an that's going to like try to make their life a living hell um I don't think I've ever had that kind of experience with my team members but I do like to make sure that they have a space to be able to say hey look we're doing this thing it's not effective or we are doing this thing and it's super effective we should do more of it so I need to try and create that space for people but I want to make sure it's kind of multi-art here right one I want them to feel empowered to do it two I want them to be thinking about it and three when they propose it and they can get Buy in from their team members to try it now the team is coming up with the change they want to see and that

means they will be much more bought in to trying that change out and that way I have found his historically that if it happens to be a good fit it's because it is genuinely a good fit right and it's like if something if I propose it and it fails it doesn't mean that it was a bad idea it might just mean that people are resisting change because they're like I don't understand why we're doing it I wasn't part of creating this change so all of this to say that I think that when you have processes in place for your team these are tools these are tools to help make sure that you the way that you're developing is more effective the way that your team operates is more effective if they're not helping and they're just creating more ceremonial meetings they're just taking up time

or they're causing complications they creating more work with no benefit change them and feel comfortable speaking up about these things that doesn't necessarily mean that you just say every time you have a meeting you're like oh this meeting sucks it's useless like what about it sucks what about it is useless what is your proposed idea for a change right be part of the solution so yes I have had conversations with my Engineers over the past 4 and a half years to say like I'm very open if we're doing something and you want to suggest a change like please do in fact it's literally part of uh we have we have talent guides and I'm not sure if it's across all of Microsoft but at least in Office 365 where I work there are some items in our rubric or our talent guide that talk about

more senior Engineers being able to help contribute to improving team process how do they improve on the engineering life cycle and the how the team is operating because they should have some awareness of this and be trying to drive some improvements and I think it's a huge opportunity for people and I just don't see a lot of it happening now that's what I was saying a little bit earlier is maybe some of that's newer team members maybe that's remote team members maybe that's people being very comfortable I don't know I think it could be any number of things it's something I'm trying to make sure I work on with my teams right to make sure that I I'm doing everything I can to give them that safe environment to do that that I'm proving to them like hey you can speak up about this kind

of stuff uh there situations especially on my previous team uh I was trying to do a little bit of leading by example with that where um you know if I could get someone on the team to have enough confidence to speak to me about some changes they wanted made could I say hey like that's a great idea you should bring that up in the in the retrospective like I fully support you on this so if you want to propose that and talk through it like we should we should surface it like you should you know kind of talk through your perspective on it see see if others are interested in trying it right kind of giving them that little bit of a push to say try it like let's see what happens right and then we go try something out and and if it works

great if it doesn't no problem but we should talk about it so I think that's like for me one of the things that still feels like a bit of a gap um it's so my current team it's not just my previous team I don't think it's just a Microsoft thing I think that would be kind of a ridiculous claim to try and make I don't know if it's like mostly because of remote work um I don't know you know maybe maybe it's how I'm leading teams in these environments I I honestly don't know um I do know that in sort of how I had been running teams before I had gotten the teams to a point where I feel like everyone in the team was comfortable sharing stuff like that like hey we should change like our code review process okay like what should we

be doing about this like how many people do we need to sign off should we enforce that like what should we be tagging people in chat when a review is ready to make sure that people are jumping like all these types of things for like how we're operating and working together as a team um you know I the teams that I had before and I should I should mention if it was not obvious I kind of hinted at it but like we were in office right the that's one big difference more of a startup especially compared to Microsoft and uh in the office so I don't know if those are some factors that really affected you know how comfortable people were with this kind of stuff um so these are things that are on my mind when it comes to effectively communicating but uh certainly

around this idea of like how do we make how do we Empower Engineers on the team to to drive improvements in processes that we have um definitely feels like something that needs more work and I'm not blaming my team for that by any means like I need to figure out how to how to drive more of that so um yeah I think that's probably my answer to that Reddit question terms of communication and maybe what needs more work I don't want to say it's like going bad or something like