Tag: work

Inside The Box

Best, Propst believed, would be to join the panels at 120º angles. But his customers realised that they could squeeze more people in if they constructed cubes. A rigid 90º connector was therefore designed to join a panel to one, two or three more. Thus was born the cubicle, and Propst came to be known as its creator. He was horrified.

Inside The Box, a brief history of office design.

Status

Note to future self: always have a functioning backup keyboard in the house. You’ll save yourself a lot of hassle, and productivity, when your favorite keyboard dies.

On Keeping a Logbook. A post from 2010 where Austin Kleon writes about “keeping a simple list of who/what/where” for each and every day. Reminds me a bit of the Bullet Journal idea.

The Old Guard

The Old Guard is the cultural bellwether of the company. I believe that culture is a slippery thing to fully define, but I do believe it is the responsibility of the Old Guard to not only take the time to define the key values that are the pillars of that culture, to communicate the nuance of those values over and over again, and, lastly, when it becomes apparent they are no longer serving the company, they must be willing to let those values evolve.

Rands writing about The Old Guard.

Pomodoro Timer. I found this app a while ago and recently began using it more frequently. It’s a simple, menu bar app that runs in the background. The goal is to help you deliberately break your work day up in to focused chunks. There are, of course, tons of variations on the theme. This one’s the nicest mix of function and design.

A day in the life

Some co-workers at Automattic are taking this week to blog about what a typical day at work looks like. Everyone’s using a shared tag so you can read through all the posts over here.

So far Marcus, Ben, Andrea, Wendy, Erica, and Bryan have all written posts. At the end of her post, Erica sums it up nicely:

It seems surreal, still, and I never imagined myself here, but I’m grateful. All the perks of travel are cool, but what Automattic has really given me is confidence. Here, I’ve done things that I never thought I could do. For my first few months, I was convinced someone made a mistake and would fire me. Three years later, I realize there are no mistakes, my opinion is valuable, and as this company has grown, so has my admiration for my colleagues.

That really mirrors my own experience of the last 4.5 years. If you read through those posts and want a work day like what’s described, we’re hiring.

Negative vs. Critical

Providing effective feedback is one of the most difficult and important things you can do as a team lead. Feedback takes two forms. First, there’s feedback that stems from great work. For example, someone on your team nailed a recent project. Second, there’s feedback that originates in a mistake or poor performance. Here a team member dropped the ball on something.

People refer to that second type of feedback as “negative.” I think that makes the task of communicating it more awkward and less effective. There’s more than a semantic difference between framing feedback as negative versus critical. Approaching it as critical feedback requires greater upfront work on your part. Ultimately, though, it will set you and your teammate up for success.

Critical feedback seeks to build someone’s skills. You’re not negating what they did. You’re critiquing it so they can improve. A true critique involves a thorough analysis of merits and faults.

That analysis is more time consuming than giving negative feedback. You have to take the extra step beyond identifying what was lacking in your teammate’s work. That identification is the first step: afterward begins the real work.

The most important piece of critical feedback is consciously and deliberately analyzing what could be done differently to improve an outcome. By doing that, you help your team member. You’re doing more than flagging poor work and walking away.

Once you’ve done that you need to take the next step. You have to look at different approaches in addition to what was already good about the existing work. Though an end result may be poor, it rarely means each and every step in the process was. When you take the extra step to clarify positive aspects you reinforce the right habits in your team.

When you clearly communicate what needs to change while succinctly stating what went well, you shift the conversation from negative to critical. You take an action that adversely impacted your team, identify it, and then clearly illustrate to your team member what must be done in the future to make the shift from poor to great. Do that enough times and you build a strong foundation for your team to grow.

How to Hire and Build a Remote Team. Zapier’s co-founder writes about how they interview, trial, and hire people. There are a lot of commonalities with how we approach things at Automattic.

101 Questions to Ask in One on Ones. Tons of questions to help prompt discussion and feedback in 1-1 chats with people on your team. Jason breaks the 101 question up in to topical sections. The last two are my favorite tips. (via Michael).

Fighting to Stay Creative:

Diligence isn’t a personality type, it’s a skill we learn.