by Esther Derby | May 4, 2020 | Collaboration & Teams, Organizational Change
Like many people, I’m staying home during a pandemic, trying to work, using collaboration tools. I’m having many Zoom meetings. In one such meeting, I was on a panel regarding remote retrospectives. One of the panelists posited that people from earlier...
by Esther Derby | Apr 29, 2020 | Leadership & Management
Management by walking around isn’t possible right now. You can’t walk by the team room, sense the buzz, see what’s on the task wall, engage in conversation, ask questions. Casual conversations don’t happen naturally. So how do you, as a dev manager (or line...
by Esther Derby | Apr 20, 2020 | Leadership & Management
At the start of the great wave of WFH, a comment about using PTO for child care during the day scrolled by. No one can seriously be expecting people to switch to PTO each time their kid needed some attention, can they? How could that possibly work? 7 minutes here, 22...
by Esther Derby | Apr 6, 2020 | Leadership & Management
I’ve been hearing various people speculate about how work will look after things get back to normal. (First, they aren’t going to go “back” to normal. There will be a normal, but I doubt it will be what existed pre-pandemic.) It does seem likely that remote work will...
by Esther Derby | Mar 30, 2020 | Collaboration & Teams, Leadership & Management
On the first day of widespread work from home brought about by the pandemic, I heard a workplace “expert” talking about the new reality of remote work. “Performance expectations and standards must remain the same as in the office,” he declared. There is so much wrong...
